Bruno’s Dream

31

Danby was sitting on the edge of his bed. It was ten o’clock in the evening. The walls of the room were still a bit damp, but he had managed to dry the bed out with hot-water bottles. On warm days he put the mattress in the sun. The electricity had been off for weeks, as the whole house had had to be rewired. Fortunately the government were going, if he filled in enough forms, to pay for that. Fortunately too the weather had been exceptionally warm for the time of year.

The room had not suffered too much. Getting the mud off the floor had been the difficult thing. It was fantastic how much mud that water had brought in with it. The carpet had been mud-coloured anyway, but the walls were darkly stained up to about four feet from the ground. It was no good having the place redecorated until the walls had dried. With luck, the government would pay for that as well. Danby had been sleeping upstairs, but he was wondering if tonight he wouldn’t move back into his own room. He didn’t like it up stairs, though of course it was nearer if Bruno called in the night. But Bruno very rarely called in the night now. He seemed to be sleeping better, and indeed spent quite a lot of his time asleep.

Danby had stopped going to the printing works and spent his days at home now. Someone had to stay with Bruno. Nigel had simply vanished from the scene, leaving most of his be longings behind, and Danby felt there was no point in engaging another nurse at this stage. The doctor was surprised that Bruno had lasted so long. Diana came nearly every day in the late afternoon and Danby went out for a breather and a visit to the pub while she sat with Bruno. He could hear her talking to Bruno sometimes, as he went out of the hall door, but he never asked her what they talked about. He talked a little with Bruno himself, usually about immediate things, food, the weather, Bruno’s room. Bruno could talk quite sensibly about these things, but the background of his mind seemed to have come adrift, and Danby often caught Bruno looking at him with a puzzled expression, as if he did not know who Danby was and did not quite like to ask. Diana too was a source of puzzlement, though Danby lost no opportunity of repeating, “Diana, you know, Miles’s wife.” But Danby did not explain his own identity. He did not want to remind Bruno about Gwen.

With Diana Danby had achieved a sad but strangely sweet relationship such as one might have with a wife one had divorced long ago. They kissed each other on the cheek and squeezed hands. The tending of Bruno made a solemn and melancholy bond between them. “How is he today?”

”Not too bad. He took some soup.” Danby knew that Diana was afraid that Bruno might die when she was alone with him and Danby was not there. She never said this, but Danby under stood what it meant when she asked anxiously, “You won’t be too long away, will you?” It was strange and terrible, this waiting for death. Every morning Danby wondered if Bruno had not died quietly during the night, and then saw, with a shock of pain and relief, the bedclothes still rising and falling a little. He had come, during this last time, to love Bruno with a blank almost impersonal sort of love, and he was able at last to measure that vast difference, that distance between presence and absence. Bruno’s presence in the house was something real, so positive, so profoundly touching. And yet it was also impossible not to feel it as a defilement. Danby looked forward with dread and yet with longing to the time when he would come home and take off his coat and get out the whisky bottle in a house utterly empty of Bruno. Yet between that moment and now there was that terrible unforeseeable thing to be endured.

Bruno had changed physically too since his fall. He had stopped wearing his false teeth and the lower part of his face had collapsed. His head seemed to be shrinking generally as the chunky flesh which had made his face look so lumpy and strange began to subside and fall in towards the bone. The ring of thin silky white hair which had fringed the base of the skull had mostly come off, rubbed away upon the pillow, and the skull was almost completely bare. Only Bruno’s eyes remained the same, narrow moist and terrifyingly full of puzzlement, speculation, and a weird kind of intelligence. With these puzzled hostile rather frightened eyes he surveyed the people who served him. Only sometimes for Diana would his shrunken face strain into a smile and his eyes wrinkle up with something like pleasure.

Miles had called two or three times and conducted rather one-sided conversations with Bruno. Once Danby, passing the door, had heard Miles talking about cricket, though he had not heard Bruno reply. Miles carried with him an atmosphere of complete unconcern. He was almost debonair. He approached Bruno with a kind of cheerfulness which irritated Danby extremely. He made brisk inquiries about what the doctor had said. He behaved like a man performing a duty and pleased with himself for doing so. He seemed completely uninvolved in the pain and the mystery of what was about to take place. He left the house smiling secretively and humming to himself. Danby decided that he detested Miles. The strange emotion, which had once seemed like love, which Miles had inspired in him, had faded away. He no longer even thought that Miles resembled Gwen. He saw him as a large smiling rat. He also sensed Miles’s increased dislike of himself, and wondered if Diana had talked. Probably not.

