Free Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch

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.
    Parvati had made all other women impossible for him. Parvati plaiting her very long black hair. Parvati with quick deft movements pleating her sari. Parvati sitting on the floor with her tongue slightly out like a cat. Her delicate aquiline face, her honey-coloured skin; his sense of acquiring with her a whole precious civilisation. The jewels in her ears which he was so surprised to learn were real rubies, real emeralds. How she had laughed at his surprise. Parvati ironing her saris in a room in Newnham. Then ironing his shirts. ‘You represent the god.’ ‘What god?’ ‘The god–Shiva, Eros … All poets have angels. You are mine.’ The very small deft brown hands, the glimpse of bare sandalled feet upon the wet autumnal pavements. The red-brown grain of her lips. Her grace, which made any western woman look gauche and stiff. How coarsely made, how dumpy and disagreeably pink her college friends looked beside her. The feel of that long thick plait of hair in his hand the first time he had dared, playfully but trembling, to take hold of it. He had kissed her hair. Then he had kissed the edge of her silken sari where it slipped over her thin arm. She laughed, pushing him away. She was a clever girl who was going to get a first in economics, but she had not been very long out of that enclosed courtyarded house in Benares where her mother wove garlands to place upon images. Parvati talking about swaraj and the fundamental problems of an agricultural economy.
    He had written hundreds of love poems for Parvati. After the war, poetry, like so much else, seemed to have come to an end. Eros had changed into Thanatos, and now even the face of Thanatos was veiled. The only person he had any real contact with was Gwen. He had not been very close to Gwen as a child. She was several years younger and he had been away at school. He first became really fond of Gwen, indeed first really noticed Gwen, when she stood up for him so fiercely when his father opposed the marriage. Gwen loved Parvati and admired her. Gwen was very partisan and given to making long speeches. He thought much later, when he a little regretted the breach with his father, that perhaps Gwen had done more harm than good. Bruno needed coaxing, and a different kind of daughter might have coaxed him instead of lecturing him. Miles had no intention of coaxing him. He wished his father at the devil.
    After Parvati’s death he wanted to see nobody,