Bruno's Dream

by Iris Murdoch

  Days had lost their pattern. There was soup, bedpan, soup, bedpan. There was darkness and light, rain upon the window, sunlight which was worse than anything, which showed the limp crumpled greyness of the sheets and the stains on the wallpaper and the puckered brass door handle which had not been cleaned for years. Bruno knew that he was unable to think properly. Perhaps it was those latest tablets which the doctor had given him for the pain. They were new tablets, a different colour. He felt as if the centre of his mind was occupied by a huge black box which took up nearly all the space and round which he had to edge his way. Names not only of people but of things eluded him, hovering near him on the left, on the right, like birds which sped away when he turned his head. He did in fact turn his head, heavily, in puzzlement, searching for an area of clarity which he knew must be near to him because he could somehow see its light but not it.

  People came and went. Danby and Gwen often sat with him together and talked sometimes to each other, sometimes to him. He liked that. There had been a young man with dark hair, only that was a long time ago. Bruno wanted to ask for the young man but could not recall his name. He heard himself say, ‘The young man, the young man–’ No one seemed to understand. Miles had come. Bruno knew Miles and knew his name and said his name. But he had not talked to him. Miles’s visits were like being in the cinema. Miles moved, spoke, performed and Bruno watched. When Miles leaned forward and spoke with an unusual intensity Bruno would nod to him and try to smile. It was difficult to smile now because of the pain ectoplasm, but with a lot of effort he could smile, though sometimes he wondered if this strange thing was really smiling. And there was a woman with pale hair and a very sweet radiant face who was with him a lot of the time now. Bruno did not know who she was.

  Time passed and Bruno watched it pass, his face contracted with a kind of cunning. Time had never been visible to him before. People came to him and brought him things, soup, bedpans, the Evening Standard, his own book in two volumes, The Great Hunting Spiders. He looked at the pictures in the evening paper and in the spider book, but even with his glasses on the print had become vague and furry. If he woke at night he moaned and made the time move on by moaning, dropping a moan into a little cup or sack of time which was then taken from him. Sometimes he moaned for what seemed like hours on end. Sometimes Danby or Gwen would come, talk to him, tuck in his bedclothes, arrange his pillows. When they had gone he moaned again.

  That was what the present was like. Somewhere quite else there was the past, perfectly clear, brightly coloured, stretching out quite near to him in some sort of different kind of extension. He saw moving pictures. It was not quite like remembering. One day he saw Sambo’s grave in the garden of the house at Twickenham. Miles was walking slowly towards it. They had got a little plain stone to mark the dog’s grave. They had meant to have his name engraved upon it, but this had never been done. Often he saw his mother, sometimes by lamp light combing out her long hair, sometimes by sunlight, calling through screens of golden leaves, ‘Bruin, Bruin, where are you, my darling.’ Once he saw Maureen in a very short skirt lying fast asleep in a nest of feathers. That could not be a memory. Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me, Lord how they weigh me down. He saw Gwen in a gym slip with pigtails holding Kennedy’s Latin Primer. He used to help her with her homework. He saw the page with her big childish writing side by side with his precise small writing. Amo, amas, amat. Latin begins where everything begins. But where does everything end, thought Bruno, where does it end?

  I am dying, he thought, but what is it like? Is it just this pain, this fear? For there was fear, fear of something. Would death, when it came, be some unimaginably more dreadful physical agony, would one experience death, would it be long? Yet it was not really this future thing that Bruno feared. He feared something that was present with him, the whimpering frailty of his being which so dreaded extinction. What moaned in the night was different and less terrible. There was something in him which was capable of a far more awful suffering and which he must somehow cheat out of a full awareness. He must, with a part of his mind, look always away from that, and not let the structure of his personality be destroyed by what it could not bear. Some old habit of uprightness must serve here, some habit bred to deal with quite different matters, and which must somehow be coaxed into helping him now. There were tears. Bruno did not mind the tears, they were a kind of contemplation. He wept as he looked at the slow movement of time and at the coloured pictures. This was not the terror. The terror must be kept in its corner. He must play the game of survival until the very end. That was one important thing.