Danby had heard the news of Adelaide’s marriage with distress and relief. Now that he was no longer deafened by her cries he was able to remember her charm. She had been a sweet girl friend to him during those years and he felt a shamed gratitude which he would have liked to express to her in some way. He thought of giving her fifty pounds as a wed ding present and got as far as writing the cheque, but then could not decide whether it would be proper to send it or not. When things have gone hopelessly wrong one simply does not know how to behave. In the end he did not send the cheque. Will would only tear it up and send back the pieces.

Danby drew the curtains. It was very dark outside, a moon less night and a little rain falling. He went to check that the door of the annex was propped open so that he could hear Bruno if he called. The old man had been fast asleep when Danby went up to see him earlier. Oh let him die in his sleep, Danby prayed with a sad pained heart. Let him die peacefully in his sleep and not know. Only not tonight, not tonight. Poor Bruno. Danby pulled back the sheets and blankets and felt the mattress, wondering if it was dry enough to sleep on. It seemed to be all right. The Stadium Street house had never felt entirely like a home to Danby, but he liked his little room with the dreary outlook onto the yard. The yard was just an expanse of grey mud now, caked and cracking in dry weather, in wet weather like thick glue. Danby vaguely intended to clear it up, but could not see how this could be done.

He sat down again on the bed and looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. A fat man with a lot of white hair and rather good teeth. He sighed. If only he had not seen Lisa, if only he had not been given that glimpse of something else, of really being alive or whatever it was. He had been quite happy sleeping with Adelaide, quite happy flirting with Diana. These beings belonged to his ordinary dull world and his ordinary dim consciousness. Meeting Lisa was the sudden exchange of twilight for daylight, greyness for colour, shadow for substance and shape. He had forgotten what these things were like. Perhaps he would forget again. Perhaps he would come through it all and out onto some great placid lake where the sun shone hazily and with a difference. Perhaps he would achieve some sort of peace, the peace of an elderly man, a peace of cosy retirement without angels. Without women too, he thought. Could he find another girl now? After seeing Lisa he simply didn’t want to.

He wondered where she was now, in some unimaginable abode of bliss with her other man. He could not think of her as belonging to this world and inhabiting the same space as himself. He pictured her enclosed in some kind of radiant extragalactic egg, some strange fold of the space-time continuum which wrapped her absolutely away. This vague image was necessary to him to soothe what would otherwise have been a crippling degree of jealousy and desire. If there was no place for possibility there was no place for yearning. Lisa had been a vision, an apparition, not a possibility. Yet however much he tried to refuse the knowledge, he knew that what he had seen and, oh God, touched was a real woman who might have loved him.

Danby thought that he might soon start to cry. For years he had been incapable of tears. Now quite lately, he had found himself weeping in the late evening and the early morning. The tears were strange, sweetly soothing and a little unnerving, as if his body were suffering some weird physical change. He must be careful not to let Bruno see him crying. He got up and went to the door for a moment to listen. There was no sound from upstairs. Then he thought that he had better go up and check that he had locked the front door, and he went up the stairs on tiptoe. Thank God poor Bruno slept at night.

A letter, which must have come by the second post, was lying on the mat. Danby saw at once that the writing was unfamiliar and it instantly seemed to him that the letter must be from Lisa. In trembling haste he tore it open. It was rather long and appeared to be from Nigel. Danby locked the door and fixed the chain and went slowly down the stairs again. He sat for a while staring sadly at nothing and holding Nigel’s letter crumpled in his hand. If only there were not these vain ghostly hopes, these sudden inane shadows of possibilities, these unfulfilled conditionals of hopeless desire. He closed his eye and a tear trickled down his cheek. Then he began to read Nigel’s letter.

