Bruno's Dream (22 page)

The nightmarish aspect of the whole situation had then begun to be a little more obvious. He had, he realised, thought about the problem so far simply in relation to himself, as if it were all somehow neatly enclosed within him. He had to decide how to deal with the two women and manage them both somehow: this part remained vague, but as there was evidently no alternative some arrangement would doubtless prove to be possible. He would
hold
the situation: this form of words which he had used to Lisa recurred to him together with an atmosphere of comfort; he would hold the situation together and not let it fall to pieces, and this holding would be an embrace which strongly enfolded both Lisa and Diana. Love would triumph.

But now he had just begun to see, and the glimpse of it made him grit his teeth together with pain and terror, the absolute awfulness of the situation for the other two. Diana loved him, deeply, completely, she was his wife, she had shared his bed for years. He had had so many conversations with her about Lisa, as if they had been Lisa’s parents. They had talked with benevolent superior connivance about the failed nun, the broken-winged bird. They had worried about her together and speculated about her sex life and wondered if she were a Lesbian and made all sorts of plans to protect and cherish her. How could Diana tolerate this sudden monstrous change in her sister’s status? The sisters loved each other. What would happen now? And how could Lisa, with her rigid views of duty and her uncompromising life bear to become the instrument which should destroy her sister’s marriage? Miles’s vague vision of holding the situation had simply ignored both Diana’s claims and Lisa’s conscience. Oh how happy he had been before, he suddenly thought, living simply in the house with the two of them in a state of unconsciousness. Yet all that time Lisa must have been suffering.

There were certain impossibilities. He could not abandon Diana. Nor had he the faintest grain of inclination to abandon Diana. He loved and needed Diana, she had rescued him from desolation, she had been faithful to him and served him, he was bound to her by every tie of duty and indeed of deep marital love. The women were so different. He loved them both, but in different ways. Why was there not some dispensation for a situation which must be as common as this? However he had meant, and he still meant, what he had expressed to Lisa by saying, ‘You are
the one.
’ This was no blasphemy against Parvati. Parvati was twenty three years old. Miles was fifty five. Parvati would understand. It was simply true that Lisa fitted him, fitted into his soul, in a way that Diana did not. It was true, he realised with a terrible new pain, that if he had met Lisa first he would have married her.

Suppose he were to take lodgings for Lisa in another part of London? He could divide his week between them. It would seem odd at first, but they would all soon settle down to it and it would begin to seem natural. But as Miles started to imagine the details he saw that it was a perfectly abominable idea. He could not ask Diana, whose entire life consisted of caring for him, of waiting for him, to endure days of absence about which she would want to know nothing. And, even more strongly, he felt that it would be monstrous, if he were going to offer Lisa anything, to offer her less then everything. But this was exactly what he had decided at the start that he could not do. Terrible and unendurable possibilities began to structure themselves in the background of his mind. Unable to envisage them, Miles said frantically to himself, Suppose I just run off with Lisa after all?

Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison.
The choir were singing again. It was like a bird’s cry, piercing, repetitive, insistent, wearying God with petition. Or perhaps more like a kind of work, a close attentive intricate laborious toiling. How happy are those who believe that they can pray and be helped, or even, without being helped, be listened to. If there really existed an all-wise intelligence before which he could lay the present tangle, even if that intelligence held its peace, the knowledge that the right solution somewhere existed would soothe the nerves. As it was, it was indeed the opposite conjecture, that in fact there was no solution, that it did not matter very much what one did, which produced the impulse to struggle and plunge about like a terrified horse whose cart has been overturned. A vision of chaos came suddenly to Miles: the blotting out of the ordinary world of ordinary obligations. Perhaps all ordinary obligations were fakes, and all meticulous lives based upon illusion?

