Iris and the Friends

by John Bayley

  The now restored church of Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire was a special showpiece of his. A frugal person and careful with his pension – he made almost nothing out of restoration work – he used to sleep in his campbed in the churches where he worked, however remote or desolate they might be. I once asked him if this wasn’t a shade spooky at times. He pooh-poohed the idea; but added, after a pause for reflection, that he had once felt a little uneasy on waking up in the night in a private chapel on the Harewood estate in Yorkshire. We inquired whether any explanation for this had manifested itself. Not exactly, he said, and yet he had been beset with the sense that something flat and dark, of considerable size, was in motion on the floor in the half-light, slowly coming closer to his bed. Rather tactlessly I mentioned M.R. James’s ghost story, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, in which a creature resembling a damp leather bag has been set in mediaeval times by some satanic cleric to guard a treasure concealed under a church’s nave. He had not read it, he said shortly. In fact, as he occasionally remarked, almost the only book he had read since his schooldays was A Month in the Country, not Turgenev’s play but a brief romance about a young man engaged like himself in the work of church restoration. I cannot recall the name of the author, but about this book my brother was prepared to be enthusiastic.

  I don’t think he ever read any of Iris’s novels, but in his own way he greatly respected her achievement. Perhaps because he saw her in a sense as a dedicated fellow-soldier: one who had been prepared, as a good commander should be, to devote herself singlemindedly to the job of winning the battle. Certainly there was an unspoken accord between them, notwithstanding his extreme reserve, which was perhaps in secret sympathy with her own. Undoubtedly they felt close to each other, although only meeting on rare occasions, family Christmases and the like. Since Iris developed Alzheimer’s he has expressed, most uncharacteristically for him, a wish to come and see us at fairly frequent intervals, driving down from London on Sundays for lunch. Although she doesn’t remember him beforehand, or grasp who it is that is coming, these visits always have a cheering effect on Iris.

  My own feelings are more mixed as I have to produce something in the way of lunch instead of our vague little everyday picnic. When at home or on a job my brother lives on sardines and tomatoes, a healthy diet although he’s not concerned with that. But he unconsciously expects his younger brother to take trouble for him. There is something I enjoy in this fraternal manifestation – essentially one of kindness, unspoken protectiveness – even though it is a bit irksome, practically speaking, to go along with it. He is punctilious about not drinking when he drives, bringing his own bottle of alcohol-free beer with some military name like ‘Caliber’.

  I used sometimes to tease Iris by telling her that she possessed, in mild form, a ‘Lawrence of Arabia complex’. She smiled but did not deny it. I have always held the opinion that T.E. Lawrence was a bogus figure. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, once worshipped as a cult book among upper-class homosexuals and academics pining for action, seemed to me so turgidly written as to be almost unreadable. I still think this is true, but Iris always remained quietly loyal to her affection for the book and its author. She had read it at school, ‘soon after my Rafael Sabatini period’, as she once told me. (Sabatini, author of Captain Blood and The Black Swan, was a prolific swash and buckle performer of popular literature.) This willingness to be unserious about The Seven Pillars went with its much deeper and more serious romantic influence, strongly discernible in many of her own novels. Transmuted as they are, and as is the world she gives them to inhabit, her characters frequently have for the addicted reader the same sort of powerful fascination that the Lawrence legend and personality once exerted. My brother himself has a shadowy presence in some of her novels, appearing in An Unofficial Rose as a character called Felix. I doubt if he would be recognised in the role, by himself or by anybody else, and I never commented on the point to Iris. She always hated to think her characters were in any sense identifiable, least of all by her own family. She had made them up: they were completely her own and belonged to her own world, which in its own way was certainly true.

