Bruno’s Dream

1

Bruno was waking up. The room seemed to be dark. He held his breath, testing the quality of the darkness, wondering if it was night or day, morning or afternoon. If it was night that was bad and might be terrible. Afternoon could be terrible too if he woke up too early. The drama of sleeping and waking had become preoccupying and fearful now that consciousness itself could be so heavy a burden. One had to be cunning. He never let himself doze in the mornings for fear of not being able to fall asleep after lunch. The television had been banished with its false sadnesses and its images of war. Perhaps he had nodded off over his book. He had had that dream again, about Janie and Maureen and the hatpin. He felt about him and began to push himself up a little on his pillows, his stockinged feet scrabbling inside the metal cage which lifted the weight of the blankets off them. Tight bedclothes are a major cause of bad feet. Not that Bruno’s feet minded much at this stage.

It was not night, thank God. The cowering mind and body fidgeted, discovering themselves in time. He remembered, or somehow knew, that it was the afternoon. The curtains were tightly pulled, but there was a cold reddish glow about the edges. The sun must be shining out there, the chilly spring sun, casting a graceless light upon sinful London and the flooding Thames and the grimy ringed towers of Lots Road power station which would be visible from the window when Adelaide came at five o’clock to pull the curtains. He reached for his glasses and held his watch up towards the dim curtainedge and made out that it was four-fifteen. He wondered if he should call out to Adelaide but decided not to. He could manage three-quarters of an hour without the horrors. And Adelaide was a rather irritable servant who disliked a premature summons. Or perhaps she had become irritable only in the last year. Did she smash the best plates on purpose? There were always crumbs on the tray. He was so old now and he had been ill so tediously long.

No letters today. There would be none by the afternoon post. But when five o’clock came it was a cozy time of day, the best time really, with tea and muffins and anchovy toast and a new kind of jam and the Evening Standard and then Danby coming home from the printing works. It was nicer in winter when there was a coal fire in his room and it was dark outside. That lucid spring sun was his enemy and the interminable summer evenings were a torture to the mind. He would have liked a coal fire now, only it made so much work and even Nigel, who thought of most things, had not thought of that. Bruno would have tea, making it last as long as possible, then read the Evening Standard, starting with the strip cartoons, then six-o’clock news on the wireless, then talk for half an hour to Danby, not about business of course but about the funny things that happened in Danby’s day. Danby always had funny things in his day. Then play telephone perhaps or look at the stamps and then it would be seven and he could start drinking champagne, then read some spider books or a detective novel, then it would be supper brought by Nigel, and then talk with Nigel and then settle down for the night by Nigel. Soft padding Nigel with the angel fingers.

Danby said Nigel was unreliable and threatened to sack him once. Danby must not know that Nigel broke the Simla cup. Bruno must remember to say that he broke it himself. But of course Danby would not send Nigel away if Bruno did not want. Nigel was not really a trained nurse, he had just been an orderly or something, but he was so good with pillows and helping out of bed, he was so gentle. Danby was a kind son-in-law to Bruno. He would never send the old man to a home, Bruno knew that. It was years now since Danby had absolutely insisted that Bruno should come to stay with him and be looked after. Danby was kind, though no doubt it was all a matter of temperament and good health and being always hungry and ready for a drink. Danby was the sort of man who, if civilization were visibly collapsing in front of him, would cheer up if someone offered him a gin and French. God knows what Bruno’s daughter had seen in Danby, Gwen such a strong serious girl and Danby a shambler through pubs. Women were unaccountable. Yet they had seemed to love each other. He could remember that much, though poor Gwen had died so long ago.

He could see now in the twilight of the room the hump of the foot-cage, the big wooden box on the table, which held the stamp collection, the bottles of champagne on the marble-topped bookcase, and nearby upon the wall the square framed photograph of his wife, Janie. Janie had died twenty years before Gwen, but they seemed equally far away now. Gwen’s photo was still downstairs on the piano. He could not bring himself to ask for it to be brought. Three weeks ago he had overheard Adelaide saying to Nigel, “He won’t be coming downstairs anymore.” He had felt a sense of injustice and a thrill of fright. How could he concede that “any more”?

