Bruno's Dream Read online

  Miles had forgiven nothing. Perhaps it was her death that fixed him in that endless resentment. The often quoted remark about ‘coffee-coloured grandchildren’. Well, there had been a judgement. Bruno had no grandchildren. Gwen and Danby, childless, Miles and Parvati, childless, Miles and–Bruno could not recall the name of Miles’s second wife, he had never met her. Oh yes, Diana. Miles and Diana, childless. Was there any point in trying even now to be reconciled, whatever that meant? It was a mere convention after all that one ought to be on good terms with one’s son or father. Sons and fathers were individuals and should be paid the compliment of being treated as such. Why should they not have the privilege, possessed by other and unrelated persons, of drifting painlessly apart? Or so he had said to Danby, many years ago, when the latter had questioned him about his relations with Miles. Danby had probably been worrying about the stamps.

  Of course Miles’s resentment had started much earlier with the Maureen business. Had Janie told them about it or had the children just guessed? He would like to know that. The dark-eyed handsome censorious pair, whispering, looking at him unsmilingly. Gwen had come back to him much later, but Miles had never come, and that old bitterness had entered into what happened afterwards, so that the two guilts seemed to be entwined. No one had ever understood about Maureen and it was now too late to try to explain it all and who could it be explained to? Not to Danby, who would just laugh, as he laughed at everything, at life, even at death. He said he found Gwen’s death comical, his own wife’s death comical. It was years later of course, long after that terrible meaningless leap from the bridge. Could he explain to Miles about Maureen and would Miles listen? He was the only person left in the world who cared about it any more. Could he compel Miles to see it all as it really was? Could Miles forgive him on behalf of the others or would it all be coldness and cruelty and a final increase of horror?

  Janie had called Maureen a pathetic little tart. But how remote words, particularly angry words, are from the real thing at which they aim. Of course Maureen had had a lot of money out of him. Janie had forced him to reckon up how much. But money had not entered into his real relationship with Maureen, and it had not been just bed either, but somehow joy. Maureen had been sweetness, innocence, gentleness, gaiety, and peace. He bought her sheets and new curtains and cups and saucers. Playing at domesticity with Maureen gave him a pleasure which he had never had in setting up house with Janie. That had been a matter of quarrels about antique furniture with Janie’s mother. Janie had equipped the house: she had not expected him to be interested. Maureen singing in her little Liverpool Irish voice Hold that tiger, hold that tiger. Maureen swaggering in the new short skirts. Maureen, dressed only in a blue necklace, dancing the charleston. Her little flat, full of the paraphernalia of her millinery trade, was like an exotic bird’s nest. Once when he returned home covered with feathers and Janie noticed he said he had been to the Zoo. Janie believed him. Maureen laughed for hours.

  Well, not perhaps innocence. How did she live? She never seemed to sell any of those hats. She said she sometimes worked as an usherette in the cinema, and she had seemed to him like a nymph of the cinema age, a sybil of the cavern of illusory love. But she had too many clothes, too nice a flat. He found a man’s handkerchief once. She said it was her brother’s. Yet even jealousy became, with her, a convention, a kind of game, a personal sweet game, like the chess game he had seen her setting out in a cafe with big handsome red and white pieces on a large board on the first occasion when he had seen her. It later appeared that she could not play chess. The chess men were simply an instrument of seduction. This discovery charmed Bruno utterly. She said she was eighteen and that Bruno was her first man. Yet even these lies were sweet as he tasted them mingled with her lipstick in long slow clinging kisses. Oh God, thought Bruno, and it all came back to him, it could come back even now with a warm rush to the centre of that dry schematic frame. Physical desire still stalked, still pounced, sometimes vague and fantastic, sometimes with memories of Maureen, sometimes with images of coloured girls whom he had followed in the street and embraced with impotent excitement in twilit rooms in Kilburn and Notting Hill long long after Janie was dead.

