Bruno's Dream (6 page)

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, but she soon saw that the little girls were also impressed. Perhaps it was her name which had made Adelaide so puzzled about her status and her identity. The puzzlement had not subsided as her life went on. Her parents were unpretentious people who lived in Croydon and ate their meals in the kitchen. When she was growing up Adelaide vainly attempted to persuade them to eat in the dining room. Later she took over the dining room herself and called it her ‘study’ and filled it with knick-knacks from antique shops. But it never looked like a real room. Adelaide’s brother, who was ten years her elder, never had any puzzles. He went into computers, got married, and went to Manchester where he lived in a detached house and gave dinner parties without a table cloth.

Adelaide was clever at school, but left at fifteen and became a clerk in an insurance office. She learnt to type and hoped to become somebody’s secretary. The office moved out of London. Adelaide became a shop assistant in a very superior shop and hoped to become a buyer. No one seemed to notice her talents so she left and became a clerk in a post office. She began to feel that if there had ever been a bus she had by now certainly missed it. In a moment of desperation she answered Danby’s cunningly worded advertisement for a resident housekeeper. She expected a grand house. By the time she had recovered from her surprise it was too late. She had fallen in love with Danby. In fact she did no housekeeping, since Danby, who had an old maidish streak in his nature, did all the organising and catering. Adelaide cleaned and cooked. She was the maid. Danby called her Adelaide the Maid, and invented clerihews about her. He must have invented about fifty. He turned her into a joke as he turned almost everything into a joke, and it hurt her. He once said to her, ‘You have the surname of a famous tart in a story.’ Adelaide replied, ‘Well, I suppose I am a tart too.’ ‘All the nicest girls are,’ he said, instead of denying it. Adelaide did not ask about her namesake, she did not want to know. She thought bitterly, ‘I am just the ghost of a famous tart in a story.’

Adelaide’s father died when she was about twelve and her helpless vague mother became entirely dependent on Joseph Boase, the father of Will and Nigel. So did Adelaide. Her own brother was already in Manchester. Joseph’s wife, who had once been an actress, had left him some time ago because he was so bad-tempered and returned to the stage, and the trio of men became an irresistible focus and magnet to the bereaved mother and daughter. In fact the Boase family had long fascinated Adelaide and as a young child the twins, who were only three years older than her, had been much closer to her than her own brother. She was in love with both of them, in those days slightly favouring Nigel. She was a bit in love with her Uncle Joseph too, though she was afraid of his bad temper. He was an extremely handsome person with a black moustache and beard who worked in a shipping office and imagined himself a seafaring man.

Her childhood with the twins had been the happiest part of Adelaide’s life and she often felt its most real part. She was a tomboyish child and joined as an equal in all their games, which consisted largely of exploring building sites, climbing scaffolding, making marks in wet cement, escaping from watchmen, and stealing bricks. ‘May Will and Nigel come to tea?’ ‘May I go to tea with Will and Nigel?’ On Saturdays they played cricket with other children in the Boase’s back garden. But of course they were superior to other children. They were a little secret society. It was their times as a trio that were special. Then when the twins were nineteen they ran away from Uncle Joseph and joined their mother and went on the stage.

Adelaide was working in the insurance office at the time. Their flight was a great shock to her. Although they had passed the brick-stealing stage she still saw a great deal of them. They went to plays and films together and the boys, who had stayed on in the sixth form of their grammar school, were insensibly educating their young cousin. She listened to their talk and read the books they talked about. They seemed scarcely to notice that she was growing up though they spoke teasingly of her prettiness. She was jealous of their girl friends. She was just beginning to think that one day she would marry one of them, she could not quite decide which.

Then there was a long interval during which the twins were heard of but not seen. Great things were hoped of their careers. Then Nigel was said to have left the stage and to be working at something or other in Leeds. Will appeared once on television in a small part, but Adelaide was working at the time and could not see him. The actress mother died, allegedly of drink. Adelaide’s mother died, and Adelaide moved into digs. She changed jobs. She had a number of boy friends, some quite ardent, with whom she could not decide to go to bed. After the twins, they all seemed so undistinguished and insipid and dull. Will was working in repertory in Scotland. Then he suddenly started to write her love letters.

He’s lonely up there, he’s thinking sentimentally of when we were children, it doesn’t really mean anything, Adelaide told herself. But she was very pleased all the same. She replied affectionately, trying at first to be non-committal, but soon her letters were as romantic as his. They both enjoyed the correspondence and the letters became positive works of art. Adelaide kept carbon copies of hers. Will went on saying that he was coming south but did not come. Uncle Joseph retired from the shipping office and went to live at Portsmouth. Will hinted at a big job coming up in the West End. At last he turned up in London, out of work, moved in on Auntie, and proposed to Adelaide.

Adelaide simply did not know what she felt. She had not seen Will for a long time and he had changed. He was a good-looking chap and getting to look more like Uncle Joseph. He was stouter, he had grown a moustache. He had always been more thick-set than Nigel, and now he looked like a sort of Victorian rugger player. He was big and heavy and rather mechanical in his movements, ruddy in the face, wearing his straight almost black hair neatly cut and rather long. He also seemed to be developing Uncle Joseph’s temper, as Adelaide, who was not able to conceal the fact that she was dithering, soon learnt.

