Iris and the Friends

by John Bayley

  I can still see and imagine the pair, wringing out the last drop. I have only met either of them a few times, but when I do I find it difficult to be more than barely civil.

  It is too late to remind Iris of the story now, but if I were able to do so I am sure that she would reveal the same Christ-like qualities of tolerance, amusement and good nature – forgiveness would not even be in question – which she must have felt as she gazed on that fearful scene. Or perhaps it only became fearful in the telling? – more specifically, in the way she told it to me? All my instincts, or so I still feel, would have led me into some wild counter-excess. I should have gone after the pair, murdered one or both of them, or at the very least cut as many of their possessions as I could find into ribbons, with a sharp knife. And yet here I was, when Iris told me the story, longing to share my life with a woman who could behave as angelically as she seemed to have done.

  I think that was what really upset me most of all. It seemed so unnatural. As it still does. I can upset myself still more if I am not careful by wondering whether Iris really behaved so angelically after all? Did something in her secretly long to be violated in this way by the pair? Did she in some sense invite this wanton exercise of power over her? Was she submitting to these gods of logic and philosophy as she submitted to the godmonster of Hampstead? Was she, almost as if in one of her own novels, the absent victim of a sacrifice in which she would have participated as a willing victim, had she been present?

  The idea still makes me shiver a bit. Have I really been sharing my life with someone like that? But if I have it has never seemed to matter much, even though the idea of having behaved in a way so unlike myself can give me the occasional shock of incredulity. One thing remains certain: Iris has always disliked fish, and particularly abominated the whole herring tribe. That may well have been true before the episode: it has certainly been the case ever since.

  Why should someone who loves water so much have so little desire for the creatures that live in it? Or is it that she feels in unconscious fellowship, and so would not dream of eating them? As a strict matter of fact, however, she will eat my sardine paté, heavily flavoured with curry powder. Perhaps she doesn’t recognise it as fish at all? But there must have been no doubt about what caused the appalling smell that came from her scarf, when she picked up the poor bedraggled thing. My instinct, none the less, would have been to try to wash it out, to rescue and cherish it. But Iris was not like that. She sacrificed the scarf cheerfully; and seemingly at least on the wholesome altar of friendship.

  — 6 —

  ‘The house and premises known as Cedar Lodge’, as the old deeds described them, were neither warm nor dry. There were the remains of a huge cedar near the front gate, just a vast plate of rotten wood nearly flush with the earth. Perhaps they had chopped this great tree down and burnt it indoors in a vain attempt to keep warm? We ourselves tried various ways of doing the same thing. An old Rayburn stove my mother gave us, night storage heaters, electric fires, an expensive affair in the front hall, with a beautifully fluted stainless steel front, which burned anthracite nuggets as expensive as itself. Nothing seemed to do any good. When we at last installed some partial central heating, after one of Iris’s novels had been turned into a film, that failed to work properly too. Something about gravity, the position of the oil tank, the installation of pipes ... Our dear Mr Palmer was dead by then, and his son put it in.

  But we never minded the cold and the damp; indeed I think we rather enjoyed them. We were always warm in bed, and in retrospect I seem to spend most of my time in bed: I very soon developed the habit of working there. I remember coming home on a snowy evening, and uttering wild cries as we rushed about the garden together hand in hand, watching our feet make holes in the printless snow. It often snowed at Steeple Aston, which is several hundred feet higher than Oxford, where it seldom or never does. Our bed, too, was the one place from which to me the house felt safe and natural. The bed was home, even if unknown creatures might be living at the other end of the long house, perhaps unaware of our existence?

  It was when Iris was away for a day or two that I realised that the existence of such beings was not just fantasy. We had never heard anything, but as I came from the garden and went up the dark rather narrow staircase I saw something going up ahead of me. It was a large rat. It reached the top, looked around unhurriedly, and dived with a plop into a wide crack between the oak boards. It had come home.

  Those rats were gentlemen. Until that moment we had no idea of their existence. Nor did their presence, once defined, cause us at first any bother. They led their lives and we led ours. But since we knew they were there, and they knew we knew they were there, our relations could never feel quite the same. For one thing their behaviour ceased to be so considerate. Now we often heard them moving about in their own solid subterranean world beneath the floorboards. Although the house was in bad condition it had been built in the solid style of its period, and there must have been plenty of room in that other world, and plenty of massive woodwork to gnaw upon. Those rats took to gnawing it as a night-time occupation, and sometimes, as it seemed out of sheer joie de vivre, they charged up and down those long invisible corridors at one or two in the morning. They must have been in residence for many generations, and the arrangements they had made must by now have suited them perfectly.

  It seemed clear that something had to be done. From the rural chemist I obtained large quantities of a substance alleged not only to destroy rats without pain but to be positively enjoyed by them in the process. We spooned it lavishly through the cracks: soon we could hear the rats enjoying it. Now there were not only cavorting noises in the night but squeals of ecstasy as well. Iris began to look worried, in fact anguished. Didn’t I think we ought to stop, while there might still be time? I began to waver, but fortunately the rats solved the problem for us. The sounds ceased quite abruptly, as if the animals had decided that if we would not play the game, neither would they – they would rather leave home. Iris looked more anguished than ever: I was concerned about the probable smell of unburied rat bodies. But the cold old house remained odour-free. It really looked as if they had staged a final feast and moved out.

