Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

Diana had so far found herself quite unable to discuss the situation with Miles. He had made one or two half-hearted attempts to refer to it, but had seemed relieved when she had, with a kind of submissive animal gesture, simply turned her head away and refused to reply. In the two days since Lisa’s departure they had lived in the house together like two maniacs, each totally absorbed in a tempestuous inferno of private thoughts. Yet with all this they managed to behave with a certain degree of normality. Diana went shopping, Miles went to the office. They slept in the same bed, or rather lay awake for hours side by side, motionless and silent. Diana cried quietly, not wiping her tears, soaking the pillow. By day they were immensely polite and considerate and solicitous and rather formal. The only evident change in their routine was in the matter of meals. By tacit mutual consent they had abandoned any pretence of serious eating. Diana laid out, at intervals, a sort of buffet in the dining room at which, usually not together, they occasionally picked, a little shame-faced at being able to eat at all.

Diana had not at any point talked to Lisa either. She had made no comment to her sister, nor had Lisa attempted to speak to her, although twice she had taken Diana’s hand and squeezed it and laid it against her cheek, while Diana looked back at her blankly without responding. Diana conjectured that Lisa had determined on her flight immediately after Miles’s nocturnal visit. Then she had kept her silence during the time in which she was arranging for the job in India. She announced her departure on the morning of the day on which she left, and Diana could see that Miles was just as stunned as she was. On the final walk to the station Lisa had been cool and businesslike, talking fast, and Diana had been silent. Lisa had been trying to impress upon her that she must prevent Miles from trying to find Lisa before her departure to India, and that he would certainly fail if he tried. She did not tell Diana where she was going. When they got to the station she spoke again about Bruno. They embraced with closed eyes, clasping each other hard. Then Lisa was gone.

Diana had walked about the streets on that day and on the next day. She had sat on benches in parks and in churchyards. She rehearsed the situation endlessly in her mind, trying to find some way of thinking about it which was less than torture, but she could not. She had begun by believing that Miles and Lisa would run away together. Now she believed that they had finally and definitively crucified their love for her sake. It was not at first clear to her which was worse. In thinking them capable of running away she had made a judgement which seemed to bear not so much upon the honesty of either as upon the intense and terrible thing which was their love. Diana had fully taken in the scale of it, as with her first violent shock of horror she realized that the unthinkable had happened and that her life was utterly changed. She had apprehended with certainty this thing, huge, full-fledged, and monstrous in the house, when at a certain moment she had seen Miles and Lisa looking at each other across the dining table. She had not foreseen it. The pity for Lisa which she had so long shared with Miles had made her incapable of seeing her sister as pre-eminently able to charm her husband.

Her appalled and frightened imagination could not now inhabit the alternative. Once the dreadful fear of Miles’s flight had become less it began to seem to her a far worse and a far more difficult thing to accept their sacrifice. It would have been better to be their victim. That at least would have justified and made endurable the extreme jealousy and resentment which she could not stop feeling, and which she felt undiminished and intensified as she now saw Miles frantic-eyed at Kempsford Gardens, pacing and shuddering inside the walls of the house like a creature in a cage. For her too the house, the garden, had become utterly changed, a prison, a desolation. He could not expect her to be grateful, even though he had in a sense behaved impeccably. That impeccable behaviour tormented her almost more than anything. The situation somehow demanded her gratitude in a way which humiliated her utterly. How had they spoken of her? She had tried not to watch them. They could have spent the days together outside the house while she, at home, sat waiting for their judgement upon her-“You can’t leave poor Diana.”

”Poor Diana would break her heart.”

”After all, she is your wife, Miles. She has nothing but you.”

”She is not strong, Lisa, and independent as you are.” How strangely she and Lisa had now changed places. Now it was Diana who was the bird with the broken wing who would ever after be trailing her feathers in the dust.

If only they had gone away, thought Diana, I could have survived. Of course it would have been terrible. She tried to imagine the house suddenly empty, deprived of that dear familiar animal presence. They had lived together for so long like animals in a hutch. But all she could feel was the hollow misery of her irrevocably transformed marriage. “Things will never be the same again, never.” But if they had gone, she thought, then all the energy, all the pride, all the sense of self would have been on the side of survival. I would have wanted to show them and to show the world how well I could survive. I would have felt less bitter. I could have sought for help and found it in other places. As the wife, retained, triumphant, I can appeal to nobody, least of all to myself. Every way I lose. She has taken him from me, she has destroyed our married love, and I have no new life, only the dead form of the old life. They have acted rightly, and just by this I am utterly brought low. My pain and my bitterness are sealed up inside me forever. I have no source of energy, no growth of being, to enable me to live this hateful role of the wife to whom they have together planned to sacrifice their great love. I am humbled by this to the point of annihilation. Sooner or later Miles will begin to speak about it. He will speak kindly, gently, trying to make me feel that his love for me is something real. But I saw that thing, their love. Miles and I never loved so.

They had decided not to run away together. But supposing Diana were to run away, and leave them to each other? Was there somehow somewhere here an issue from the circle of her pain? Almost blindly she considered it. She might go abroad somewhere leaving no address. But they would scarcely believe that she had gone for good. They would search for her lovingly together. In any case Diana had no money and no skill to earn it with. With a conscious sense of madness she even considered going to Danby. If she went to Danby would Miles and Lisa then feel convinced, released? Diana had kept, during all her awful preoccupations, the idea of Danby in reserve. She had retained a feeling for him, gratitude, affection, a sense of him as a holiday from Miles. Here at least there was a new place of love. It had struck her as odd that Miles had said nothing to her about Danby’s drunken visit. Doubtless his own agony had rendered Danby’s activities invisible. Yet did it really make any sense to run to Danby? He might simply not know what to do with her. It would end in a muddle which would merely reveal her as, after all, irrevocably and slavishly attached to Miles. Was there no other way?

Diana looked at the bottle of sleeping tablets and then looked back at Bruno. He was a little propped up, as he had been when he was talking to her, the head fallen sideways. It was not easy to tell, even when regarding him full face, when his eyes were open and when they were not. Perhaps he was quietly watching her now? Diana turned back to him and moved to the side of the bed. Holding her breath she leaned over him. His eyes, amid the pudgy folds of flesh, were tightly closed, the little sighing breath issued from the mouth, the moist red lower lip extended and retracted rhythmically with the breath.