Bruno's Dream (7 page)

Auntie was pottering in the hall, about to retire to rest. Adelaide was washing up. Will was sitting at the table smoking.

‘What does old Bruno
do
all day?’

‘He plays with his stamps. He reads those books about spiders over and over. He rings up wrong numbers on the telephone. He reads the newspapers.’

‘It must be awful to be so old, Ad. I hope I don’t ever grow old.’

‘He’s got awfully hideous too. He looks like one of your monsters.’

‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter what he looks like now, poor old bastard. Those stamps of his must be worth a packet.’

‘Twenty thousand pounds, I heard Danby say.’

‘Who’ll get them?’

‘Danby, I suppose.’

‘Do you know anything about stamps, Ad?’

‘No. You used to collect them, do you remember?’

‘Yes. Nigel used to pinch my best ones. Nigel’s a natural thief.’

‘And you used to punch him. You’re a natural bully.’

‘Maybe. I wonder if Bruno has any Cape Triangulars.’

‘What are Cape Triangulars?’

‘Cape of Good Hope triangular stamps.’

‘He has some triangular ones. I saw them. Don’t know what kind they were. Could I have your coffee cup?’

‘Ad, do you see a lot of those stamps?’

‘How do you mean? Yes. I spend half my life picking them up off the floor and putting them away and bringing them out again–’

‘How are they mounted? Are they in books?’

‘They live in a box, in drawers, between sheets of cellophane. A lot of them are just loose in the box. He’s got them into an awful jumble.’

‘Could you look and see if he has any Cape Triangulars? I’ll show you a picture of one.’

‘Why are you interested? You chucked stamps long ago. It’s a child’s game.’

‘Twenty thousand pounds isn’t a child’s game, Ad.’

‘People must be mad to pay that money.’

‘A Cape Triangular sold last week for two hundred pounds, I read in the paper.’

‘I expect you wish you had one.’

‘I’m going to have one, Ad.’

‘What do you mean? How are you going to get it?’

‘You’re going to get it for me out of Bruno’s collection.’

‘Will!’

‘Just one.’

Adelaide stopped washing. She turned round from the sink and stared at her cousin. Will was sitting with his thick legs stretched straight out, the heels of his heavy boots making yet another pair of permanent dints in the soft brown linoleum. He was looking up at Adelaide with a dreamy sly expression which she remembered from childhood.

‘You want me to steal one of Bruno’s stamps! You’re not serious!’

‘I am, Ad. That camera I told you about. In fact I’ve got it. The only trouble is I haven’t paid for it. I need two hundred pounds.’

‘Will, you’re mad. Anyway, Bruno would see it was gone.’

‘No, he wouldn’t. You said he was getting terribly vague and gaga. And you said they were in a jumble. And no one else looks at the stamps, do they?’

‘No. But I think Bruno would see. And anyway it would be perfectly wicked to steal from an old man.’

‘Much less wicked than stealing from a young one. You’re being soppy, my dear. He won’t miss the stamp. It probably won’t make any difference to the total value of the collection anyway. And it’ll solve my camera problem.’

‘Well, I won’t, that’s all!’

‘You selfish bitch! Don’t you want me to make money? There’s hundreds of things I could do with that camera, I’ve got hundreds of ideas!’

‘Why don’t you sell those duelling pistols?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘Or get a cheaper camera. I can give you ten pounds.’

‘I’m not asking you to swipe the lot, Ad. It isn’t even as if Bruno collected the stamps himself. He just inherited them. Things like that shouldn’t be allowed. Property is theft, really. Isn’t that so, Auntie?’

Auntie had come in to fetch her orange cardigan before retiring.

‘Seezara seezaroo, boga bogoo.’

‘And boo to you.’

‘Will, I think you’re crazy.’

‘So you won’t do it, just to please me?’

‘No.’

‘You’re always saying no, Ad. Come and sit beside me now Auntie’s gone. Leave the washing up, I’ll do it later.’

‘I’ve got to go soon.’

‘Stop saying that or I’ll hit you. Come and sit here.’