He had not been downstairs for more than a month. But that was not “not anymore.” He could still get to the lavatory quite easily. Yet why was Nigel always talking about bedpans now and saying how easy they were and suggesting that today he was surely too tired to go? Was Nigel preparing him for that time? Well, it was not yet. He was sure of that, although he no longer wanted to know what it was that Danby and the fool doctor were whispering about on the landing. The fool doctor had said he might live for years. “You’ll outlive us all!” he had said, laughing healthy laughter and looking at his watch. Years might mean anything. He must live three years anyway, he had to do that so as to cheat the income tax, to live three years was a statutory requirement.

When I ought to be thinking about death I am thinking about death duties, thought Bruno. That was not really al truism. It was more like a pathetic inability, even now, to divest himself of a sense of property. It was all very confusing. He felt quite muzzy today, it was those tablets, though they did stop the pain. Or perhaps those bromide sleeping pills were poisoning him slowly. Sometimes he got muddled, a dislocated feeling quite unlike the euphoria of the champagne, and overheard himself talking aloud without knowing what he was talking about. One million brain cells were destroyed every day after the age of twenty-five, Danby had told him once, having read it in the Sunday paper. Could there be any brain cells left at that rate when one was well over eighty, Bruno wondered. Some days were clearer. There was so much less pain now. Wonderful what science can do. He must find out about a deed of gift and make the stamp collection over to somebody and not let the income tax have it. The stamp collection should fetch twenty thousand pounds. Twenty thou sand pounds tax free was worth anybody’s having. How his father had hated giving it to him at the end. He could still see with clarity, a little coloured picture in the nutshell of his mind, the thin white hand pushing the box towards him along the mahogany table. His dying father saying to him with bitterness, “You’ll sell it, Bruno you fool, and you’ll be cheated royally.” Well, he had not sold it, he had even added to it a little, he had even loved it a little, though he was never a serious philatelist like his father. He had kept it for a rainy day, and now his life was nearly over and there had been no rainy day. He might have had a world tour. Or bought great works of art and enjoyed them. Or had oysters and caviar every day. Or given it to Oxfam. He must find out about the deed of gift, how it worked, only he did not like to ask Danby. Danby was very kind but he was a thoroughly worldly man. Danby must be wondering who would get the stamps. Bruno wondered too. His son-in-law Danby or his son Miles? But it was years since he had seen Miles. Miles had rejected him long ago.

Of course they all caused him pain, all the time, they just could not help it. He could spy their assumptions, their thoughts which no longer ended in him but sped away past him into that unimaginable time when he would no longer be. He had become a monster to them. “A fine old man” he had overheard someone calling him more years ago than he liked to think of. What was he now? In his own consciousness he was scarcely old at all. He could see that his hands had aged. He noticed that with puzzlement as he promenaded the two twisted dried-up heavily spotted things upon the counterpane. He no longer looked into the mirror though he could feel sometimes like a mask the ghost of his much younger face. He glimpsed himself only in the averted eyes of Danby and Adelaide, in the fastidious reluctances which they could not conceal. It was not just the smell, it was the look. He knew that he had become a monster, animal-headed, bull-headed, a captive Minotaur. He had a face now like one of his spiders, Xysticus perhaps, or Oxyptila, that have faces like toads. Below the huge emergent head the narrow body stretched away, the contingent improbably human form, strengthless, emaciated, elon gated, smelly. He lived in a tube now, like Atypus, he had become a tube. Soma sema. His body was indeed a tomb, a grotesque tomb without beauty. How different death appeared to him now from how it had seemed even three years ago when he still had his white hair. Real death was nothing to do with obelisks and angels. No wonder they all averted their eyes.

