Iris and the Friends

by John Bayley

  Once a dowser came to try for water on the Spenders’ small property. He was a polite man, forthcoming about his craft, and it was uncanny to hold his willow switch in both hands and feel it stir and tremble. Iris stood motionless and enthralled for minutes, until the dowser eventually had to remove it from her hands with a courteous ‘S’il vous plaît, Madame.’ He found water all right, but it was far down, the well that was at last built over a hundred feet deep. It solved the problem of a domestic water supply, but Iris and I always rather missed the need to visit the well in the village square – it was a chore we could perform together like Jack and Jill – and going to ‘wash’ at noon in the agricultural.

  In the evening at Mas St Jerome we used to play Scrabble, Stephen and Natasha being great experts. Outside in the warm night treefrogs made a soft soporific din. Stephen had an innocently cunning smile which was delightful to watch as he coaxed improbable words on to the Scrabble board. Picking up my seven letters once I found they made the word ‘Bunfish’, which I attempted to pass off as an authentic marine species. The others weren’t having any, but the word found its way into our language, and that of the Spenders too. ‘Doing a bunfish’ became quite an expressive term for trying to get away with something.

  *

  Back in Oxford we drove about, looking at ‘For Sale’ signs. I loved now the idea of a small house. Iris was sorry to see that there didn’t seem to be any big ones, not at least For Sale. With a rush of warmth and relief we decided mutually to abandon the whole idea, only to go home and find the house expectant in some way, but not of our return. It was waiting for us to go away, and for all the accumulated dirt and debris of our long sojourn to go with us. It gave me a slight feeling of horror, and we looked at each other. We were becoming too anthropomorphic by far. The house was just a house after all, and couldn’t order us about.

  And yet it did. Or it seemed to. Iris went to London. I went to Oxford, and after my day of a lecture and classes visited a house agent and was equipped with the prospectus for a number of desirable residences. I drove to the first, up a long straight street in Summertown, a leafy suburb of north Oxford. There it was on the corner, a pleasant little brick house. My heart warmed to it at once. I felt we would really own that house. No more living on sufferance in a place that had always been the haunt and the property of other beings.

  Without bothering to look at other houses whose particulars he had supplied I rushed back to the estate agent. I was in a fever to buy that little house before it should be snapped up by someone else. I knew that all the residences in this part of Oxford were extremely sought after. I all but besought the agent to let me pay for the house straight away. He pointed out that he would first have to consult the owner, but he was kind enough to accept a deposit. I don’t suppose so naive a purchaser had ever come into his hands and he played my enthusiasm craftily, regretting that so many other candidates were in the market, some of whom were only awaiting a bridging loan before they established their right to number 54 Hartley Road. The thought of these effective and determined purchasers made me more agitated than ever.

  Early next morning, with Iris still in London, I went to view the house. The owners had gone to work. Their young daughter, eating her breakfast before setting off for school, appeared baffled by the purpose of my visit but raised no objection to my wandering about. She seemed herself a delightful emblem of urban pastoral. The clean sunlit little rooms had a fresh and fragrant smell. A canary sang in its cage; a cat lay asleep on the dresser. A whole new mode of existence, original, unsampled, never even encountered in married life before, seemed to offer itself, seductively yet modestly. I felt sure that the poet John Betjeman, who sang of the joys of suburban life, would have approved that house and its occupants. I saw myself sitting reading by the gasfire while Iris worked upstairs. Presently we would stroll down to the shops to make some simple purchase for our supper. There were no shops to speak of in Steeple Aston, and nowhere much to stroll to either, outside our own wild garden.

  Iris took it wonderfully well. I think she saw at once that it was no use arguing with me in my besotted state. The power of a new daydream had overwhelmed me. Nor was it, as fantasies go, at all an ambitious one. It was commensurate, as no previous lifestyle of ours had been, with my own instincts for living; and those instincts had apparently been lying in wait for years. I think Iris saw that, and even felt a kind of guilt about it. Although a stricken look rapidly crossed her face when she saw my dream house she threw herself into the dream like a Roman matron putting her hand into the fire. She acted as if her enthusiasm matched my own.

