Bruno’s Dream

27

Danby switched on the light. The big lower room of the printing works, musty with mingled smells of ink and paper and years-old papery debris, looked desolate, untidy, cluttered, cold, caught off its guard, and yet peculiarly immobile and suddenly attentive, against the line of black uncurtained windows. It always looked very odd without the bustle of people and the clattering noise. It was nearly five o’clock in the morning.

Danby began to cross the room. On the way he paused beside the old Albion press which had arrived the day before from the art school. The cast iron was dulled and a little rusty. It needed paint, oil, love. Even in its humbled disused con dition it was a thing of strength and beauty. Cope, London.1827. He caressed the big iron flower which served as a counterweight, and when he swung the bar the press moved easily, silently, with quiet power. He left it and went on across the room.

At the far side a door led out onto a flight of stone steps. The steps led down onto a diminutive wharf, now disused, from which an iron ladder led on down into the river, or at low tide to the muddy banks of the Thames. Danby unlocked the door and opened it and looked out. He could now see a very faint suggestion of light in the sky, a grey dimness contrasting with the thicker black below. He tried to make out the outline of the power station chimneys opposite but could not find them. Two or three lighted windows on the other side of the water distracted his eye, and he thought for a moment about Bruno, although he knew that Stadium Street could not be seen from the printing works. The surface of the river seemed now to be becoming visible. Or perhaps it was an illusion. Perhaps too there was a faint rivery sound, or perhaps just a steady murmuring in his ears. There was a smooth cool smell of mud and water. It was still a little time to low tide.

Danby stepped back inside and looked at his watch. He took off his mackintosh, shivered, and put it back on again. The cold air was making his bruised shoulder ache. He went over to the little rickety wooden office which jutted out like a hut into the main room, and switched on the light inside it. The office, which was used by Danby and Gaskin, was untidy, the desk piled with letters, some still unopened. Danby had been un able to work himself and unable to delegate his duties. The walls were papered with old handbills, announcing sales and theatrical performances of sixty years ago. Danby opened the cupboard and poured himself out a glass of neat whisky. He was feeling ridiculously nervous.

He had accepted Will Boase’s absurd challenge to a duel for reasons which had seemed compelling at the time, but which were now by no means quite so clear. Of course he knew that the “duel” would be a farce, something staged by the twins with theatre pistols loaded with blanks, and designed to confuse and humiliate him. Nevertheless it now seemed like a frightening trial, something unforeseeable and violent, a happening in which he would have to play a rapid and impromptu role, and in which he might find it difficult to act resolutely and impossible to act with dignity. He felt that he had delivered himself entirely into the hands of hostile men.

Yet such a handing of himself over had been what at first he had thought that he wanted. He had wanted to become the victim of a violent event. He had been arrested by the word “punish” which Will had used in his letter, and it had seemed to Danby that the twins, whom he now connected together into one agency, were the instruments of a fate, directed against him, and yet indubitably his. The idea of the duel was the idea of an ending, a fake ending of course, as Danby vaguely knew, but at any rate such a sort of forced small catastrophe as might symbolize the closing of an era.

He knew that Lisa had gone away. He had gone round to Kempsford Gardens and Diana had shown him the empty room. Diana said that she had gone abroad, for good. Danby did not ask for details. He did not suppose that she had gone abroad alone. He had stood silently with Diana in the empty room. Only after he had departed did he realize that Diana now seemed to know about him and Lisa. Miles must have told her. He went to the office the next day and the next day. He tended Bruno as usual, coming back to feed him at lunchtime. Nigel, after an absence of three days, returned and resumed his ministry. Only now Nigel was a hostile presence, a thin sardonic judging angel. Danby spoke to him awkwardly, apologetically, and shrank away from his smile. Adelaide had packed her belongings in several suitcases, which she had to unpack every day to find things she needed. She had announced her intention of going but had not yet gone. She spent most of every day away from the house. The kitchen was filled with dirty crockery and decaying food. Danby held a used plate under the hot tap every time he had to feed Bruno. He took his own meals in pubs.