My Dearest Danby,

I hope you will try to forgive me for my dereliction of duty, my unannounced departure, my taking of leave without consultation or permission. I am sorry to leave Bruno and had not intended to do so before the end. I hope he is calm and I would send my love if I thought he still remembered Nigel, only I trust that mercifully he does not. Since in a sense Nigel never really existed, he probably casts no memory image as he casts no shadow. I write to speak to you, just once, since it is a delicious joy to do so (see below) and because I feel I should try to explain why I went away. That, and other things. Love is a strange thing. There is no doubt at all that it and only it makes the world go round. It is our only significant activity. Everything else is dust and tinkling cymbals and vexation of spirit. Yet on the other hand what a trouble-maker it is to be sure. What a dreamer-upper of the impossible, what an embracer of the feet of the unattainable. It is a weird thought that anyone is permitted to love anyone and in any way he pleases. Nothing in nature forbids it. A cat may look at a king, the worthless can love the good, the good the worthless, the worthless the worthless, and the good the good. Hey presto: and the great light flashes on revealing perhaps reality or perhaps illusion. And alas how very often, dearest Danby, does one love alone, in solipsism, in vain encapsulation, while concealment feeds upon the substance of the heart. It is not a matter of conventions. Love knows no conventions. Anything can happen, so that in a way, a terrible terrible way, there are no impossibilities. Ah, I have thought of this too, my dear, and it has not been the least part of my suffering. You might have loved me. It was, alas, logically possible. But what made me go away was not simply my sense of the improbability of the conceivable, but my knowledge that my very great love was a very great destroyer. If I had been the saint that I could be I would have loved you and let you know it and stayed near you and done you no harm at all, surrounding you like the harmless air and making you almost not notice how much I loved you. As it is, the unpredictable force of that immense angelic thing, once let loose from its dark concealment, would have dragged us-where? I know not, but down. You would have had to act a hateful part. And I-The other great love of my life is, well you can guess who. To have you both before me pointing loaded pistols at each other was the acting out of a fantasy. And how absolutely, when it came to it, you were both of you clay in my hands. How easy it proved to make you do exactly what I wanted! But I must not think about my godlike power-that way lies the possible-impossible torment which I have determined to end. It was a great happening, was it not, our duel? Not knowing the outcome was heavenly pain, was Russian roulette of the soul. Forgive me.

I have decided that the only way to deal with myself as I now am is to leave England. A friend has told me how I can get a job in India, with the Save the Children Fund, and I am going to Calcutta. I leave no address and I sign no name. I am a spirit that wished you well and will wish you well for however long or short a time it preserves your memory. I kiss your feet.

Danby stared at the letter. It caused him an extraordinary and novel kind of pain. He wished he had known that Nigel loved him. Yet what on earth would he have done about it? Would he have acted that “hateful part”? Yes, what a trouble maker it was. Every manjack craving for love, and how rarely it all worked out. Nigel loved Danby who loved Lisa who loved-How sad and crazy it all was. Oh God, I feel so bloody lonely, he thought. The voice of love, even though it was not the right one, came to him with such an unmistakable accent out of that inaccessible real world. His eyes seemed to be filling with tears again. “Oh hell,” said Danby aloud. He shook the tears away and took off his jacket and his tie. Better go to bed and drown all this self-pity in decent oblivion. Misery and drink made him a sound sleeper. He stood for a moment listening to the rain, which had grown fiercer and listening to the wind, which was rattling the windowpane. He undid the front of his shirt.

Suddenly there was a strange sharp regular noise very close to him. Danby stood paralyzed, clutching his shirt. In a moment the sound came again, loud and several times repeated. Someone was tapping urgently upon the window. Will! Danby thought, it’s Will for sure, come to do me properly. He stood perfectly still. The tapping came again, insistent, demanding, violent. He’ll break the glass in a minute, thought Danby. Whatever shall I do? Call the police? Pretend not to be here? Can he see me through the chink in the curtain? Oh God, why did this have to happen. Danby felt tired and old. He wanted to go to bed. He did not want to be forced to fight with a half-crazy young man. It was all ridiculous. He called out, “Who’s there?” There was no answer, only the tapping on the window, once more repeated, fierce and sharp. Danby hesitated. Then he moved silently out of the room and into the kitchen. He picked up a long carving knife and then laid it down again. He returned and went up to the window. “Who is it?” Tap, tap, tap, tap. Danby pulled back the curtains. He could not see out into the darkness and the rain. Then he violently pulled up the sash of the window and re treated across the room.

At once a long leg with an extremely muddy shoe appeared over the window ledge. But it was a woman’s leg. “Help me, would you?” said Lisa.

Danby closed the window and pulled the curtain again. Lisa was sitting on the bed. She had taken off her mackintosh and was removing her shoes. Her hair, which had been un covered, was plastered to her head and curled in wet arabesques down her neck.

She said, “I’m sorry to come in this way and I wouldn’t have done so if I’d known how much mud I would bring in with me. I didn’t like to ring the bell because of Bruno. Would you mind getting me a towel?”