They sat awkwardly side by side in upright chairs under the electric light. Adelaide rested her arms on the red and white check table cloth, grinding the crumbs a little to and fro under her sleeve. She looked ahead out of the darkened window at the rain and the jagged creosoted fence of the side passage and the dripping grey roughcast wall of the house next door. Will, sitting sideways and staring at her with his knee pressing hard into her thigh, laid a hand on her shoulder and drew it down her arm, thrusting up her sleeve and bearing down toward the wrist. The crumbs pressed painfully into her flesh. Will’s other hand was beginning to fumble at her skirt. Adelaide released her arm. She captured Will’s two hands and squeezed them rhythmically, still looking vaguely out of the window.

‘Oh Ad, you know I’m in a state about you. I can’t stop. When’ll it be yes?’

‘Will, don’t tease me so. I don’t want to.’

‘I’m not teasing, damn you. This is serious, it’s real, Adelaide. Sometimes I think you just live in a dream world. You ought to be shaken out of it.’

‘I’m sorry, Will. I can’t want things just by wanting to want them.’

‘Have a try, my darling. I do love you. I can’t bear my life going on and on without you. It’s such a waste. Oh Adelaide, why not?’

‘Just not.’

‘I can’t understand it. You
must
love me.’

‘We’re first cousins. You’re like my brother.’

‘Rubbish. I know I excite you. You’re trembling.’

‘You just upset me. Please, Will, don’t be horrid, don’t quarrel. We quarrelled last week and it was so silly.’

‘Adelaide, is there somebody else? Be honest, please. Is there somebody else?’

‘No.’

‘God, I think if there were somebody else I’d bloody well kill him.’

6

Why does one never see dead birds?

How can they all hide to die?

M
ILES CLOSED HIS
notebook and moved over to the window. Earlier he had been trying to describe a dead leaf which the rain had glued to the window pane. It was a last year’s leaf, in a shade of luminous dark brown, a sort of stocking brown, which reminded Miles of girls’ legs. The veins of the leaf made the pattern of a tree, of which the stalk was the trunk. Only the stalk was, from Miles’s side of the window, concave, a funnel divided by a narrow opening, at the base of which a raindrop was suspended, almost transparently grey around a point of yellow light.

How hard it was to describe things. How hard it was to
see
things. He wondered if, since he had completely given up drinking, he had actually been able to see more. Not that he had ever drunk very much, but any departure from total sobriety seemed to damage his perception. Even yet he was not sober enough, not quiet enough, to take in the marvels that surrounded him. The ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese. His
Notebook of Particulars
was in its third volume, and still he was simply learning to look. He knew that this, for the present, was all of his task. The great things would happen later when he was ready for them.

Miles pushed up the sash of the window. It was evening, just coming to twilight, a time that he loved. The air was damp and warm. He reached a hand out and twisting his arm round took hold of the stocking-brown leaf by its stalk and detached it from the glass. It came away with a faint sucking noise. He examined it for a moment and then dropped it into the invisibility of the darkening air. The rain had ceased and there was a purplish gleam in the sky up above the huge humped roof of the Earls Court Exhibition Hall. The wet roof was glistening and metallic. But the narrow garden down below him was already dark between its walls except for a faint reflection of light from the windows of the summer house. Miles had built the summer house, a square box against the wall a little away from the house, in the hope that sitting in it he might write better poetry. But it did not seem to have made any difference and it got terribly damp in winter.

The garden was obscure in the vibrating diminishing light and he could just discern the grey domes of santolin and hyssop and Jackman’s rue which grew in the neat squares in the pavement. Beyond the pavement was the diminutive lawn with a shaven grass path in its centre and at the end the yew hedge with the gap in it beyond which was Diana’s tool shed. That gap, which the yews were just beginning to roof over with long feathery boughs to make into an archway, somehow made the tiny garden into a dream place, made it seem longer, as if there must be more beyond, another garden, and another and another beyond that. The yew archway was black now and the yews almost as black, thickening with darkness.