  I saw that it didn’t of course. But I was obdurate – why shouldn’t I be obdurate for once? And yet the dream faded even before the new house was bought and the old one sold. I realised – we realised – what a mistake we were making, but it seemed as if such a mistake was inevitable, was all we could do in return for all those years – more than thirty of them – spent together in the country in the happy shadow of Iris’s own original daydream. Those badgers of hers had, so to speak, come home at last. The old house was in a terrible state and we left it like that, still full of every kind of rubbish. But much of the rubbish, including all the old dusty stones, had to be taken to the new establishment. Poor Iris had been so good that I could not even try to prevent that happening.

  The house in Hartley Road was a predictable disaster, but I continued to feel a dogged loyalty to it, even when the children round about screamed all day, and the neighbourhood burglars payed us routine visits at night. We stuck it for three years, longing to go, and finally found a quieter and more suitable small house which a colleague of mine was preparing to sell. Oddly enough Iris had done some of her best work at Hartley Road, including the Gifford Lectures. She had driven her pen there day after day, and all the more determinedly because the place was, as I well knew, so uncongenial to her. Needless to say we never seemed to stroll together down to the shops; nor, so far as I recall, did I ever sit cosily with a book in front of the gasfire, ‘like a picture of somebody reading’, as Keats chortles in one of his letters.

  The colleague who was selling us her house (she taught economic history) enquired if we would be wanting Mrs Shostakovich, two days a week. As a cleaning lady she could be highly recommended, and she was familiar with the house. Mrs Shostakovich, married to a Polish ex-serviceman of that name, turned out to be a genial rather bossy Irishwoman who saw through us in the first seconds of our meeting. We were not serious householders. She could start on Monday, she told us, implying not unkindly that by the time she had finished that day we would know what was what so far as our own domestic duties were concerned. We behaved in a craven fashion. We thanked Mrs Shostakovich effusively, and then told my colleague that we would be making our own arrangements. We had not come through thirty-three years of home life together to be bullied by a cleaning lady who would regard our house as her own property.

  Our own arrangements were easily made, and we heaved a sigh of deep relief at having escaped the Irish dominatrix. Spick and span at the time of our arrival in August 1989, Number 30 Charlbury Road soon found itself joining the seedy but, as I privately hoped, not undistinguished club of our former residences. All the miscellaneous rubbish arrived, and the books, and the armchairs grey in our service, impregnated with the dust of four decades. Perhaps the house welcomed them with a secret relief. There were little flecks and blobs of blutack on the walls, relic of posters and drawings stuck on by my colleague’s little boy, and Mrs Shostakovich had spared these. I started to get some of them off as I hung our own pictures but Iris soon stopped me. They belonged to the house, as our own things would soon do.

  Number 30 has not much in the front garden beyond two tall trees which almost wholly conceal the front of the house. Iris fell in love with these when she saw them. In 1925, when the house was built, they must have been intended as rather unusual miniature ornamentals. Nobody seems to have known then that this new import, Metasequoia glyptos
troboides, the Chinese Dawn Redwood, was a serious conifer that would grow to a hundred feet, even though not aspiring to quite the height and girth of its majestic cousin, the true sequoia. Now when the wind blows lithe reddish twigs and bigger branches rain down incessantly, creating a sort of shadowy Tannenburg below which a Russian caller, come to ask Iris questions for a thesis on her novels, eyed with some respect. ‘Diky sad,’ she murmured. ‘A wild garden.’ I think she began to look instinctively, as a good Russian would, for forest mushrooms poking their heads through the mat of brown needles.