  There is another important thing, thought Bruno, or is it the same thing? What is the other thing? It’s something I’ve got to do. If God existed He would do it for me. Bruno had had a dream about God. God had hung up above him in the form of a beautiful Eresus niger, swinging very very slightly upon a fine almost invisible golden thread. God had let down another thread toward Bruno and the thread swung to and fro just above Bruno’s head and Bruno kept seizing it and it kept breaking. The light fragile touch of the thread was accompanied by an agonising and yet delightful physical sensation. Then suddenly the Eresus niger seemed to be growing larger and larger and turning into the face of Bruno’s father. The face filled up the whole sky.

  God would do it for me, but God doesn’t exist, thought Bruno laboriously. He began to think about the women. He saw Maureen sitting in the cafe with the chess board on the table in front of her, staring at the red and white pieces and moving one of them every now and then. She’s got eyes of blue, I never cared for eyes of blue, But she’s got eyes of blue, So that’s my weakness now. Maureen was wearing a little round red and white checked cloche hat pulled well down over her ears. Why had it never occurred to him before that the hat matched the chess men? Had she done it on purpose? He must ask her sometime.

  ‘Must ask her,’ he said aloud.

  ‘What’s that, Bruno?’

  ‘Must ask her.’

  The pale-haired woman came and sat on his bed and took his hand in both of hers as she often did. Her big oval ivory complexioned face looked tired and sad. Twice he had seen her crying quietly when she thought he was asleep. Who was she? He wondered how old she was. Her face was quite unlined but it was not the face of a young woman.

  ‘What is it, Bruno, dear heart?’

  ‘Fly in the web,’ said Bruno.

  A big Araneus diadematus had made a very handsome orb web across a corner of the window outside. It was usually to be seen hanging head downwards at the hub of the web or else sitting in a crack at the side of the window, in a little bower made of threads, attached to the centre of the web by a strong signal thread. Bruno had been watching it for days. It had had no prey. Now a large house fly was struggling in the web and the spider was rushing towards it.

  ‘Shall I rescue the fly?’

  Bruno did not know whether he wanted the fly rescued or not. The spider had already reached the fly and cast a thread around it. Now the woman had opened the window and put her hand into the web, destroying its beautiful symmetry. The spider retreated. The captive fly dangled from a thread.

  ‘Too late. Bring them here both. In the mug, the cup.’

  The woman detached the fly into the mug and with more difficulty captured the spider in the cup. She brought them both to Bruno.

  The fly was struggling feebly, moving its legs and its head. Its wings had already been crushed up against its body by the circling thread. The spider was agitated, trying to rush up the slippery side of the cup. The woman kept moving the cup with a light circular motion against the direction of the spider, so that it kept falling back again to the bottom. After a while it was still.

  ‘Such a fat spider.’

  ‘You’re not afraid,’ said Bruno. ‘Most women are afraid.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of spiders. I rather like them. I like flies too.’

  ‘It’s a sad thing. Look at the cross, big white cross on her back. In the middle
ages they said she was holy because of the cross.’

  ‘Do you think we’d better kill the fly?’

  Bruno considered. They had interfered with nature and were now at a loss. ‘Yes. And put the spider back.’

  The woman dropped the fly on to the floor and stepped on it. She carefully reintroduced the spider to the web. The spider ran straight into its bower, cowering back so as to be almost invisible.

  ‘Leave the window open, please.’

  The warm early summer air filled the room. The smell of dusty streets, the special smell of the Thames, a sort of fermented rotting yet cool fresh smell, was mingled with a vague scent of flowers.

  What do they feel, thought Bruno. Had the fly suffered pain when its wings were forced back and crushed by the strong thread? Had the spider felt fear when it was in the tea cup? How mysterious life was at these its extremities. And yet was the mystery less when one returned from the extremities to the centre? Perhaps if God existed He would look down upon His creation with the same puzzlement and ask, what do they feel?