  At the time we got married she had written three successful novels and had begun on her fourth. An unforgettable scene in her third, The Sandcastle, has a green Riley car undergoing a complex underwater adventure. I was proud of knowing where the original of the Riley, as a character in the book, had come from, because I had found the car for Iris after a diligent study of the advertisements in the Oxford Mail. This had itself followed a mildly unfortunate incident involving a car – her car. It was a pale blue Hillman Minx, and it had been bought out of the proceeds of the preceding novel, The Flight from the Enchanter. During the fine summer of 1955 I had acted as driving instructor. I had an old Morris car I had bought cheap from my parents when they had acquired a more respectable vehicle, and Iris quickly learnt to drive, and to drive very well. It would be presumptuous to say I taught her, but I sat beside her and made suggestions. My old car was known to us by its number EKL, which, as I pointed out, indicated the German word ekelhaft – disgusting – but we were fond of it none the less. Iris took her test on it and passed first time. I was hovering in the background when she met the test official – in those days even driving tests were more informal than they are now – and I was relieved to see her make a conspicuous point of adjusting the driving mirror before moving off, as I had advised her.

  After this sage display of advice and instruction on my part it was I who managed to crash the poor Minx on an icy road in December. I had borrowed the car to go to a party outside Oxford. No one has ever taken a piece of bad news better than Iris did when I broke it to her. She loved her Minx, and its life had been a sadly short one. But looking back I think that was the moment at which our life together really began, even though there was still nothing said about marriage, and I had long since given up even hinting at it. But on its own minor scale this was the kind of domestic disaster which tests a relationship, and shows whether or not it is going to work. Iris was so relieved I wasn’t hurt that she didn’t mind too much about the Minx. The accident had shown my importance to her more effectively than any loving deeds on my part could have done. Moreover the insurance company paid up, and the green Riley, though impractical in many ways, was a far more romantic and beautiful car. It was a 1947 model, nearly ten years old, and its dark green chassis, recently and rather amateurishly repainted, was set off by elegant black wings and the graceful curl of the marque’s radiator, with the name enamelled in blue. No one could have been less fickle than Iris, but in her excitement over the Riley the Minx was soon out of mind, if not forgotten.

  Not forgotten until now, that is. That memory has passed beyond her mind, but when I mention the Riley, and describe it to her, there is still a very faint flicker of recognition. She even smiles when I go on to remind her of its bad habits and its bad brakes. It would be a valuable car today if it still exists. We kept it in honoured retirement for more than twenty years, until we could no longer afford garage space and so let it go for a few pounds.

  Rivers, as I said, featured in our honeymoon, although not by intention. Our idea had been to take a cultural tour in a leisurely manner, down through France and over the Alps into north Italy, keeping clear of famous places like Florence and Venice, which we would leave for another time, staying instead at Urbino, San Gimignano and Arezzo, places earnestly recommended to Iris by a couple whom I thought of as her ‘art friends’ – Brigid Brophy and her husband Michael, who was later to become director of the National Gallery. Brigid had chided Iris for allowing herself to do anything so banal as to get married, but her sarcasms were weakened by the fact that she had, however reluctantly, taken the same step herself. She wanted the experience of having a child, and single mothers in those days had not yet acquired the glamour they would achieve later on.

  Wisely we were not going in the Riley, but in a very small Austin van, which I had recently bought new for a modest sum. It
was all the cheaper because being a ‘commercial vehicle’ it was exempt from what was then called Purchase Tax. The same Elaine Griffiths who had asked me to the party at St Anne’s where I met Iris, had recently acquired one of these, and being a crafty lady had caused a garage to remove the metal side panels at the back, substituting neat glass windows. The vehicle now became officially a saloon car, and as such was not subject to the 30 mile an hour speed limit imposed in those days on all trucks and vans. She recommended this device, but after consideration we rejected it, unwisely as it turned out, because I was soon stopped and fined by an unsporting policeman for doing nearly forty miles an hour.