  How selective guilt is, thought Bruno. It is the sins that link significantly with our life which we remember and regret. People whom we just knocked down in passing are soon lost to memory. Yet their wounds may be as great. We regret only the frailty which the form of our life has made us own to. Before that moment in Harrods which had changed his world he had felt practically no guilt at all. Afterwards, after Janie’s awful scene with Maureen, after Maureen crying behind that closed door, he had felt the burden and the horror of it, the ugliness and the scandal. Why ever had Janie married him anyway? Stylish Janie Devlin. He must have been momentarily transformed by love and ambition into the witty dashing youth that she wanted. Her disappointment had been ironical and dry.

  His pictures of Janie all seemed to belong to before the first war, to the epoch of courtship and marriage. The war itself was scarcely there in recollection. He had not been fighting, he was already over thirty, he suffered from a stomach ulcer, he hardly seemed to have noticed it at all. His father was dead and he was running the printing works which was doing well on government orders. His mother, who had gone to Norfolk because of the Zeppelins, died in nineteen sixteen. This shook him more than the holocaust. The pictures of Janie were brighter and yet more remote. Janie playing tennis in a white dress of heavy linen whose hem became green from brushing the grass through a long summer afternoon. Janie chattering Italian at a diplomatic party while her bright bold eye quizzes the men. Janie twirling her parasol surrounded by admirers in the Broad Walk. Janie in St. James’s Theatre on the night when he proposed. How gay, how sweet, and how infinitely far off it all seemed now. Maureen’s was the more febrile gaiety of a later and grimmer world. At the parting of the ways, You took all my happy days, And left me lonely nights.

  Society conspires to make a newly wed couple feel virtuous. Marriage is a symbol of goodness, though it is only a symbol. Janie and he had enjoyed their virtue for quite a long time. ‘Is she a good woman?’ his mother, who never quite got on with Janie, had asked him at the start. It was not a conventional question. Bruno was embarrassed by it and did not know the answer. His relation to Janie had fallen into two parts. In the first part, before Harrods, they had played social roles, put on smart clothes, been admired and envied, lived above Bruno’s station and beyond his means, and born two handsome and talented children. In the second part, after Harrods, they seemed to have been alone, really related to each other at last, in an awful shut-in solitude, becoming demons to each other. Janie behaved so badly to me, he thought, or he tried for the ten thousandth time to frame the judgement but could not. Agamemnon was killed on his first night home from Troy. But Agamemnon was guilty, guilty. Janie’s cancer came so soon after and she blamed it on him.

  His love for Janie was not accessible to memory, he knew it only on evidence. She must have destroyed it systematically during that reign of terror. And he only, as it seemed to him now, knew for certain that she loved him when she was crucifying that love before his face. He only knew that she had kept all his letters when she tore them up and scattered them around the drawing-room, only knew that she had kept his proposal note when she hurled it screaming on to the fire. For weeks, months he was saying he was sorry, weeping, kneeling, buying her flowers which she threw out of the window, begging her to forgive him. ‘Don’t be angry with me, Janie, I can’t bear it, forgive me, Janie, oh forgive me, for Christ’s sake.’ He must have loved her then. Maureen had vanished as if she had never been. He did not visit her again. He sent her fifty pounds. He could not even write a note. He must have loved Janie then, but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness. His mother would not have punished him so for any fault. Later he became ferocious, violent. Janie said, ‘You have destroyed my world.’ Bruno shouted, ‘You reject me. You reject
everything that I am. You always have done. You never loved me.’ They began to quarrel and they went on quarrelling even when Janie was ill, even when they both knew that Janie was dying. He ought not to have let Janie make him hate her. That was worse than anything.

  Bruno’s heart was beating violently. He hauled himself up a little further on his pillows. These million-times thought thoughts could still blind him, make him gasp with emotion and absorb him into an utter oblivion of everything else. Was there no right way to think about those dreadful things, no way of thinking about them which would bring resignation and peace? Janie had been dead for nearly forty years. How well he knew this particular rat-run of his mind. He must not, must not become so upset or he would not sleep at night and sleepless nights were torture. He did not like to call out at night, he was affrighted by his own voice calling in the darkness. Even if he did call Nigel did not always hear, did not always come. Once in extremity he had shouted so loud that Nigel must have heard, but he did not come. Perhaps he was not there at all but lying somewhere else in the arms of a girl. He knew so little really about Nigel. After that he was afraid to call in case Danby should hear and find out that Nigel was not there.

