Bruno's Dream

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Hello,’ said Adelaide, looking past him at the twins.

  Nigel advanced and kissed her a little awkwardly on the cheek. He was smiling. Will’s face was thunderous. He had trimmed his moustache into a Hitlerian toothbrush. He came and kissed Adelaide, also on the cheek. He said, ‘Christ, your face is hot.’ Auntie said, ‘Moya meelaya devooshka.’ Will said, ‘Shut up, Auntie.’ Adelaide felt that she was going to faint and had to sit down.

  ‘Now then,’ said the registrar a little coyly, ‘must remember why we’re here, musn’t we. Now let me see, which of you gentlemen is going to be married? Mustn’t marry the lady to the wrong one, must I?’

  ‘I’m the groom,’ said Will. ‘Oh Ad, do stop crying, turn off the waterworks, will you? Have you got no dignity? Anyone’d think you were going to be executed.’

  ‘I think we all feel like that on our wedding day, ha ha,’ said the registrar.

  Nigel smiled.

  Auntie said, ‘Svadba, soodba, slooshba.’

  Will said, ‘Ba ba black sheep to you, Auntie. Now Ad, do pull yourself together. You don’t want to call the whole thing off, do you?’

  ‘Nooo,’ Adelaide wailed.

  Auntie said, ‘Ya tosha,’ and began to sniff.

  ‘Tosh off, Auntie. Ad, try to behave like a rational being or I shall really get angry with you. Come and sit here beside me, come on. Now stop it, or I’ll give you something to cry for!’

  Adelaide came forward. She had knocked her hat sideways by her exertions with her handkerchief and she had smeared her lipstick again. Her breath hissed through shuddering lips. Tears had begun to course down Auntie’s face. Nigel was smiling.

  ‘Now I think you both know the procedure,’ said the registrar. ‘This is a very simple little ceremony, but it has the force and solemnity of law and society behind it, and is just as binding as if you were being married in a cathedral.’

  Adelaide moaned and put her damp handkerchief to her mouth. Nigel, still smiling, wiped away a tear from his eye.

  ‘First I must check your names please, your full names, and also your fathers’ names. You, Adelaide Anne de Crecy …’

  Nigel’s face was streaming with tears. He was still smiling.

  ‘And you, Wilfred Reginald Boase …’

  ‘Oh Christ!’ said Will. His face became red, and his eyes filled and overbrimmed with tears. ‘Christ! Sorry, Ad.’

  ‘And your father’s name–Oh dear–Oh dear me–’ The registrar’s pen faltered and he began to reach for his handkerchief.

  Adelaide had anticipated pains and difficulties in her married life, and her anticipations were fulfilled. Will’s temper did not improve as the years went by, and a chronic dyspepsia, caused by the irregular life of the theatre, did nothing to soothe his frequent tantrums. Adelaide submitted meekly at first. Later she learnt how to shout back. But she always felt ashamed and tired after their rows. Will never seemed even to remember that there had been a quarrel. Yet if Adelaide had certainly foreseen the bad things it was also true that she had not managed to foresee the good ones. She had married Will in a mood of cornered desperation because she felt that Will was her fate. She had not even framed the idea of happiness in connection with her marriage. Yet there was happiness too. Adelaide had not realised beforehand how very much she would enjoy being in bed with Will and how greatly this enjoyment would lighten the way for both of them. Nor did she, as she wept and signed her new name, Adelaide Boase, for the first time, dream of much later and sunnier days, in spite of Will’s cantankerous temper, when her tall twins would be up at Oxford (non-identical, Benedick and Mercutio), when Will would be one of the most famous and popular actors in England, and a greatly transformed Adelaide would be Lady Boase.

  Nearer in time, and a financial godsend to the young household, was the surprise they got when Auntie died and her jewels turned out to be worth ten thousand pounds. Auntie’s memoirs too, when translated into English, proved a bestseller, as well as being a mine of information for historians about the last days of the Czarist regime. Adelaide and Will kept saying that they would learn Russian one day so as to read Auntie’s memoirs in the original, but they never did. However Benedick became a Russian expert. Mercutio was a mathematician.

