Iris Murdoch: Bruno’s Dream

”Does it work backwards?” said Bruno. “It can’t, can it?”

”What do you mean, my dear?”

The woman was holding his hand again, sitting close up against him on the bed. He felt no sexual desire any more. The fear had killed it.

”If only it could work backwards, but it can’t.”

Some people believed that too. That life could be redeemed. But it couldn’t be, and that was what was so terrible. He had loved only a few people and loved them so badly, so selfishly. He had made a muddle of everything. Was it only in the presence of death that one could see so clearly what love ought to be like? If only the knowledge which he had now, this absolute nothing-else-matters, could somehow go backwards and purify the little selfish loves and straighten out the muddles. But it could not.

Had Janie known this at the end? For the first time Bruno saw it with absolute certainty. Janie must have known. It would be impossible in this presence not to know. She had not wanted to curse him, she had wanted to forgive him. And he had not given her the chance.

”Janie, I am so sorry,” murmured Bruno. His tears flowed. But he was glad that he knew, at last. The dressing gown had moved forward towards him and was standing at the foot of the bed.

I believe he’s going, thought Diana. Oh why have I got to suffer this?

Bruno had been talking a kind of nonsense for days and intermittently crying. He could scarcely eat and all power of movement seemed to be leaving his body. The limp shrunken form lay inertly under the counterpane. Only in the head, only perhaps in the eyes, there burned with a fierce almost violent strength the flame which was so soon to be put out.

Diana held onto his hand, which just perceptibly returned her pressure. He was blinking the tears away from his eyes. Diana put up her other hand to brush his cheek. He had not the strength now to raise his hand to his face. How strange it was that when almost all the other functions of the body had dwindled and fallen away into the hand of nature the eyes had not surrendered their mysterious power to manufacture tears.

Diana felt the tears rising into her own eyes, and she drew her free hand back to mop them. Her tears and Bruno’s were mingled on her cheek. She had come to love Bruno so much in this terrible time.

If Bruno went now Danby would feel very bad about it. He and Lisa had gone away for the night. Diana had persuaded them to go. Then Bruno had suddenly begun to sink.

It seemed to Diana that Danby and her sister were scarcely sane. They both seemed to be drunk with ecstasy. The physical change in Lisa was so great that Diana could scarcely recognize her as the same person. She looked not ten but twenty years younger and more beautiful than she had ever looked in her life. She laughed almost all the time, with a new laugh which Diana had never heard before. Or perhaps it was that throughout the years she had just forgotten the sound of Lisa’s laughter. Had she and Danby been to bed together? Lisa’s appearance left the matter in little doubt. Their attempts, in that house of death, to conceal their felicity were touching and unsuccessful. They could not help presenting a picture of life at its most explosively robust and hopeful. They could not help presenting a spectacle of triumph.

Miles’s indignation had been extreme and comic. Her perception of the comicality of Miles in this situation had been one of the things which had helped Diana herself to bear it. It had been some time before Miles would even believe what Diana was telling him. He regarded it as impossible, as strictly contradictory. He stared at Diana with wild amazed eyes. It was all a mistake, she would find that she had been mistaken, she had certainly got it wrong. For nature so preposterously to err… When at last Diana did succeed in persuading Miles of the truth of what she said, that Lisa was not leading a dedicated life in India but was to be seen riding about Lon don in Danby’s new sports car and dining with Danby at riverside restaurants, dressed in extremely smart new clothes, Miles gave himself up to a day of rage and execration. He cursed Danby, he cursed Lisa. He said it could not possibly last. She would be sorry, my God, she would be sorry! He announced himself irreparably damaged. The next day he was silent, frowning, concentrating, refusing to answer Diana’s questions. On the third day he said to Diana enigmatically, “It’s all over now,” and returned to work in the summerhouse. It was another week before Diana, walking down the garden, saw once more the strange angelic smile upon his face as he wrote.

Lisa had sent no communication to Miles and offered no explanation to Diana. Diana had simply discovered her with Danby one morning at Stadium Street. They had assumed that she would immediately understand. They looked upon her golden-eyed, a little apologetically, coaxingly like children. And, as it seemed to Diana, almost at once started treating her as if she were their mother. It had taken Diana herself some time to see and to believe what was there in front of her face. It had been a very bitter revelation. Diana, when she had first taken it on herself to visit Bruno regularly, had come to find a certain sweetness in her renewed relationship with Danby. She felt she had not really got over him and saw no reason why she should try to. She experienced his attractiveness now in a more diffused and peaceful way as a comforting warmth and a consoling presence. There was healing for her in their coexistence with Bruno. She could see that Danby was unhappy. She respected his grief and looked forward to a time when she might be able in turn to console him. She felt vague about this. There would be no extremes. But something would have survived the wreck. When poor Bruno is dead, she thought, I’ll consider about Danby and I’ll see what to do. In fact, she thought a lot about him, especially in the evenings when she was alone in the drawing room at Kempsford Gardens, and his image brought her a kind of happiness.

But now. Lisa had taken Miles away from her and now she had taken Danby too. While she listened to Miles’s outraged cries she struggled with her own pain. How could her resentment ever have an end? She realized now just how much she had been relying on Danby. Indeed it was not until Miles told her that at least she ought to be pleased by this definitive removal of her rival that this aspect of the matter occurred to her at all. Danby was far more final than India. A Lisa in India would have become a divinity. A Lisa sitting in Danby’s car with an arm outstretched along the back of the seat, as Diana had last seen her, was fallen indeed. Miles said venomously, “Well, she has chosen the world and the flesh. Let’s hope for her sake she doesn’t find she’s got the devil as well!” Naturally it did not occur to Miles that Diana would be other than pleased. In fact, he was not concerned with Diana’s feelings, being so absorbingly interested in his own. He will manage, she thought, he will manage. We’ve all paired off really, in the end. Miles has got his muse, Lisa has got Danby. And I’ve got Bruno. Who would have thought it would work out like that?

Diana felt that she had emerged at last into a vast place of loneliness. Danby and Lisa, with their solicitous concern about her and their submissive politeness, were as lost to her as if they were dead. And she was beginning to realize how little Miles really reflected about her, how little he tried in his imagination to body forth the real being of his wife. His imagination was engaged in other and more exotic battles. He had seemed very close to her when he had talked to her about Parvati, but it seemed to her now that she had simply been made use of. Miles had needed a crisis in his relations with the past, he had needed a certain ordeal, and she had helped him to achieve it. Now he had returned into himself more self-sufficiently than ever before. She thought of startling him into noticing her by telling him that she too was in love with Danby. But that would be merely to add absurdity to pain.