  And indeed something like that may have happened. I think mutual awareness of each others’ presence may have unsettled them, inclined them to change their habits. Previously they had seemed to accommodate us by leaving to work in the outside world by night, and sleeping in the house by day. That had caused no problems, and I daresay the previous owner, the kindly old widow Blanche Tankerville-Chamberlayne (her real and fabulous name) had never bothered them, nor they her. Perhaps she never knew they were there.

  And now of course we missed them. Iris ceased to look so agonised, and we never mentioned the rats, but I think we sometimes listened for them, perhaps a little wistfully, if we woke up in the night. I can feel and hear their almost sympathetic company in some of Iris’s novels, written at her table just above their heads; for after we first realised their presence she used to say she had become aware of it in the day-time as well as by night, and found it congenial, even stimulating. In summertime it blended with sounds from the garden, the song of blackbirds and the twittering of the swallows – ‘the Weatherbys’ – on the telephone wire outside the window.

  After she had given up her teaching post at St Anne’s Iris used to write every morning, from about nine to one o’clock. If I was away in Oxford she listened to the news, had something to eat, and then went into the garden. She didn’t actually do much gardening, if any, but she liked to find places to put things. It was the time when the new fashion for the old shrub roses was coming in. They had wonderful names: Duc de Guise, Captain John Ingram, Cuisse de Nymphe, and Cuisse de Nymphe Emue. They had tissue-like petals and smelt of wine. The white petals looked as transparent as ice, with a vivid green centre (‘muddled centres’, as the book called them, became a favourite phrase with Iris). The deep mauve ones like Captain Ingram faded almost into black.
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  We bought them at a rose garden at the weekends and I put them in inexpertly. Iris soon had her rose walk, and in a sense they were all Unofficial Roses, of the sort her heroine Fanny Peronet would have approved. (Her title An Unofficial Rose comes from a poem by Rupert Brooke which Iris had always been fond of.) But we had no idea how to look after them, and roses need a lot of looking after. Quite soon they began to look sickly, and the leaves became covered with black spots. A friend when he saw them teased Iris by remarking that she seemed to be keeping a concentration camp for flowers. The pleasantry was not in good taste, nor was it taken in good part. For a short while at least Iris’s behaviour towards the friend cooled distinctly. She could be quite touchy, but never for long, and the friend was soon received back into favour. I don’t think he put her off the roses, but somehow they had their day – most of them – and ceased to be, without either of us getting distressed about it. One only, I remember, continued to survive and flourish without appearing to need care or attention at all. It had thick luxurious foliage deeply furrowed and indented like a tropic plant, and its crimson hips were as big and glossy as a tropical fruit. It was called, I think, the Queen of Denmark.

  Possibly as a result of all the effort that I felt I should – and indeed wanted – to put into the place, I fell ill with the glandular fever after we had been there less than a year. Like a Victorian illness, it makes the patient weak, as if fading painlessly away. It also keeps recurring at intervals. After the first recovery I used to totter down beside Iris through the tall grass to the pond, where she swam or rather paddled about, stirring up the dark mud. I felt I should be there, but had she got into difficulties I should have been far too weak to do anything about it. Of course she didn’t, and in my enfeebled state I was greatly cheered by the sight of her face smiling blissfully up at me from under the willow shadows. Then I climbed thankfully and laboriously back into bed.

  It was the sort of bed you do have to climb into, or on to, a wide high Victorian bed with a carved oak frame and a great soft almost soggy mattress. We had attended an auction in Oxford at the time we moved, and we got the bed for a pound. No one else seemed to want it, and when I got up the courage and offered a bid the auctioneer gave me a pained look. ‘That’s a bad bid, Sir,’ he remarked, ‘a very bad bid, but in the absence of another offer I shall have to accept it.’ That summer the bed became my home, as the house itself never seemed to do. I read in it, ate and drank in it, wrote reviews in it, for I was still doing the novels for the Spectator, and the bed was always covered with them.

  Up inside the bed, secure and, as it seemed, protected from the world, I could feel that this was marriage, the true nirvana of the wedded state. One of the books I reviewed in that dreamy time was by Pamela Hansford Johnson, a very capable novelist of the fifties, wife of the scientist and PR man C.P. Snow, who also wrote novels. Power was his chief interest: The Masters, concerning the power struggle to be the head of a Cambridge college, an early and original specimen of the campus novel.

  Snow’s wife had what for me were more subtle interests, and I enjoyed her novel, the last of a trilogy. An earlier one, advertised on the jacket and which I had not read, had its title borrowed from a poem of Donne’s: This Bed Thy Centre. I felt that was a good omen, though I discovered later that the authoress had intended it satirically. The novel was an early feminist outcry against the sexual and domestic subordination of women. For me domestication on and in the bed was sheer bliss.