Danby went to the kitchen and returned with a towel. She began to dry her face and hair. Danby stood by the window, leaning on the chest of drawers, staring with his mouth open. An extreme pain, passing up the centre of his body like a white-hot rod, kept him clenched and rigid.

”I’m sorry to arrive unannounced,” said Lisa. She had rubbed her hair into a mass of rather frizzy small ringlets which she was now trying to smooth down. “Could I borrow your comb?”

Danby, moving gingerly because of the pain, handed her the comb, leaning stiffly. His teeth had begun to chatter and he closed his mouth grinding his teeth together.

Lisa was combing her hair. It was difficult. “What a stormy night,” she said. “Oh God!” said Danby. “Oh Christ!”

”Do sit down, Danby. Sit on that chair by the window, would you? How is Bruno?”

Danby sat down, still stiffly. The pain made him groan. He put his hands to his face and groaned again. He said in a low stumbling voice, “Why are you here?”

”I said how is Bruno?”

”All right. No, dying. But quiet, okay. Why are you here?”

”I will explain,” said Lisa. “And I must begin with an apology. It might have been better to write to you. But I have been a long time in a great deal of doubt and when things at last became clear I found that I wanted to see you at once and to, as I say, explain.” She spoke rather coldly, staring at him and still combing her hair.

”You don’t know what you’ve done,” said Danby.

”Not yet. But a little time will show.”

”I mean, coming to see me like this. It makes it all a thou sand times worse. There’s nothing to explain. I wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t even looking for you. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do. I’ve just got to suffer it. Oh God, I wish you hadn’t come!”

”I’m afraid you’ll have to undergo the explanation,” she said. “It is necessary-for me.”

”There isn’t any explanation!” said Danby. “I just love you like a crazy fool. Anybody can love anybody. The worthless can love the good. A cat can look at a king, queen, princess, angel. I’ve just got to grit my teeth and sit it out. I don’t want your sympathy or your bloody explanations!”

Lisa was looking at him with a frowning faintly curious look, her mouth pouting as if with a slight disgust. Her face was a glowing pink after her exertions with the towel. Her hair, which she had finished combing and smoothing back, curled damply down her neck, blackened by the rain. She pulled up one wet stockinged foot and tucked it under her, arranging the pillows behind her back against the wall. When she had made herself comfortable she said, “Now I want you to listen.”

”I’m inclined to tell you to go,” said Danby. He felt something curiously like anger.

”No. You would find yourself incapable of that, I think.”

She’s right, he thought. Oh God, oh God, why do I have to endure this?

”I am going to talk, and I may ask you some questions,” said Lisa. “I want to start with a question. When you came that night to Kempsford Gardens Miles told you I was in love with somebody. Do you know who that person is?”

”The person you’re in love with? No.”

”It’s Miles.”

Danby looked at the floor. He leaned slowly forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He thought, I simply mustn’t start crying. If I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. Miles. Miles. He was silent.

”I’m sorry,” said Lisa. “I know this hurts you but it’s necessary. I have been and am in love with Miles. I fell in love with him when I first met him, on the day of his marriage with Diana. I loved him all through those years and I imagined that I would never let him know it.”

Danby was silent, pressing his hands into his eyes.

”Quite recently however he found out, or rather I told him. I ought not to have done so, but it was very difficult not to, psychologically difficult I mean, because by then he had fallen in love with me.”

Danby was silent.

”I don’t know how long he has loved me,” Lisa went on in the same cool precise even voice. “He imagines that it has been a long time. But my own guess is that he only really fell in love quite lately.”

Danby lifted his head. There were tears and he did not try to conceal them. “God blast you, why are you torturing me with this damned love story?”

”It is necessary to make this quite clear. I love Miles and he loves me.”

”Oh get out, will you,” said Danby.

”However,” said Lisa, paying no attention to the interruption, “the fact remained that Miles was married to Diana.”

”This is a nightmare,” said Danby. “What’s the point of all this? Oh Lisa, Lisa, you are thoughtless and cruel, or else you don’t realize what kind of state I’m in. If only I hadn’t seen you again, talked to you again. It would have stopped hurting so much sooner. And now you come here and talk about Miles, about Miles of all people. You must be insane to hurt somebody like this.”

”I am sorry,” she said. “But you will see that it has been necessary.”

