Bruno’s Dream

26

Bruno was asleep. His huge head, made even larger by the ragged undipped beard, lolled uncomfortably sideways, his mouth open, a moist lower lip showing amid the dull grey growth. He drew his breath in and out with a long shuddering sigh. His dark spotted hands with their swollen knuckles trembled and clutched a little on the yellowish-white surface of the thin counterpane. Diana wondered if he was dreaming.

He had asked for Lisa. Diana had told him Lisa was away. He had asked when she would be back and whether Miles was away too. He seemed to imagine that Lisa was married to Miles. Diana had answered vaguely. He had been peevish and abstracted and twice said aloud, as if unconscious of her presence, “Poor Bruno, poor Bruno.” At last she had managed to induce something like a conversation, and they had talked, about the various houses he had lived in and about the merits of different parts of London. They talked about how London was changing, and whether it was as handsome as Rome or Paris. Bruno showed a little animation. Diana could not bring herself to stroke him as Lisa had enjoined, but, a little self-consciously, she had taken his hand, which he let her hold, squeezing her fingers rather absently from time to time. She felt rather less physical horror of him, but the smell was hard to bear and she had a terrible intuition of his inward parts and of his pitiable mortality. There was something so strange and pathetic about the thin wispy emaciated body, so scarcely perceptible under the bedclothes, as if it were doing its best to shrivel right away leaving nothing but the head. An hour of the afternoon had passed in something like talk. She did not want to risk meeting Danby, whom she did not yet feel quite ready to encounter, and had just begun to say that it was time to go, when Bruno had suddenly, still holding her hand, fallen asleep.

Diana had been disconcerted and had immediately wondered if he was dying. She released her hand cautiously from his and stood up. His breathing seemed to be regular and steady. Even as she was moving the chair and rising to her feet she was able to measure the intensity of her attention to Bruno by the sudden violence of her misery at remembering about Miles and Lisa. She stood for a while looking down at Bruno until he became ghostly and almost invisible. Then as she began to make her way to the door she saw, clear and separated like a detail in a Flemish picture, a big bottle of sleeping tablets which was standing upon the top of the marble-topped bookcase. She knew what they were, because Bruno had mentioned them in reply to a question of hers about how he slept. Diana stood still again, staring at the bottle of tablets.

Diana had so far found herself quite unable to discuss the situation with Miles. He had made one or two half-hearted attempts to refer to it, but had seemed relieved when she had, with a kind of submissive animal gesture, simply turned her head away and refused to reply. In the two days since Lisa’s departure they had lived in the house together like two maniacs, each totally absorbed in a tempestuous inferno of private thoughts. Yet with all this they managed to behave with a certain degree of normality. Diana went shopping, Miles went to the office. They slept in the same bed, or rather lay awake for hours side by side, motionless and silent. Diana cried quietly, not wiping her tears, soaking the pillow. By day they were immensely polite and considerate and solicitous and rather formal. The only evident change in their routine was in the matter of meals. By tacit mutual consent they had abandoned any pretence of serious eating. Diana laid out, at intervals, a sort of buffet in the dining room at which, usually not together, they occasionally picked, a little shame-faced at being able to eat at all.

Diana had not at any point talked to Lisa either. She had made no comment to her sister, nor had Lisa attempted to speak to her, although twice she had taken Diana’s hand and squeezed it and laid it against her cheek, while Diana looked back at her blankly without responding. Diana conjectured that Lisa had determined on her flight immediately after Miles’s nocturnal visit. Then she had kept her silence during the time in which she was arranging for the job in India. She announced her departure on the morning of the day on which she left, and Diana could see that Miles was just as stunned as she was. On the final walk to the station Lisa had been cool and businesslike, talking fast, and Diana had been silent. Lisa had been trying to impress upon her that she must prevent Miles from trying to find Lisa before her departure to India, and that he would certainly fail if he tried. She did not tell Diana where she was going. When they got to the station she spoke again about Bruno. They embraced with closed eyes, clasping each other hard. Then Lisa was gone.