  31

  DANBY WAS SITTING on the edge of his bed. It was ten o’clock in the evening. The walls of the room were still a bit damp, but he had managed to dry the bed out with hot water bottles. On warm days he put the mattress in the sun. The electricity had been off for weeks, as the whole house had had to be rewired. Fortunately the government were going, if he filled in enough forms, to pay for that. Fortunately too the weather had been exceptionally warm for the time of year.

  The room had not suffered too much. Getting the mud off the floor had been the difficult thing. It was fantastic how much mud that water had brought in with it. The carpet had been mud-coloured anyway, but the walls were darkly stained up to about four feet from the ground. It was no good having the place redecorated until the walls had dried. With luck, the government would pay for that as well. Danby had been sleeping upstairs, but he was wondering if tonight he wouldn’t move back into his own room. He didn’t like it upstairs, though of course it was nearer if Bruno called in the night. But Bruno very rarely called in the night now. He seemed to be sleeping better, and indeed spent quite a lot of his time asleep.

  Danby had stopped going to the printing works and spent his days at home now. Someone had to stay with Bruno. Nigel had simply vanished from the scene, leaving most of his belongings behind, and Danby felt there was no point in engaging another nurse at this stage. The doctor was surprised that Bruno had lasted so long. Diana came nearly every day in the late afternoon and Danby went out for a breather and a visit to the pub while she sat with Bruno. He could hear her talking to Bruno sometimes, as he went out of the hall door, but he never asked her what they talked about. He talked a little with Bruno himself, usually about immediate things, food, the weather, Bruno’s room. Bruno could talk quite sensibly about these things, but the background of his mind seemed to have come adrift, and Danby often caught Bruno looking at him with a puzzled expression, as if he did not know who Danby was and did not quite like to ask. Diana too was a source of puzzlement, though Danby lost no opportunity of repeating, ‘Diana, you know, Miles’s wife.’ But Danby did not explain his own identity. He did not want to remind Bruno about Gwen.

  With Diana Danby had achieved a sad but strangely sweet relationship such as one might have with a wife one had divorced long ago. They kissed each other on the cheek and squeezed hands. The tending of Bruno made a solemn and melancholy bond between them. ‘How is he today?’ ‘Not too bad. He took some soup.’ Danby knew that Diana was afraid that Bruno might die when she was alone with him and Danby was not there. She never said this, but Danby understood what it meant when she asked anxiously, ‘You won’t be too long away, will you?’ It was strange and terrible, this waiting for death. Every morning Danby wondered if Bruno had not died quietly during the night, and then saw, with a shock of pain and relief, the bedclothes still rising and falling a little. He had come, during this last time, to love Bruno with a blank almost impersonal sort of love, and he was able at last to measure that vast difference, that distance between presence and absence. Bruno’s presence in the house was something real, so positive, so profoundly touching. And yet it was also impossible not to feel it as a defilement. Danby looked forward with dread and yet with longing to the time when he would come home and take off his coat and get out the whiskey bottle in a house utterly empty of Bruno. Yet between that moment and now there was that terrible unforeseeable thing to be endured.

  Bruno had changed physically too since his fall. He had stopped wearing his false teeth and the lower part of his face had collapsed. His head seemed to be shrinking generally as the chunky flesh which had made his face look so lumpy and strange began to subside and fall in toward the bone. The ring of thin silky white hair which had fringed the base of the skull ha
d mostly come off, rubbed away upon the pillow, and the skull was almost completely bare. Only Bruno’s eyes remained the same, narrow moist and terrifyingly full of puzzlement, speculation, and a weird kind of intelligence. With these puzzled hostile rather frightened eyes he surveyed the people who served him. Only sometimes for Diana would his shrunken face strain into a smile and his eyes wrinkle up with something like pleasure.

  Miles had called two or three times and conducted rather one-sided conversations with Bruno. Once Danby, passing the door, had heard Miles talking about cricket, though he had not heard Bruno reply. Miles carried with him an atmosphere of complete unconcern. He was almost debonair. He approached Bruno with a kind of cheerfulness which irritated Danby extremely. He made brisk enquiries about what the doctor had said. He behaved like a man performing a duty and pleased with himself for doing so. He seemed completely uninvolved in the pain and the mystery of what was about to take place. He left the house smiling secretively and humming to himself. Danby decided that he detested Miles. The strange emotion, which had once seemed like love, which Miles had inspired in him, had faded away. He no longer even thought that Miles resembled Gwen. He saw him as a large smiling rat. He also sensed Miles’s increased dislike of himself, and wondered if Diana had talked. Probably not.

