Iris

by John Bayley

  The door opened. An apparition in what seemed a sort of flame-coloured brocade stood before me. I felt in some way scandalised: dazzled but appalled at the same time. All my daydreams, my illusions and preconceptions about the woman – the girl? the lady? – of the bicycle seemed to have torn away and vanished back into a past which I would still very much have preferred to be inhabiting, given the choice. But I had no choice. The person before me was exactly the same as the one riding the bicycle. I still thought her face homely and kindly, not in any conventional sense pretty or attractive, even if it was a strong face in its own blunt-featured snub-nosed way; and for me it was always mysterious too. But now I was seeing it as other people saw it. Although it was in no way conventional itself its trappings, so to speak, were now conventional. Their appearance disappointed me sadly. They seemed the sort of things that any girl would wear; a silly girl who had not the taste to choose her clothes carefully.

  Well, there was nothing to be done about that. Iris seemed preoccupied. Perhaps about her face, which she now dabbed with powder, or her hair, or some hitch in her underwear. She wriggled and pulled her dress about uneasily, as if she were unfamiliar with whatever lay underneath it, and uncomfortable in consequence. Or perhaps she was preoccupied with the thought of what she might be doing somewhere else, with some other friends. She seemed preoccupied with anything and everything except me, about whom she appeared as unconscious as she had been when she rode past under my window. She didn’t look at me, but she did take my hand in an absent way as we went out to the entrance of the St Anne’s house where she lived; and that cheered me as much as the awkward movements she had made, as if she were wearing something thoroughly unfamiliar and uncomfortable. A corset probably.

  The restaurant was a disaster. I can’t remember what we ate, but it was very nasty, and the waiter was both gloomy and supercilious. He seemed preoccupied with quite other things than us, just as Iris had seemed to be preoccupied with other things than with me when I met her at the door of her room. Even the bottle of red wine which we drank was tasteless and bad. But as the dreadful dinner went on – there were very few other people in the restaurant – our spirits for some reason appeared to rise amazingly. We began to giggle and to talk in whispers about the few other sepulchral-looking diners. At the end of it Iris excused herself and went out to the Ladies, leaving me to pay the bill. I did this and added an enormous tip, which the waiter paid no attention to when he came to collect the money. I felt discouraged by this, because I was hoping in some way for a friendly word, and perhaps a benevolent query about where we were going. The saturnine waiter simply took up the money and departed, as absent and intent on other matters as ever. Perhaps his wife had just left him. If the Regency Restaurant had ‘probably’ the best food in Oxfordshire it had certainly the worst service.

  I was left to contemplate the green and white stripes of the wallpaper, a kind of wallpaper then very much in the fashion which I have hated ever since. Iris was away for an age. When she finally came out of the Ladies she was transformed again. Now she looked like a doll, a Watteau china doll with incongruously schoolgirl hair. She had lathered her mouth with lipstick, which she now proceeded in an amateurish way to kiss at with a scrap of paper taken from her bag. I noticed handwriting on this paper, and wondered if it could be a love letter, an urgent note from some admirer. But at least she did not put it back in her bag but crumpled it up and left it on the table.

  It was drizzling outside. By the time I had managed to find a taxi it was well after half-past nine. The dance was in full swing when we got to St Antony’s.

  I felt in a resigned way now that I was taking some quite different girl to the dance: one with bright red lips, covered inexpertly with a substance which made them look thick and unattractive: not that I had ever noticed them particularly in the first place. This strange girl would no doubt appeal to my St Antony colleagues and their friends. That would be something anyway, I thought, because I had no wish myself to spend the evening dancing with her. My one wish now was that the whole thing should be over as soon as possible, and I was extremely glad that the dance did not propose to prolong itself past midnight. Most sincerely I hoped it would not.

  St Antony’s was a former Anglican convent, built around 1870. A steep flight of stone steps led down to the crypt below the nuns’ chapel, now the library, in which the dance was to be held. As we went down Iris trod on her long dress, slipped, and slid inelegantly down a few steps on her behind. People descending before and after us rushed to help me help her get up. I found myself entertaining the unworthy thought that she might have sprained her ankle; not badly, but enough to incapacitate her for the evening. She would not wish to stay on the sidelines, and I could take her home. Perhaps we could go on talking in her room.

  But Iris was not hurt at all. She got up and smiled while the others brushed her down, amid laughter and joking. The ice was already broken as far as fellow-dancers were concerned. We moved on to the floor among a crowd, who all seemed to be chatting to us and to each other. I made a few introductions. She seemed already to have made new friends. Her manner was no longer quiet and withdrawn. I made unconfident gestures indicative of asking her to dance, and we assumed the appropriate semi-embrace.

  My dancing was indeed unconfident. I had sometimes enjoyed it at hops in the nightclubs or weekends in the army, when already more than a little drunk. Now, when we moved, there seemed no correlation between the different parts of us. Iris smiled at me encouragingly, but soon relinquished me and began to execute arm-twirlings and arabesques on her own. She looked ungainly and rather affected, but touchingly naive at the same time. It seemed clear that she knew no more about dancing à deux than I did; but when we brushed accidentally against a dancing couple a few seconds later, and the man turned with a smile and seized hold of her, she melted into him at once, and the pair swung off together in perfect unison. The girl whom the man had been with did not look best pleased, but she too had no choice but to smile at me as we began to revolve in some sort of way. I felt the dance was already going against me, and that success, whatever it might have consisted in, had already gone beyond recall.

