Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

Bruno, with whom Gwen had by now reestablished relations, was reported to be fond of Danby, and after a while Miles began to tolerate his brother-in-law. Danby was anxious to please, and after Miles had made clear what he thought of the masculine jokes with which Danby at first sought to establish connivance, they did manage to achieve a sort of understanding, based on Danby’s interpretation of his role as a controlled and censored fool. Danby, who was not totally in sensitive, managed to extend in the direction of Miles, as a kind of propitiatory feeler, the sense of inferiority which he genuinely felt in relation to Gwen. He accepted Miles as his superior and he accepted and shared Miles’s view of his incredible and quite undeserved good luck in having obtained Miles’s sister. Like that, things settled down; but Miles saw less and less of them. Then after Gwen was dead there was no reason to see Danby any more.

Diana came later, as a surprise, almost as a miracle. The terrible bitterness of Gwen’s death put Miles once more into the presence of that which his long poem had served to shield him from. But as soon as he was able to he ceased to look and to feel and set himself to lead a life of complete retirement and almost ferocious dullness. Writing was inconceivable. He read a good deal, as a matter of routine, mainly history and biography, but without passion. He did his job, avoided his colleagues, was classified as an eccentric and quietly passed over at promotion times. His superiors began to regard him as slightly unbalanced, but on the whole he attracted little attention. He suffered occasional fits of severe depression, but not very frequently.

Then one day in the grocer’s shop in the Earls Court Road where he went twice a week with a large basket to buy his provisions a girl said to him, “Don’t look so sad.” Miles shuddered at being addressed by a woman and left the shop immediately. She followed him. “I’m so sorry. I’ve so often seen you in here. May I walk along with you?” And later, “Do you live alone?” And later still, “Have you been married?” Diana did all the work. She explained afterwards to Miles how she had seen him several times in the shop looking self-absorbed and melancholy and had had a fantasy that everything would happen even as it did happen: that he would turn out to live alone, that he had had a great sorrow, that he shunned society, that he had no dealings with women. For Diana it was, in some extraordinary way, the perfect working out of a dream. She had been searching for Miles. She recognized him at once. It was her sense of destiny which carried them both along.

Diana had a very positive conception of her role as a woman. It was in fact her only role and one which had absorbed her since she left school. She grew up in Leicester, where her father was a bank clerk. Her parents were vague people and she and her sister did what they pleased. Diana went on a scholar ship to an art school in the London suburbs but left it after two years. She became an unsuccessful commercial artist, she worked in an advertising agency. But mainly she just lived. She moved to Earls Court. She had adventures. She lived with men, some rich ones who found her puzzling and gave her expensive presents, and some poor ones who took her money and got drunk and wept. All this she recounted to Miles later on, enjoying his incomprehension and his quite involuntary twitches of disapproval. She had been looking for him, she told him, all this time. She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.

She loved him very much and although he told her at first that he was an empty vessel, a nothing, and that her love was to him a nothing, she succeeded at last in attracting his attention. Miles was thirty-five. Diana was twenty-eight. Miles became aware that she was beautiful. She was a fair-haired brown-eyed girl with a straight assertive nose and a big well-made mouth and a large flat brow and an ivory complexion and a cool enigmatic expression. She tucked her hair well back behind her ears and thrust her pale smooth large-eyed face boldly forward at the world. A quality in her which seemed at first to Miles to be shamelessness later seemed to him more like courage. In the early days of his interest he apprehended her, not without a certain pleasure, as a courtesan; and later, when he was certain that she loved him, he felt her “adventurousness” as intensifying, not diminishing, the love which she had to offer. When he married her he still felt that she was his mistress, and that pleased both of them.

Of course Diana understood about Parvati. She knew that for Miles this had been something supreme, a love not of this world only. She submitted, in a way which touched his heart and first made him believe absolutely in her love, to being the second not only in time. She accepted indeed the fact that there was not even any question of a contest. A place in his life, a part of himself, perhaps the best part, was simply not available to her. This Miles tried to explain to her while he was still trying to dissuade her love. Soon after, perhaps even then, he was relieved to find that he had laid every vexation upon her and told her every unhappy truth without dissuading her at all. In the end he stopped fighting and let her use the whole huge force of her woman’s nature to comfort him, to lure him out of the dark box in which he had been living. His pleasure in her joy was the best experience in his life for many years.

They moved to the house in Kempsford Gardens and after a while, although she said nothing about it, Miles knew that Diana was hoping for a child. Miles was not sure what he felt about children. His child, the one, had died in the Alps. Could there be another? He began vaguely to want a son. But the years passed and nothing happened. They looked at each other questioningly in the spaces of the house. Their life was simple. Miles had never craved for company. Now that he had Diana he was perfectly contented. He would have been happy to see no one else. Diana met her friends at lunchtime. They hardly ever entertained.

Diana supported, even invented, the formalities of their life together. She made the little house in Kempsford Gardens as ceremonious as an old-fashioned manor house. Meals were punctual and meticulously served. Miles was not allowed in the kitchen. The house was always filled with flowers with never a petal out of place. Miles was forced to adopt a standard of tidiness which he found unnatural and absurd and to which he became completely used. It was as if Diana was determined to make him feel that he was living rather grandly and after a while he did begin to feel it. She had a power of making small things seem large, just as she had uncannily made the garden seem large, made it seem to go on and on like an enchanted garden in a tale. Miles suspected that, in all this, Diana was fighting back against her childhood in Leicester. She had once said to him thoughtfully, “You were the most distinguished of all my suitors.” Diana had her own strict routine, her own invented personal formalities. Entirely without other occupation, she filled her time with household tasks and enjoyments. There was her hour for working in the garden, her hour for doing the flowers, her hour for doing embroidery, her hour for sitting in the drawing room and reading a leather-bound book, her hour for playing on the gramophone old-fashioned popular music which Miles disliked, but to which also he had become accustomed. Diana would have enjoyed an eighteenth-century country-house life of peaceful ennui and formal tedium and lengthy leisured visiting. In the midst of one of the seedier parts of London she almost succeeded in conjuring it up.

A change came into the life of Miles and Diana. Perhaps in a way they welcomed it, though at first it made both of them rather apprehensive. Diana’s younger sister Lisa had made a very different start in life. She read Greats at Oxford and got a first. She went to teach in a school in Yorkshire and joined the Communist Party. Diana, who was very fond of her sister, lost touch with her for a while. Lisa came south for Diana’s wedding and met Miles. Then she vanished again and when next heard of she had become a Catholic and joined the order of the Poor Clares. “I’m sure she was just attracted by the name,” Diana told Miles. “She was always rather a literary girl.” After a few years Lisa emerged from the Poor Clares and the Roman Catholic Church and went to live in Paris. She came back to England with tuberculosis and stayed with Miles and Diana during her convalescence. She got a teaching job in a school in the East End. The idea vaguely materialized that she might stay on living with Miles and Diana. She stayed on.