Iris Murdoch: Bruno’s Dream

And now, she thought, I have done the most foolish thing of all, in becoming so attached to someone who is dying. Is this not the most pointless of all loves? Like loving death itself. The tending of Bruno had had at first simply a kind of consoling inevitability. It was something compulsory, a task, a duty, and it took her away from Kempsford Gardens where Miles sat smiling his entranced and private smile. It also brought her into a natural relationship with Danby. Later Danby’s proximity was a torment. But by then she had come to love Bruno, to love him with a blank unanxious hopeless love. He could give her nothing in return except pain. And it seemed to her as the days went by and Bruno became weaker and less rational, that she had come to participate in his death, that she was experiencing it too.

Diana felt herself growing older and one day when she looked in the glass she saw that she resembled somebody. She resembled Lisa as Lisa used to be. Then she began to notice that everything was looking different. The smarting bitterness was gone. Instead there was a more august and terrible pain than she had ever known before. As she sat day after day holding Bruno’s gaunt blotched hand in her own she puzzled over the pain and what it was and where it was, whether in her or in Bruno. And she saw the ivy leaves and the puckered doorknob, and the tear in the pocket of Bruno’s old dressing gown with a clarity and a closeness which she had never experienced before. The familiar roads between Kempsford Gardens and Stadium Street seemed like those of an un known city, so many were the new things which she now began to notice in them: potted plants in windows, irregular stairs upon walls, moist green moss between paving stones. Even little piles of dust and screwed-up paper drifted into corners seemed to claim and deserve her attention. And the faces of passersby glowed with an uncanny clarity, as if her specious present had been lengthened out to allow of contemplation within the space of a second. Diana wondered what it meant. She wondered if Bruno was experiencing it too. She would have liked to ask him, only he seemed so far away now, wrapped in a puzzlement and a contemplation of his own. So they sat together hand in hand and thought their own thoughts.

The pain increased until Diana did not even know whether it was pain any more, and she wondered if she would be utterly changed by it or whether she would return into her ordinary being and forget what it had been like in those last days with Bruno. She felt that if she could only remember it she would be changed. But in what way? And what was there to remember? What was there that seemed so important, something that she could understand now and which she so much feared to lose? She could not wish to suffer like this throughout the rest of her life.

She tried to think about herself but there seemed to be nothing there. Things can’t matter very much, she thought, because one isn’t anything. Yet one loves people, this matters. Perhaps this great pain was just her profitless love for Bruno. One isn’t anything, and yet one loves people. How could that be? Her resentment against Miles, against Lisa, against Danby had utterly gone away. They will flourish and you will watch them kindly as if you were watching children. Who had said that to her? Perhaps no one had said it except some spirit in her own thoughts. Relax. Let them walk on you. Love them. Let love like a huge vault open out overhead. The helplessness of human stuff in the grip of death was something which Diana felt now in her own body. She lived the reality of death and felt herself made nothing by it and denuded of desire. Yet love still existed and it was the only thing that existed.

The old spotted hand that was holding onto hers relaxed gently at last.