Bruno's Dream Read Online Free PDF Page B

that sickening point of malaise in the middle of his being, that possibility of awful pain, had dimmed to nothing. He just felt almost agreeably limp and weak. He had had a long relaxing conversation on the telephone with the weather report man who had been reassuring about the possibility of the Thames flooding. These conversations with polite impersonal official voices soothed Bruno’s nerves. He felt he was a voice himself, a disembodied citizen. After that he had had some excellent wrong numbers.
    It was necessary to talk to Miles. He would talk to his son about ordinary indifferent things, about the printing works, about Miles’s job, about Danby’s kindness, about Nigel’s skill. They would talk and talk, and the room would grow dimmer, and then by some quiet scarcely notable transition they would be speaking the names of the women, Parvati, Janie, Maureen, in grave relaxed sadness together contemplating these conjured shades. Miles would be a little formal at first, but as he listened to Bruno’s voice, naming the women, speaking of them with humility and simplicity, he would bow his head and then look upon his father with great gentleness and the room would be filled with an aura of reconciliation and healing. Earlier and alone, repeating to himself the words ‘reconciliation and healing’, Bruno had found tears in his eyes. He wept so easily now. Any story in the newspaper about a lost dog or cat could bring tears to his eyes. Even something about the Royal Family could do it.
    It all went back to the beginning. That was something which he would like to try to explain. ‘Bruno’ his father had named him, but his mother, who could not get on with the name, had called him ‘Bruin’, ‘Little Bear’. How had he become corrupted and lost the innocence which belonged to his mother’s only child, and how could the child of such a mother ever have become bad? Yet had he become so bad, and how bad had he become? Most men deceive their wives all the time, statistics say. He had only had Maureen. And his later excesses amounted to little more than holding hands in Notting Hill. He had lived a chaste life really. It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him.
    It all seemed so accidental now. Yet could anything have been different on that night, when he proposed to Janie in St. James’s Theatre in an atmosphere of sugar and Shakespeare and the sweet craziness of the London season? He wrote Marry me, Janie on a page from his programme, folded the page into a paper dart, and threw it from the stalls into her box. She caught it in the air and read it with a faint smile as the lights dimmed after the interval. The play was Twelfth Night. Afterwards he searched for her frenziedly in the crowded foyer. Turning away with her party she tapped his arm with her fan. ‘I quite like your suggestion, Bruno. Come and discuss it tomorrow.’
    It had gone on, the froufrou and the wit and the bright artificial lights, right on it seemed to him until that moment in crowded sale-time Harrods when Maureen had been struggling with the dress. It was the early days of zip fasteners. Bruno, who often bought her clothes, was standing just outside the curtain of the trying-on room. Maureen had got the dress half over her head, but because the zip had stuck she could get it no further. She came out to Bruno, masked by the dress, her arms helplessly waving, a foot of frilly petticoat showing. ‘Quick, Bruno, get it off, I can’t breathe.’ Bruno laughed, pulled. Then there was suddenly a moment of panic. ‘Maureen, keep still, you won’t suffocate, you fool. You’re tearing the dress.’ The dress came away. Bruno looked over Maureen’s bare shoulder into the eyes of Janie. Janie turned at once and disappeared among the shoppers. Bruno, for whom Maureen no longer existed, darted after her. He sought for her desperately in the slow crowds as he had sought her long ago in the foyer of the theatre. He glimpsed her ahead,