Diana had walked about the streets on that day and on the next day. She had sat on benches in parks and in churchyards. She rehearsed the situation endlessly in her mind, trying to find some way of thinking about it which was less than torture, but she could not. She had begun by believing that Miles and Lisa would run away together. Now she believed that they had finally and definitively crucified their love for her sake. It was not at first clear to her which was worse. In thinking them capable of running away she had made a judgement which seemed to bear not so much upon the honesty of either as upon the intense and terrible thing which was their love. Diana had fully taken in the scale of it, as with her first violent shock of horror she realized that the unthinkable had happened and that her life was utterly changed. She had apprehended with certainty this thing, huge, full-fledged, and monstrous in the house, when at a certain moment she had seen Miles and Lisa looking at each other across the dining table. She had not foreseen it. The pity for Lisa which she had so long shared with Miles had made her incapable of seeing her sister as pre-eminently able to charm her husband.

Her appalled and frightened imagination could not now inhabit the alternative. Once the dreadful fear of Miles’s flight had become less it began to seem to her a far worse and a far more difficult thing to accept their sacrifice. It would have been better to be their victim. That at least would have justified and made endurable the extreme jealousy and resentment which she could not stop feeling, and which she felt undiminished and intensified as she now saw Miles frantic-eyed at Kempsford Gardens, pacing and shuddering inside the walls of the house like a creature in a cage. For her too the house, the garden, had become utterly changed, a prison, a desolation. He could not expect her to be grateful, even though he had in a sense behaved impeccably. That impeccable behaviour tormented her almost more than anything. The situation somehow demanded her gratitude in a way which humiliated her utterly. How had they spoken of her? She had tried not to watch them. They could have spent the days together outside the house while she, at home, sat waiting for their judgement upon her-“You can’t leave poor Diana.”

”Poor Diana would break her heart.”

”After all, she is your wife, Miles. She has nothing but you.”

”She is not strong, Lisa, and independent as you are.” How strangely she and Lisa had now changed places. Now it was Diana who was the bird with the broken wing who would ever after be trailing her feathers in the dust.

If only they had gone away, thought Diana, I could have survived. Of course it would have been terrible. She tried to imagine the house suddenly empty, deprived of that dear familiar animal presence. They had lived together for so long like animals in a hutch. But all she could feel was the hollow misery of her irrevocably transformed marriage. “Things will never be the same again, never.” But if they had gone, she thought, then all the energy, all the pride, all the sense of self would have been on the side of survival. I would have wanted to show them and to show the world how well I could survive. I would have felt less bitter. I could have sought for help and found it in other places. As the wife, retained, triumphant, I can appeal to nobody, least of all to myself. Every way I lose. She has taken him from me, she has destroyed our married love, and I have no new life, only the dead form of the old life. They have acted rightly, and just by this I am utterly brought low. My pain and my bitterness are sealed up inside me forever. I have no source of energy, no growth of being, to enable me to live this hateful role of the wife to whom they have together planned to sacrifice their great love. I am humbled by this to the point of annihilation. Sooner or later Miles will begin to speak about it. He will speak kindly, gently, trying to make me feel that his love for me is something real. But I saw that thing, their love. Miles and I never loved so.

They had decided not to run away together. But supposing Diana were to run away, and leave them to each other? Was there somehow somewhere here an issue from the circle of her pain? Almost blindly she considered it. She might go abroad somewhere leaving no address. But they would scarcely believe that she had gone for good. They would search for her lovingly together. In any case Diana had no money and no skill to earn it with. With a conscious sense of madness she even considered going to Danby. If she went to Danby would Miles and Lisa then feel convinced, released? Diana had kept, during all her awful preoccupations, the idea of Danby in reserve. She had retained a feeling for him, gratitude, affection, a sense of him as a holiday from Miles. Here at least there was a new place of love. It had struck her as odd that Miles had said nothing to her about Danby’s drunken visit. Doubtless his own agony had rendered Danby’s activities invisible. Yet did it really make any sense to run to Danby? He might simply not know what to do with her. It would end in a muddle which would merely reveal her as, after all, irrevocably and slavishly attached to Miles. Was there no other way?

Diana looked at the bottle of sleeping tablets and then looked back at Bruno. He was a little propped up, as he had been when he was talking to her, the head fallen sideways. It was not easy to tell, even when regarding him full face, when his eyes were open and when they were not. Perhaps he was quietly watching her now? Diana turned back to him and moved to the side of the bed. Holding her breath she leaned over him. His eyes, amid the pudgy folds of flesh, were tightly closed, the little sighing breath issued from the mouth, the moist red lower lip extended and retracted rhythmically with the breath.

