Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

”No,” said Lisa carefully, leaning forward with an equal intentness, “I’ve thought all this out. You have to believe me that I won’t go back to Miles. You must see. Miles is the one man who is entirely impossible.”

”I don’t see. Nothing is impossible when people are in love. You’re mad, you’re absolutely mad. And you obviously haven’t understood what you’re trifling with here. It’s a great fire, Lisa, it’s a killer.”

”I want to get over Miles and I will get over Miles,” said Lisa. “I know how to do it. I shall suffer pain and I shall inflict pain, I know that. Miles feels I’m in a nunnery or dead. His peace depends on seeing me as unattainable, as an angel. It will hurt terribly when it turns out that I am only a woman after all.”

”Then he’ll come round and get you.”

”No. Then he will stop loving me.”

”So it’s all in aid of a cure for Miles!”

”Don’t be a fool. Danby, listen, can’t you conceive that I might care for you and find you attractive, that something did happen that day in the cemetery and that night in the garden? I’m grateful that you love me, but it isn’t just that. It means a lot to be wanted, but it isn’t just that. I loved Miles but I could see you too. I wouldn’t come to just anybody like this and ask to be consoled and helped. I’ve been thinking about you for days and weeks. Thinking about you made me decide not to go to India. Does it seem so strange after all that I should want to make somebody happy and be happy myself? I’ve thought about the way you fell on your knees in the ashes in the garden and how very much at that moment I wanted to touch you. In all those years at Kempsford Gar dens I lost my instinct of self-preservation. I’ve been living in a dark cage. Now I’m out of it. It has been painful, this coming out, and it will go on being painful for some time, but that’s a simple clean pain such as one might live with. I am not mad, Danby. I have never been more sane, coldly sane, self-interestedly sane. I am a woman. I want warmth and love, affection, laughter, happiness, all the things I’ve done without. I don’t want to live upon the rack.”

”You don’t know me at all-“

”I have seen your heart. You don’t know me. You imagine I’m good. But those self-denying years prove nothing. And you think I am-like someone else.”

”No,” he said, “no. I can see you. I can see you.”

”Then let us trust each other.”

”Wait a minute,” said Danby, “before I start screaming. Just what are you suggesting?”

”Something very simple. That we try to get to know each other better. For instance, you might invite me out to dinner.”

” Invite you-out-to dinner! I am going mad, I must be,” said Danby. He began to sob with laughter. “It’s no use, Lisa. It’s all fantasy. You’d leave me and it would kill me.”

”Well, if you prefer not to take the risk-“ Lisa stretched out a long leg and massaged her ankle. Then she thrust her feet into her shoes and reached for her coat.

Danby fell on his knees and put his head onto her lap. With a tired sad triumphant smile she caressed the dry white hair.

Bruno was waking up. Thank God it was not the night-time. Waking up was different now. It was a kind of entry into pain which was like a very slow quiet entry into warm water. The pain was not physical pain though there was physical pain. Sometimes there were sudden wrenches with a sense of something inward griping and collapsing. But these were brief and rare. There was the general restless itching aching un ease of the body which could find no rest now and to which even sleep came like an anxious cloud trailing its twilight over tensed knotted limbs. This other pain was of the mind, or somehow of the whole being as if in the doomed animal mind and body were fusing into almost diaphanous ectoplasm, only vaguely located in space, which vibrated blindly with the agony of consciousness. The return from sleep into this ectoplasmic consciousness was always misery. I am still here, he thought.

Days had lost their pattern. There was soup, bedpan, soup, bedpan. There was darkness and light, rain upon the window, sunlight which was worse than anything, which showed the limp crumpled greyness of the sheets and the stains on the wallpaper and the puckered brass doorhandle which had not been cleaned for years. Bruno knew that he was unable to think properly. Perhaps it was those latest tablets which the doctor had given him for the pain. They were new tablets, a different colour. He felt as if the centre of his mind was occupied by a huge black box which took up nearly all the space and round which he had to edge his way. Names not only of people but of things eluded him, hovering near him on the left, on the right, like birds which sped away when he turned his head. He did in fact turn his head, heavily, in puzzlement, searching for an area of clarity which he knew must be near to him because he could somehow see its light but not it.

People came and went. Danby and Gwen often sat with him together and talked sometimes to each other, sometimes to him. He liked that. There had been a young man with dark hair, only that was a long time ago. Bruno wanted to ask for the young man but could not recall his name. He heard himself say, “The young man, the young man-“ No one seemed to understand. Miles had come. Bruno knew Miles and knew his name and said his name. But he had not talked to him. Miles’s visits were like being in the cinema. Miles moved, spoke, performed and Bruno watched. When Miles leaned forward and spoke with an unusual intensity Bruno would nod to him and try to smile. It was difficult to smile now because of the pain ectoplasm, but with a lot of effort he could smile, though sometimes he wondered if this strange thing was really smiling. And there was a woman with pale hair and a very sweet radiant face who was with him a lot of the time now. Bruno did not know who she was.

Time passed and Bruno watched it pass, his face contracted with a kind of cunning. Time had never been visible to him before. People came to him and brought him things, soup, bedpans, the Evening Standard , his own book in two volumes, The Great Hunting Spiders . He looked at the pictures in the evening paper and in the spider book, but even with his glasses on the print had become vague and furry. If he woke at night he moaned and made the time move on by moaning, dropping a moan into a little cup or sack of time which was then taken from him. Sometimes he moaned for what seemed like hours on end. Sometimes Danby or Gwen would come, talk to him, tuck in his bedclothes, arrange his pillows. When they had gone he moaned again.

That was what the present was like. Somewhere quite else there was the past, perfectly clear, brightly coloured, stretching out near to him in some sort of different kind of ex tension. He saw moving pictures. It was not quite like remembering. One day he saw Sambo’s grave in the garden of the house at Twickenham. Miles was walking slowly towards it. They had got a little plain stone to mark the dog’s grave. They had meant to have his name engraved upon it, but this had never been done. Often he saw his mother, sometimes by lamplight combing out her long hair, sometimes by sun light, calling through screens of golden leaves, “Bruin, Bruin, where are you, my darling?” Once he saw Maureen in a very short skirt lying fast asleep in a nest of feathers. That could not be a memory. Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me, Lord how they weigh me down. He saw Gwen in a gym slip with pigtails holding Kennedy’s Latin Primer . He used to help her with her homework. He saw the page with her big childish writing side by side with his precise small writing. Amo, amas, amat. Latin begins where everything begins. But where does everything end, thought Bruno, where does it end?