Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

He reclines upon the pavement where the rising waters have lifted up the window of a houseboat near to his telescopic eye. A man and a woman are sitting on a bed, the man fully clothed, the woman naked. He speaks angrily to her and brings his fist up to her eyes. She shakes her head, moving it uneasily away, her face made ugly by evasiveness and fear. The man begins to take his clothes off, tearing them off, stripping himself bare with curses. He drags back the blankets of the bed and the woman darts inside like an animal into its burrow and hides, peering, with the blankets up to her eyes. The man pulls the blankets off her and turns out the light. Nigel lies on the damp pavement and sighs for the sins of the world.

He lifts himself a little to see over a sill through an uncurtained window. Beside a cluttered kitchen table Will and Adelaide are arguing. He takes her hand which she tries stiffly to withdraw. He hurls her hand back at her. Auntie is knitting an orange cardigan. “So there is a Cape Triangular stamp?”

”Yes, there’s several.”

”You must get the right one, I’ll show you a picture.”

”I’m not going to get any one.”

”Oh yes you are, Ad.”

”Oh no I’m not.”

”Sometimes I could murder you, Adelaide.”

”Let go my arm, that hurts.”

”It’s meant to hurt.”

”I think you’re hateful.”

”Why do you come here to torment me.”

”Let go.”

”You enjoy tormenting me.”

”Let go.” Auntie, who has noticed, not for the first time, Nigel’s face risen like the moon above the window sill, smiles mysteriously and goes on knitting.

Altogether elsewhere beside a glass door he prostrates himself among feathery grey herbs. Here there is only a chink in the curtains through which he can see a thin-faced sallow man with narrow eyes and a heavy fall of dense dark hair disputing with a thin woman with sticklike arms and la gaunt ardent face. Her brown hair is wild, formless as a dark cloud about her thrusting face.

”The world is independent of my will.”

”The sense of it must lie outside it. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value.”

”And if there were it would be of no value.”

”If good and bad willing changes the world it can only change the limits of the world. The world must wax and wane as a whole.”

”The world of the happy is quite other than the world of the unhappy.”

”As in death too, the world does not change but ceases.”

”Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

”If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, he lives eternally who lives in the present.”

”Not how the world is but that it is is the mystical.”

”Whereof we cannot speak.”

”Thereof we must be silent.”

A beautiful woman has entered the room with a brow as broad and bland as the dawn. Her night robe of midnight blue sweeps the ground. She sets a tray before the disputants and sits between them patting them both with her hands. Looking upon her with love they sip Ovaltine dissolved in hot milk and nibble custard-cream biscuits.

Nigel goes home. He kneels on damp slimy moss while Danby gazes at himself in a mirror. Danby smiles at himself, admiring his double row of even white teeth. Kneeling so close to him unseen Nigel smiles too, the tender forgiving in finitely sad smile of almighty God.

Slow foxtrot.

With eyes half closed Danby and Diana were rotating dreamily in each other’s arms. The dancing floor was filled with quiet gliding comatose middle-aged couples, all dancing very well. The lights were reddish and low. The marble pillars of the ballroom soared into an invisibility of cigarette haze. The walls were of golden mosaic with turquoise blue mosaic flowers figured upon them. Upon the pillars gilded cornucopias, cunningly fixed, leaned outward into the hall, above scalloped fringes of purple velvet. Jungles of ferns and palms occupied all corners and masked the entrance. There was a thick sweet powdery smell of inexpensive perfume and cosmetics. A few people sat at tables at the side, but most of those present were dancing with their eyes half closed and their cheeks glued together. A few conversed in low whispers. Most were silent. It was the afternoon.

”Danby.”

”Yes.”

”We are the youngest people here.”

”Yes.”

”Do you think all those women are dancing with their husbands?”

”No, of course not.”

”Will they tell their husbands?”

”No, of course not. Will you tell your husband?”

”Isn’t it odd to think it’s afternoon outside and the sun is shining.”

”Yes.”

”The afternoon is a wicked time. I think in hell it must be always afternoon.”

Diana spoke in a scarcely audible murmur as if in her sleep. Her attention was almost completely absorbed by the pressure of Danby’s cheek upon her own and by the light firm sensitive guiding movements of Danby’s right hand upon her back.

Diana was not sure how or why she was on the dancing floor with Danby. He had rung up. There had been a sense of fatality, a craving, extremely sharp and precise, to feel those authoritative cellist fingers once again touching her back. It was all very unusual. She had spent so many years waiting for children and only lately had consciously told herself that the wait was over. She had occupied so many years-how had she occupied them? Miles had been her occupation: Miles’s loneliness, Miles’s shyness, his nervous animism, his in ability in some ways to take hold of life at all. She had soon ceased being ambitious for him in his work. She simply wanted to preserve and prolong her sense of protecting him, of warming him to life. Meanwhile she flirted a little with her friends of both sexes. She told herself that she was not naturally monogamous while remaining strictly so. She took notice of the fact that her vaguely erotic daydreams did not always concern her husband. Yet there was no one who could interest her as Miles constantly, consistently, passionately interested her. The umbilical cord of her early love for him had never been broken. She still counted herself fortunate. Though lately, perhaps prophetically, collected quietly in the kitchen at night, she had found herself looking a little with new eyes, had felt a vague need for change, had sensed even the possibility of boredom.

She had lived upon her inexhaustible love for Miles. She had also lived on something which was perhaps not inexhaustible, her dream picture of herself. Making the house had taken her years and within it she had occupied years in posing. She posed in a silk afternoon dress in the drawing room, in a nylon negligee in the bedroom. While doing the flowers she posed as a lady doing the flowers. She made up her face through solitary afternoons. Miles hated social life and they hardly ever entertained. She was like a prostitute waiting among the toys and trinkets of her trade, only the man she was waiting for was her husband.

Like a religious, she had meditated for years upon her luck in getting Miles. She had never dreamed of so distinguished, so aristocratic a catch. She would even have been contented with much less. Her father was dead, but she still visited her elderly mother in the house where she had been brought up, and she was kind to the old lady, but could not help contemplating with satisfaction the gap between her mother’s life and her own. Miles, without even noticing it, had lifted her across. She set herself to make a beautiful and elegant burrow for them both and within it over the years they grew together like two animals that come to develop a single telepathic personality.

She had played the passionate exacting mistress to Miles with the more conscious abandon since she knew that she was for him a second best. The idea of Parvati did not distress her, on the contrary. She charmed herself with her role of healer. She was not the damsel heroine in the castle, she was the mysterious lady of the fountain who heals the wound of the wandering knight, the wound which has defied all other touches. The role was the more grateful since the damsel heroine was long ago dead, not forgotten, but mercifully absent. There was only the fountain lady now. And the memory of the lost one remained as a guarantee of her husband’s fidelity. The dead Parvati reigned felicitously over their marriage.