The printing works ought to be a kind of monument only he still thought of the works as his father’s creation. Gater and Greensleave. Greensleave and Odell it ought to be now with Danby in charge, only Danby had refused to change the name although old Gater had been dead these forty years. There had been a bad patch after the war when it was so hard to get spare parts for the American presses, but things had picked up somehow. Was that due to Danby? Variety was the secret, and nothing too humble: programmes, catalogues, leaflets, posters, Bingo cards, students’ magazines, writing paper. Bruno had done his best for the place. He had been born to it, for it, practically in it with the clack of monotype machines in his infant ears. But he had never felt at home with printers, and their strange private language had always been for him a foreign tongue. He had been always a little afraid of the works, just as he had been afraid of the horses which his father had forced him to ride when he was a child. It was different for Danby, who had no natural bent and no creative gifts and was not even an intellectual, and who had taken to printing when he married Gwen as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Bruno, who never got over thinking Danby a fool, had resented that calmness. Yet it was Danby who had turned out to be the businessman.

Bruno had wanted to study zoology and not to go into the printing works. His father had made him study classics and go into the printing works. How had he made him? Bruno could not remember. Only through business, only through money, had he ever really communicated with his father. Because of certain punishments he had forgotten almost everything about his father, who remained nevertheless in his life as a source of negative energy, a spring of irritation and resentment, a hole through which things drained away. He could flush with anger even now when thinking of his father, and even now the old hatred came to him fresh and dark, without images. Yet he could see his mother so clearly and see that particular strained smile on her face as she tried to persuade her husband, and the tones of her voice came to him clearly over an interval of eighty years. “George, you must be more gentle with the boy.”

I ought to have been a recluse, Bruno thought, lived in the country like an eighteenth-century clergyman with my books of theology and my spiders. The proper happiness of his life, the thing which he had so completely mislaid, came to him always associated with his mother, and with memories of summer nights when he was sixteen, seeing in the light of his electric torch the delicate egg-laying ritual of the big handsome Dolomedes spider. O spiders, spiders, spiders, those aristocrats of the creepy-crawly world, he had never ceased to love them, but he had somehow betrayed them from the start. He had never found an Eresus niger, though as a boy his certainty of finding one had seemed to come direct from God. His projected book on The Mechanics of the Orb Web had turned into an article. His more ambitious book, The Spiders of Battersea Park, had shrunk to a pair of articles. His monograph on the life and work of C. A. Clerck was never published. His book on The Great Hunting Spiders did not get beyond the planning stage. He corresponded for several years with Vladimir Pook, the eminent Russian entomologist, and Pook’s great two-volume work Soviet Spiders, inscribed to B. Greensleave, an English friend and a true lover of spiders, was among his most treasured possessions. But he had never accepted Pook’s invitation to visit Russia; and it was Pook who had written the last letter.

What had happened to him and what was it all about and did it matter now that it was practically all over, he wondered. It’s all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard. Death refutes induction. There is no “it” for it to be all about. There is just the dream, its texture, its essence, and in our last things we subsist only in the dream of another, a shade within a shade, fading, fading, fading. It was odd to think that Janie and Gwen and his mother and for all he knew Maureen now existed more intensely, more really, here in his mind than they existed anywhere else in the world. They are a part of my life-dream, he thought, they are immersed in my consciousness like specimens in formalin. The women all eternally young while I age like Tithonus. Soon they will have that much less reality. This dream stuff, this so intensely his dream stuff, would terminate at some moment and be gone, and no one would ever know what it had really been like. All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes. He had worked so hard, learning German, learning Italian. It seemed to him now that it had all been vanity, a desire at some moment which never came, to impress somebody, to succeed, to be admired. Janie had spoken such beautiful Italian.