  Certainly Iris did not at all regard the great bed as her centre, and the knowledge of that seemed perfectly harmonious to me too. Our marriage was shared, but the bed was mine. Iris would sit beside it, after bringing me barley water and orange jelly, the only things that the ulcerated glands in my throat would tolerate. As I got better we seemed to live mostly on poached eggs. Iris developed a skill in doing these which I have since envied. I have never been able to master it as she did: I regard skill in poaching an egg as the ultimate cooking test.

  What I most appreciated too was Iris’s complete indifference to the womanly image of a helpmate. She was not in the least a Florence Nightingale. She just looked after me, and as she did so I could see from her face that her mind was far away, pursuing the plot of the story she was engaged on. She found no bother at all in getting on with it while I was ill, and indeed told me later that she owed the genesis of that particular tale to the quiet time my illness had brought us both. That gave me such satisfaction that I at once fell ill again.

  The second bout was worse than the first, and our doctor, an elderly dapper little man who always wore a rose in his buttonhole, looked a little worried, I thought, under his professionally jovial manner, just as one of his Victorian predecessors might have done. I was gratified by this, and also because Iris paid no attention. She knew in some way that there was nothing to worry about, although she politely shared the doctor’s pleasure when he looked in later after making a blood test to announce that it had shown ‘the Paul Bunnell effect’, which meant that the trouble was indeed glandular fever, and not something worse. A charming and probably an extremely competent doctor, he used to look from one to the other of us with his bright old eyes, as if incredulous that two such absurd if engaging creatures could be living in this house, pretending to be husband and wife. While I was ill he came over every day from Bladon, a good many miles distant. It was in the early days of the National Health Service, and Dr Bevan – his name coincidentally the same as that of the minister who had just done the most to plan the service – took no private patients; but he always behaved as if we were the only people he had to look after, and that it was never any trouble to do so.

  The comfortable feel of space, distance and separation which seemed to me to confirm the pleasures of the married state, in spite of Dr Bevan’s incredulous and amused glances at what he appeared to regard as two quaint children rather than a married couple, was greatly enhanced by that summer of illness. When the term began I had to get sick leave. I luxuriated in the business of Iris working and me being ill. She was working away at her novel, now nearly finished. Bed had inspired me too, after a fashion. I had the idea for a book that became The Characters of Love, a study in detail of three texts – a poem, a play, and a novel – which seemed to me to exemplify in one way or another the understanding about love which I had picked up in the course of my relationship with Iris. It was a very naive idea, although some of the comments that I made about Chaucer’s long narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, still seem to me quite sophisticated if I re-read them. Critical books of that sort were in fashion at the time, and The Characters of Love did quite well, although I can’t now imagine anyone trained on literary theory in the new schools of English Literature wanting to read it, or indeed being able to do so. Its vocabulary of appreciation and technique of appraisal are too different from anything currently in vogue.

  The real satisfaction I got from it at the time was Iris’s wish to read it as it slowly proceeded, and what was for me the unexpected warmth of her reaction. This was not just automatic loyalty and a simulated interest in what hubby was up to, any more than her care of me when I was ill had been an imitation of wifely behaviour. She was really interested. We talked about it a lot, although as always without any attempt to have rational and serious discussion of the kind she would have engaged in with her pupils, or with friends and colleagues. We had already got to the stage of a relationship which Tolstoy writes about in War and Peace, where Pierre and Natasha, as husband and wife, understand each other and grasp each other’s viewpoint without having to make sense or needing to be coherent. I was fascinated in my turn when I found later how much of what we had felt and spoken together had gone into Iris’s landmark seminal essays. Against Dryness and The Sovereignty of Good are not in the least incoherent. They are not ‘muddled centres’ but lucid dewdrops, pearls of distilled wisdom, and yet I recognise in them the things we used to talk about in our own way,
of which we had become conscious together by our own private and collective means.

  Iris is without question the most genuinely modest person I have ever met, or if it comes to that, could ever imagine. Modesty is apt to be something acted, by each individual in his or her own way, part of the armoury with which people half-consciously build up the persona they wish others to become aware of, and with which they intend to confront the world. Iris has no pride in being modest: I don’t think she even knows she is. The normal anxieties and preoccupations of a successful writer about status and the future – whether, to put it crudely, they can keep it up – were with her completely absent. Now that she has forgotten all about it anyway I am struck by the almost eerie resemblance between the amnesia of the present and the tranquil indifference of the past. She went on then secretly quietly doing her work, never wishing to talk about it, never needing to compare or discuss or contrast, never reading reviews or wanting to hear about them, never needing the continual reassurance from friends or public or the media which most writers require, in order to go on being sure that they are writers.

  This normal need for status and reassurance, for feeling at however a humble a level ‘a published writer’ can have its endearing side. It often goes with real modesty, and with an accurate self-assessment of what the writer concerned can and cannot do. This would be true of a writer like Barbara Pym, whose novels I have always enjoyed and re-read, together with those of Raymond Chandler, C.S. Forester, Anthony Powell, one or two others. I can read them over and over, as if indulging in a private and comforting vice.