The Collector by John Fowles

Clegg sends his regards?”
    Very funny, I said. She wrote something more and handed me the sheet of paper. It said, See you soon, love, Nanda, at the bottom.
    What’s this? I asked.
    “My baby name. They’ll know it’s me.”
    I prefer Miranda, I said. It was the most beautiful for me. When she had written the envelope I put the sheet in and then luckily I looked inside. At the bottom of the envelope there was a piece of paper no bigger than half a cigarette paper. I don’t know how but she must have had it ready and slipped it in. I opened it out and looked at her. She was bold as brass. She just leant back in the chair and stared at me. She’d written very very small with a sharp pencil, but the letters were clear. It wasn’t like her other note, it said:
     
D. M. Kidnapped by madman. F. Clegg. Clerk from Annexe who won pool. Prisoner in cellar lonely timbered cottage date outside 1621 hilly country two hours London. So far safe. Frightened.
M.
     
    I was really angry and shocked, I didn’t know what to do. In the end I said, are you frightened? She didn’t say anything, she just nodded.
    But what have I done? I asked.
    “Nothing. That’s why I’m frightened.”
    I don’t understand.
    She looked down.
    “I’m waiting for you to do something.”
    I’ve promised and I’ll promise again, I said. You get all high and mighty because I don’t take your word, I don’t know why it’s different for me.
    “I’m sorry.”
    I trusted you, I said. I thought you realized I was being kind. Well, I’m not going to be used. I don’t care about your letter.
    I put it in my pocket.
    There was a long silence, I knew she was looking at me, but I wouldn’t look at her. Then suddenly she got up and stood in front of me and put her hands on my shoulders so that I had to look at her, she made me look down into her eyes. I can’t explain it, when she was sincere she could draw the soul out of me, I was wax in her hands.
    She said, “Now you’re behaving like a little boy. You forget that you are keeping me here by force. I admit it is quite a gentle force, but it is frightening.”
    As long as you keep your word, I’ll keep mine, I said. I had gone red, of course.
    “But I’ve not given you my word not to try and escape, have I?”
    All you live for is the day you see the last of me, I said. I’m just a nobody still, aren’t I?
    She turned half away. “I want to see the last of this house. Not of you.”
    And mad, I said. Do you think a madman would have treated you the way I have? I’ll tell you what a madman would have done. He’d have killed you by now. Like that fellow Christie, I suppose you think I’m going for you with a carving-knife or something. (I was really fed up with her that day.) How daft can you get? All right, you think I’m not normal keeping you here like this. Perhaps I’m not. But I can tell you there’d be a blooming lot more of this if more people had the money and the time to do it. Anyway there’s more of it now than anyone knows. The police know, I said, the figures are so big they don’t dare say them.
    She was staring at me. It was like we were complete strangers. I must have looked funny, it was the most I’d ever said.
    “Don’t look like that,” she said. “What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you.”
    What, I asked. I was still angry.
    “I don’t know. It’s lurking somewhere about in this house, this room, this situation, waiting to spring. In a way we’re on the same side against it.”
    That’s just talk.
    “We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
    We all take what we can get. And if we haven’t had much most of our life we make up for it while the going’s good, I said. Of course you wouldn’t know about that.
    Then she was smiling at me, as if she was much older than me. “You need psychiatric treatment.”
    The only treatment I need is you to treat me like a friend.
    “I am, I am,” she