Iris Murdoch - Bruno’s Dream

The Pholcus phalangioides was showing no further signs of life. He must have half crushed it as he leaned against the wall. He dropped it onto the floor and put two more pieces of lavatory paper on top of it and brought his heel down hard onto the little resistant bundle.

Bruno felt the wretched tears near again. The women were all young while he aged like Tithonus. Supposing Janie had wanted to forgive him at the end after all? She held out her hands to him saying, “Bruno, I forgive you. Please forgive me. I love you, dear heart, I love you, I love you, I love you.” He would never never know. The most precious thing of all was lost to him forever.

“How is my worthy twin?” said Will Boase to his cousin Adelaide de Crecy.

“Oh all right.” Adelaide looked at him distrustfully. She was never sure how close those two were. They often seemed like enemies, but she could not guess what they really felt.

”I wouldn’t have his job. I can’t think how he puts up with the poor old fool.”

”He’s terribly good with Bruno,” said Adelaide. “It’s almost uncanny.”

”Nigel’s a bit potty if you ask me. He should have stayed in acting.”

”Look where acting’s got you!”

”I could get a part if only I had some decent clothes.”

”I’m not giving you any more money, Will!”

”I’m not asking you to, am I?”

”It’s just as well you’ve got Auntie’s pension!”

”Oh stop nagging!”

”Danby said you could paint the outside of the house if you’d like.”

”Tell him to paint it himself.”

”Don’t be so silly , Will. Danby paid you a lot for that last job. Far too much in fact.”

”Exactly. I don’t want Danby’s blasted charity.”

”Well, I think you ought to try and make money like other people.”

”This society thinks too much about money.”

”You’re just a scrounger.”

”Oh for God’s sake! I’ll sell my drawings. You’ll see.”

”You mean those pornographic drawings, the ones you wouldn’t let me look at?”

”There’s nothing wrong with pornography. It’s good for you. If politicians stuck to pornography the world wouldn’t be in such a mess.”

”Who’d buy that horrible stuff anyway?”

”There’s a market. You’ve just got to find it.”

”I wish you’d keep on at one thing instead of starting all these things that never get anywhere.”

”I can’t help it if I’m versatile, Ad!”

”Are you still going to that pistol-practice place?”

”A man has got to be able to defend himself.”

”You live in a dream world. You’re as bad as Nigel.”

”You wait, Ad. And I’m going to buy a really good camera. There’s money in photography.”

”First it’s pornography, then it’s photography. You can’t afford a really good camera.”

”Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag!”

”Vot serdeety molodoy!”

”The same to you with knobs onski.”

”Shto delya zadornovo malcheeka!”

”I think she’s getting worse.”

”Stop gibbering, Auntie, or we’ll put you in a bin. Go and write your memoirs!”

Adelaide went to Will’s place every Sunday to cook midday dinner for Will and Auntie. She knew better than to call it “lunch” to Will. It was Auntie’s place, really, Will had just moved in when he was out of a job. Auntie was gaga, but she was quite capable of looking after the house. Adelaide cooked a plain dinner since neither Will nor Auntie ever knew what they were eating and Will thought interest in food was bourgeois.

Auntie, who was not a real auntie but a devotee acquired by the twins in their early acting days when she kept theatrical lodgings in the north of England, had been parting company with reality over a period of several years. She announced periodically that she was a Russian princess, was about to sell her jewellery for a fortune, and was engaged in writing her memoirs of the Czarist court. Of late even her ability to talk seemed to be deserting her. In shops she mumbled and pointed to what she wanted, or uttered a stream of gibberish with Russian-sounding endings. Da and nyet she had probably acquired from the newspapers. Auntie lived in a dark ground-floor flat in Camden Town. Auntie’s flat was genteel. It contained too many objects, including a great many small pieces of china whose number never seemed to diminish in spite of Will’s habit of breaking things in fits of rage. Not everything which ought to be against a wall had a wall to be against. The sitting room was partitioned by a long sideboard and a tall bookcase which stood out at right angles into the room. This did not matter much as no one ever went in there. Life went on in the kitchen. Will had once gone through a short phase of wanting to “modernize” the flat, but had got no further than buying a steel chair of outstanding ugliness which now stood in the hall mercifully covered with coats.

The kitchen was dark, and darker today because it was raining, so they had the light on. An unshaded bulb bleakly lit up the cramped scene round the kitchen table where they were just finishing their roast lamb. Auntie, more than usually preoccupied with Czarism, was smiling vaguely behind thick steel-rimmed spectacles. She had a way of looking into her spectacles as if there was a private scene imprinted on the glass.

She had been a handsome woman once. She was tall, with somewhat blue hair, and wore long skirts and very long orange cardigans which she knitted herself. Her face had become putty-coloured and podgy, but she had bright cheerful eyes. The loss of her reason did not seem to have made her unhappy.

Adelaide had always been troubled by having such an aristocratic-sounding name. Her mother, Mary Boase, had married a fairly well-off carpenter called Maurice de Crecy. “We come of a Huguenot family,” Adelaide had early learnt to repeat, although she did not know who the Huguenots were or even how to spell them. At school, where she came on the roll call between Minnie Dawkins and Doris Dobby, she had been much teased about her name, but she soon saw that the little girls were also impressed. Perhaps it was her name which had made Adelaide so puzzled about her status and her identity. The puzzlement had not subsided as her life went on. Her parents were unpretentious people who lived in Croydon and ate their meals in the kitchen. When she was growing up Adelaide vainly attempted to persuade them to eat in the din ing room. Later she took over the dining room herself and called it her “study” and filled it with knick-knacks from antique shops. But it never looked like a real room. Adelaide’s brother, who was ten years her elder, never had any puzzles. He went into computers, got married, and went to Manchester, where he lived in a detached house and gave dinner parties without a tablecloth.

Adelaide was clever at school, but left at fifteen and became a clerk in an insurance office. She learnt to type and hoped to become somebody’s secretary. The office moved out of London. Adelaide became a shop assistant in a very superior shop and hoped to become a buyer. No one seemed to notice her talents so she left and became a clerk in a post office. She began to feel that if there had ever been a bus she had by now certainly missed it. In a moment of desperation she answered Danby’s cunningly worded advertisement for a resident house keeper. She expected a grand house. By the time she had re covered from her surprise it was too late. She had fallen in love with Danby. In fact she did no housekeeping, since Danby, who had an old-maidish streak in his nature, did all the organizing and catering. Adelaide cleaned and cooked. She was the maid. Danby called her Adelaide the Maid, and invented clerihews about her. He must have invented about fifty. He turned her into a joke as he turned almost everything into a joke, and it hurt her. He once said to her, “You have the surname of a famous tart in a story.” Adelaide replied, “Well, I suppose I am a tart too.”