Bruno’s Dream

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 recognized 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 onto 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 maneuvered his legs towards 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 towards 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 1 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 upwards, her ringer pointing upwards, 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 counterchecks. 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 onto 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.”