  He stared at his old red dressing gown hanging on the door, a big shrouded thing in the dim light. It was the only garment now which he put on, it represented his only travelling, his wardrobe was shrunk to this. Why had it somehow become the symbol of his death? Danby offered to buy him a new one, and Bruno had refused, saying ‘It’s not worth it now.’ Danby accepted the remark. The old dressing gown would still be there when they returned with relief from the funeral and began to get out the bottles, and then someone would say, ‘Bruno’s gone, but there’s his poor old dressing gown still hanging on the door.’

  What would it be like, would someone be there? A girl perhaps? But there was no girl. If only he could be loved by somebody new. But it was impossible. Who would love him now when he had become a monster? Perhaps he would die alone, calling, calling. He had let Janie die alone. He could not bear it. He had heard her crying out, calling his name. He had not gone up. He feared that she would curse him at the end. But perhaps she had wanted to forgive him, to be reconciled with him, and he had taken away from her that last precious good thing? The groans and cries had continued for a while and become silent at last. Tears began to stream down Bruno’s face. He murmured ‘Poor Bruno, poor Bruno, poor Bruno…’

  2

  ‘O Adelaide, sweet Adelaide,

  The years may come, the years may go....’

  ‘SSSH!’

  Danby Odell was in bed with Adelaide the maidservant. She had been his mistress for nearly three years. Before that there had been Linda. Linda was smart and neat, her shiny black handbags were like a sort of well-kept professional kit. Relaxed and divorcee, neatness was her form of virtue, and she had kept the affair, which she had initiated, tidy and well-organised. Then one day she went back to Australia. They exchanged three letters. Six months later Danby had taken up with Adelaide. She was sweet, she was there.

  These things had nothing to do with the servitude of being in love. They had nothing to do with what it had been like with Gwen. With Gwen it had been the once-in-a-lifetime form of insanity. Danby had suffered. Even when he was married to her he had suffered, as a soul might suffer in the presence of its God simply from an apprehension of a difference in substance. Gwen was intense and high and spiritual. Danby loved her moral intensity with physical love. They both suffered a pain of separation. Even when he was making her laugh, which he did very often, there would sometimes be a spasm of pain and they would both look quickly away. Gwen had loved him profoundly, meditating upon his unlikeness and their mutual impossibility, enclosing his separateness in the sweep of her love and brooding over it as a saint might brood secretly upon the wounds of the stigmata which unknown to his fellows he ever conceals in the folds of his robe. Danby had not recovered from her death. But his life energy was cheerful stuff.

  Danby was attractive to women. He was tall but getting rather stout now. A bulky paunch was developing below his waist. The long hairs which covered his chest and stomach were still fine and golden while the straight thick hair of his head had become pure white. His face had the glowing very slightly wrinkled texture of a russet apple, his eyes were a clear light blue, and he had excellent regular teeth which he often admired in the mirror. He enjoyed eating and drinking and doing business. When he was younger he had been an excellent ballroom dancer and a good tennis player. He came of an unambitious tradesman’s family and though he was the only child of adoring parents, neither he nor anybody else had had any particular plans for his life. He went to a mediocre grammar school and spent a year at a provincial university. His father died, his mother died, there was no money left. He realised, now that there was no one to bully and reprove him, how deeply he had loved his mother. He went into insurance. He was rescued from this fate by the war, every moment of which he enjoyed. Then came seriousness in the person of Gwen. Danby entered the printing works with some trepidation but soon found to his surprise that he had a talent for business and was indeed much better at it than Bruno was. Bruno, who was by then over sixty, was only too glad to surrender his power to his son-in-law. Danby flourished. It was not so much the money-making that he enjoyed but something much more like housewifery or domestic neatness: keeping things tidy, making things fit, dealing with twenty tiny crises every day. The men, with whom he was regularly to be found drinking in the public bar of The Old Swan, liked Danby. Indeed almost everybody liked Danby, though there were a few people who thought him an ass. Danby liked Danby.

