Bruno's Dream (12 page)

‘Have you got anybody, Danby?’

‘A girl, no.’

‘You’re not queer, are you?’

‘Good God no! Diana, you make me feel quite faint!’

‘All alone?’

‘All alone. There was someone, but she went to Australia. I mope.’

‘Poor Danby. But really I think one’s thoughts and feelings are not all that important.’

‘Mine are. I am thinking and feeling that I want you. What are you going to do about it? You realise that you’ve led me on?’

‘I’m nearly fifty. It doesn’t apply.’

‘I’m over fifty. It does.’

‘Don’t make difficulties. Just for the moment really I feel young again.’

‘It’s the music. This place belongs to the past. It’s something to do with movement, repetition. I feel young too, timeless, rather.’

‘Timeless, yes. You’re very attractive.’

‘Then what about it?’

‘No, no.’

‘You aren’t going to tell Miles and then write me a note saying you won’t see me again? I shall really make difficulties if you do that.’

‘No, of course not. But it must all be quiet and formal and romantic.’

‘Those seem to me contradictory terms. You mean chocolates, flowers–?’

‘I mean a sort of romantic friendship.’

‘Men aren’t good at romantic friendships. I want you in bed.’

‘You aren’t really in love with me, I’m not really in love with you. We’re just captivated.’

‘We can’t tell yet about being in love. And anyway what’s wrong with being captivated? I’m not all that often captivated, I can tell you!’

‘We care for each other with the less good parts of ourselves.’

‘Now you’re being philosophical. May I see you home?’

‘No.’

‘Miles won’t be there, it’s too early.’

‘No.’

‘Diana, I’ve just got to be alone with you for a minute. I want to kiss you.’

‘No.’

11

‘N
IGEL
!’

It was three o’clock in the morning, the terrible slough of the night time. Bruno had been dreaming. He dreamt that he had murdered somebody, a woman, but he could not remember whom, and had buried the body in the front garden of a house in Twickenham where he had lived as a child. People kept coming and staring at the place where the body was buried and pointing to it until Bruno noticed with horror that the shape of the body was clearly visible through the earth, outlined with a reddish luminous glow. Then he was in a law court and the judge, who was Miles, was condemning him to death. He woke up with a racing heart. He felt sudden instinctive relief at knowing it was a dream before he realised a moment later that it was true. He was condemned to death.

The room with its curtains closely drawn was pitch dark, but he could just see the time on the luminous dial of his watch. Bruno reached out to try to put his light on but could not find the lamp. It must have been moved from his bedside table to the table beside the window. Adelaide sometimes did this when she was dusting and forgot to put it back. Nigel had put the light out for him at eleven o’clock. Bruno lay with one hand pressed to his heart. His heart was jumping and missing beats like a runner who runs too fast and constantly stumbles. There was an acute pain in his chest in the region of the heart and a sense of constriction as if a wire which had been passed round his chest were being drawn tighter and tighter. He moved his feet feebly inside their cage, thinking he might get up and find the light, but he felt too weak to move. Then an agonising cramp seized his left foot. He tried to rub it against the other foot to ease the pain. He thought, it’s come, the time of prostration, of overwhelming weakness, of bedpans. The time of the dressing gown. Only, how odd, he would not be needing the dressing gown any more. The dressing gown would be a spectator awaiting its hour. But this was absurd. He had often felt weak before and it had passed off. Life is a series of unpleasant things which pass off. Except that there is one last one which doesn’t.

Bruno made an effort to restrain his tears. Odd business, trying to restrain tears, he said laboriously to himself. They live somewhere there at the back of your eyes, you can feel them moving in there like animals. Then there is the weak defeated pleasure of the warm tide rising, the water overflowing on to the cheek. The tears were a little relief. He moved his hand with difficulty and touched his cheek and took his salty finger to his lips. He thought, perhaps I won’t see Miles after all. His son now seemed to him the image of death. His heart was still stumbling along. And what was that noise, an intermittent buzzing noise, like an engine. Listening, Bruno could not decide whether it was a loud sound far away or a little sound near. Then he recognised it. It was the sound of a fly struggling in a spider’s web. It was probably in the web of a large
Tegenaria atrica
of whose friendly presence high up in the corner of the ceiling Bruno had for some time been conscious. The desperate bursts of buzzing continued, became briefer, stopped. The horror came back to Bruno. The time of the dressing gown. Then he began to call again.

