Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

With Diana Danby had achieved a sad but strangely sweet relationship such as one might have with a wife one had divorced long ago. They kissed each other on the cheek and squeezed hands. The tending of Bruno made a solemn and melancholy bond between them. “How is he today?”

”Not too bad. He took some soup.” Danby knew that Diana was afraid that Bruno might die when she was alone with him and Danby was not there. She never said this, but Danby under stood what it meant when she asked anxiously, “You won’t be too long away, will you?” It was strange and terrible, this waiting for death. Every morning Danby wondered if Bruno had not died quietly during the night, and then saw, with a shock of pain and relief, the bedclothes still rising and falling a little. He had come, during this last time, to love Bruno with a blank almost impersonal sort of love, and he was able at last to measure that vast difference, that distance between presence and absence. Bruno’s presence in the house was something real, so positive, so profoundly touching. And yet it was also impossible not to feel it as a defilement. Danby looked forward with dread and yet with longing to the time when he would come home and take off his coat and get out the whisky bottle in a house utterly empty of Bruno. Yet between that moment and now there was that terrible unforeseeable thing to be endured.

Bruno had changed physically too since his fall. He had stopped wearing his false teeth and the lower part of his face had collapsed. His head seemed to be shrinking generally as the chunky flesh which had made his face look so lumpy and strange began to subside and fall in towards the bone. The ring of thin silky white hair which had fringed the base of the skull had mostly come off, rubbed away upon the pillow, and the skull was almost completely bare. Only Bruno’s eyes remained the same, narrow moist and terrifyingly full of puzzlement, speculation, and a weird kind of intelligence. With these puzzled hostile rather frightened eyes he surveyed the people who served him. Only sometimes for Diana would his shrunken face strain into a smile and his eyes wrinkle up with something like pleasure.

Miles had called two or three times and conducted rather one-sided conversations with Bruno. Once Danby, passing the door, had heard Miles talking about cricket, though he had not heard Bruno reply. Miles carried with him an atmosphere of complete unconcern. He was almost debonair. He approached Bruno with a kind of cheerfulness which irritated Danby extremely. He made brisk inquiries about what the doctor had said. He behaved like a man performing a duty and pleased with himself for doing so. He seemed completely uninvolved in the pain and the mystery of what was about to take place. He left the house smiling secretively and humming to himself. Danby decided that he detested Miles. The strange emotion, which had once seemed like love, which Miles had inspired in him, had faded away. He no longer even thought that Miles resembled Gwen. He saw him as a large smiling rat. He also sensed Miles’s increased dislike of himself, and wondered if Diana had talked. Probably not.

Danby had heard the news of Adelaide’s marriage with distress and relief. Now that he was no longer deafened by her cries he was able to remember her charm. She had been a sweet girl friend to him during those years and he felt a shamed gratitude which he would have liked to express to her in some way. He thought of giving her fifty pounds as a wed ding present and got as far as writing the cheque, but then could not decide whether it would be proper to send it or not. When things have gone hopelessly wrong one simply does not know how to behave. In the end he did not send the cheque. Will would only tear it up and send back the pieces.

Danby drew the curtains. It was very dark outside, a moon less night and a little rain falling. He went to check that the door of the annex was propped open so that he could hear Bruno if he called. The old man had been fast asleep when Danby went up to see him earlier. Oh let him die in his sleep, Danby prayed with a sad pained heart. Let him die peacefully in his sleep and not know. Only not tonight, not tonight. Poor Bruno. Danby pulled back the sheets and blankets and felt the mattress, wondering if it was dry enough to sleep on. It seemed to be all right. The Stadium Street house had never felt entirely like a home to Danby, but he liked his little room with the dreary outlook onto the yard. The yard was just an expanse of grey mud now, caked and cracking in dry weather, in wet weather like thick glue. Danby vaguely intended to clear it up, but could not see how this could be done.

He sat down again on the bed and looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. A fat man with a lot of white hair and rather good teeth. He sighed. If only he had not seen Lisa, if only he had not been given that glimpse of something else, of really being alive or whatever it was. He had been quite happy sleeping with Adelaide, quite happy flirting with Diana. These beings belonged to his ordinary dull world and his ordinary dim consciousness. Meeting Lisa was the sudden exchange of twilight for daylight, greyness for colour, shadow for substance and shape. He had forgotten what these things were like. Perhaps he would forget again. Perhaps he would come through it all and out onto some great placid lake where the sun shone hazily and with a difference. Perhaps he would achieve some sort of peace, the peace of an elderly man, a peace of cosy retirement without angels. Without women too, he thought. Could he find another girl now? After seeing Lisa he simply didn’t want to.

