Iris Murdoch: Bruno’s Dream

Society conspires to make a newlywed couple feel virtuous. Marriage is a symbol of goodness, though it is only a symbol. Janie and he had enjoyed their virtue for quite a long time. “Is she a good woman?” his mother, who never quite got on with Janie, had asked him at the start. It was not a conventional question. Bruno was embarrassed by it and did not know the answer. His relation to Janie had fallen into two parts. In the first part, before Harrods, they had played social roles, put on smart clothes, been admired and envied, lived above Bruno’s station and beyond his means, and borne two handsome and talented children. In the second part, after Harrods, they seemed to have been alone, really related to each other at last, in an awful shut-in solitude, becoming demons to each other. Janie behaved so badly to me, he thought, or he tried for the ten-thousandth time to frame the judgement but could not. Agamemnon was killed on his first night home from Troy. But Agamemnon was guilty, guilty. Janie’s cancer came so soon after and she blamed it on him.

His love for Janie was not accessible to memory, he knew it only on evidence. She must have destroyed it systematically during that reign of terror. And he only, as it seemed to him now, knew for certain that she loved him when she was crucifying that love before his face. He only knew that she had kept all his letters when she tore them up and scattered them around the drawing room, only knew that she had kept his proposal note when she hurled it, screaming, onto the fire. For weeks, months, he was saying he was sorry, weeping, kneeling, buying her flowers which she threw out of the window, begging her to forgive him. “Don’t be angry with me, Janie, I can’t bear it, forgive me, Janie, oh forgive me, for Christ’s sake.” He must have loved her then. Maureen had vanished as if she had never been. He did not visit her again.

He sent her fifty pounds. He could not even write a note. He must have loved Janie then, but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness. His mother would not have punished him so for any fault. Later he became ferocious, violent. Janie said, “You have destroyed my world.” Bruno shouted, “You reject me. You reject everything that I am. You always have done. You never loved me.” They began to quarrel and they went on quarrelling even when Janie was ill, even when they both knew that Janie was dying. He ought not to have let Janie make him hate her. That was worse than anything.

Bruno’s heart was beating violently. He hauled himself up a little farther on his pillows. These million-times-thought thoughts could still blind him, make him gasp with emotion and absorb him into an utter oblivion of everything else. Was there no right way to think about those dreadful things, no way of thinking about them which would bring resignation and peace? Janie had been dead for nearly forty years. How well he knew this particular rat-run of his mind. He must not, must not become so upset or he would not sleep at night and sleepless nights were torture. He did not like to call out at night, he was affrighted by his own voice calling in the dark ness. Even if he did call Nigel did not always hear, did not always come. Once in extremity he had shouted so loud that Nigel must have heard, but he did not come. Perhaps he was not there at all but lying somewhere else in the arms of a girl. He knew so little really about Nigel. After that he was afraid to call in case Danby should hear and find out that Nigel was not there.

He stared at his old red dressing gown hanging on the door, a big shrouded thing in the dim light. It was the only garment now which he put on, it represented his only travelling, his wardrobe was shrunk to this. Why had it somehow become the symbol of his death? Danby had offered to buy him a new one, and Bruno had refused, saying, “It’s not worth it now.” Danby accepted the remark. The old dressing gown would still be there when they returned with relief from the funeral and began to get out the bottles, and then someone would say, “Bruno’s gone, but there’s his poor old dressing gown still hanging on the door.”

What would it be like, would someone be there? A girl perhaps? But there was no girl. If only he could be loved by somebody new. But it was impossible. Who would love him now when he had become a monster? Perhaps he would die alone, calling, calling. He had let Janie die alone. He could not bear it. He had heard her crying out, calling his name. He had not gone up. He feared that she would curse him at the end. But perhaps she had wanted to forgive him, to be reconciled with him, and he had taken away from her that last precious good thing? The groans and cries had continued for a while and become silent at last. Tears began to stream down Bruno’s face. He murmured “Poor Bruno, poor Bruno, poor Bruno…”

“O Adelaide, sweet Adelaide,

The years may come, the years may go…”

“Sssh!”

Danby Odell was in bed with Adelaide the maidservant. She had been his mistress for nearly three years. Before that there had been Linda. Linda was smart and neat, her shiny black handbags were like a sort of well-kept professional kit. Relaxed and divorc� , neatness was her form of virtue, and she had kept the affair, which she had initiated, tidy and well organized. Then one day she went back to Australia. They exchanged three letters. Six months later Danby had taken up with Adelaide. She was sweet, she was there.

These things had nothing to do with the servitude of being in love. They had nothing to do with what it had been like with Gwen. With Gwen it had been the once-in-a-lifetime form of insanity. Danby had suffered. Even when he was married to her he had suffered, as a soul might suffer in the presence of its God simply from an apprehension of a difference in substance. Gwen was intense and high and spiritual. Danby loved her moral intensity with physical love. They both suffered a pain of separation. Even when he was making her laugh, which he did very often, there would sometimes be a spasm of pain and they would both look quickly away. Gwen had loved him profoundly, meditating upon his unlikeness and their mutual impossibility, enclosing his separateness in the sweep of her love and brooding over it as a saint might brood secretly upon the wounds of the stigmata which unknown to his fellows he ever conceals in the folds of his robes. Danby had not recovered from her death. But his life energy was cheerful stuff.

Danby was attractive to women. He was tall but getting rather stout now. A bulky paunch was developing below his waist. The long hairs which covered his chest and stomach were still fine and golden while the straight thick hair of his head had become pure white. His face had the glowing very slightly wrinkled texture of a russet apple, his eyes were a clear light blue, and he had excellent regular teeth which he often admired in the mirror. He enjoyed eating and drinking and doing business. When he was younger he had been an excellent ballroom dancer and a good tennis player. He came of an unambitious tradesman’s family and though he was the only child of adoring parents, neither he nor anybody else had had any particular plans for his life. He went to a mediocre gram mar school and spent a year at a provincial university. His father died, his mother died, there was no money left. He realized, now that there was no one to bully and reprove him, how deeply he had loved his mother. He went into insurance. He was rescued from this fate by the war, every moment of which he enjoyed. Then came seriousness in the person of Gwen. Danby entered the printing works with some trepidation but soon found to his surprise that he had a talent for business and was indeed much better at it than Bruno was. Bruno, who was by then over sixty, was only too glad to surrender his power to his son-in-law. Danby flourished. It was not so much the money-making that he enjoyed but something much more like housewifery or domestic neatness: keeping things tidy, making things fit, dealing with twenty tiny crises every day. The men, with whom he was regularly to be found drinking in the public bar of the Old Swan, liked Danby. Indeed almost everybody liked Danby, though there were a few people who thought him an ass. Danby liked Danby.