Danby felt very sorry about Adelaide. What had seemed so natural and simple and pleasant while it was going on nicely now seemed much more like a crime. He could not work out quite why it was a crime. It was not what Adelaide said, about his not wanting to marry her because he thought her inferior. He did not, he believed, think her inferior. He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way. He would not have married Linda either. Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved. Perhaps it was that of allowing someone to be committed, to be utterly bound, for the sake of a second-rate kind of loving. It was not that it was a casual loving exactly. It had its own kind of reality, it was domestic, it belonged, like some humble house spirit, to the house at Stadium Street, to the kitchen and bedrooms there. Yet it was after all a poor weak thing, instantly broken at the touch of what now seemed to Danby to be the re-entry into his life of a reality which he had shamefully forgotten.

Yet which was the reality? He told himself sometimes that Lisa was, must be, a dream figure, an apparition, and that as time went on he would more and more realize this, until it would seem to him in the end that he had never really met her and that she had never really existed at all. He had become momentarily insane because of a girl who resembled Gwen, a serious intense girl with a dark wig of hair and a thinking mouth whom he had seen about half a dozen times in his life. He had become insane because she had suddenly reminded him of what it had been like, of what he had been like, of how he had been made to be, so long ago during his marriage. Lisa was just an angel of memory, a reminder of loss.

Yet he knew really that she was not simply an apparition. She was not Gwen come back from the dead. She was very different from Gwen. And he was very different from Gwen’s husband. He was an older fatter more drunken man than the one whom Gwen had so unaccountably loved. But he was also perhaps, and this intimation somehow entered into the deepest part of Danby’s pain, a wiser man. The years had brought him something which, potentially at least, was good. That obscure small good seemed to suffer and ache inside him as he thought vaguely but intensely about all the might-have-beens of a quite other life with Lisa. It seemed to him that in spite of his casual mode of being and his bad behaviour to Adelaide and his general willingness to play the fool, he had found something in the world, some little grain of understanding which that glimpse of Lisa had made suddenly luminous and alive. He felt obscurely the dividedness of his being, the extent of what was gross, the littleness and value of what was not. But these thoughts, when they came, were never entirely clear to him, and he spent most of his days in a coma of misery, thinking about Lisa and the other man, inducing physical pains of yearning and jealousy which made him gasp, and putting off the attempt to pull himself together.

The prospect of the crazy “duel” had been, to his desperate mood, almost a relief. It had seemed the image of something destructive and mad, and also of something appropriate and necessary. The aching and deprived heart yearns for necessity. Danby would have been glad to be arrested, imprisoned, scourged, judged. Now in his dreams, in some huge echoing courtroom, a woman’s voice rehearsed misdoings which dated back to his earliest childhood. Anything which could show his present situation as inevitable would have been an alleviation of his pain. It was not enough that his rational mind could display to him the utter improbability of his success. It was its im possibility that he needed to have the proof of. As it was, the torment of accidents continued. If only he had met her earlier, if only there were not this other man, if only she had not seen him kissing Diana, if only he were the different and better per son which it seemed to him he might easily be. He had accepted and even welcomed the idea of the duel because it seemed somehow to belong to the other order of things, the legal, the necessary.

But now, shivering in the cold cramped little office underneath the electric light, with all the familiar things looking alienated and eerie, the craziness of the plan took on a different and more sinister air. From the moment of the tapping on the window and the receipt of Will’s pompous letter, Danby had thought of nothing but himself. He had thought of the encounter in relation to himself, as something that he was going to bring about or do. He had not thought of Will except as of a blind agency destined somehow to act upon him. Now, as he poured himself out another glass of whisky, he thought about Will more carefully. He really knew very little about him. The one thing which he certainly knew about Will was the degree of his hatred. But how exactly would that hatred make him behave? Will had loved Adelaide since they were children. He had thought of her as ever the pure sweet maid who was somehow reserved for him. This much Danby had gathered from Adelaide’s tearful outpourings after the delivery of the letter. How would Will feel towards a man who had casually, unseriously, seduced this dream woman, and what fate would he deem appropriate for such a man? That Will intended in some way to humiliate him became clearer to Danby now. Had he proposed the dawn hour, the deserted place, for some quite other purpose of his own? Perhaps he and Nigel would arrive with other men, tie Danby up, and thrash him? He had heard of such things.

