Bruno’s Dream

”I think we all feel like that on our wedding day, ha ha,” said the registrar.

Nigel smiled.

Auntie said, “Svadba, soodba, slooshba.”

Will said, “Ba ba black sheep to you, Auntie. Now Ad, do pull yourself together. You don’t want to call the whole thing off, do you?”

”Nooo,” Adelaide wailed.

Auntie said, “Ya tosha,” and began to sniff.

”Tosh off, Auntie, Ad, try to behave like a rational being or I shall really get angry with you. Come and sit here beside me, come on. Now stop it, or I’ll give you something to cry for!”

Adelaide came forward. She had knocked her hat sideways by her exertions with her handkerchief and she had smeared her lipstick again. Her breath hissed through shuddering lips. Tears had begun to course down Auntie’s face. Nigel was smiling.

”Now I think you both know the procedure,” said the registrar. “This is a very simple little ceremony, but it has the force and solemnity of law and society behind it, and is just as binding as if you were being married in a cathedral.”

Adelaide moaned and put her damp handkerchief to her mouth. Nigel, still smiling, wiped away a tear from his eye.

”First I must check your names please, your full names, and also your fathers’ names. You, Adelaide Anne de Crecy…”

Nigel’s face was streaming with tears. He was still smiling.

”And you, Wilfred Reginald Boase?”

”Oh Christ!” said Will. His face became red, and his eyes filled and over-brimmed with tears. “Christ! Sorry, Ad.”

”And your father’s name-Oh dear-Oh dear me-“ The registrar’s pen faltered and he began to reach for his handkerchief.

Adelaide had anticipated pains and difficulties in her married life, and her anticipations were fulfilled. Will’s temper did not improve as the years went by, and a chronic dyspepsia, caused by the irregular life of the theatre, did nothing to soothe his frequent tantrums. Adelaide submitted meekly at first. Later she learnt how to shout back. But she always felt ashamed and tired after their rows. Will never seemed even to remember that there had been a quarrel. Yet if Adelaide had certainly foreseen the bad things it was also true that she had not managed to foresee the good ones. She had married Will in a mood of cornered desperation because she felt that Will was her fate. She had not even framed the idea of happiness in connection with her marriage. Yet there was happiness too. Adelaide had not realized beforehand how very much she would enjoy being in bed with Will and how greatly this enjoyment would lighten the way for both of them. Nor did she, as she wept and signed her new name, Adelaide Boase, for the first time, dream of much later and sunnier days, in spite of Will’s cantankerous temper, when her tall twins would be up at Oxford (nonidentical, Benedick and Mercutio), when Will would be one of the most famous and popular ac tors in England, and a greatly transformed Adelaide would be Lady Boase.

Nearer in time, and a financial godsend to the young house hold, was the surprise they got when Auntie died and her jewels turned out to be worth ten thousand pounds. Auntie’s memoirs too, when translated into English, proved a best seller, as well as being a mine of information for historians about the last days of the Czarist regime. Adelaide and Will kept saying that they would learn Russian one day so as to read Auntie’s memoirs in the original, but they never did. However, Benedick became a Russian expert. Mercutio was a mathematician.

31

Danby was sitting on the edge of his bed. It was ten o’clock in the evening. The walls of the room were still a bit damp, but he had managed to dry the bed out with hot-water bottles. On warm days he put the mattress in the sun. The electricity had been off for weeks, as the whole house had had to be rewired. Fortunately the government were going, if he filled in enough forms, to pay for that. Fortunately too the weather had been exceptionally warm for the time of year.

The room had not suffered too much. Getting the mud off the floor had been the difficult thing. It was fantastic how much mud that water had brought in with it. The carpet had been mud-coloured anyway, but the walls were darkly stained up to about four feet from the ground. It was no good having the place redecorated until the walls had dried. With luck, the government would pay for that as well. Danby had been sleeping upstairs, but he was wondering if tonight he wouldn’t move back into his own room. He didn’t like it up stairs, though of course it was nearer if Bruno called in the night. But Bruno very rarely called in the night now. He seemed to be sleeping better, and indeed spent quite a lot of his time asleep.

Danby had stopped going to the printing works and spent his days at home now. Someone had to stay with Bruno. Nigel had simply vanished from the scene, leaving most of his be longings behind, and Danby felt there was no point in engaging another nurse at this stage. The doctor was surprised that Bruno had lasted so long. Diana came nearly every day in the late afternoon and Danby went out for a breather and a visit to the pub while she sat with Bruno. He could hear her talking to Bruno sometimes, as he went out of the hall door, but he never asked her what they talked about. He talked a little with Bruno himself, usually about immediate things, food, the weather, Bruno’s room. Bruno could talk quite sensibly about these things, but the background of his mind seemed to have come adrift, and Danby often caught Bruno looking at him with a puzzled expression, as if he did not know who Danby was and did not quite like to ask. Diana too was a source of puzzlement, though Danby lost no opportunity of repeating, “Diana, you know, Miles’s wife.” But Danby did not explain his own identity. He did not want to remind Bruno about Gwen.

With Diana Danby had achieved a sad but strangely sweet relationship such as one might have with a wife one had divorced long ago. They kissed each other on the cheek and squeezed hands. The tending of Bruno made a solemn and melancholy bond between them. “How is he today?”

”Not too bad. He took some soup.” Danby knew that Diana was afraid that Bruno might die when she was alone with him and Danby was not there. She never said this, but Danby under stood what it meant when she asked anxiously, “You won’t be too long away, will you?” It was strange and terrible, this waiting for death. Every morning Danby wondered if Bruno had not died quietly during the night, and then saw, with a shock of pain and relief, the bedclothes still rising and falling a little. He had come, during this last time, to love Bruno with a blank almost impersonal sort of love, and he was able at last to measure that vast difference, that distance between presence and absence. Bruno’s presence in the house was something real, so positive, so profoundly touching. And yet it was also impossible not to feel it as a defilement. Danby looked forward with dread and yet with longing to the time when he would come home and take off his coat and get out the whisky bottle in a house utterly empty of Bruno. Yet between that moment and now there was that terrible unforeseeable thing to be endured.

Bruno had changed physically too since his fall. He had stopped wearing his false teeth and the lower part of his face had collapsed. His head seemed to be shrinking generally as the chunky flesh which had made his face look so lumpy and strange began to subside and fall in towards the bone. The ring of thin silky white hair which had fringed the base of the skull had mostly come off, rubbed away upon the pillow, and the skull was almost completely bare. Only Bruno’s eyes remained the same, narrow moist and terrifyingly full of puzzlement, speculation, and a weird kind of intelligence. With these puzzled hostile rather frightened eyes he surveyed the people who served him. Only sometimes for Diana would his shrunken face strain into a smile and his eyes wrinkle up with something like pleasure.

Miles had called two or three times and conducted rather one-sided conversations with Bruno. Once Danby, passing the door, had heard Miles talking about cricket, though he had not heard Bruno reply. Miles carried with him an atmosphere of complete unconcern. He was almost debonair. He approached Bruno with a kind of cheerfulness which irritated Danby extremely. He made brisk inquiries about what the doctor had said. He behaved like a man performing a duty and pleased with himself for doing so. He seemed completely uninvolved in the pain and the mystery of what was about to take place. He left the house smiling secretively and humming to himself. Danby decided that he detested Miles. The strange emotion, which had once seemed like love, which Miles had inspired in