”What’s necessary about it? If you want to see how much power you’ve got well you’re seeing it. If you want to see a man reduced to-“

”Stop it, please, and listen-“

”I’d managed to find some sort of peace with Bruno here. Well, not peace, but it’s been real. I was starting to realize that you were-just something impossible. And now you’ve spoilt it all. You just can’t know what you’ve done, coming here, coming into my room-“

”Naturally, you were beginning to recover-“

”I wasn’t beginning to recover! I’ll never recover! Oh damn you, damn you, damn you!”

”Don’t shout so. Will you listen to what I’ve got to tell you? I need your help.”

”I’m to help you get hold of Miles I suppose! Oh Christ, Lisa, you don’t mean that-You can’t mean-“ Danby sat upright, glaring at her, his face puckered up with pain.

”What are you supposing?”

”When I first saw you, Lisa, I was, oh God, I was holding Diana in my arms. What hope have I ever had of convincing you that I love you, that it’s serious, different, terrible? You think I’m just a man who chases women. You think I’m really-just as interested in Diana. You want me to occupy Diana, to take her away, so that you and Miles-You absolute fiend!” Danby stood up. He raised his hands, half desperate, half threatening.

”Sit down and stop shouting at me.”

”That’s devil’s work. You’re driving me straight into madness. Do you want me to kill you?”

”You’re being very stupid. Don’t dare to touch me!”

”Touch you-I’d like to strangle you!” Danby moaned and turned about and leaned against the chest of drawers, covering his face. “Oh Lisa, Lisa, Lisa-“

”I want you to listen and I want you to think. If you’d been using your mind you wouldn’t have said what you said just now. I don’t want you to take Diana away from Miles. You couldn’t do it anyway.”

Danby moaned again.

”Miles and I knew at once that there was no future for us together. What sort of people do you think we are?”

”People in love,” he said. “Romantic love is not an absolute.”

”People who are in love think so.”

”It’s an overprized condition. Besides one recovers. Even you began to recover!”

”I didn’t. Nor did you. You say you’ve loved Miles for years.”

”Absence cures.”

”Anyhow, you and Miles will find a way. You’re both so damn clever.”

”Listen. There was and is nothing that we could do with our love. Miles could not leave Diana. He is married to Diana, Diana has given her whole life to Miles. And after I had told my love and tasted his I could not remain in the house-“

”There are other houses in London.”

”Not for Miles and me. We couldn’t live like that.”

”You could try. Did you go to bed together?” Danby was still standing with his back to her, staring down at his hair brush.

”No, of course not.”

”I don’t see why of course. You’re not saints.”

”No. We are cool self-interested people. We did not want to set a course into ruin and madness.”

”Well, I’m still waiting to see what aspect of your cool self-interest has brought you to me with this practically unbearable story!”

”As I told you, we decided that we must part and I decided that it would be easier for both of us if I went right away and I fixed up a job for myself in India, in Calcutta, with the Save the Children Fund.”

”Then why aren’t you in Calcutta,” said Danby, “why are you in Stadium Street, in my bedroom, sitting on my bed with your shoes off?”

There was silence. He looked up at last. She was looking at him with a peculiar hard intensity. After a pause she went on, “I decided not to go to India. It was a difficult decision and a very crucial one.”

”So you’re going back to Miles after all, and you thought you’d drop in on me on the way and tell me all about it!”

”No, I’m not going back to Miles.”

”Then what are you going to do?”

”That,” said Lisa, “depends partly on you.”

Danby sat down very slowly in the chair by the window.

He stared at her fiercely, sternly. “Lisa, just what are you talking about?”

She looked at him now almost with hostility. “I want to make it all crystal clear,” she said. “And it’s not easy to make clear.”

”I’ll say it isn’t!”

”I don’t want you to be in any way cheated.”

”I look like being killed not cheated.”

”I had to make it plain about Miles-“

”You’ve made it plain! What do you want, Lisa, do you want to use me to make Miles jealous?”

”It’s odd,” she said, “I think it was seeing you talking to me that day in the cemetery that made Miles suddenly realize he loved me-when he saw that someone else might.”

”You can spare me the touching reminiscences. So that is what you want?”

”No. I have no plans which concern Miles.”

”It’s impossible,” said Danby. “You love him. He loves you. As you’ve explained ten times. It’s impossible. You must in tend to go back to him.”

”No.”

”Well, then what do you want me to do?”

For the first time since her arrival Lisa showed some confusion. She sighed, dropped her gaze, and began to push her hair back, fingering the damp rings on her neck into dry dark brown tendrils. “I decided not to go to India-“

”Go on.”