He put the glass down and came out into the main work shop. The windows were paler. He switched off the lights and could now see the nearer shore and the surface of the water gleaming and shifting in flakes of very pale yellowish grey. The opposite shore was veiled by a mist which seemed to quiver and vibrate, casting out a diffused yellow radiance which revealed the debris-strewn river bank below the printing works in a faint but horribly clear morning light. Danby shuddered.

He heard a sound behind him and jerked round. He had left the outer door open, as they had agreed. There were two figures on the other side of the room, one tall and thin, the other shorter, stouter.

”Oh,” said Danby, “good morning.” He did not like to turn the electric light on again. There was just enough illumination to recognize his visitors. His heart beat violently.

Will, who was carrying a large case under his arm, stayed by the doorway. Nigel came forward, tiptoeing or gliding across the floor. When he came up to the window Danby could see his face quite clearly.

”You’ve no one with you?”

”No. I thought I’d dispense with a second!”

”That’s a bit irregular, you know,” said Nigel. He stood for a moment staring at Danby. His face seemed stretched, beaming with a blissful excitement, the purple bruise still visible along the cheek and under the eye.

”Isn’t this all rather absurd?” said Danby in a loud voice. “I think we should forget it and go home. I can’t think why I came at all.”

Will moved forward from the door. He stopped about five paces away, put the case down on the level tray of one of the colour-printing machines, and looked at Danby with a gaze of cool intense hatred.

”All right,” said Danby. “Do what you like. Play out your little game. But let’s do it quickly. I want to get home.” He thought, this man is in the theatre, and yet he’s horribly in earnest too. I can’t get away now. If I tried to go he’d spring on me. At any rate there seemed to be only the two of them.

”Let’s go down then,” said Nigel. “The tide’s out, isn’t it? It was a good idea of yours to have it here.”

Danby opened the door. The cold water-scented air filled the doorway. He could smell the sea. He took a deep breath and went a little unsteadily down the steps, trailing his hand on the wall. He crossed the wharf and began to climb slowly down the iron ladder to the river shore. As he stepped off onto the yielding gravelly mud, he could see the large rubber-soled boots of Will on the upper rungs of the ladder.

The expanse of shore, some twenty feet from the base of the wall to the water, was quite clearly lit now by a light still faint but rather lurid which seemed to emanate from the curtain of mist which hung now at the centre of the river and arched over the shore, enclosing it in a capsule of bright haze. A quietness, which seemed also to be coming out of the mist, held the scene poised, and Danby was startled by the sound of his own footsteps moving over the rather sticky gravel. He stood staring at the water’s edge. The tide had not yet turned and the river was still running steadily downstream. A sleek line of mud was reflecting the yellowish light. Above it, the surface was more irregular, lumpy, stony, strewn with plastic bags and old motor tyres and bottles of green and clear glass and very pale smooth clean pieces of driftwood which the Thames had long had for her own. The clear glowing light made the littered scene seem over-precise, purposive, as if one had wandered suddenly into the very middle of a work of art.

Will was still standing beside the ladder, leaning the edge of the case against one of the rungs and fumbling with the clasp. Nigel, with the same lilting gliding motion, came over to Danby. The light fell on his face, which was strained into a semblance of an archaic smile.

”How would you like to proceed? Have you any special wishes?”

”Anything you like,” said Danby.

”There are various possibilities-“

”You decide. Only get on with it.”

”What Will wants is the system where you measure out twenty paces in the middle and draw a line on each side. Then you each stand another twenty paces behind the lines. After I give the word you can walk forward as far as the line and fire at any point before you reach it, or when you reach it. No order of firing, just fire when you want to.”

”Look, Nigel, can’t we call off this farce?” said Danby in a low voice. “Couldn’t Will and I just have a talk? I know how he feels-“

”Do you want to apologize to him?”

”No! I just mean a sort of civilized talk-“

”It’s” impossible. You don’t understand. Will couldn’t talk to you, he couldn’t.” Nigel had laid his hand on Danby’s arm. Nigel’s teeth were chattering.