The trouble was that as soon as she saw Will she decided that she wanted Nigel. If only there hadn’t been
two
of them! She had not seen nor heard from Nigel for years and no one knew his whereabouts. But she was haunted now by a vision of a slim dark-haired boy about whom she could not decide whether he was Nigel or whether he was Will as he used to be. She hoped Will would not guess. Will guessed and broke all Auntie’s Meissen parakeets. Nigel turned up in London, working at the Royal Free Hospital. Adelaide told fervent lies to Will and went secretly to see Nigel. It was no good. Nigel was cool, vague, abstracted, not quite unkind. Adelaide was frantic. She answered Danby’s advertisement. She fell in love with Danby. Will felicitously left London to work in a film at East Grinstead. By the time he came back Adelaide was Danby’s mistress.

Adelaide never talked to Danby about Will except in the most casual terms and of course concealed from Will that she had any special interest in Danby. She managed to persuade Will that he had been wrong about her and Nigel, and this was easier to do now since it was true. She no longer had any tender feelings about Nigel, though he still occasioned obscure and unnerving emotions. She could not forgive him for having been so calmly unresponsive to her undignified and unambiguous appeal. He had changed too, and she felt almost a little frightened of him. He seemed to be living in another world. She had most unwisely told Danby that Nigel was a half-trained nurse and now out of work. Danby, who took to Nigel instantly, could not be prevented from summoning him and engaging him. At first she thought that Nigel’s presence in the house would make her life impossible, but she had got used to it, though it still upset and frightened her. There was no reason why Nigel should know what went on behind the closed door of the annexe at night, and even if he did speculate she was sure that he would say nothing to Will, with whom he seemed to have broken off all relations. He had never told Will that Adelaide had been to see him.

Her feelings about Danby had changed without rendering her any the less slavishly in love. She had been completely captivated by his easy charm, his good looks, and the atmosphere of cheerfulness which he carried about with him. She was also strangely moved by the legend of the dead wife, whose photograph she dusted on the drawing room piano. Big dark brooding eyes, heavy serrated dark hair, pale intense oval face, pouting finely-shaped small mouth. Whenever Danby spoke of his wife, which he did quite often, the note of his voice changed and his eyes changed and there was something serious and almost alien about him, even if he was supposed to be laughing. Adelaide liked this. It gave an alluring touch of mystery to what might otherwise have seemed too easy-going, too open. She found Danby altogether god-like, a sort of smiling vine-leaf-crowned forest deity, full of frolics but also full of power. From the first he used to smack and pat her a good deal, but then he smacked and patted the men at the printing works and the barmaid at the Balloon and the girl in the tobacconist’s and the temporary charwoman and the milkman. One day he came into her bedroom, looked at her very gravely for some time in silence, then kissed her, and said, ‘What about it, Adelaide?’ She nearly fainted with joy.

Danby as a lover was a little less godlike. It was not that she felt that he was unreliable. He had most seriously, at the start, informed her that he intended their liaison to be lasting and that he would provide for her in her old age. Adelaide, who was not thinking about her old age and who would have accepted Danby’s suggestion on any terms whatsoever, listened with some puzzlement to those protestations. Later she was glad of them. At moments when she felt, as she later occasionally felt, that she was giving up a great deal for Danby, it was a consolation to think that at least she had gained something permanent.

She did not really mind not altogether enjoying it in bed. She was anxious about contraception. She was pleased that he was pleased, and had been very moved by his tenderness and delight on learning that he was the first. It was just, she reflected, that any man, as soon as you get to know him well, turns out to be totally selfish. Danby did exactly what he wanted and never seemed to think that this might not suit Adelaide perfectly. Adelaide found it difficult in fact to recall the specific issues upon which he had crossed her, but she retained a vague sense of not being sufficiently considered. Perhaps, working deep in the whole situation, was Danby’s assumption that she was not socially his equal. Adelaide sometimes felt the assumption, nebulous, pervasive, profound. She felt, almost physically, his selfishness and her own defencelessness, on long nights, after they had made love, as she lay awake wondering what that huge paunchy sweating hairy body was doing in her bed. But the discovery of his frailty, even his ordinariness, only made her love him all the more.

Will meanwhile remained terrifyingly single-minded. He settled into a condition of amazement at Adelaide’s reluctance and confident expectation of her imminent capitulation. She put a great deal of energy into persuading him that there was no one else. She began to build up a picture of herself as a natural spinster. Once she thought it might be helpful to hint that she was a lesbian, but Will got so upset and angry that she decided not to develop that idea. He never seemed to suspect Danby, largely because Will belonged to the sector of humanity that was entirely blind to Danby’s charm. Will thought Danby an ass. Time, who will take over the most improbable arrangements and make them seem steady and commonplace, took over this one. Adelaide stopped being frightened of Will finding out about Danby, though she still had occasional moments of panic. She got used to coming over on Sundays and accepting Will’s touchy nervy electrical devotion. She gave him money out of a small store which she was building up out of donations which Danby gave her to spend on clothes and which she promptly banked. There was usually a bad patch after lunch, after Auntie had retired, when Will would be pressing and possibly cross. But she was getting better at managing him. She had even begun a little to enjoy having, in this rather inconclusive sense, Will as well.

Although Adelaide had received, where Will was concerned, the same revelation of masculine total selfishness as she had received about Danby, she still thought of him as somehow noble and distinguished. She admired his social confidence, his sturdy conviction that he was ‘working class’. In fact he was not really ‘working class’. A versatile Bohemianism had rendered him classless. She even admired his ability to be unemployed without anxiety. He really was talented. He had lately shown her a series of drawings of monsters which he had done, weird embryos and hideous bristly creatures with half human faces, which frightened and impressed her. There were some pornographic drawings too of which she had accidentally seen one and it had made her feel quite sick. There was a force of violence in Will which she feared but which also a little thrilled her. But she remained circumspect and wary in her dealings with him and fell into playing the part of a sort of nagging sister.