Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch Page B

and read. He saw a book on one of the chairs. Jane Austen. A woman who was perhaps a little bored. Who waited.
    ‘I’m so very glad we’ve met at last,’ he said.
    Then, oh God, he thought, what awfully sexy music. What is it? It was something familiar. ‘What is that thing on the gramophone?’
    She turned it up. It was a slow foxtrot, formal, dignified, intensely sweet, bringing with it again that precise and yet unplaceable sense of the past. Danby’s feet sketched a movement, sliding, catching, upon the close-woven carpeted floor.
    Then the next moment he had sidled forward, slid his arm around her waist, and they were dancing in silence, advancing, retreating, circling, their slow precise feet patterning the floor and their mingled shadow climbing over the furniture after them.
    The music stopped and they moved apart. Blue eyes stared at brown eyes and brown eyes dropped their gaze.
    ‘You dance beautifully, Diana.’
    ‘So do you.’
    ‘I think the slow foxtrot is the best of all dances.’
    ‘Yes. And the most difficult.’
    ‘I haven’t danced in years.’
    ‘Nor I. Miles hates dancing.’
    ‘I won a dancing competition once.’
    ‘So did I.’
    ‘Diana, will you come and dance with me, some afternoon, at one of those dance halls, you know, one can dance there in the afternoons.’
    ‘No, of course not.’
    ‘Miles wouldn’t mind would he?’
    ‘Danby, don’t be silly.’
    ‘Diana, slow foxtrot?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Slow foxtrot?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Slow fox?’
    ‘No.’

9
    B AREFOOTED NIGEL SQUATS beside a railing looking down. His feet are muddied, his hands red with rust. A man passes by him on the pavement in the darkness, turns and pauses, stares. Nigel smiles without moving, flashing his white teeth in the half dark, catching a ray of light from a distant lamp post. The man hesitates, retreats, flees. Nigel still smiling returns to gaze. He sees through a divided curtain a man going to bed in a basement flat. The man is stepping out of his trousers. He leaves his trousers in a coiled mound upon the floor and goes to urinate into the washbasin. The tail of his shirt is ragged. He pulls off his shirt and scratches under his arms for some time, each hand busy scratching inside the opposite armpit. He stops and with intentness smells his fingers. Still wearing his cosy dirty vest he puts on crumpled pyjamas and crawls heavily into bed. He lies a while vacant, scratching, staring up at the ceiling, then switches out the light. Nigel rises.
    These are the glories of his night city, a place of pilgrimage, a place of sin, a place of shriving. Nigel glides barefoot, taking long paces, touching each lamp post as he passes. He has seen men prostrated, writhing, cursing, praying. He has seen a man lay down a pillow to kneel upon and close his eyes and join his two hands palm to palm. All through the holy city in the human-boxes the people utter prayers of love and hate. Unpersonned Nigel strides among them with long silent feet and the prayers rise up about him hissing faintly, like steam. Up any religion a man may climb. Along the darkened alleyways the dusky white-clad worshippers are silently carrying the white fragrant garlands to lay upon the greasy lingam of Great Shiva.
    Nigel strides noiselessly, crossing the roadways at a step, his bare feet not touching ground, a looker-on at inward scenes. He has reached the sacred river. It rolls on at his feet black and full, a river of tears bearing away the corpses of men. There is weeping but he is not the weeper. The wide river flows onward, immense and black beneath the old cracked voices of the temple bells which flit like bats throughout the lurid black air. The river is thick, ribbed, curled, convex, heaped up above its banks. Nigel makes offerings. Flowers. Where was the night garden where he gathered them? He throws the flowers down upon the humped river, then throws after them all the objects which he finds in his pockets, a knife, a handkerchief,