  Danby had heard the news of Adelaide’s marriage with distress and relief. Now that he was no longer deafened by her cries he was able to remember her charm. She had been a sweet girl friend to him during those years and he felt ashamed gratitude which he would have liked to express to her in some way. He thought of giving her fifty pounds as a wedding present and got as far as writing the cheque but then could not decide whether it would be proper to send it or not. When things have gone hopelessly wrong one simply does not know how to behave. In the end he did not send the cheque. Will would only tear it up and send back the pieces.

  Danby drew the curtains. It was very dark outside, a moonless night and a little rain falling. He went to check that the door of the annexe was propped open so that he could hear Bruno if he called. The old man had been fast asleep when Danby went up to see him earlier. Oh let him die in his sleep, Danby prayed with a sad pained heart. Let him die peacefully in his sleep and not know. Only not tonight, not tonight. Poor Bruno. Danby pulled back the sheets and blankets and felt the mattress, wondering if it was dry enough to sleep on. It seemed to be all right. The Stadium Street house had never felt entirely like a home to Danby, but he liked his little room with the dreary outlook on to the yard. The yard was just an expanse of grey mud now, caked and cracking in dry weather, in wet weather like thick glue. Danby vaguely intended to clear it up, but could not see how this could be done.

  He sat down again on the bed and looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. A fat man with a lot of white hair and rather good teeth. He sighed. If only he had not seen Lisa, if only he had not been given that glimpse of something else, of really being alive or whatever it was. He had been quite happy sleeping with Adelaide, quite happy flirting with Diana. These beings belonged to his ordinary dull world and his ordinary dim consciousness. Meeting Lisa was the sudden exchange of twilight for daylight, greyness for colour, shadow for substance and shape. He had forgotten what these things were like. Perhaps he would forget again. Perhaps he would come through it all and out on to some great placid lake where the sun shone hazily and with a difference. Perhaps he would achieve some sort of peace, the peace of an elderly man, a peace of cosy retirement without angels. Without women too, he thought. Could he find another girl now? After seeing Lisa he simply didn’t want to.

  He wondered where she was now, in some unimaginable abode of bliss with her other man. He could not think of her as belonging to this world and inhabiting the same space as himself. He pictured her enclosed in some kind of radiant extragalactic egg, some strange fold of the space-time continuum which wrapped her absolutely away. This vague image was necessary to him to soothe what would otherwise have been a crippling degree of jealousy and desire. If there was no place for possibility there was no place for yearning. Lisa had been a vision, an apparition, not a possibility. Yet however much he tried to refuse the knowledge, he knew that what he had seen and, oh God, touched was a real woman who might have loved him.

  Danby thought that he might soon start to cry. For years he had been incapable of tears. Now quite lately, he had found himself weeping in the late evening and the early morning. The tears were strange, sweetly soothing and a little unnerving, as if his body were suffering some weird physical change. He must be careful not to let Bruno see him crying. He got up and went to the door for a moment to listen. There was no sound from upstairs. Then he thought that he had better go up and check that he had locked the front door, and he went up the stairs on tiptoe. Thank God poor Bruno slept at night.

  A letter, which must have come by the second post, was lying on the mat. Danby saw at once that the writing was unfamiliar and it instantly seemed to him that the letter must be from Lisa. In trembling haste he tore it open. It was rather long and appeared to be from Nigel. Danby locked the door and fixed the chain and went slowly down the stairs again. He sat for a while staring sadly at nothing and holding Nigel’s letter crumpled in his hand. If only there were not these vain ghostly hopes, these sudden inane shadows of possibilities, these unfulfilled conditionals of hopeless desire. He closed his eyes and a tear trickled down his cheek. Then he began to read Nigel’s letter.

  My dearest Danby,

  I hope you will try to forgive me for my dereliction of duty, my unannounced departure, my taking of leave without consultation or permission. I am sorry to leave Bruno and had not intended to do so before the end. I hope he is calm and I would send my love if I thought he still remembered Nigel, only I trust that mercifully he does not. Since in a sense Nigel never really existed, he probably casts no memory image as he casts no shadow. I write to speak to you, just once, since it is a delicious joy to do so (see below) and because I feel I should try to explain why I went away. That, and other things.