Miles leaned forward, crossing his hands across his eyes. There came back to him not exactly as a memory but as a hallucination, the moment when he had received the news of Parvati’s death. An acquaintance who had seen the newspaper account, with the names of the dead, had come round to his house. Miles had made the man go away at once. He had stood there alone in the hall holding the newspaper. He had believed it instantly. Hope would have been too great an agony. And as it seemed to Miles now, he had begun, even in those first seconds, to
plot
how to cheat himself of any full recognition of what had occurred. His excuse was indeed a convincing one: a full recognition might have destroyed his reason. He acted as other human beings act, only with a different and in some ways more refined apparatus. He began to write the poem within three days. He continued it for over a year. His pain went into it almost raw.

It certainly seemed strange, when Miles reflected about it, that throughout his life, so much of which now seemed to have slipped dully away, he had retained his deep conviction that he was a poet. He had published a volume of young man’s poems just before Parvati died. He had continued to publish occasional poems in periodicals. There had been another small collected volume. His work was to be found in one or two anthologies. But he had always felt these to be weak preliminaries. His Duino visitation, his great angels were still to come. He had never lost this faith. Yet on the evidence it seemed so unlikely. He had become duller with the years, more pleasure-loving, less conscious. All those years with Diana, coming home on the tube to sherry and dinner and Diana’s latest flower-arrangements. Even Lisa’s coming had left him still blind. It was only lately, when he had started the
Notebook of Particulars,
that his vague faith had turned into a sharper hope, and had he perhaps even here misinterpreted what had happened? Was that sharper sense of life, that thrilled apprehension of being, not perhaps due rather to Lisa’s presence in the house and his still sleeping awareness of being in love with her? Perhaps it was Lisa, not poetry, which would complete his destiny.

Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison, Christe eleison, Christe eleison.
Can I not unriddle myself, thought Miles. Being in love,
l’amour fou
, is very like a spiritual condition. Plato thought any love was capable of leading us into the life of the spirit: perhaps because falling in love convinces so intensely of the reality and power of love itself which dulled life knows nothing of. But falling in love involves also an enlivening and magnifying of the greedy passionate self. Such love will envisage suffering, absence, separation, pain, it will even exult in these: but what it cannot envisage is death, utter loss. This is the vision which it will on no account tolerate, which at all costs it will thrust away, transform and veil. Miles struggled in thought: he said to himself, the key is somewhere here, but where? Do these fragments really fit together? I scarcely make sense to myself at all, I babble, I rave.

As if yielding to a pressure upon his shoulders he slid forward on to his knees. He had knelt down occasionally in churches in recent years, always a little self-consciously, well aware of satisfying an emotional need which had more to do with sex than with virtue. But now he scarcely noticed what he had done. Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair. In transforming Parvati’s death into something which he could bear to contemplate, and in using for this purpose the one talent which he held as sacred, he had acted humanly, forgivably; yet it somehow seemed to him now that this almost inevitable crime had set his whole life moving in the wrong direction. Of course he had really loved Parvati, he had loved her with the total and as yet unspecialised passion of a young man. But such a love could not be expected to fight it out with death, and the defeat had mattered. Why did it all suddenly seem so alive and so close and so important now? Was he being given a second chance? I am raving, thought Miles, I am raving.

He knew, and knew it in fear and trembling, that good art comes out of courage, humility, virtue: and in the more discouraged moments of his long vigil he had felt his continued failure to be simply the relentlessly necessary result of his general mediocrity, his quiet well-bred worldliness and love of ease. There was a barrier to be surmounted which he could not surmount, and the barrier was a moral barrier. Was it still possible somehow to cleave his heart in twain and throw away the worser part of it? Miles knew that such a thing could never be simple, could scarcely be conceivable. A human being is a morass, a swamp, a jungle. It could only come from somewhere far beyond, as a dream, as a haunting vision, that image of the true love, the love that accepts death, the love that lives with death.

