Bruno’s Dream

”Invite you-out-to dinner! I am going mad, I must be,” said Danby. He began to sob with laughter. “It’s no use, Lisa. It’s all fantasy. You’d leave me and it would kill me.”

”Well, if you prefer not to take the risk-“ Lisa stretched out a long leg and massaged her ankle. Then she thrust her feet into her shoes and reached for her coat.

Danby fell on his knees and put his head onto her lap. With a tired sad triumphant smile she caressed the dry white hair.

32

Bruno was waking up. Thank God it was not the night-time. Waking up was different now. It was a kind of entry into pain which was like a very slow quiet entry into warm water. The pain was not physical pain though there was physical pain. Sometimes there were sudden wrenches with a sense of something inward griping and collapsing. But these were brief and rare. There was the general restless itching aching un ease of the body which could find no rest now and to which even sleep came like an anxious cloud trailing its twilight over tensed knotted limbs. This other pain was of the mind, or somehow of the whole being as if in the doomed animal mind and body were fusing into almost diaphanous ectoplasm, only vaguely located in space, which vibrated blindly with the agony of consciousness. The return from sleep into this ectoplasmic consciousness was always misery. I am still here, he thought.

Days had lost their pattern. There was soup, bedpan, soup, bedpan. There was darkness and light, rain upon the window, sunlight which was worse than anything, which showed the limp crumpled greyness of the sheets and the stains on the wallpaper and the puckered brass doorhandle which had not been cleaned for years. Bruno knew that he was unable to think properly. Perhaps it was those latest tablets which the doctor had given him for the pain. They were new tablets, a different colour. He felt as if the centre of his mind was occupied by a huge black box which took up nearly all the space and round which he had to edge his way. Names not only of people but of things eluded him, hovering near him on the left, on the right, like birds which sped away when he turned his head. He did in fact turn his head, heavily, in puzzlement, searching for an area of clarity which he knew must be near to him because he could somehow see its light but not it.

People came and went. Danby and Gwen often sat with him together and talked sometimes to each other, sometimes to him. He liked that. There had been a young man with dark hair, only that was a long time ago. Bruno wanted to ask for the young man but could not recall his name. He heard himself say, “The young man, the young man-“ No one seemed to understand. Miles had come. Bruno knew Miles and knew his name and said his name. But he had not talked to him. Miles’s visits were like being in the cinema. Miles moved, spoke, performed and Bruno watched. When Miles leaned forward and spoke with an unusual intensity Bruno would nod to him and try to smile. It was difficult to smile now because of the pain ectoplasm, but with a lot of effort he could smile, though sometimes he wondered if this strange thing was really smiling. And there was a woman with pale hair and a very sweet radiant face who was with him a lot of the time now. Bruno did not know who she was.

Time passed and Bruno watched it pass, his face contracted with a kind of cunning. Time had never been visible to him before. People came to him and brought him things, soup, bedpans, the Evening Standard, his own book in two volumes, The Great Hunting Spiders. He looked at the pictures in the evening paper and in the spider book, but even with his glasses on the print had become vague and furry. If he woke at night he moaned and made the time move on by moaning, dropping a moan into a little cup or sack of time which was then taken from him. Sometimes he moaned for what seemed like hours on end. Sometimes Danby or Gwen would come, talk to him, tuck in his bedclothes, arrange his pillows. When they had gone he moaned again.

That was what the present was like. Somewhere quite else there was the past, perfectly clear, brightly coloured, stretching out near to him in some sort of different kind of ex tension. He saw moving pictures. It was not quite like remembering. One day he saw Sambo’s grave in the garden of the house at Twickenham. Miles was walking slowly towards it. They had got a little plain stone to mark the dog’s grave. They had meant to have his name engraved upon it, but this had never been done. Often he saw his mother, sometimes by lamplight combing out her long hair, sometimes by sun light, calling through screens of golden leaves, “Bruin, Bruin, where are you, my darling?” Once he saw Maureen in a very short skirt lying fast asleep in a nest of feathers. That could not be a memory. Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me, Lord how they weigh me down. He saw Gwen in a gym slip with pigtails holding Kennedy’s Latin Primer. He used to help her with her homework. He saw the page with her big childish writing side by side with his precise small writing. Amo, amas, amat. Latin begins where everything begins. But where does everything end, thought Bruno, where does it end?

I am dying, he thought, but what is it like? Is it just this pain, this fear? For there was fear, fear of something. Would death, when it came, be some unimaginably more dreadful physical agony, would one experience death, would it be long? Yet it was not really this future thing that Bruno feared. He feared something that was present with him, the whimpering frailty of his being which so dreaded extinction. What moaned in the night was different and less terrible. There was something in him which was capable of a far more awful suffering and which he must somehow cheat out of a full awareness. He must, with a part of his mind, look always away from that, and not let the structure of his personality be destroyed by what it could not bear. Some old habit of uprightness must serve here, some habit bred to deal with quite different matters, and which must somehow be coaxed into helping him now. There were tears. Bruno did not mind the tears, they were a kind of contemplation. He wept as he looked at the slow movement of time and at the coloured pictures. This was not the terror. The terror must be kept in its corner. He must play the game of survival until the very end. That was one important thing.

There is another important thing, thought Bruno, or is it the same thing? What is the other thing? It’s something I’ve got to do. If God existed He would do it for me. Bruno had had a dream about God. God had hung up above him in the form of a beautiful Erisus niger, swinging very very slightly upon a fine almost invisible golden thread. God had let down another thread towards Bruno and the thread swung to and fro just above Bruno’s head and Bruno kept seizing it and it kept breaking. The light fragile touch of the thread was ac companied by an agonizing and yet delightful physical sensation. Then suddenly the Erisus niger seemed to be growing larger and larger and turning into the face of Bruno’s father. The face filled up the whole sky.

God would do it for me, but God doesn’t exist, thought Bruno laboriously. He began to think about the women. He saw Maureen sitting in the cafe with the chess board on the table in front of her, staring at the red and white pieces and moving one of them every now and then. She’s got eyes of blue, I never cared for eyes of blue, But she’s got eyes of blue, So that’s my weakness now. Maureen was wearing a little round red and white checked cloche hat pulled well down over her ears. Why had it never occurred to him before that the hat matched the chessmen? Had she done it on purpose? He must ask her sometime.

”Must ask her,” he said aloud.

”What’s that, Bruno?”

”Must ask her.”

The pale-haired woman came and sat on his bed and took his hand in both of hers as she often did. Her big oval ivory-complexioned face looked tired and sad. Twice he had seen her crying quietly when she thought he was asleep. Who was she? He wondered how old she was. Her face was quite unlined but it was not the face of a young woman.

”What is it, Bruno, dear heart?”

”Fly in the web,” said Bruno.

A big Araneus diadematus had made a very handsome orb web across a corner of the window outside. It was usually to be seen hanging head downwards at the hub of the web or else sitting in a crack at the side of the window, in a little bower made of threads, attached to the centre of the web by a strong signal thread. Bruno had been watching it for days. It had had no prey. Now a large house fly was struggling in the web and the spider was rushing towards it.

”Shall I rescue the fly?”

Bruno did not know whether he wanted the fly rescued or not. The spider had already reached the fly and cast