  Love is a strange thing. There is no doubt at all that it and only it makes the world go round. It is our only significant activity. Everything else is dust and tinkling cymbals and vexation of spirit. Yet on the other hand what a trouble-maker it is to be sure. What a dreamer-upper of the impossible, what an embracer of the feet of the unattainable. It is a weird thought that anyone is permitted to love anyone and in any way he pleases. Nothing in nature forbids it. A cat may look at a king, the worthless can love the good, the good the worthless, the worthless the worthless and the good the good. Hey presto: and the great light flashes on revealing perhaps reality or perhaps illusion. And alas how very often, dearest Danby, does one love alone, in solipsism, in vain incapsulation, while concealment feeds upon the substance of the heart. It is not a matter of conventions. Love knows no conventions. Anything can happen, so that in a way, a terrible terrible way, there are no impossibilities. Ah, I have thought of this too, my dear, and it has not been the least part of my suffering. You might have loved me. It was, alas, logically possible. But what made me go away was not simply my sense of the improbability of the conceivable, but my knowledge that my very great love was a very great destroyer. If I had been the saint that I could be I would have loved you and let you know it and stayed near you and done you no harm at all, surrounding you like the harmless air and making you almost not notice how much I loved you. As it is, the unpredictable force of that immense angelic thing, once let loose from its dark concealment, would have dragged us–where? I know not, but down. You would have had to act a hateful part. And I–

  The other great love of my life is, well you can guess who. To have you both before me pointing loaded pistols at each other was the acting out of a fantasy. And how absolutely, when it came to it, you were both of you clay in my hands. How easy it proved to make you do exactly what I wanted! But I must not think about my godlike power–that way lies the possible-impossible torment which I have determined to end. It was
a great happening, was it not, our duel? Not knowing the outcome was heavenly pain, was Russian roulette of the soul. Forgive me.

  I have decided that the only way to deal with myself as I now am is to leave England. A friend has told me how I can get a job in India, with the Save the Children Fund, and I am going to Calcutta. I leave no address and I sign no name. I am a spirit that wished you well and will wish you well for however long or short a time it preserves your memory. I kiss your feet.

  Danby stared at the letter. It caused him an extraordinary and novel kind of pain. He wished he had known that Nigel loved him. Yet what on earth would he have done about it? Would he have acted that ‘hateful part’? Yes, what a troublemaker it was. Every manjack craving for love, and how rarely it all worked out. Nigel loved Danby who loved Lisa who loved–How sad and crazy it all was. Oh God, I feel so bloody lonely, he thought. The voice of love, even though it was not the right one, came to him with such an unmistakable accent out of that inaccessible real world. His eyes seemed to be filling with tears again. ‘Oh hell,’ said Danby aloud. He shook the tears away and took off his jacket and his tie. Better go to bed and drown all this self-pity in decent oblivion. Misery and drink made him a sound sleeper. He stood for a moment listening to the rain which had grown fiercer and listening to the wind which was rattling the windowpane. He undid the front of his shirt.

  Suddenly there was a strange sharp regular noise very close to him. Danby stood paralysed, clutching his shirt. In a moment the sound came again, loud and several times repeated. Someone was tapping urgently upon the window. Will! Danby thought, it’s Will for sure, come to do me properly. He stood perfectly still. The tapping came again, insistent, demanding, violent. He’ll break the glass in a minute, thought Danby. Whatever shall I do? Call the police? Pretend not to be here? Can he see me through the chink in the curtain? Oh God, why did this have to happen. Danby felt tired and old. He wanted to go to bed. He did not want to be forced to fight with a half crazy young man. It was all ridiculous. He called out, ‘Who’s there?’ There was no answer, only the tapping on the window, once more repeated, fierce and sharp. Danby hesitated. Then he moved silently out of the room and into the kitchen. He picked up a long carving knife and then laid it down again. He returned and went up to the window. ‘Who is it?’ Tap, tap, tap, tap. Danby pulled back the curtains. He could not see out into the darkness and the rain. Then he violently pulled up the sash of the window and retreated across the room.