”It’s all perfectly insane-“

”Wait here. I’ll just report to Will.”

Nigel’s footsteps, crunching, sucking, moved away over the gravel and Danby could hear the murmur of voices. He felt light-headed, a sensation as at the onset of extreme drunkenness. The lurid detailed scene seemed to be tilting a little sideways. Nigel was back beside him and was thrusting something into his hand.

”Here. You know how to fire a pistol, don’t you?”

Danby lifted his hand, which was holding a rather beautiful duelling pistol with a long slim barrel. The handle, very smooth and already warm in his hand, was made of a rich rosy-brown wood with a curly grain. The barrel and the butt end of the handle were ornamented with a flowery silver inlay. Danby stared with fascination at the strange weighty object.

”You sight along the barrel. Better keep a straight arm. It doesn’t kick much.”

”I trust you and your brother are enjoying yourselves,” said Danby. “It’s loaded. If you don’t want to hurt him fire well wide. Remember you don’t have to walk as far as the line.”

”You ought to be in films!”

Danby, who was well acquainted with revolvers and had sometimes played with pistols, examined his weapon. It was indeed loaded. A blank of course, but loaded. It appeared that the twins were going to carry their theatre scene through to the end.

”I’ll drop a handkerchief, and after that you can fire when you like.”

”All we need now is a surgeon!”

Nigel gave him the ecstatic beaming stare, giggled, and glided away.

The light was growing. Will had moved away on the other side of the iron ladder. Danby watched Nigel pacing the shore, making marks with pieces of driftwood. A chilly breeze had begun to blow and the mist had receded a little without yet revealing the other side of the river. Danby turned up the collar of his mackintosh. He thought, supposing this were all real and I was perhaps going to die. He thought, Lisa, where are you now.

”Back here please,” said Nigel. He motioned Danby back behind a line which he had scored in the stony mud. A long way ahead of him he could see the figure of Will, rigid, up right, compact, small, a focused pellet of menacing significance. He could see a blotch of purple which must be Will’s scarf, perhaps his shirt.

”Sixty paces between you,” said Nigel. “The next line is there, marked with driftwood, which you mustn’t cross, but you can fire before you reach it.” His hand touched the sleeve of Danby’s raincoat, gathered up some of the stuff and fingered it.

”I’m sorry I pushed you into that lamppost,” said Danby. “I didn’t mean to.” A very fine misty rain had begun to fall. Nigel’s black hair was filmed over with glittering pinheads of rain.

”That’s all right. Good luck. If you fire first, stand side ways, there’s less risk. The light’s still a bit uncertain, he’ll probably miss you.”

Nigel moved away. This performance is designed to frighten me, thought Danby. They want me to break down, lose my nerve, beg them to stop, run away. It’s all ridiculous. But all the same he found that he was trembling.

Nigel had returned to the middle point, halfway between Will and Danby. He was flourishing a white handkerchief above his head. The two lines marking the twenty paces in the centre were plainly marked with wood. A boat on the river hooted distantly. The handkerchief fluttered to the ground.

Will had begun to walk very slowly forward, carefully lifting his pistol with outstretched arm and gazing along the barrel. Danby stared. Then as if compelled by a magnetic line of force stretched between himself and his opponent he began to move too. His heart seemed to be pounding and rattling at an incoherent speed. He put his left hand to his breast. It’s theatre, he said to himself, just theatre. But the power of the scene had already made him its actor and he found himself raising the pistol, feeling for the trigger. It was all idiotic, but it was also awful, a grotesquerie, a piece of obscene unworthy mumming. Get it over with, he thought. Instinctively he turned the gun away from the slowly advancing but still distant figure of Will, and lowering the barrel in the direction of the river he pulled the trigger.

The leap of the gun, the deafening noise of the report, over laid another event. A green glass bottle which had been lying upon the mud at the very edge of the water disappeared into fragments with a high splintering clang.

Danby stood quite still, the echoes of the report still roaring in his ears, and stared at the bottle. So the pistol had been really loaded after all.