”I spent all those years-in that house-loving Miles and knowing where he slept-every night-“. “Cut that bit.”

”I could have gone on, you see, indefinitely, and I thought I would go on indefinitely. Only then that suddenly happened, his loving me like that and my telling him-“

”Lisa, don’t take me round again, I can’t stand it.”

”When I thought I’d go away I imagined I was the same person, the person of before. It was the person of before who decided to go to India-“

”Go on, go on.”

”Well, I found I wasn’t that person anymore.”

”What on earth are you talking about?”

”I’d also like you to know,” she said, looking directly at him again, “that I do absolutely believe that you love me, and that it is, as you put it, serious, different, terrible.”

Danby stared at her. He felt as if he was going to faint and slide forward off the chair. He said hoarsely, “Christ. You want me to console you.”

Lisa was looking at him with great intentness. “There is something, yes, which might be put like that. As I said it is extremely difficult to be precise. That-experience-with Miles altered me. Maybe for the worse, time will show. found I couldn’t just go away-and be alone. I didn’t want to go away-anymore.”

”Oh Lisa,” said Danby. He put his hand to his eyes. “It’s no good,” he said. “I should die of it.”

”Possibly. Possibly not.”

Danby leaned forward, glaring at her. “You listen to me now. You are simply deluding yourself. You said you couldn’t go away and be alone. All right, but what’s the point of coming to me when you don’t love me and you do love somebody else? Don’t you realize there’s only one cure for your loneliness and this isn’t it? You don’t love me. You certainly don’t know me. Perhaps just at this moment you are grateful to me for being in love with you. I might cheer you up, amuse you, for a short while, days, weeks maybe. Then you’d go back to Miles. And I should kill myself. Or Miles. Or you.”

”No,” said Lisa carefully, leaning forward with an equal intentness, “I’ve thought all this out. You have to believe me that I won’t go back to Miles. You must see. Miles is the one man who is entirely impossible.”

”I don’t see. Nothing is impossible when people are in love. You’re mad, you’re absolutely mad. And you obviously haven’t understood what you’re trifling with here. It’s a great fire, Lisa, it’s a killer.”

”I want to get over Miles and I will get over Miles,” said Lisa. “I know how to do it. I shall suffer pain and I shall inflict pain, I know that. Miles feels I’m in a nunnery or dead. His peace depends on seeing me as unattainable, as an angel. It will hurt terribly when it turns out that I am only a woman after all.”

”Then he’ll come round and get you.”

”No. Then he will stop loving me.”

”So it’s all in aid of a cure for Miles!”

”Don’t be a fool. Danby, listen, can’t you conceive that I might care for you and find you attractive, that something did happen that day in the cemetery and that night in the garden? I’m grateful that you love me, but it isn’t just that. It means a lot to be wanted, but it isn’t just that. I loved Miles but I could see you too. I wouldn’t come to just anybody like this and ask to be consoled and helped. I’ve been thinking about you for days and weeks. Thinking about you made me decide not to go to India. Does it seem so strange after all that I should want to make somebody happy and be happy myself? I’ve thought about the way you fell on your knees in the ashes in the garden and how very much at that moment I wanted to touch you. In all those years at Kempsford Gar dens I lost my instinct of self-preservation. I’ve been living in a dark cage. Now I’m out of it. It has been painful, this coming out, and it will go on being painful for some time, but that’s a simple clean pain such as one might live with. I am not mad, Danby. I have never been more sane, coldly sane, self-interestedly sane. I am a woman. I want warmth and love, affection, laughter, happiness, all the things I’ve done without. I don’t want to live upon the rack.”

”You don’t know me at all-“

”I have seen your heart. You don’t know me. You imagine I’m good. But those self-denying years prove nothing. And you think I am-like someone else.”

”No,” he said, “no. I can see you. I can see you.”

”Then let us trust each other.”

”Wait a minute,” said Danby, “before I start screaming. Just what are you suggesting?”

”Something very simple. That we try to get to know each other better. For instance, you might invite me out to dinner.”

”Invite you-out-to dinner! I am going mad, I must be,” said Danby. He began to sob with laughter. “It’s no use, Lisa. It’s all fantasy. You’d leave me and it would kill me.”

”Well, if you prefer not to take the risk-“ Lisa stretched out a long leg and massaged her ankle. Then she thrust her feet into her shoes and reached for her coat.

Danby fell on his knees and put his head onto her lap. With a tired sad triumphant smile she caressed the dry white hair.