‘NIGEL!’

The door opened softly. ‘Ssh, ssh, you’ll wake Danby.’ Nigel switched the light on at the door, moved to the table beside the window, switched on the dark green shaded lamp, and then switched off the centre light.

Bruno lay weak and relaxed with relief. ‘Could you put the lamp beside me, Nigel? Oh dear, I seem to have knocked over my water. Could you mop it up? I hope it hasn’t got on to the books.’

‘Are you feeling funny?’

‘I’m all right. I just got frightened. I’ve got awful cramp in my left foot. Could you just hold it, hold it tight, that’s fine.’

Nigel’s strong warm hands gripped the suffering foot and the pain immediately went away.

‘Thank you, it’s gone. I’m sorry I woke you.’

‘I was awake anyway.’

‘Nigel, could you prop me up a bit, I want to be sure I can still get my legs out.’

Bruno slowly edged up in the bed, pushing hard with his hands while Nigel raised him with a hand under each arm. Nigel lifted the bedclothes while Bruno very slowly manoeuvred his legs toward the edge of the bed. It seemed to be all right after all.

‘Do you want to go?’

‘No. I just wanted to be sure I could. I felt so weak just now. I had a bad dream. All right, let me be now. Nigel, would you mind staying just a short while until I feel better? Would you sit beside me?’

‘Sure.’

Nigel drew the chair up beside Bruno’s bed. He collected Bruno’s two hands which were straying spider-like upon the counterpane and began to caress them. This caressing movement, a firm smoothing down toward the tips of the fingers, always made Bruno feel relaxed. Perhaps it eased the rheumatism in his knuckles.

They spoke in low voices.

‘Why are you so kind to me, Nigel? I know I’m horrible. No one else would touch me. Are you mortifying the flesh?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I impose on you.’

‘I exist to be imposed upon.’

‘You’re a funny chap, Nigel. You worship don’t you, you believe in Him.’

‘In Him. Yes.’

‘Odd how He changes. When I was very young,’ said Bruno, ‘I thought of God as a great blank thing, rather like the sky, in fact perhaps He
was
the sky, all friendliness and protectiveness and fondness for little children. I can remember my mother pointing upward, her finger pointing upward, and a sense of marvellous safeness and happiness that I had. I never thought much about Jesus Christ, I suppose I took
him
for granted. It was the great big blank egg of the sky that I loved and felt so safe and happy with. It went with a sense of being curled up. Perhaps I felt I was inside the egg. Later it was different, it was when I first started to look at spiders. Do you know, Nigel, that there is a spider called
amaurobius,
which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother’s dead body. One can’t believe that’s an accident. I don’t know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern, He
was
those spiders which I watched in the light of my electric torch on summer nights. There was a wonderfulness, a separateness, it was the divine to see those spiders living their extraordinary lives. Later on in adolescence it all became confused with emotion. I thought that God was Love, a big sloppy love that drenched the world with big wet kisses and made everything all right. I felt myself transformed, purified, glorified. I’d never thought about innocence before but then I experienced it. I was a radiant youth. I was deeply touched by myself. I loved God, I was in love with God, and the world was full of the power of love. There was a lot of God at that time. Afterwards He became less, He got drier and pettier and more like an official who made rules. I had to watch my step with Him. He was a kind of bureaucrat making checks and counter-checks. There was no innocence and no radiance then. I stopped loving Him and began to find Him depressing. Then He receded altogether, He became something that the women did, a sort of female activity, though very occasionally I met Him again, most often in country churches when I was alone and suddenly He would be there. He was different once more in those meetings. He wasn’t an official any longer, He was something rather lost and pathetic, a little crazed perhaps, and small. I felt sorry for Him. If I had been able to take Him by the hand it would have been like leading a little child. Yet He had His own places, His own holes and burrows, and it could still be a sort of surprise to find Him there. Later on again He was simply gone, He was nothing but an intellectual fiction, an old hypothesis, a piece of literature.’

