Free Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch Page B

but Miles saw less and less of them. Then after Gwen was dead there was no reason to see Danby any more.
    Diana came later, as a surprise, almost as a miracle. The terrible bitterness of Gwen’s death put Miles once more into the presence of that which his long poem had served to shield him from. But as soon as he was able to he ceased to look and to feel and set himself to lead a life of complete retirement and almost ferocious dullness. Writing was inconceivable. He read a good deal, as a matter of routine, mainly history and biography, but without passion. He did his job, avoided his colleagues, was classified as an eccentric and quietly passed over at promotion times. His superiors began to regard him as slightly unbalanced, but on the whole he attracted little attention. He suffered occasional fits of severe depression, but not very frequently.
    Then one day in the grocer’s shop in the Earls Court Road where he went twice a week with a large basket to buy his provisions a girl said to him, ‘Don’t look so sad.’ Miles shuddered at being addressed by a woman and left the shop immediately. She followed him. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve so often seen you in here. May I walk along with you?’ And later, ‘Do you live alone?’ And later still, ‘Have you been married?’ Diana did all the work. She explained afterwards to Miles how she had seen him several times in the shop looking self-absorbed and melancholy and had had a fantasy that everything would happen even as it did happen: that he would turn out to live alone, that he had had a great sorrow, that he shunned society, that he had no dealings with women. For Diana it was, in some extraordinary way, the perfect working out of a dream. She had been searching for Miles. She recognised him at once. It was her sense of destiny which carried them both along.
    Diana had a very positive conception of her role as a woman. It was in fact her only role and one which had absorbed her since she left school. She grew up in Leicester where her father was a bank clerk. Her parents were vague people and she and her sister did what they pleased. Diana went on a scholarship to an art school in the London suburbs but left it after two years. She became an unsuccessful commercial artist, she worked in an advertising agency. But mainly she just lived. She moved to Earls Court. She had adventures. She lived with men, some rich ones who found her puzzling and gave her expensive presents, and some poor ones who took her money and got drunk and wept. All this she recounted to Miles later on, enjoying his incomprehension and his quite involuntary twitches of disapproval. She had been looking for him, she told him, all this time. She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.
    She loved him very much and although he told her at first that he was an empty vessel, a nothing, and that her love was to him a nothing, she succeeded at last in attracting his attention. Miles was thirty five. Diana was twenty eight. Miles became aware that she was beautiful. She was a fair-haired brown-eyed girl with a straight assertive nose and a big well-made mouth and a large flat brow and an ivory complexion and a cool enigmatic expression. She tucked her hair well back behind her ears and thrust her pale smooth large-eyed face boldly forward at the world. A quality in her which seemed at first to Miles to be shamelessnesss later seemed to him more like courage. In the early days of his interest he apprehended her, not without a certain pleasure, as a courtesan; and later, when he was certain that she loved him, he felt her ‘adventurousness’ as intensifying, not diminishing, the love which she had to offer. When he married her he still felt that she was his mistress, and that pleased both of them.
    Of course Diana understood about Parvati. She knew that for Miles this had been something