  But there was no God. I am at the centre of the great orb of my life, thought Bruno, until some blind hand snaps the thread. I have lived for nearly ninety years and I know nothing. I have watched the terrible rituals of nature and I have lived inside the simple instincts of my own being and now at the end I am empty of wisdom. Where is the difference between me and these little humble creatures? The spider spins its web, it can no other. I spin out my consciousness, this compulsive chatterer, this idle rambling voice that will so soon be mute. But it’s all a dream. Reality is too hard. I have lived my life in a dream and now it is too late to wake up.

  ‘What was the other thing?’ said Bruno.

  ‘What other thing, my dear?’

  ‘The other thing.’

  If only one could believe that death was waking up. Some people believed this. Bruno stared at his dressing gown hanging on the door. He never used it now since he did not leave his bed, and it had hardened into folds which were every day the same. How well he knew those folds. It seemed to be getting taller, larger, darker. Even the sunshine did not dispel that darkness now. The pity of it all, thought Bruno. I’ve been through this vale of tears and never seen anything real. The reality. That’s the other thing. But now it’s too late and I don’t even know what it is. He looked round him. The sunshine revealed the terrible little room, the faded stained wallpaper with the green ivy design, the dull puckered door knob, the thin Indian counterpane with its almost invisible spidery arabesques, the row of champagne bottles getting dusty in the corner. He could not drink champagne any more now. And the dressing gown.

  Tears came out of Bruno’s eyes and ran down over the bones of his face and into his beard.

  ‘What is it, dear heart? Don’t cry.’

  ‘I can’t remember, I can’t remember.’

  It’s something simple really, he thought. Something to do with Maureen and Janie and the whole thing. One sees now how pointless it all was, all the things one chased after, all the things one wanted. And if there is something that matters now at the end it must be the only thing that matters. I wish I’d known it then. It looks as if it would have been easy to be kind and good since it’s so obvious now that nothing else matters at all. But of course then one was inside the dream.

  ‘Does it work backwards?’ said Bruno. ‘It can’t, can it?’

  ‘What do you mean, my dear?’

  The woman was holding his hand again, sitting close up against him on the bed. He felt no sexual desire any more. The fear had killed it.

  ‘If only it could work backwards, but it can’t.’

  Some people believed that too. That life could be redeemed. But it couldn’t be, and that was what was so terrible. He had loved only a few people and loved them so badly, so selfishly. He had made a muddle of everything. Was it only in the presence of death that one could see so clearly what love ought to be like? If only the knowledge which he had now, this absolute nothing-else-matters, could somehow go backwards and purify the little selfish loves and straighten out the muddles. But it could not.

  Had Janie known this at the end? For the first time Bruno saw it with absolute certainty. Janie must have known. It would be impossible in this presence not to know. She had not wanted to curse him, she had wanted to forgive him. And he had not given her the chance.

  ‘Janie, I am so sorry,’ murmured Bruno. His tears flowed. But he was glad that he knew, at last.

  The dressing gown had moved forward towards him and was standing at the foot of the bed.

  I believe he’s going, thought Diana. Oh why have I got to suffer this?

  Bruno had been talking a kind of nonsense for days and intermittently crying. He could scarcely eat and all power of movement seemed to be leaving his body. The limp shrunken form lay inertly under the counterpane. Only in the head, only perhaps in the eyes, there burned with a fierce almost violent strength the flame which was so soon to be put out.

  Diana held on to his hand which just perceptibly returned her pressure. He was blinking the tears away from his eyes. Diana put up her other hand to brush his cheek. He had not the strength now to raise his hand to his face. How strange it was that when almost all the other functions of the body had dwindled and fallen away into the hand of nature the eyes had not surrendered their mysterious power to manufacture tears.

  Diana felt the tears rising into her own eyes, and she drew her free hand back to mop them. Her tears and Bruno’s were mingled on her cheek. She had come to love Bruno so much in this terrible time.