  The back garden is also full of trees, including three gnarled and ancient Japanese prunus which in summer form a deep bower of foliage, amethystine in spring with white blossoms like English windflowers, turning in summer and autumn to a dusky red. Beneath them in May shoots up a wilderness of bluebells and cowparsley – Queen Anne’s Lace – so that the small garden seems to recede into the endless enchanted wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When we arrived I put a heavy teak garden-chair out for Iris to sit at, and for the first time she started on fine days to write outdoors. I feel now it was a sign that things were beginning to slow down; and when I looked at her through the window and saw her sitting tranquilly, with the pen idle in her hand, I felt a slight qualm. It was scarcely to be called a premonition, but Iris was enjoying the garden, as she still does, in a way that she never seemed to do at Steeple Aston, where it would not be glanced at while work was in progress. On the wall at the back is a fine fig-tree, with leaves large enough to make biblical loincloths. The college gardener told me that one must never feed a fig-tree, otherwise it will produce a mass of foliage but no fruit. I had given it bonemeal conscientiously, until it was too dark in summer to see out of the windows: our drawing-room concealed its dust and dirt and became a shadowy bower of deepest green. After the gardener’s wise words I hastily stopped the bonemeal treatment and the next year figs abounded. Blackbirds as tame as cats reposed in a gorged state among them, taking an occasional languid peck. They left plenty for us. The leaves remained huge too, the drawing-room as umbrageous as ever.

  At the foot of the fig-tree I put the bronze bust of Iris, done in 1963 by Tolkien’s daughter-in-law. The birds did not respect it, but Iris’s serene features remained unperturbed. Faith Tolkien also did an excellent head of her father-in-law, looking like the Lord of the Rings himself, which broods benevolently on a plinth in the Oxford English Faculty Library.

  — 8 —

  In 1994 we were invited by the University of the Negev in Israel, to take part in an international gathering whose purpose was to celebrate, I think, the University’s coming of age. I was to read a paper on ‘Aspects of the Novel’ or ‘The Novel Today’, one of those comfortably vague prospectuses which make few demands on either speaker or audience. Iris asked not to give a paper, but said she would rather take part in a discussion in which she would answer questions on her novels or philosophical writings. She had often done this before, and it was always a success, because while never holding the floor she had the knack of taking seriously anything that was put forward by a questioner, and investigating its potential in a friendly and sympathetic way which was both flattering and rewarding for the audience.

  This time it all went wrong. The chairman was sympathetic, but soon baffled and made uncomfortable by Iris’s inability to bring out the words she seemed to want. Her delivery had always been slow and thoughtful and a little hesitant, and at first I was not perturbed, sure that she would recover in a few minutes as she got the feel of the gathering. It was hard to say how conscious she was of her own difficulty, but the effect soon became paralysing, for the listener as well as for herself. The audience was polite, but the liveliness and curiosity in their faces was gone: they began to look concerned and embarrassed. Israelis are straightforward in their reactions. Several people simply got up and left the conference room.

  I thought she would tell me afterwards how awful it had been, and that for some reason she simply hadn’t felt up to it, but that did not happen. She seemed unaware and to shrug the incident off, together with my cautious solicitude: I tried to avoid giving any impression that a fiasco had taken place. The chairman and one or two others came up to her afterwards and she talked to them and laughed in her natural way. One asked about her last novel, The Green Knight, and produced a copy for her to sign. It was at that moment I remembered being surprised at her telling me, several months before, that she was in trouble over her current novel, the one that appeared the following year as Jackson’s Dilemma. Often before, if I asked her, or sometimes if I didn’t, she would complain she was stuck, she couldn’t get on with the current novel, and in any case that it was no good at all. I used to make reassuring noises, knowing this would pass, and that in a few days she would suddenly seize pencil and paper while we sat eating or drinking at the kitchen table and write something down. I would say ‘Better?’ and she would reply ‘I think so.’

  But this time it was quite different. ‘It’s this man Jackson,’ she had said to me one day with a sort of worried detachment. ‘I can’t make out who he is, or what he’s doing.’ I was interested, because she hardly ever spoke of the people in a novel she was writing. ‘Perhaps he’ll turn out to be a woman,’ I said. Iris was always indulgent to a joke from me, even a feeble one, but now she looked serious, even solemn, and puzzled. ‘I don’t think he’s been born yet,’ she said.

