Bruno’s Dream

said once about not wanting a coloured daughter-in-law. He could not remember any feeling about it all now, any feeling that he had had. Miles said he had “bitterly opposed” the marriage. It was not true. All he could remember was the muddle, denying he’d said things, and Miles’s cold high-minded anger. It was so unfair.

Bruno was inside the lavatory leaning against the closed door. As he began to fiddle with his pajamas something dropped to the floor at his feet. He saw at once that it was a Pholcus phalangioides which he had dislodged from its place on the door, or perhaps in the corner of the wall, where it had woven its irregular almost invisible scaffolding, unmolested by Adelaide. The spider did not move. He wondered if he had damaged it with his sleeve. He touched it gently with his stockinged feet. The creature lay still, its long legs curled to its body. It might be shamming dead. Slowly stepping across it Bruno lowered the lavatory seat and sat down on it. He took a piece of lavatory paper and leaning forward introduced it carefully underneath the little curled-up thing. The spider slid onto the paper together with a good deal of dust and fluff. It stirred slightly. He must have damaged it somehow, but without the microscope, or at any rate a magnifying glass, he could not see how. He tried to look into the spider’s face but without his spectacles all was blurred. He had not kept captive spiders for a long time now. A year ago he had had a sudden yearning to see again a beautiful Micromatta vivescens and he had sent Nigel, armed with a photograph, to hunt in Battersea Park. Nigel came back without a Micromatta but with a jam jar full of assorted spiders, two of them already dead, a poor Ciniflo ferox and an Oonops pulcher, probably killed by the fierce Drassodes lapidosus with which they had been sharing their captivity. Bruno put his magnifying glass away and told Nigel to release them all in the yard straight away. He had never really been a scholar anyway.

The Pholcus phalangioides was showing no further signs of life. He must have half crushed it as he leaned against the wall. He dropped it onto the floor and put two more pieces of lavatory paper on top of it and brought his heel down hard onto the little resistant bundle.

Bruno felt the wretched tears near again. The women were all young while he aged like Tithonus. Supposing Janie had wanted to forgive him at the end after all? She held out her hands to him saying, “Bruno, I forgive you. Please forgive me. I love you, dear heart, I love you, I love you, I love you.” He would never never know. The most precious thing of all was lost to him forever.

5

“How is my worthy twin?” said Will Boase to his cousin Adelaide de Crecy.

“Oh all right.” Adelaide looked at him distrustfully. She was never sure how close those two were. They often seemed like enemies, but she could not guess what they really felt.

”I wouldn’t have his job. I can’t think how he puts up with the poor old fool.”

”He’s terribly good with Bruno,” said Adelaide. “It’s almost uncanny.”

”Nigel’s a bit potty if you ask me. He should have stayed in acting.”

”Look where acting’s got you!”

”I could get a part if only I had some decent clothes.”

”I’m not giving you any more money, Will!”

”I’m not asking you to, am I?”

”It’s just as well you’ve got Auntie’s pension!”

”Oh stop nagging!”

”Danby said you could paint the outside of the house if you’d like.”

”Tell him to paint it himself.”

”Don’t be so silly, Will. Danby paid you a lot for that last job. Far too much in fact.”

”Exactly. I don’t want Danby’s blasted charity.”

”Well, I think you ought to try and make money like other people.”

”This society thinks too much about money.”

”You’re just a scrounger.”

”Oh for God’s sake! I’ll sell my drawings. You’ll see.”

”You mean those pornographic drawings, the ones you wouldn’t let me look at?”

”There’s nothing wrong with pornography. It’s good for you. If politicians stuck to pornography the world wouldn’t be in such a mess.”

”Who’d buy that horrible stuff anyway?”

”There’s a market. You’ve just got to find it.”

”I wish you’d keep on at one thing instead of starting all these things that never get anywhere.”

”I can’t help it if I’m versatile, Ad!”

”Are you still going to that pistol-practice place?”

”A man has got to be able to defend himself.”

”You live in a dream world. You’re as bad as Nigel.”

”You wait, Ad. And I’m going to buy a really good camera. There’s money in photography.”

”First it’s pornography, then it’s photography. You can’t afford a really good camera.”

”Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag!”

”Vot serdeety molodoy!”

”The same to you with knobs onski.”

”Shto delya zadornovo malcheeka!”

”I think she’s getting worse.”

”Stop gibbering, Auntie, or we’ll put you in a bin. Go and write your memoirs!”

Adelaide went to Will’s place every Sunday to cook midday dinner for Will and Auntie. She knew better than to call it “lunch” to Will. It was Auntie’s place, really, Will had just moved in when he was out of a job. Auntie was gaga, but she was quite capable of looking after the house. Adelaide cooked a plain dinner since neither Will nor Auntie ever knew what they were eating and Will thought interest in food was bourgeois.

Auntie, who was not a real auntie but a devotee acquired by the twins in their early acting days when she kept theatrical lodgings in the north of England, had been parting company with reality over a period of several years. She announced periodically that she was a Russian princess, was about to sell her jewellery for a fortune, and was engaged in writing her memoirs of the Czarist court. Of late even her ability to talk seemed to be deserting her. In shops she mumbled and pointed to what she wanted, or uttered a stream of gibberish with Russian-sounding endings. Da and nyet she had probably acquired from the newspapers. Auntie lived in a dark ground-floor flat in Camden Town. Auntie’s flat was genteel. It contained too many objects, including a great many small pieces of china whose number never seemed to diminish in spite of Will’s habit of breaking things in fits of rage. Not everything which ought to be against a wall had a wall to be against. The sitting room was partitioned by a long sideboard and a tall bookcase which stood out at right angles into the room. This did not matter much as no one ever went in there. Life went on in the kitchen. Will had once gone through a short phase of wanting to “modernize” the flat, but had got no further than buying a steel chair of outstanding ugliness which now stood in the hall mercifully covered with coats.

The kitchen was dark, and darker today because it was raining, so they had the light on. An unshaded bulb bleakly lit up the cramped scene round the kitchen table where they were just finishing their roast lamb. Auntie, more than usually preoccupied with Czarism, was smiling vaguely behind thick steel-rimmed spectacles. She had a way of looking into her spectacles as if there was a private scene imprinted on the glass.

She had been a handsome woman once. She was tall, with somewhat blue hair, and wore long skirts and very long orange cardigans which she knitted herself. Her face had become putty-coloured and podgy, but she had bright cheerful eyes. The loss of her reason did not seem to have made her unhappy.

Adelaide had always been troubled by having such an aristocratic-sounding name. Her mother, Mary Boase, had married a fairly well-off carpenter called Maurice de Crecy. “We come of a Huguenot family,” Adelaide had early learnt to repeat, although she did not know who the Huguenots were or even how to spell them. At school, where she came on the roll call between Minnie Dawkins and Doris Dobby, she had been much teased about her name,