Diana stood in the middle of the room halfway to the door and looked out of the window at the plump grey folds of cloud which were passing in a rapid seething surge behind the chimney of the power station. A sick fear rose up in her throat. She had the power to blot out all the suffering years. She had loved Miles, she still utterly and agonizingly loved him. But was not the future now simply the long grey time of the extinction of love? He would never forgive her because of that sacrifice. And she would never forgive him. They would watch each other grow cold. But if she quitted the scene, if she went, utterly went, she would be the preserver of love: his love, hers, Lisa’s. Was not this, so plainly and for all of them, the answer and the only answer?

Diana caught her breath and almost staggered. She moved to the door and picked up the bottle of sleeping tablets. She opened the door.

A lanky dark-haired man was standing on the landing just outside the door. “Oh!” said Diana. The immobility and sudden closeness of the figure seemed menacing and uncanny.

”I beg your pardon,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was listening to see if anyone was with Bruno.” Diana closed the door and slipped the bottle of tablets into her handbag. “I was talking to him but he fell asleep.”

”My name is Nigel. I’m the nurse. Nigel the Nurse. I sup pose I should say the male nurse, the way people say women writers, though I don’t see why they should, do you, as more women are writers than men are nurses. Wouldn’t you agree?”

”I’m afraid I must be going,” said Diana. She began to go down the stairs.

However before she could reach the front door Nigel had darted past her into the hall. He now stood with his back to the door. “Don’t go just yet.”

”I’m in a hurry,” said Diana.

”Not just yet.”

She stood uncertainly, facing him. His face was very bland, almost sleepy, as he leaned floppily against the door with arms outspread against it. She felt confused and alarmed. “Get out of the way, please.”

”No, Mrs. Greensleave.”

”You know who I am-“

”I know you well. Come in here a minute, I want to speak to you. Please.”

He took hold of the strap of her handbag and tugged her gently in the direction of the front room. The room smelt of dust and damp and disuse and the curtains were half drawn. “This is the drawing room. But no one ever comes in here, as you can see. Please sit down.” He gave Diana a little push and she fell over onto the brown plush sofa, raising a puff of dust which made her sneeze. Nigel pulled the curtains back and let in the cold cloudy afternoon light.

”What do you want?”

”There’s something you ought to know.”

”What?”

”Danby loves your sister.”

Diana stared at him as he swayed to and fro against the window. “I think you are confused,” she said. “Danby scarcely knows my sister.”

”He knows her enough to be madly in love with her.”

”I think you must be mixing my sister up with me. Not that Danby-Anyway it’s nothing to do with you.”

”I’m not mixing you up. He liked you. Then he met Lisa and fell in love.”

”You are mistaken,” said Diana. She began to rise.

”Well, look at this.” Nigel thrust into her hand a much-torn piece of paper which had been reconstituted with the help of adhesive tape. It was a first draft of Danby’s second letter to Lisa.

Diana read it through. Then it fell from her fingers onto the floor. She leaned back into the sofa and stared ahead of her. This was surely a sign. She knew now, and knew it quite clearly that Danby’s love would have kept her from suicide. But now-Lisa had taken Danby too. Diana clutched her handbag, feeling the bottle of tablets inside it. She thought, I will go home, no I will go to a hotel, and do it at once. This is the end. Danby too. Lisa had annexed the world. A tear rolled down her cheek. She had forgotten Nigel’s presence.

He had sat down beside her. “I thought you ought to know in case it made any difference.”

”It makes no difference,” she said, wiping away the tear. She began to get up.

”Wait. I’ve got something else to say.”

”What about?”

”About Miles and Lisa. You mustn’t be desperate.”

”How do you know all these things?”

”Because I am God. Maybe this is how God appears now in the world, a little unregarded crazy person whom everyone pushes aside and knocks down and steps upon. Or it can be that I am the false god, or one of the million million false gods there are. It matters very little. The false god is the true God. Up any religion a man may climb.”

”Let me go,” said Diana. Nigel had taken her by the shoulders.

