Iris Murdoch: Bruno’s Dream

If only certain things had not been said. One says things hastily, without meaning them, without having thought, without understanding them even. One ought to be forgiven for those hasty things. It was so unfair to have been made to carry the moral burden of his careless talk, to carry it for years until it became a monstrous unwilled part of himself. He had not wanted Miles to marry an Indian girl. But how soon he would have forgotten his theories when confronted with a real girl. If only they had all ignored his remarks, if only they had made him meet Parvati, let him meet Parvati, instead of flying off and building up his offence into a permanent barrier. If they had only been gentle with him and reasoned with him instead of getting so high-minded and angry. It all happened so quickly, and then he had been given his role and condemned for it. And Miles said he had said all those things he was sure he had never said. There were so many misunderstandings. Gwen tried a little. But even Gwen did not have the sense to argue with him properly. And then Parvati was killed so soon after the marriage. It was not till much later that he even saw a picture of her, a snapshot taken of her and Gwen in Hyde Park, enlaced together, their arms round each other’s waists. Gwen had taken Parvati’s long black plait of hair and drawn it round over her own shoulder. They were laughing. Even that snapshot might have brought him round.

Miles had forgiven nothing. Perhaps it was her death that fixed him in that endless resentment. The often-quoted remark about “coffee-coloured grandchildren.” Well, there had been a judgement. Bruno had no grandchildren. Gwen and Danby, childless, Miles and Parvati, childless, Miles and-Bruno could not recall the name of Miles’s second wife, he had never met her. Oh yes, Diana. Miles and Diana, childless. Was there any point in trying even now to be reconciled, whatever that meant? It was a mere convention after all that one ought to be on good terms with one’s son or father. Sons and fathers were individuals and should be paid the compliment of being treated as such. Why should they not have the privilege, possessed by other and unrelated persons, of drifting painlessly apart? Or so he had said to Danby, many years ago, when the latter had questioned him about his relations with Miles. Danby had probably been worrying about the stamps.

Of course Miles’s resentment had started much earlier with the Maureen business. Had Janie told them about it or had the children just guessed? He would like to know that. The dark-eyed handsome censorious pair, whispering, looking at him unsmilingly. Gwen had come back to him much later, but Miles had never come, and that old bitterness had entered into what happened afterwards, so that the two guilts seemed to be entwined. No one had ever understood about Maureen and it was now too late to try to explain it all and whom could it be explained to? Not to Danby, who would just laugh, as he laughed at everything, at life, even at death. He said he found Gwen’s death comical, his own wife’s death comical. It was years later of course, long after that terrible meaningless leap from the bridge. Could he explain to Miles about Maureen and would Miles listen? He was the only person left in the world who cared about it anymore. Could he compel Miles to see it all as it really was? Could Miles forgive him on behalf of the others or would it all be coldness and cruelty and a final increase of horror?

Janie had called Maureen a pathetic little tart. But how re mote words, particularly angry words, are from the real thing at which they aim. Of course Maureen had had a lot of money out of him. Janie had forced him to reckon up how much. But money had not entered into his real relationship with Maureen, and it had not been just bed either, but somehow joy. Maureen had been sweetness, innocence, gentleness, gaiety, and peace. He bought her sheets and new curtains and cups and saucers. Playing at domesticity with Maureen gave him a pleasure which he had never had in setting up house with Janie. That had been a matter of quarrels about antique furniture with Janie’s mother. Janie had equipped the house: she had not expected him to be interested. Maureen singing in her little Liverpool Irish voice Hold that tiger, hold that tiger. Maureen swaggering in the new short skirts. Maureen, dressed only in a blue necklace, dancing the Charleston. Her little flat, full of the paraphernalia of her millinery trade, was like an exotic bird’s nest. Once when he returned home covered with feathers and Janie noticed he said he had been to the zoo. Janie believed him. Maureen laughed for hours.

Well, not perhaps innocence. How did she live? She never seemed to sell any of those hats. She said she sometimes worked as an usherette in the cinema, and she had seemed to him like a nymph of the cinema age, a sybil of the cavern of illusory love. But she had too many clothes, too nice a flat. He found a man’s handkerchief once. She said it was her brother’s. Yet even jealousy became, with her, a convention, a kind of game, a personal sweet game, like the chess game he had seen her setting out in a cafe with big handsome red and white pieces on a large board on the first occasion when he had seen her. It later appeared that she could not play chess. The chessmen were simply an instrument of seduction. This discovery charmed Bruno utterly. She said she was eighteen and that Bruno was her first man. Yet even these lies were sweet as he tasted them mingled with her lipstick in long slow clinging kisses. Oh God, thought Bruno, and it all came back to him, it could come back even now with a warm rush to the centre of that dry schematic frame. Physical desire still stalked, still pounced, sometimes vague and fantastic, sometimes with memories of Maureen, sometimes with images of coloured girls whom he had followed in the street and embraced with impotent excitement in twilit rooms in Kilburn and Notting Hill long long after Janie was dead.

How selective guilt is, thought Bruno. It is the sins that link significantly with our life which we remember and regret. People whom we just knocked down in passing are soon lost to memory. Yet their wounds may be as great. We regret only the frailty which the form of our life has made us own to. Before that moment in Harrods which had changed his world he had felt practically no guilt at all. Afterwards, after Janie’s awful scene with Maureen, after Maureen crying behind that closed door, he had felt the burden and the horror of it, the ugliness and the scandal. Why ever had Janie married him anyway? Stylish Janie Devlin. He must have been momentarily transformed by love and ambition into the witty dashing youth that she wanted. Her disappointment had been ironical and dry.

His pictures of Janie all seemed to belong to before the first war, to the epoch of courtship and marriage. The war itself was scarcely there in recollection. He had not been fighting, he was already over thirty, he suffered from a stomach ulcer, he hardly seemed to have noticed it at all. His father was dead and he was running the printing works, which was doing well on government orders. His mother, who had gone to Norfolk because of the Zeppelins, died in nineteen-sixteen. This shook him more than the holocaust. The pictures of Janie were brighter and yet more remote. Janie playing tennis in a white dress of heavy linen whose hem became green from brushing the grass through a long summer afternoon. Janie chattering Italian at a diplomatic party while her bright bold eye quizzes the men. Janie twirling her parasol, surrounded by admirers in the Broad Walk. Janie in St. James’s Theatre on the night when he proposed. How gay, how sweet, and how infinitely far off it all seemed now. Maureen’s was the more febrile gaiety of a later and grimmer world. At the parting of the ways, You took all my happy days, And left me lonely nights.