He dropped the pistol, which was wreathed in white smoke, and it fell with a dull thump into the glistening greyish mud. He stooped to pick it up again and saw straight ahead of him in the enclosed dome of golden luminosity the still advancing figure of Will. Danby tried to think. He said to himself, I must do something quickly, I must stop him, it’s all a mistake. He tried to move, but his limbs seemed too heavy to stir. He stood paralyzed, watching with fascination as the figure with the pointing pistol grew larger. Yes, he was wearing a mauve shirt. A mauve shirt.

Danby thought, supposing this man kills me. He wants to kill me, he wills my death. I should have known it wasn’t play acting. But he must know that I’m harmless, I didn’t mean to hurt him, I must explain it’s a mistake, I mustn’t die by mistake. Who would understand? He raised his hand. He tried to move his foot but it seemed to be rooted in the mud. He stood there with a raised hand, like a signal, a totem. The rain was increasing.

Will had reached the line of driftwood and stopped, pointing the pistol with care. There were about thirty yards between them.

He must be stopped, thought Danby, I must call out to him. But his body had become rigid with fear and expectation of the impact of the bullet. His mind seemed to float above him in some other sphere. He saw himself lying dead on the bank of the Thames with Will’s bullet in his heart. He thought, I am dying for a girl I didn’t love, I am dying because I failed to love, I am dying just upon the brink of love. I was not worthy. He tried to will to move, to sidestep, even to stand sideways as Nigel had advised. But he could not stop staring at Will, who was still taking aim, clear and detailed in an ellipse of bright vision.

”No, no, no!” Something black had shot across the centre of the scene, something capering, agitated, Nigel waving, shouting, spreading out his arms. He capered in front of Danby, dancing in the gravelly mud, his feet spraying pebbles.

”Get out of the way, damn you!”

As Will shouted Danby rushed forward and seized Nigel around the waist. They swayed together. Over Nigel’s shoulder Danby could see the steady pointing pistol. Danby crooked his foot round Nigel’s ankle and threw him stumbling to the ground. Will shouted again and fired.

As Danby heard the bullet whistle past his head the explosion loosened his limbs and he sat down heavily on the stones. Nigel was lying full length. He gazed on Danby. Then his eyes closed and there was an expression of bliss upon his face. The echo of the shot died away and there was a curiously intense silence.

Danby reached out to Nigel’s shoulder with the intention of shaking him, but he had no force in his arm and remained leaning there, staring down into the swooning beatific face. There was a sound of crunching footsteps.

Will, the still-smoking pistol hanging limp at his side, said, “Which of you have I hit?” His face was white, his mouth open and shuddering.

”Neither of us, fortunately for you,” said Danby. He began to get up.

”Nigel, Nigel-“ Will fell on his knees beside his brother.

Nigel’s eyes opened. “Hello, Will. I think I’ve been in heaven.”

”Are you all right, you bloody fool?”

”Yes. But look. I spy police.” A uniformed figure had appeared on the next wharf, which belonged to the cattle-cake mills. Somebody was distantly shouting. Danby turned about and began to walk in the opposite direction along the slippery shore. Then he decided it was silly to walk and began to run. The mist was lifting and he could see through the light now rather luminous curtain of rain a line of barges, the outline of the bridge, and the surface of the river smoothed and pitted with rain.

The water was lapping the base of the brick wall below the churchyard. The strand was coming to an end. Danby’s feet splashed in the water. He heard shouts behind him. He plunged in deeper, wildly splashing, and then with a sudden sense of blissful release gave himself to the Thames, losing his footing and falling forward into the deeper water. He began to swim towards the line of barges. He passed under the stern of the last barge and the shore behind him was blot ted out.

Now there was a sudden peace and silence. Danby swam slowly, breast stroke, scarcely stirring the surface of the quiet water. It did not seem cold. The still-flowing tide took him gently with it. He felt a strange beatific lightness as if all his sins, including the ones which he had long ago forgotten, had been suddenly forgiven. The mist had lifted and the rain was abating. A little pale sunlight began to glow from behind him, and he saw that a perfect rainbow had come into being, hanging over London, bridging the Thames from north to south. Danby swam towards it. He swam under Battersea Bridge.