”You must not be resentful. You must not be angry with them. There must be not a speck of resentment, not a speck of anger. That is a task, that is the task. To make a new heaven and a new earth. Only you can do it. And it is possible, it is possible.”

”Let me go. It’s no business of yours.”

”It is my business. I love you.”

”Don’t be silly, we’ve never met before.”

”We have met. I was painting the railings. I had paint in my hair.”

”But surely that was-someone else-“ Diana put her hand to her face. She felt she must be going slightly mad.

”Besides I love everybody.”

”Then it can’t be love. Take your hands away, please.”

”Why not? Didn’t I tell you I was God?”

”I think you must be mad-or drugged.”

”Maybe. May I call you Diana, Diana? Do you know that you’re rather beautiful?” Nigel began to slide his arms round the back of her shoulders. Diana struggled, but he was amazingly strong.

”Do you want me to start screaming?”

”You won’t scream. Besides, who would rescue you? Bruno? I just want to hold you ever so lovingly while I talk to you.”

Diana, her arms pinioned, tried to get some purchase with her knee. More clouds of dust arose out of the old sofa. Diana began to sneeze again and Nigel’s grip tightened. Tears of helplessness and misery coursed down her face. She stopped struggling.

”There, there, don’t fight poor Nigel, he loves you. You must forgive Miles and Lisa.”

Diana let the tears flow for a while. She was unable to wipe them away because of the closeness of Nigel’s embrace. She said at last, “How?”

”Let them trample over you in their own way. Perhaps they have done the right thing, though they have done it proudly, riding on horses. Their pride has its little necessities. See and pardon.”

”There is also my pride,” said Diana.

”Abandon it. Let it fall away like a heavy stone.”

”It hardly concerns me,” she said, “that they have done the right thing. They have made a great sacrifice. I’ve got to be grateful. But I can’t be. They love each other terribly.”

”Each loves himself more. Their love for themselves and for their own lives left them no other way. They have sacrificed nothing. They have just decided to do what will make them flourish.”

”I can’t discuss this with you,” said Diana. But she did not now try to draw herself away.

”You are discussing it with me, my dear. The terrible thing is that nobody will die of this! Miles will flourish, and you will watch him kindly, as if you were watching a child.”

”They should have gone away together. He’ll resent it forever. He’ll despise me. There can be no love between us anymore. I cannot bear his thoughts, his thoughts about her, his thoughts about me.”

”A human being hardly ever thinks about other people. He contemplates fantasms which resemble them and which he has decked out for his own purposes. Miles’s thoughts cannot touch you. His thoughts are about Miles. This too you must see and forgive. He will be pleased with himself and you will see him smiling.”

”But what about me?”

”That is what they all cry. Relax. Let them walk on you. Send anger and hate away. Love them and let them walk on you. Love Miles, love Danby, love Lisa, love Bruno, love Nigel.”

Diana had laid her head against Nigel’s shoulder. Her tears were drying upon her cheek and upon his coat. “I don’t think I know how to do it.”

”You know how to try to do it. Everybody knows that.”

”It’s all been so mad. Danby and Lisa too. It all seems like a dream now, a nightmare, with nothing clear.”

”It is mostly a dream, Diana. Only little pieces are clear and they don’t necessarily fit together. When we suffer we think everything is a big machine. But the machine is just a fantasm of our pain.”

”It did seem like a machine,” she said. She began to sit up and push back her hair. Nigel had relaxed his hold.

”You see, it is already passing.”

She sat back and looked at him. A bluish-purple bruise covered one side of his face, darkly ringing the half-closed eye. “Whatever have you done to yourself?”

”I ran into a piece of the real world. It can hurt.”

”Poor Nigel-“

”And let me take these away. You won’t be needing them.”

Nigel’s hand, burrowing in her handbag, had got hold of the bottle of sleeping tablets. He lifted them out and transferred them to his pocket.

Diana rubbed her face, smoothing the dried tears into the skin. “No, I suppose I won’t. But I don’t know why. You’ve just talked nonsense to me.”

”Of course, of course. I am the nonsense priest of the non sense god! A false doctor is not a kind of doctor, but a false god is a kind of god, Diana. Let me see you home.”