As one grows older, thought Bruno, one becomes less moral, there is less time, one bothers less, one gets careless. Does it matter now at the end, is there really nothing outside the dream? He had never bothered with religion, he had left that to the women, and his vision of goodness was connected not with God but with his mother. His grandmother had had evening prayers every night with the servants present. His mother had gone to church every Sunday. Janie had gone to church at Christmas and Easter. Gwen was a rationalist. He had gone along with them and lived in casual consciousness through the life and death of God. Was there any point in starting to think about it all now, in setting up the idea of being good now, of repenting or something? Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there? If only he could believe in death-bed repentance and instant salvation. Even the idea of purgatory was infinitely consoling: to survive and suffer in the eternal embrace of a totally just love. Even the idea of a judgement, a judgement on his cruelty to his wife, his cruelty to his son. Even if Janie’s dying curses were to drag him to hell.

It must be ten years since he had seen Miles, and that had been about the deeds of the house in Kensington, which had been let and which Miles wanted to sell. The house was in Janie’s name, bought with Janie’s money, and of course she had left everything to the children. Before that he had met Miles at Janie’s funeral, at Gwen’s funeral, and there had been one or two other encounters about money. Miles, so cold, so unforgiving, writing those regular patronizing letters for Christmas and birthday: I always think of you with affection and respect. It could not be true. He had thought his son distinguished. He had admired him for refusing to go into the works, envied him perhaps. Yet Miles had not done all that much with his life. How hard it was to believe that Miles must be over fifty. He was an able civil servant, they told Bruno, but nowhere near the top. And then there had been all that poetry nonsense, getting him nowhere.

If only certain things had not been said. One says things hastily, without meaning them, without having thought, without understanding them even. One ought to be forgiven for those hasty things. It was so unfair to have been made to carry the moral burden of his careless talk, to carry it for years until it became a monstrous unwilled part of himself. He had not wanted Miles to marry an Indian girl. But how soon he would have forgotten his theories when confronted with a real girl. If only they had all ignored his remarks, if only they had made him meet Parvati, let him meet Parvati, instead of flying off and building up his offence into a permanent barrier. If they had only been gentle with him and reasoned with him instead of getting so high-minded and angry. It all happened so quickly, and then he had been given his role and condemned for it. And Miles said he had said all those things he was sure he had never said. There were so many misunderstandings. Gwen tried a little. But even Gwen did not have the sense to argue with him properly. And then Parvati was killed so soon after the marriage. It was not till much later that he even saw a picture of her, a snapshot taken of her and Gwen in Hyde Park, enlaced together, their arms round each other’s waists. Gwen had taken Parvati’s long black plait of hair and drawn it round over her own shoulder. They were laughing. Even that snapshot might have brought him round.

Miles had forgiven nothing. Perhaps it was her death that fixed him in that endless resentment. The often-quoted remark about “coffee-coloured grandchildren.” Well, there had been a judgement. Bruno had no grandchildren. Gwen and Danby, childless, Miles and Parvati, childless, Miles and-Bruno could not recall the name of Miles’s second wife, he had never met her. Oh yes, Diana. Miles and Diana, childless. Was there any point in trying even now to be reconciled, whatever that meant? It was a mere convention after all that one ought to be on good terms with one’s son or father. Sons and fathers were individuals and should be paid the compliment of being treated as such. Why should they not have the privilege, possessed by other and unrelated persons, of drifting painlessly apart? Or so he had said to Danby, many years ago, when the latter had questioned him about his relations with Miles. Danby had probably been worrying about the stamps.

Of course Miles’s resentment had started much earlier with the Maureen business. Had Janie told them about it or had the children just guessed? He would like to know that. The dark-eyed handsome censorious pair, whispering, looking at him unsmilingly. Gwen had come back to him much later, but Miles had never come, and that old bitterness had entered into what happened afterwards, so that the two guilts seemed to be entwined. No one had ever understood about Maureen and it was now too late to try to explain it all and whom could it be explained to? Not to Danby, who would just laugh, as he laughed at everything, at life, even at death. He said he found Gwen’s death comical, his own wife’s death comical. It was years later of course, long after that terrible meaningless leap from the bridge. Could he explain to Miles about Maureen and would Miles listen? He was the only person left in the world who cared about it anymore. Could he compel Miles to see it all as it really was? Could Miles forgive him on behalf of the others or would it all be coldness and cruelty and a final increase of horror?