There was silence in the room. The green-shaded lamp gave a dim light. Nigel had stopped massaging Bruno’s hands and sat staring at him, his long legs hooked round the edge of the chair. Nigel’s eyes were round and vague and his thin-lipped mouth hung open where he had been chewing the lank end of a lock of dark hair. He looked like a slice of a human being. He groaned faintly to indicate understanding of what Bruno had said.

‘Odd,’ said Bruno. ‘There are people with whom one always talks about sex. And there are people with whom one always talks about God. I always talk to you about God. The others wouldn’t understand.’

Nigel groaned.

‘What is God made of, Nigel?’

‘Why not spiders? The spiders were a good idea.’

‘The spiders
were
a good idea. But I just hadn’t the nerve, the courage, to hang on to them. Perhaps that’s where it all began.’

‘It doesn’t matter what He’s made of.’

‘Perhaps God is all sex. All energy is sex. What do you think, Nigel?’

‘It wouldn’t matter if He was all sex.’

‘If He’s all sex how can we be saved?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether we are saved.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Bruno. ‘I want to be saved. Do you love Him, Nigel?’

‘Yes, I love Him.’

‘Why?’

‘He makes me suffer.’

‘Why should you love Him for that?’

‘I dig suffering.’

After a further silence Bruno said, ‘I suppose one is like what one loves. Or one loves what one is like. All gods are private gods. Do you pray, Nigel?’

‘I worship. Prayer is worship. Being annihilated by God.’

‘Do you think one must worship something?’

‘Yes. But real worship involves waiting. If you wait He comes, He finds you.’

‘I never went in much for suffering,’ Bruno went on. ‘But I wouldn’t mind it now if I felt it had any meaning, as if one were buying back one’s faults. I’d take an eternity of suffering in exchange for death any day.’

‘I think death must be something beautiful, something one could be in love with.’

‘You’re young, Nigel. You can’t see death.’

‘When I think of death I think of a jet black orgasm.’

‘Death isn’t like that, it isn’t like that at all.’ Bruno wondered if he could tell Nigel about the dressing gown and decided he could not. He added, ‘I’m going to see my son. We shall forgive each other.’

‘That’s beautiful.’

Would it be beautiful, something golden, complete and achieved? Could there still be achievement?

‘You understand almost everything, Nigel.’

‘I love everything.’

‘But you don’t understand about death. Do you know what I think?’ said Bruno, staring hard at the dressing gown in the dim light. ‘I think God is death. That’s it. God is death.’

12

D
ANBY CLOSED THE
door of the fan-lighted sitting room behind him and leaned against it. His heart was beating like a steam hammer.

Diana was standing tense and erect near the French windows. They stared at each other without smiling.

The distance between them was a huge, airy, magnetic space. Danby moved into it slowly, pushing the little rounded chintz chairs out of the way with his feet. Diana stood rigid. When he was a yard away from her he stopped again.

Then very slowly he came nearer, opening his hands, not with a grasping gesture but with a praying gesture, or perhaps a gesture of benediction. The blessing hands descended, outlining, a foot away, her figure. With a very deep sigh he put his hands behind him. Another step forward and the stuff of his jacket was lightly touching her breast. She slowly leaned her head back and, hands still behind him, he kissed her on the lips. They remained for some time, immobile, eyes closed, lip to lip.

‘The metaphysic of kisses,’ said Danby. He put his arms round her now, caressing her slender neck and running his hands very slowly down the length of her back. The fragility, the flexibility, of the human neck. He could feel the pain of her heart beating strongly against his own.

‘You made quite a ceremony out of that.’

‘The first time I kiss you is worth a ceremony. This is the first of thousands.’

‘Or the first of few. Who knows?’

‘What am I saying? Millions.’

Her hands were still hanging at her side.

‘I am a very determined and highly organised hedonist, Diana.’

‘We aren’t in love.’

‘Yes we are. In a way suited to our advanced age.’