He wondered where she was now, in some unimaginable abode of bliss with her other man. He could not think of her as belonging to this world and inhabiting the same space as himself. He pictured her enclosed in some kind of radiant extragalactic egg, some strange fold of the space-time continuum which wrapped her absolutely away. This vague image was necessary to him to soothe what would otherwise have been a crippling degree of jealousy and desire. If there was no place for possibility there was no place for yearning. Lisa had been a vision, an apparition, not a possibility. Yet however much he tried to refuse the knowledge, he knew that what he had seen and, oh God, touched was a real woman who might have loved him.

Danby thought that he might soon start to cry. For years he had been incapable of tears. Now quite lately, he had found himself weeping in the late evening and the early morning. The tears were strange, sweetly soothing and a little unnerving, as if his body were suffering some weird physical change. He must be careful not to let Bruno see him crying. He got up and went to the door for a moment to listen. There was no sound from upstairs. Then he thought that he had better go up and check that he had locked the front door, and he went up the stairs on tiptoe. Thank God poor Bruno slept at night.

A letter, which must have come by the second post, was lying on the mat. Danby saw at once that the writing was unfamiliar and it instantly seemed to him that the letter must be from Lisa. In trembling haste he tore it open. It was rather long and appeared to be from Nigel. Danby locked the door and fixed the chain and went slowly down the stairs again. He sat for a while staring sadly at nothing and holding Nigel’s letter crumpled in his hand. If only there were not these vain ghostly hopes, these sudden inane shadows of possibilities, these unfulfilled conditionals of hopeless desire. He closed his eye and a tear trickled down his cheek. Then he began to read Nigel’s letter.

My Dearest Danby,

I hope you will try to forgive me for my dereliction of duty, my unannounced departure, my taking of leave without consultation or permission. I am sorry to leave Bruno and had not intended to do so before the end. I hope he is calm and I would send my love if I thought he still remembered Nigel, only I trust that mercifully he does not. Since in a sense Nigel never really existed, he probably casts no memory image as he casts no shadow. I write to speak to you, just once, since it is a delicious joy to do so (see below) and because I feel I should try to explain why I went away. That, and other things. Love is a strange thing. There is no doubt at all that it and only it makes the world go round. It is our only significant activity. Everything else is dust and tinkling cymbals and vexation of spirit. Yet on the other hand what a trouble-maker it is to be sure. What a dreamer-upper of the impossible, what an embracer of the feet of the unattainable. It is a weird thought that anyone is permitted to love anyone and in any way he pleases. Nothing in nature forbids it. A cat may look at a king, the worthless can love the good, the good the worthless, the worthless the worthless, and the good the good. Hey presto: and the great light flashes on revealing perhaps reality or perhaps illusion. And alas how very often, dearest Danby, does one love alone, in solipsism, in vain encapsulation, while concealment feeds upon the substance of the heart. It is not a matter of conventions. Love knows no conventions. Anything can happen, so that in a way, a terrible terrible way, there are no impossibilities. Ah, I have thought of this too, my dear, and it has not been the least part of my suffering. You might have loved me. It was, alas, logically possible. But what made me go away was not simply my sense of the improbability of the conceivable, but my knowledge that my very great love was a very great destroyer. If I had been the saint that I could be I would have loved you and let you know it and stayed near you and done you no harm at all, surrounding you like the harmless air and making you almost not notice how much I loved you. As it is, the unpredictable force of that immense angelic thing, once let loose from its dark concealment, would have dragged us-where? I know not, but down. You would have had to act a hateful part. And I-The other great love of my life is, well you can guess who. To have you both before me pointing loaded pistols at each other was the acting out of a fantasy. And how absolutely, when it came to it, you were both of you clay in my hands. How easy it proved to make you do exactly what I wanted! But I must not think about my godlike power-that way lies the possible-impossible torment which I have determined to end. It was a great happening, was it not, our duel? Not knowing the outcome was heavenly pain, was Russian roulette of the soul. Forgive me.