  He had no particular pangs of conscience about Adelaide. He thought that one should do what one wanted on the whole so long as one did not make people unhappy, and he saw no reason why he should make Adelaide unhappy. She was at the age when women need the reassurance of being wanted. He had no idea whether she liked going to bed with him but he knew that she was in love with him and had been from almost the first moment when she arrived in answer to his advertisement. Bruno was just beginning to be ill. It had been a long business with poor old Bruno. Adelaide was useful and her cousin Nigel the Nurse had become indispensable. It never occurred to him, or he imagined to Adelaide, that there was any question of marriage. It was not that sort of relationship. But he had begun to feel that he was getting old and had reached resting point. Adelaide suited him. He promised to support her in her old age. He got into bed with her every night, slightly drunk, and was perfectly happy.

  Adelaide, though putting on weight and no longer very young, was really rather beautiful, as Danby came to see after he had been going to bed with her for some time. She was heavy about the hips and stomach but her shoulders and breasts were classical. She had a round face and a naturally rosy complexion and a great deal of long hair of a rich brown colour. (Her hair was dyed, only Danby had never realised this.) Her tendency to overdress–such a change from Linda–gave her for him a sort of exotic almost oriental charm. Adelaide clinked and rattled with accoutrements, rustled with frills. Her wide-apart brown eyes worshipped him as she coiled the straight abundant hair into an artful bun. Her flat South London voice was to him an infinitely sexy mating call.

  Danby hiccupped. It was raining outside with a gentle friendly pissing sound. It was his evening for drinking with Gaskin at The Raven. He had had a bit too much as usual. He was lying on his back with his knees up. He liked to lie on his back like that, it gave him a relaxed happy feeling. Adelaide had just switched out the light and now she was up against him, glued to his side like Eve. He could see the hump of his knees outlined against the thin curtains which glowed faintly with the light of the street lamp which shone into the yard. He and Adelaide slept in the semi-basement annexe which a previous owner had built on to the house in Stadium Street in days when the neighbourhood was a good deal less seedy than it had since become. Danby was solaced by its seediness. The neat pretty house in Notting Hill had been Gwen’s house, Gwen
’s territory. Danby had fled from it and after years in lodgings had bought the Stadium Street house because it was so different, so shabby. And of course it was near the printing works. He loved the little yard outside his window, below ground level, always dark and covered in slippery green moss. It was always called ‘the yard’, never ‘the garden’ although it had a yellow privet bush and a laurel bush and a rose that had reverted to briar. The soil was black and no grass would grow on it, only a few dandelions and weedy marigolds which struggled up each year through the damp crust of the moss. The chimneys of Lots Road power station towered above, suitable extensions of that murky infertile earth.

  The printing works were situated on the other side of the Thames in Battersea, upon the water’s edge, almost directly opposite the municipal wharf beside the power station, and every day Danby crossed Battersea bridge into another territory, equally dirty and seedy, but different, smelling of cattle cakes and brewing and watery flotsam. Gwen’s dowry was still a source of joy to Danby. He loved the works, the clattering noise, the papery dust, the tribal independence of the printers, he loved the basic stuff of the trade, the clean-cut virginal paper, the virile elemental lead. As a child he had preferred melting his lead soldiers to parading them, and the manufacture of letters out of lead was an occupation that never ceased to satisfy. He was fond of the machines, especially the older simpler ones, and took pride in the precarious multifarious domestic economy which constantly and only just kept the concern from foundering in its own antiquity. He occasionally went into Chelsea, at least he got as far along the embankment as The Kings Arms, and more occasionally he took Adelaide to a smart Kings Road restaurant, because she liked that, but he never felt at home over that particular border. Fulham, Battersea, where he knew every public house, this was the London on whose mystery he meditated. He was relieved when Bruno stopped urging him to move. He did not like disagreeing with the old man. They had always got on so well together.