Bruno's Dream (3 page)

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....
’

‘S
SSH
!’

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.

‘Warm enough, Adelaide?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your hair’s all cool. Funny stuff, human hair. If you love me never cut your hair off.’

‘Shove over a bit, would you.’

‘Have I got a clean shirt for tomorrow? The Bowater chaps are coming.’

‘Of course you have.’

‘Did you hear the six o’clock news? What’s the river up to?’

‘Another flood warning.’

‘I hope we won’t have it in the back yard like we did two years ago.’

‘Did you have a nice day?’

‘Yes, fine. Did you? How was the old chap?’

‘Same as usual. He was on about Miles again.’

‘Oh.’

‘Talking about seeing him.’

‘Just talk.’

‘Well, I think he ought to see Miles. He is his son.’

‘Nonsense, Adelaide. There’d be no point after all these years. They’d have nothing to say. They’d just upset each other. By the way, did you remember to bring down the stamps?’

‘Yes.’

Danby did really think there was no point in his seeing Miles. It was not just that Danby hoped to get the stamps. Though of course he did hope to get the stamps. Anybody would.

‘Do you think he’s getting senile?’

‘Certainly not, Adelaide. He gets confused sometimes, but his mind’s very clear really.’

‘He will talk so about spiders. I think he imagines them.’

‘I suspect he attracts them. Have you noticed how his room is always full of spiders?’

‘Horrid things! How long do you think he’ll last?’

‘He sinks under a complication of disorders. Could be ages though.’

‘You said he wouldn’t talk business any more and it was a bad sign.’

‘Maybe. But he’s got a terrific will to live, poor old fellow.’

‘I can’t see why anyone would want to go on living when they’ve got like that. Whatever can he look forward to?’

‘The next drink.’

‘Well,
you
would! I think old age is awful. I hope I’ll never be old.’

‘When you are old, Adelaide, you will find that life is just as desirable as it is now.’

‘My Auntie’s senile. She’s got completely gaga. She thinks she’s a Russian princess. She talks some sort of gibberish she thinks is Russian.’

‘Funny how mad people go for titles. By the way, is your other cousin still out of work?’

‘Will Boase! He’s not even trying to get work! He just draws National Assistance. They give them too much.’

‘He could do that painting job for us. He needn’t tell the National Assistance people.’

‘He went to grammar school. So did Nigel.’

‘I daresay, Adelaide, but I’m afraid I haven’t any intellectual work to offer him just at the moment!’

‘He ought to be in a proper job. You paid him far too much last time.’

‘Well, one likes to help. He’s quite unlike Nigel, isn’t he. It’s odd to think they’re twins.’

‘They’re not identical twins. I wish you hadn’t got Nigel to work here. It wasn’t my idea.’

‘Well, that was not for charity. He’s terribly good with Bruno. It’s almost uncanny.’

‘What are Bruno and he always
talking
about?’

‘I don’t know. They shut up like clams when I come in.’

‘I think they’re talking about sex, about girls.’

‘Girls? Nigel? Mmmm.’

‘Fancy Bruno being interested in sex at his age.’

‘A topic of enduring fascination, my dear Adelaide.’

‘But he can’t
do
anything.’

‘We all live in a private dream world most of the time. Sex is largely in the mind.’

‘I’ve never noticed that
you
thought it was! I think Nigel knows all about it.’

‘About sex? No one knows that, my dear. You have to specialise. I intuit an interesting and unusual specialist in our Nigel.’

‘You’d need to be an odd sort of man to want to be a nurse.’

‘It’s a very honourable profession, Adelaide.’

‘Don’t be silly. Do you think Nigel takes drugs or something?’

‘He is a bit mystical. But I doubt it. One has enough creepycrawlies in one’s mind without positively encouraging them. Nigel has some sense.’