Janie had called Maureen a pathetic little tart. But how re mote words, particularly angry words, are from the real thing at which they aim. Of course Maureen had had a lot of money out of him. Janie had forced him to reckon up how much. But money had not entered into his real relationship with Maureen, and it had not been just bed either, but somehow joy. Maureen had been sweetness, innocence, gentleness, gaiety, and peace. He bought her sheets and new curtains and cups and saucers. Playing at domesticity with Maureen gave him a pleasure which he had never had in setting up house with Janie. That had been a matter of quarrels about antique furniture with Janie’s mother. Janie had equipped the house: she had not expected him to be interested. Maureen singing in her little Liverpool Irish voice Hold that tiger, hold that tiger. Maureen swaggering in the new short skirts. Maureen, dressed only in a blue necklace, dancing the Charleston. Her little flat, full of the paraphernalia of her millinery trade, was like an exotic bird’s nest. Once when he returned home covered with feathers and Janie noticed he said he had been to the zoo. Janie believed him. Maureen laughed for hours.

Well, not perhaps innocence. How did she live? She never seemed to sell any of those hats. She said she sometimes worked as an usherette in the cinema, and she had seemed to him like a nymph of the cinema age, a sybil of the cavern of illusory love. But she had too many clothes, too nice a flat. He found a man’s handkerchief once. She said it was her brother’s. Yet even jealousy became, with her, a convention, a kind of game, a personal sweet game, like the chess game he had seen her setting out in a cafe with big handsome red and white pieces on a large board on the first occasion when he had seen her. It later appeared that she could not play chess. The chessmen were simply an instrument of seduction. This discovery charmed Bruno utterly. She said she was eighteen and that Bruno was her first man. Yet even these lies were sweet as he tasted them mingled with her lipstick in long slow clinging kisses. Oh God, thought Bruno, and it all came back to him, it could come back even now with a warm rush to the centre of that dry schematic frame. Physical desire still stalked, still pounced, sometimes vague and fantastic, sometimes with memories of Maureen, sometimes with images of coloured girls whom he had followed in the street and embraced with impotent excitement in twilit rooms in Kilburn and Notting Hill long long after Janie was dead.

How selective guilt is, thought Bruno. It is the sins that link significantly with our life which we remember and regret. People whom we just knocked down in passing are soon lost to memory. Yet their wounds may be as great. We regret only the frailty which the form of our life has made us own to. Before that moment in Harrods which had changed his world he had felt practically no guilt at all. Afterwards, after Janie’s awful scene with Maureen, after Maureen crying behind that closed door, he had felt the burden and the horror of it, the ugliness and the scandal. Why ever had Janie married him anyway? Stylish Janie Devlin. He must have been momentarily transformed by love and ambition into the witty dashing youth that she wanted. Her disappointment had been ironical and dry.

His pictures of Janie all seemed to belong to before the first war, to the epoch of courtship and marriage. The war itself was scarcely there in recollection. He had not been fighting, he was already over thirty, he suffered from a stomach ulcer, he hardly seemed to have noticed it at all. His father was dead and he was running the printing works, which was doing well on government orders. His mother, who had gone to Norfolk because of the Zeppelins, died in nineteen-sixteen. This shook him more than the holocaust. The pictures of Janie were brighter and yet more remote. Janie playing tennis in a white dress of heavy linen whose hem became green from brushing the grass through a long summer afternoon. Janie chattering Italian at a diplomatic party while her bright bold eye quizzes the men. Janie twirling her parasol, surrounded by admirers in the Broad Walk. Janie in St. James’s Theatre on the night when he proposed. How gay, how sweet, and how infinitely far off it all seemed now. Maureen’s was the more febrile gaiety of a later and grimmer world. At the parting of the ways, You took all my happy days, And left me lonely nights.