Lisa, he thought, Lisa. I cannot and I will not give you up. But how, oh how, was it all to be lived, and could that vision ever come to his aid, could it reach out into the final twisted extremity of his need?
Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison.
Help me, help me, Miles prayed, pressing his hands desperately against his eyes. He did not feel at that moment that his cry was unheard. But he knew, with a deeper spasm of despair, that the deity to which he prayed was his own poetic angel, and that that angel was without power to help him now.

22

D
ANBY WAS WALKING
down Kempsford Gardens. It was about ten o’clock on Sunday evening. The rain was pouring down, appearing suddenly in the lamplight, dense, sizzling, glittering like gramophone needles.

Danby walked in a state of abandon, his mackintosh unbuttoned, water soaking his hair and pouring down his neck. He had spent the day in a mounting frenzy, unable to eat, wanting to be sick and unable to be sick. He had been driven wild by missing Lisa’s last visit and he could scarcely hear the old man speaking so placidly about her without groaning. He had posted her two more letters. He had not seen Adelaide, the thought of whom now inspired both guilt and fear. He had felt relief at tapping on her door in vain. He had written her a note saying that he hoped she felt better, and later found it torn into small pieces on the stairs. In fact on both Saturday and Sunday, since Lisa had told Bruno she would not come, he had been absent almost all day, leaving early and returning late, wandering aimlessly about and spending every possible moment in the pubs. He was by now thoroughly drunk.

Sitting in the Six Bells in the King’s Road he had attempted to write a letter to Diana. He had written,

Dear Diana,
   You will think me crazy but I am in love with your sister. I can’t explain this. It’s something absolute. Please forgive me for having played about. It wasn’t serious and it should not have happened. This other thing is serious. Forgive me and forget me.

Danby

He stared at the letter for some time, making rings upon it with his glass. Then he tore it up. He could not write thus to Diana. It sounded too shabby. He could not ask her to forget him, that was simply silly. Then something even more important occurred to him. Supposing Miles saw the letter? Miles already thought ill enough of him without this further intimation of Danby’s tendency to play about, and what is more to do so with Miles’s own wife. With any luck Miles might never know about that episode. Miles doubtless regarded Lisa as his sister, and would be just as opposed to Danby’s suit in this context as he had been in the earlier one, and for the same reasons. And he’s quite right too, thought Danby, he’s quite right; but I do love her and somehow that makes all the difference.

Yet what was the difference? His love could hardly make Danby more eligible, more presentable, more sober. How could he ever make it plain that it had cured him of frivolity? If only Lisa had not seen him kissing Diana! But in truth the letter to Diana sounded shabby because the facts were shabby. In an agony of humility Danby surveyed himself as he walked through the windy rainy streets waiting for the evening pubs to open. His impertinence in loving this girl was fantastic. He had no attributes which could possibly interest her. He had remained absurdly vaguely confident of his ability to charm long after even his more vulgar attractions had begun to fade. Because poor Adelaide had loved him he imagined that he could obtain all women by crooking his finger. He was an obese elderly man with white hair and a face coarsened by drink. He was ridiculous, he was pathetic, he stood no chance, his suit was meaningless, and by not admitting instant defeat he would merely prolong a useless agony.

Yet love has never for a second lent an ear to arguments of this kind, and Danby’s humility coexisted strangely with a lusty confidence. Danby could not but feel himself, especially after the evening pubs had been open for an hour or two, at the beginning of a wonderful and hopeful adventure. This sense of adventure, heightened by yet more drinks, had now led his feet in the direction of Kempsford Gardens.

Danby stood in the rain swaying slightly while he checked and rechecked the number of the house. There were no lights on in the front. They could hardly have gone to bed. He was a little vague about the time, but the pubs were still open so it could not be very late. He went up the steps to the door and laid his hand upon it. Now that he was actually here fear and emotion sobered him a little. What in the world did he think he was doing? He stooped down and peered cautiously through the letter box. There was a line of light somewhere ahead from a closed-in lighted room. Danby straightened up and began to stroke the smooth painted surface of the door. He lifted his hand but could not bring himself to touch the knocker.