  If Bruno went now, Danby would feel very bad about it. He and Lisa had gone away for the night. Diana had persuaded them to go. Then Bruno had suddenly begun to sink.

  It seemed to Diana that Danby and her sister were scarcely sane. They both seemed to be drunk with ecstasy. The physical change in Lisa was so great that Diana could scarcely recognise her as the same person. She looked not ten but twenty years younger and more beautiful than she had ever looked in her life. She laughed almost all the time, with a new laugh which Diana had never heard before. Or perhaps it was that throughout the years she had just forgotten the sound of Lisa’s laughter. Had she and Danby been to bed together? Lisa’s appearance left the matter in little doubt. Their attempts, in that house of death, to conceal their felicity were touching and unsuccessful. They could not help presenting a picture of life at its most explosively robust and hopeful. They could not help presenting a spectacle of triumph.

  Miles’s indignation had been extreme and comic. Her perception of the comicality of Miles in this situation had been one of the things which had helped Diana herself to bear it. It had been some time before Miles would even believe what Diana was telling him. He regarded it as impossible, as strictly contradictory. He stared at Diana with wild amazed eyes. It was all a mistake, she would find that she had been mistaken, she had certainly got it wrong. For nature so preposterously to err … When at last Diana did succeed in persuading Miles of the truth of what she said, that Lisa was not leading a dedicated life in India but was to be seen riding about London in Danby’s new sports car and dining with Danby at riverside restaurants, dressed in extremely smart new clothes, Miles gave himself up to a day of rage and execration. He cursed Danby, he cursed Lisa. He said it could not possibly last. She would be sorry, my God, she would be sorry! He announced himself irreparably damaged. The next day he was silent, frowning, concentrating, refusing to answer Diana’s questions. On the third day he said to Diana enigmatically, ‘It’s all over now,’ and returned to work in the summer house. It was another week before Diana, walking down the garden, saw once more the strange angelic smile upon his face as he wrote.

  Lisa had sent no communication to Miles and offered no explanation to Diana. Diana had simply discovered her with Danby one morning at Stadium Street. They had assumed that she would immediately understand. They looked upon her golden-eyed, a little apologetically, coaxingly like children. And, as it seemed to Diana, almost at o
nce started treating her as if she were their mother. It had taken Diana herself some time to see and to believe what was there in front of her face. It had been a very bitter revelation. Diana, when she had first taken it on herself to visit Bruno regularly, had come to find a certain sweetness in her renewed relationship with Danby. She felt she had not really got over him and saw no reason why she should try to. She experienced his attractiveness now in a more diffused and peaceful way as a comforting warmth and a consoling presence. There was healing for her in their coexistence with Bruno. She could see that Danby was unhappy. She respected his grief and looked forward to a time when she might be able in turn to console him. She felt vague about this. There would be no extremes. But something would have survived the wreck. When poor Bruno is dead, she thought, I’ll consider about Danby and I’ll see what to do. In fact, she thought a lot about him, especially in the evenings when she was alone in the drawing room at Kempsford Gardens, and his image brought her a kind of happiness.

  But now. Lisa had taken Miles away from her and now she had taken Danby too. While she listened to Miles’s outraged cries she struggled with her own pain. How could her resentment ever have an end? She realised now just how much she had been relying on Danby. Indeed it was not until Miles told her that at least she ought to be pleased by this definitive removal of her rival that this aspect of the matter occurred to her at all. Danby was far more final than India. A Lisa in India would have become a divinity. A Lisa sitting in Danby’s car with an arm outstretched along the back of the seat, as Diana had last seen her, was fallen indeed. Miles said venomously, ‘Well, she had chosen the world and the flesh. Let’s hope for her sake she doesn’t find she’s got the devil as well!’ Naturally it did not occur to Miles that Diana would be other than pleased. In fact, he was not concerned with Diana’s feelings, being so absorbingly interested in his own. He will manage, she thought, he will manage. We’ve all paired off really, in the end. Miles has got his muse, Lisa has got Danby. And I’ve got Bruno. Who would have thought it would work out like that?