Society conspires to make a newlywed couple feel virtuous. Marriage is a symbol of goodness, though it is only a symbol. Janie and he had enjoyed their virtue for quite a long time. “Is she a good woman?” his mother, who never quite got on with Janie, had asked him at the start. It was not a conventional question. Bruno was embarrassed by it and did not know the answer. His relation to Janie had fallen into two parts. In the first part, before Harrods, they had played social roles, put on smart clothes, been admired and envied, lived above Bruno’s station and beyond his means, and borne two handsome and talented children. In the second part, after Harrods, they seemed to have been alone, really related to each other at last, in an awful shut-in solitude, becoming demons to each other. Janie behaved so badly to me, he thought, or he tried for the ten-thousandth time to frame the judgement but could not. Agamemnon was killed on his first night home from Troy. But Agamemnon was guilty, guilty. Janie’s cancer came so soon after and she blamed it on him.

His love for Janie was not accessible to memory, he knew it only on evidence. She must have destroyed it systematically during that reign of terror. And he only, as it seemed to him now, knew for certain that she loved him when she was crucifying that love before his face. He only knew that she had kept all his letters when she tore them up and scattered them around the drawing room, only knew that she had kept his proposal note when she hurled it, screaming, onto the fire. For weeks, months, he was saying he was sorry, weeping, kneeling, buying her flowers which she threw out of the window, begging her to forgive him. “Don’t be angry with me, Janie, I can’t bear it, forgive me, Janie, oh forgive me, for Christ’s sake.” He must have loved her then. Maureen had vanished as if she had never been. He did not visit her again.

He sent her fifty pounds. He could not even write a note. He must have loved Janie then, but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness. His mother would not have punished him so for any fault. Later he became ferocious, violent. Janie said, “You have destroyed my world.” Bruno shouted, “You reject me. You reject everything that I am. You always have done. You never loved me.” They began to quarrel and they went on quarrelling even when Janie was ill, even when they both knew that Janie was dying. He ought not to have let Janie make him hate her. That was worse than anything.

Bruno’s heart was beating violently. He hauled himself up a little farther on his pillows. These million-times-thought thoughts could still blind him, make him gasp with emotion and absorb him into an utter oblivion of everything else. Was there no right way to think about those dreadful things, no way of thinking about them which would bring resignation and peace? Janie had been dead for nearly forty years. How well he knew this particular rat-run of his mind. He must not, must not become so upset or he would not sleep at night and sleepless nights were torture. He did not like to call out at night, he was affrighted by his own voice calling in the dark ness. Even if he did call Nigel did not always hear, did not always come. Once in extremity he had shouted so loud that Nigel must have heard, but he did not come. Perhaps he was not there at all but lying somewhere else in the arms of a girl. He knew so little really about Nigel. After that he was afraid to call in case Danby should hear and find out that Nigel was not there.

He stared at his old red dressing gown hanging on the door, a big shrouded thing in the dim light. It was the only garment now which he put on, it represented his only travelling, his wardrobe was shrunk to this. Why had it somehow become the symbol of his death? Danby had offered to buy him a new one, and Bruno had refused, saying, “It’s not worth it now.” Danby accepted the remark. The old dressing gown would still be there when they returned with relief from the funeral and began to get out the bottles, and then someone would say, “Bruno’s gone, but there’s his poor old dressing gown still hanging on the door.”

What would it be like, would someone be there? A girl perhaps? But there was no girl. If only he could be loved by somebody new. But it was impossible. Who would love him now when he had become a monster? Perhaps he would die alone, calling, calling. He had let Janie die alone. He could not bear it. He had heard her crying out, calling his name. He had not gone up. He feared that she would curse him at the end. But perhaps she had wanted to forgive him, to be reconciled with him, and he had taken away from her that last precious good thing? The groans and cries had continued for a while and become silent at last. Tears began to stream down Bruno’s face. He murmured “Poor Bruno, poor Bruno, poor Bruno…”