How long will it be? Miles wondered. How much longer must I be patient? Will
he
come, will he really come to me at last? For nearly a year now he had been filled with a growing certainty that he was soon going to write poetry again and that it would be very much better than anything he had yet done, that it would be finally the real thing. Meanwhile he waited. He tried to prepare himself. He stopped drinking and curtailed even further his exiguous social life. Everything important, he told himself, was concerned with staying in one’s place. He spent his evenings with his notebook, and if either Diana or Lisa came near him he had to prevent himself from screaming at them to go away. He said nothing to the women. At first they thought that he was ill. Later they looked at him in silence and then looked at each other. Sometimes he wrote a few lines of verse, like a musician trying an instrument. There were some isolated beautiful things. But the time was not yet when the god would come.

The poetry of his youth seemed insipid and flimsy now. And the long poem he had written after Parvati’s death seemed merely turgid stuff. He had had to write that poem, to change into art and into significance and into beauty the horror of that death. It was a survival poem, born of his own outrageous will to survive. It had sometimes seemed to him like a crime to write that poem, as if it had prevented him from seeing what he ought to have seen and what he had never allowed himself afterwards to see, the real face of death. But it had come with a force of necessity which he had not known before or since. He had called it
Parvati and Shiva.

‘Lord Shiva,’ he could hear Parvati saying, in her precise accented voice, as she explained to him some aspect of the Hindu religion. ‘Do you believe in Shiva, Parvati?’ ‘There is truth in all religions.’ ‘But do you believe in him, in
him?
’ ‘Perhaps. Who knows what is belief?’ Parvati’s oriental ability to see that everything was, from a certain point of view, everything else, baffled and charmed his Aristotelian western mind. They had met at Cambridge, where he was reading history and she was reading economics. They were socialists of course. She was the more ardent. Parvati, in cold Cambridge evenings beside a gas fire, with her grey Cashmere shawl, as light as a cobweb, drawn round her shoulders and over her head, talking about the final crisis of capitalism. They would go back to India and serve humanity. Parvati would teach. Miles would take a course in agricultural engineering. They would work in the villages with the people. Miles began to learn Hindi. They were married immediately after their final examinations. They were both twenty-two.

Parvati came from a rich Brahmin family in Benares. Her family opposed the match. Miles could never quite understand why. Was it social, racial, religious, even perhaps financial? He questioned Parvati in vain. ‘It is many things. They cannot accept. My mother has never lived in the world.’ Once she translated to him a letter from her brother. It was a rather pompous letter. The brother did not seem to conceive that Parvati was serious. ‘For nature so preposterously to err … .’ What
could
it look like from their side? Parvati was greatly upset and wanted to postpone the marriage. They were both very much in love. Miles would not postpone. He was angry with her family, whose attitude he simply could not get clear about. He was even more angry with his own father who had immediately told him in the coarsest terms that he did not want a coloured daughter-in-law and coffee-coloured grandchildren. Miles broke off relations with his father. They got married and both wrote supplicating letters to Benares. After a while Parvati’s mother wrote asking her to visit them. Miles was not mentioned. Parvati was overjoyed. They would surely come round now, especially when she told them that she was expecting a child. Miles saw her off at London airport. The plane crashed in the Alps. Miles had never told anybody, not even Diana, that Parvati was pregnant.

Miles never went to see the parents. Understandably they seemed to blame him for their daughter’s death. He wrote to them much later when he married Diana but got no reply. He stayed on at Cambridge and did some inconclusive research and failed to get a fellowship. The war came, bringing Miles seven years of dreary misery. He saw no action. He moved from camp to camp, unable to read, unable to write, developing mysterious troubles in his intestines. He was moved into clerical work. He rose eventually to the rank of captain. When the war ended he went into the civil service.

The writing of the long poem, which took him over a year, had somehow prolonged, even in circumstances of dreadful grief, the sense of a life filled with love. He transformed the plane crash into a dazzling tornado of erotic imagery. But the poem was a
Liebestod
and although art cannot but console for what it weeps over, the completion of the poem left him sour and sick and utterly convinced of the henceforward impossibility of love. His loneliness in the army was increased by his ill-concealed disgust at the depraved casualness of his brother officers’ attitude to sex. He shunned women absolutely and when certain kinds of talk began left the room banging the door. He won himself solitude and even hostility. He did not consciously wish for death but he grieved at night for some blank thing which he could not even name.