Power and Control Theme Analysis

The only times I didn’t have nice dreams about her being when I saw her with a certain young man, a loud noisy public-school type who had a sports car. I stood beside him once in Barclays waiting to pay in and I heard him say, I’ll have it in fivers; the joke being it was only a cheque for ten pounds. They all behave like that. Well, I saw her climb in his car sometimes, or them out together in the town in it, and those days I was very short with the others in the office, and I didn’t use to mark the X in my entomological observations diary (all this was before she went to London, she dropped him then). Those were days I let myself have the bad dreams. She cried or usually knelt. Once I let myself dream I hit her across the face as I saw it done once by a chap in a telly play. Perhaps that was when it all started.

That was the day I first gave myself the dream that came true. It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. It haunted me.

I could go on all night about the precautions. I used to go and sit in her room and work out what she could do to escape. I thought she might know about electricity, you never know with girls these days, so I always wore rubber heels, I never touched a switch without a good look first. I got a special incinerator to burn all her rubbish. I knew nothing of hers must ever leave the house. No laundry. There could always be something.

“You know who I am. You must know my father’s not rich or anything. So it can’t be ransom.”

It was uncanny, hearing her think it out.

“The only other thing is sex. You want to do something to me.”

She was watching me. It was a question. It shocked me.

I took the photos that evening. Just ordinary, of her sitting reading. They came out quite well.

One day about then she did a picture of me, like returned the compliment. I had to sit in a chair and look at the corner of the room. After half an hour she tore up the drawing before I could stop her. (She often tore up. Artistic temperament, I suppose.)

I’d have liked it, I said. But she didn’t even reply to that, she just said, don’t move.

From time to time she talked. Mostly personal remarks.

“You’re very difficult to get. You’re so featureless. Everything’s nondescript. I’m thinking of you as an object, not as a person.”

She just looked at me.

“Ferdinand,” she said. “They should have called you Caliban.”

As I said, I never had any nasty desire to take advantage of the situation, I was always perfectly respectful towards her (until she did what she did) but perhaps it was the darkness, us walking there and feeling her arm through her sleeve, I really would have liked to take her in my arms and kiss her, as a matter of fact I was trembling. I had to say something or I’d have lost my head.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you I was very happy, would you, I said. Of course she couldn’t answer.

“It’s not a little thing. It’s terrible that you can’t treat me as a friend. Forget my sex. Just relax.”

I’ll try, I said. But then she wouldn’t sit by me again.

I know what some would think, they would think my behaviour peculiar. I know most men would only have thought of taking an unfair advantage and there were plenty of opportunities. I could have used the pad. Done what I liked, but I am not that sort, definitely not that sort at all. She was like some caterpillar that takes three months to feed up trying to do it in a few days. I knew nothing good would come of it, she was always in such a hurry. People today always want to get things, they no sooner think of it they want to get it in their hands, but I am different, old-fashioned, I enjoy thinking about the future and letting things develop all in good time.

She made me look a proper fool. I knew what she was thinking, she was thinking this was why I was always so respectful. I wanted to do it, I wanted to show her I could do it so I could prove I was really respectful. I wanted her to see I could do it, then I would tell her I wasn’t going to, it was below me, and below her, it was disgusting.

It was no good, she had killed all the romance, she had made herself like any other woman, I didn’t respect her anymore, there was nothing left to respect.

Power. It’s become so real.

I know the H-bomb is wrong. But being so weak seems wrong now too.

I wish I knew judo. Could make him cry for mercy.

I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn’t really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline—and me. But of course, he is right. They’re anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything.

Upstairs, bedrooms, lovely rooms in themselves, but all fusty, unlived-in. A strange dead air about everything. Downstairs what he (he would) called “the lounge” is a beautiful room, much bigger than the other rooms, peculiarly square, you don’t expect it, with one huge crossbeam supported on three uprights in the middle of the room, and other crossbeams and nooks and delicious angles an architect wouldn’t think of once in a thousand years. All massacred, of course, by the furniture. China wild duck on a lovely old fireplace. I couldn’t stand it, I got him to retie my hands in front and then I unhooked the monsters and smashed them on the hearth.

That hurt him almost as much as when I slapped his face for not letting me escape.

Uncanny. But there is a sort of relationship between us. I make fun of him, I attack him all the time, but he senses when I’m “soft.” When he can dig back and not make me angry. So we slip into teasing states that are almost friendly. It’s partly because I’m so lonely, it’s partly deliberate (I want to make him “relax,” both for his own good and so that one day he may make a mistake), so it’s part weakness, and part cunning, and part charity. But there’s a mysterious fourth part I can’t define. It can’t be friendship, I loathe him.

I felt sorry for Caliban this evening. He will suffer when I am gone. There will be nothing left. He’ll be alone with all his sex neurosis and his class neurosis and his uselessness and his emptiness. He’s asked for it. I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.

No pity. No God. I shouted at him and he went mad. I was too weak to stop him. Bound and gagged me and took his beastly photographs. I don’t mind the pain. The humiliation. I did what he wanted. To get it over. I don’t mind for myself any more. But oh God the beastliness of it all. I’m crying I’m crying I can’t write.

I will not give in. I will not give in.

Post a letter first to the police. So they would find us down there together. Together in the Great Beyond.

We would be buried together. Like Romeo and Juliet.

It would be a real tragedy. Not sordid.

I would get some proper respect if I did it. If I destroyed the photos, that was all there was, people would see I never did anything nasty to her, it would be truly tragic.

I have not made up my mind about Marian (another M! I heard the supervisor call her name), this time it won’t be love, it would just be for the interest of the thing and to compare them and also the other thing, which as I say I would like to go into in more detail and I could teach her how. And the clothes would fit. Of course I would make it clear from the start who’s boss and what I expect.

But it is still just an idea. I only put the stove down there today because the room needs drying out anyway.