  Notwithstanding this setback I clung to my idea that it would be better for the van to remain as it was, because then we should be able to sleep in it, at a pinch, when on our travels. In fact we only did this once, and that was a few years later, in the west of Ireland. We had been to see the famous black granite cliffs of Moher, and a large farmer, whom we christened the Moher giant, had conscripted ourselves and the van to help him get in the hay from a field almost on the edge of the abyss. He even offered to buy the van, enquiring with interest ‘what price would it be now’ in England. Escaping at last in a state of exhaustion we found a fishing hotel who could give us a ‘high tea’ of grilled trout, but had no room for the night. So we drove to a quiet beach, fried a further supper of bacon and eggs in a rugged iron frying pan bought in Belfast market, and settled down for the night. We slept soundly, roused early by the scream of the gulls meeting the scallop boats as they chugged into the next cove. We then returned to the hotel and had bacon and scallops for breakfast, the favourite morning dish, as I recalled, of good Queen Elizabeth the First, who used to wash it down with a pint of small beer. We had Irish coffee instead.

  It was on this trip, during which we explored the rocky coast of County Clare and the strange stony waste of ‘the Burren’, that Iris conceived the idea of her haunting novel set in Ireland, The Unicorn, and found the landscape that embodied the feel of it. With its fantasy of a woman immured in a kind of sexual cloister near the wild coast, The Unicorn has always been for me the most purely Irish of all her novels, more so even than The Red and the Green, her novel featuring the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

  It was on this trip that I made the discovery of how to swim comfortably in cold water. Or rather not to swim but to hang suspended in a narrow bay, observing the flora of the seabed with a pipe and mask. The underwater scene off a rocky northern shore is far more magical than anything in the tropics. Fronds of seaweed, dark red and amethyst, undulate quietly over vast smooth stones, polished by the storms of the winter. Green crabs as big as dinnerplates limp away sideways. Fish are rare, but a plaice like a freckled partridge lay half hidden on the white sand and looked up at me obliquely. Enthralled, I was unaware of the cold, but when I came out I shook and shivered uncontrollably. Iris rubbed some feeling into me, clucking like a disapproving parent, but when I handed her the rubber pipe and mask she became as enraptured as I had been, nor did she feel the cold. She remained in the water for what seemed hours, while with trembling hands I lit a driftwood fire and crouched beside it, taking swigs from our whiskey bottle. Later I tried going into the sea in all my clothes, and a macintosh, and that worked well, although removing the saturated garments that clung like an icy shirt of Nessus was far from easy. Hercules had been set on fire by his fatal shirt, and at those moments I quite envied him.

  Having acquired the habit I usually kept a vest on when swimming, even in warm water. Once in Pisa harbour, in a drizzle of rain, I was examining the fishes, numerous and even colourful, who congregated by the side of the harbour breakwater, where one or two anglers were fishing. Iris, who had decided not to follow me into the water, was standing there under an umbrella; and she later reported seeing one of the fishermen give a start of surprise and peer down intently into the harbour. The reason for this was not clear until I reappeared under my snorkel, clad in an ancient vest. ‘I saw the fishermen peering down and trying to read the label on your neck,’ chortled Iris. ‘I really did.’ The episode much amused her, particularly the moment – sometimes mimed by her in later years – when the incredulous Italian fishermen had craned their heads sideways, so as to keep in view the apparition slowly progressing below them in the harbour.

  Half a century ago the roads of France were empty. Long straight poplar-bordered roads, still full of ‘déformations’ as a result of wartime neglect, but wonderfully relaxing to buzz happily down in a reverie à deux. No trouble going through towns. A helpful sign promised ‘Toutes Directions’; a bored gendarme blew his whistle unnecessarily; small restaurants advertised their repas with a sign on the pavement. France existed not for the tourist nor for its own people (where were they? who were they?) but for honeymoon couples like us, without much money, listening together to each poplar saying ‘hush’ as we drove past, as regularly as the telegraph wires of those days used to rise and fall beside the train. Then we would stop at one of the little restaurants, three-quarters empty, and have charcuterie and entrecôte aux endives, with unlimited quantities of red wine which never had to be uncorked or bought by the bottle. Cramped little hotels (de la Poste or du Gare) had scrubbed floors that smelt of garlic and gauloise cigarettes. Natives were taciturn, speech formalised and distant; but I noticed that the severest French person (and to me all their faces looked austere, like those of monks and nuns) responded to Iris’s smile.

