Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

”But what about me?”

”That is what they all cry. Relax. Let them walk on you. Send anger and hate away. Love them and let them walk on you. Love Miles, love Danby, love Lisa, love Bruno, love Nigel.”

Diana had laid her head against Nigel’s shoulder. Her tears were drying upon her cheek and upon his coat. “I don’t think I know how to do it.”

”You know how to try to do it. Everybody knows that.”

”It’s all been so mad. Danby and Lisa too. It all seems like a dream now, a nightmare, with nothing clear.”

”It is mostly a dream, Diana. Only little pieces are clear and they don’t necessarily fit together. When we suffer we think everything is a big machine. But the machine is just a fantasm of our pain.”

”It did seem like a machine,” she said. She began to sit up and push back her hair. Nigel had relaxed his hold.

”You see, it is already passing.”

She sat back and looked at him. A bluish-purple bruise covered one side of his face, darkly ringing the half-closed eye. “Whatever have you done to yourself?”

”I ran into a piece of the real world. It can hurt.”

”Poor Nigel-“

”And let me take these away. You won’t be needing them.”

Nigel’s hand, burrowing in her handbag, had got hold of the bottle of sleeping tablets. He lifted them out and transferred them to his pocket.

Diana rubbed her face, smoothing the dried tears into the skin. “No, I suppose I won’t. But I don’t know why. You’ve just talked nonsense to me.”

”Of course, of course. I am the nonsense priest of the non sense god! A false doctor is not a kind of doctor, but a false god is a kind of god, Diana. Let me see you home.”

Danby switched on the light. The big lower room of the printing works, musty with mingled smells of ink and paper and years-old papery debris, looked desolate, untidy, cluttered, cold, caught off its guard, and yet peculiarly immobile and suddenly attentive, against the line of black uncurtained windows. It always looked very odd without the bustle of people and the clattering noise. It was nearly five o’clock in the morning.

Danby began to cross the room. On the way he paused beside the old Albion press which had arrived the day before from the art school. The cast iron was dulled and a little rusty. It needed paint, oil, love. Even in its humbled disused con dition it was a thing of strength and beauty. Cope, London.1827. He caressed the big iron flower which served as a counterweight, and when he swung the bar the press moved easily, silently, with quiet power. He left it and went on across the room.

At the far side a door led out onto a flight of stone steps. The steps led down onto a diminutive wharf, now disused, from which an iron ladder led on down into the river, or at low tide to the muddy banks of the Thames. Danby unlocked the door and opened it and looked out. He could now see a very faint suggestion of light in the sky, a grey dimness contrasting with the thicker black below. He tried to make out the outline of the power station chimneys opposite but could not find them. Two or three lighted windows on the other side of the water distracted his eye, and he thought for a moment about Bruno, although he knew that Stadium Street could not be seen from the printing works. The surface of the river seemed now to be becoming visible. Or perhaps it was an illusion. Perhaps too there was a faint rivery sound, or perhaps just a steady murmuring in his ears. There was a smooth cool smell of mud and water. It was still a little time to low tide.

Danby stepped back inside and looked at his watch. He took off his mackintosh, shivered, and put it back on again. The cold air was making his bruised shoulder ache. He went over to the little rickety wooden office which jutted out like a hut into the main room, and switched on the light inside it. The office, which was used by Danby and Gaskin, was untidy, the desk piled with letters, some still unopened. Danby had been un able to work himself and unable to delegate his duties. The walls were papered with old handbills, announcing sales and theatrical performances of sixty years ago. Danby opened the cupboard and poured himself out a glass of neat whisky. He was feeling ridiculously nervous.

He had accepted Will Boase’s absurd challenge to a duel for reasons which had seemed compelling at the time, but which were now by no means quite so clear. Of course he knew that the “duel” would be a farce, something staged by the twins with theatre pistols loaded with blanks, and designed to confuse and humiliate him. Nevertheless it now seemed like a frightening trial, something unforeseeable and violent, a happening in which he would have to play a rapid and impromptu role, and in which he might find it difficult to act resolutely and impossible to act with dignity. He felt that he had delivered himself entirely into the hands of hostile men.

Yet such a handing of himself over had been what at first he had thought that he wanted. He had wanted to become the victim of a violent event. He had been arrested by the word “punish” which Will had used in his letter, and it had seemed to Danby that the twins, whom he now connected together into one agency, were the instruments of a fate, directed against him, and yet indubitably his. The idea of the duel was the idea of an ending, a fake ending of course, as Danby vaguely knew, but at any rate such a sort of forced small catastrophe as might symbolize the closing of an era.

He knew that Lisa had gone away. He had gone round to Kempsford Gardens and Diana had shown him the empty room. Diana said that she had gone abroad, for good. Danby did not ask for details. He did not suppose that she had gone abroad alone. He had stood silently with Diana in the empty room. Only after he had departed did he realize that Diana now seemed to know about him and Lisa. Miles must have told her. He went to the office the next day and the next day. He tended Bruno as usual, coming back to feed him at lunchtime. Nigel, after an absence of three days, returned and resumed his ministry. Only now Nigel was a hostile presence, a thin sardonic judging angel. Danby spoke to him awkwardly, apologetically, and shrank away from his smile. Adelaide had packed her belongings in several suitcases, which she had to unpack every day to find things she needed. She had announced her intention of going but had not yet gone. She spent most of every day away from the house. The kitchen was filled with dirty crockery and decaying food. Danby held a used plate under the hot tap every time he had to feed Bruno. He took his own meals in pubs.

Danby felt very sorry about Adelaide. What had seemed so natural and simple and pleasant while it was going on nicely now seemed much more like a crime. He could not work out quite why it was a crime. It was not what Adelaide said, about his not wanting to marry her because he thought her inferior. He did not, he believed, think her inferior. He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way. He would not have married Linda either. Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved. Perhaps it was that of allowing someone to be committed, to be utterly bound, for the sake of a second-rate kind of loving. It was not that it was a casual loving exactly. It had its own kind of reality, it was domestic, it belonged, like some humble house spirit, to the house at Stadium Street, to the kitchen and bedrooms there. Yet it was after all a poor weak thing, instantly broken at the touch of what now seemed to Danby to be the re-entry into his life of a reality which he had shamefully forgotten.

Yet which was the reality? He told himself sometimes that Lisa was, must be, a dream figure, an apparition, and that as time went on he would more and more realize this, until it would seem to him in the end that he had never really met her and that she had never really existed at all. He had become momentarily insane because of a girl who resembled Gwen, a serious intense girl with a dark wig of hair and a thinking mouth whom he had seen about half a dozen times in his life. He had become insane because she had suddenly reminded him of what it had been like, of what he had been like, of how he had been made to be, so long ago during his marriage. Lisa was just an angel of memory, a reminder of loss.