  Inside marriage one ceases to be observant because observation has become so automatic, its object at once absorbing and taken for granted. The mysteriousness of Iris’s remark seemed to me at the time quite normal. ‘Don’t worry – I expect he’ll be born any day now,’ I said absently, but she continued to look worried and upset. ‘I shan’t do it, and shall never do another,’ she said, still in that quiet detached tone. She had often said such things before, though not quite like that. I had known before the mood would pass; and this one, though much odder, would too – I could not imagine anything else. But suddenly, standing blinking in the dry dusty sunlight of the Negev, I realised for the first time that something might be seriously wrong.

  I ‘realised’ it, but without any feeling of alarm, because I was somehow sure that everything would carry on just as usual. In a sense I was right. When the Alzheimer patient loses touch with time, time seems to lose both its prospective and its retrospective significance. For the partner, that is. Knowing that Iris would always be the same, I felt that the tiny disturbing eccentricity I had noticed then, when we talked about ‘Jackson’, must always have been present, and would go on undisturbed into the future. Nothing that Iris could do, and nothing that could happen to her, could possibly make her any different. As we stood in the Negev sunshine the matter simply drifted out of my mind. The eeriness of Alzheimer’s beginnings is also its reassurance. Part of me knew that I ought to be seriously worried about the future; part knew that neither future nor past was of any consequence. The shortest possible view, even shorter than the kind the Reverend Sydney Smith recommended ...

  None the less the disquiet returned in full force when the extremely nice Israeli novelist Amos Oz came up to speak to me next day. He said nothing about Iris, but from the way he looked at me I was suddenly aware that he, so to speak, knew all. Perhaps as a fellow novelist, perhaps just because he was an extremely shrewd, observant and knowledgeable man. He said casually that he lived in the Negev desert not far away, and would love us to come and stay with him. Any time, for as long as you want, it would be no bother. I could not make out whether this was pure kindness on his part, whether he meant it, whether he was lonely, whether he had taken a fancy to Iris, or wanted to study a fellow-novelist who had gone off the beam, or was going off it. Oz’s handsome and youthful face, which reminded me a little of Lawrence of Arabia, seemed none the less far too natural and too much on its own to be concerned with any of these motives. Or so it seemed. And I think it was equally natural for him to say, and to want, what he suggested. I have sometimes wished that we could have gone
, but it seems much too late now to take someone up, even this seraphic man, on such an offer. I have always enjoyed his novels. He might – looking back – have been a kind of angel of the desert, like the one who appeared to Jacob.

  That was in the spring of 1994. Jerusalem, ‘city of light, of copper and of gold’, was looking marvellously beautiful. In the autumn, by coincidence, we received another exotic invitation, as if such things had begun to arrive – for one reason or another it was years since we had been abroad in this way – at a time when Iris’s ability to respond to them, and to do a good job, had begun to falter. It was to Bangkok, to take part in the ceremony of awards at the South-East Asian Writers’ Conference. All went well. Possibly the writers from Thailand, Singapore, Malaya and the Philippines were not sufficiently in fine tune with their European colleagues to detect when a novelist like Iris, who happened to be the only writer from the West present, was in trouble with what had begun to amount to speaker’s, as well as writer’s, block.

  Writers are not usually behindhand in talking about themselves, their projects and methods of work, and Iris’s backwardness in this respect may have seemed at this voluble oriental gathering a becoming sort of modesty. Or perhaps they were too polite to notice. Even when the Crown Prince awarded the prizes, and we had each to make a little speech, Iris acquitted herself well. I had rehearsed her, and written out a suggested version of what she should say, in block capitals. Each writer who attended the ceremony was required, on reaching the podium, to present a sample of his or her work to the Crown Prince. Iris duly presented a Penguin Under the Net. This the Prince accepted and passed behind him without looking round. A courtier received it at the crouch, at once passing it to another official behind him, as in a game of rugby football. The book eventually reached the end of the scrum and disappeared through a doorway. I wondered what happened to the books at the end of the day: whether they were preserved in the royal library or quietly incinerated in some remote compound.