  Of course she knew France already – another France, inhabited entirely, in my eyes, by writers and intellectuals who sat in cafés and wrote books between drinks. It was not so long since Iris had been under the spell of Sartre’s novel La Nausée and Raymond Queneau’s Pierrot Mon Ami. She had met Queneau in Brussels cafés at the end of the war, and through him had heard of Samuel Beckett’s pre-war novel Murphy. La Nausée had interested her philosophically, and Murphy had bequeathed to her own first novel Under the Net a notional spirit of Bohemia. Along with existentialism, and perhaps partly in response to it, there went at that time with Iris something less engagé and more irresponsible, something that made me think of the young person in Boswell’s Johnson who wished to study philosophy, but ‘cheerfulness kept breaking in’.

  Our own cheerfulness found a perfect foil in quiet empty unresponsive France, which fed us so deliciously and so cheaply, and sent us on our way down endless roads on which one seemed to cover hundreds if not thousands of kilometres without any effort at all.

  Our first swim was in a river of the pas de Calais, a deep placid tributary of the Somme. Perhaps the place of the poem by Wilfred Owen, where hospital barges had been moored during those futile offensives of the first world war. The next was much further south, in a steep and wild wooded valley, with pine and chestnut growing up the mountains. The water was warm, and the stream so secluded that we slipped in with nothing on. Usually cautious, Iris may have felt that now we were in France Anglo-Saxon inhibition could be discarded. It was in this remote spot that my feet encountered a smooth round object in the shallows. It was half buried in the ooze, but I fished it up without difficulty and found an object like a Greek or Roman amphora, earth-coloured and cracked in one or two places. It was clearly not ancient – we found a trade name stamped on the base – and I was about to let it sink back into its underwater home when Iris, treading water beside me, vigorously demurred. Even at that date she wanted to keep everything she found. Wrapped in French newspapers it reposed in the bottom of the little van and lived on for years in a corner of our garden back home, until its cracks were found out by the frost and it came to pieces.

  After setting it down on the bank we slipped in again for another swim. Iris seemed dreamy and absent. ‘Suppose we had found a great old bell,’ she said as we dried ourselves. I pointed out that this would hardly be likely in such a wild spot, far from any town or village. But her imagination was equal to that one.

  ‘It could have been stolen from a belfry and buried in the river until they could disp
ose of it. People at home are stealing lead from country churches all the time, aren’t they? Then the thieves here never came back.’

  ‘Quite a recent event? Nothing legendary about it?’

  ‘No, wait ... The church was desecrated at the reformation by those – what did they call them in France?’ she appealed as she stood beside me, an earnest figure streaked all over with river mud, which she was vaguely spreading over herself with the towel.

  ‘Huguenots?’

  ‘That’s it. The Huguenots got down the bell and wanted to break it up or melt it or something, but some devoted worshippers of the old church managed to steal it away and bring it here for safe keeping.’

  Although she had done ancient history in her exams, Iris was a scholar who had done her best papers in philosophy. So she had often told me; and her sense of the historical was certainly rather sketchy. But as her novels show, her imagination possessed its own brand of sometimes almost pedantic accuracy.

  The most striking episode in her next novel The Bell certainly came out of that river. A great bell is found in an old abbey, now the centre of a modern religious community. The symbol of the bell is enigmatic: not so the penetrating and perceptive account of characters who wish to try to lead the religious life.

  Next day we were in a mountain region, nearing the frontier. In order to make an early start for crossing the Alps we decided to stop the night at a small town with a railway junction. In the dead of night our bedroom door was suddenly flung open and a voice proclaimed in dramatic tones ‘Georges! C’est l’heure.’ The unshaded light over the bed dazzled us, and when he saw how things were the young railwayman who had come to rouse his comrade hastened to switch it off again, muttering in a more subdued way, ‘Ah – Madame, mille pardons.’