  The band gave a flourish, and stopped. Iris came back to me at once, looking happy and relaxed. She asked about my room in the college, which she had not yet seen. I asked if she would like to go up there for a minute, thinking of the bottle of champagne I had bought that morning, and put in my cupboard along with two glasses. She said she would like to very much. I took her arm as we mounted the stone steps, in case she had another fall. My room was small and spartan: a bed, cupboard, table and wooden chair. But there was a gas fire, which I now turned on. I got the bottle and glasses out of the cupboard. As I put them down on the table we fell into each other’s arms.

  It seemed as natural as it had been to take her arm when coming up the stairs, or for her to take my hand for a minute when we had left her own room in St Anne’s. We never returned to the dance floor but sat in my room until two in the morning. We talked without stopping. I had no idea I could talk like that, and I am sure she never knew she could, either. It was endless, childish chatter, putting our faces together as we talked. I think Iris was accustomed only to talk properly, as it were: considering, pausing, modifying, weighing her words. To talk like a philosopher and a teacher. Now she babbled like a child. So did I. With arms around each other, kissing and rubbing noses (I said how much I loved her snub nose) we rambled on and on, seeming to invent on the spot, and as we talked, a whole infantile language of our own. She put her head back and laughed at me incredulously from time to time, and I think we both felt incredulous. She seemed to be giving way to some deep need of which she had been wholly unconscious: the need to throw away not only the manoeuvres and rivalries of intellect, but the emotional fears and fascinations, the power struggles and surrenders of adult loving.

  She asked me endlessly about my childhood, and told me about her own. She had been a happy child, attached equally to b
oth her parents. I saw that they had doted on her, but it seemed in a very sensible way. Her father, who came from Belfast, was a minor civil servant, now on the verge of retirement. His salary had always been extremely modest, and he could never have afforded to send her to a good school, even with a scholarship, if he hadn’t borrowed money. A cautious and prudent man, he had been as brave as a lion about this, and tears came into her eyes as she told me about the sacrifices her parents had made. But our talk was too happy and silly to stay long on the actualities of childhood. It was the atmosphere of it that we suddenly seemed to be breathing together, having rediscovered it mutually and miraculously in each other’s presence. The dance and the dancing, the dinner we had eaten and all that, seemed like ludicrous adult activities which we had put behind us.

  I had a wish to rub my nose and lips along her bare arms. She made me take off my dinner jacket so that she could do the same to me.

  ‘If we were married we could do this all the time,’ I said, rather absurdly.

  ‘We shall be doing it nearly all the time,’ she answered.

  ‘Yes, but if – .’

  She stopped that by starting to kiss me properly. We remained locked together for a long time. The bottle of champagne remained unopened on the table.

  Long long afterwards I was having to look through her manuscripts and papers to find some stuff requested by the publisher. In the back of an exercise book containing notes for a novel were what seemed to be a few entries, some dated, others random observations, comments on books, philosophers, people she knew, denoted only by initial. Some notes on pupils too, and on points that had struck her in their work. One entry, dated June 3 1954, read: ‘St Antony’s Dance. Fell down the steps, and seem to have fallen in love with J. We didn’t dance much.’

  — 2 —

  We trailed slowly over the long field towards the river. The heat seemed worse than ever, although the sun, overcast, did not beat down as fiercely as it had done earlier in the day. The hay had been carried away some time before, and the brownish surface of the field was baked hard and covered incongruously with molehills. The earth in them was like grey powder, and I wondered how the moles ever managed to find any sustenance as they tunnelled within it. A pair of crows flapped lazily away as we approached the river bank. Crows are said to live a long time, and I wondered idly if they were the same birds we had seen there on our bathing visits for many years past.

  I wished we had managed to come earlier, before the hay was cut, and when wild flowers – scabious, white archangel, oxeye daisies – stretched over the whole field among the grass. It was not a lush river field, probably because a bed of gravel lay just below the surface. There were big gravel ponds not far away, by the main road, but this field was a protected area, a plant and bird sanctuary of some kind. Not a fish sanctuary however: there were sometimes a few fishermen about, who kept themselves to themselves and remained almost invisible among the reeds.

  Our own little nook was seldom occupied however, and it was empty as usual today. Once we would have got our clothes off as soon as possible and slid silently into the water, as we had done on that first occasion. Now I had quite a struggle getting Iris’s clothes off: I had managed to put her bathing dress on at home, before we started. Her instinct nowadays seems to be to take her clothes off as little as possible. Even in this horribly hot weather it is hard to persuade her to remove trousers and jersey before getting into bed.

  She protested, gently though vigorously, as I levered off the outer layers. In her shabby old one-piece swimsuit (actually two-piece, with a separate skirt and tunic top) she was an awkward and anxious figure, her socks trailing round her ankles. She was obstinate about not taking these off, and I gave up the struggle. A pleasure barge chugged slowly past, an elegant girl in a bikini sunning herself on the deck, a young man in white shorts at the steering-wheel. Both turned to look at us with a slight air of incredulity. I should not have been surprised if they had burst into guffaws of ill-mannered laughter, for we must have presented a comic spectacle – an elderly man struggling to remove the garments from an old lady, still with white skin and incongruously fair hair.

  Alzheimer sufferers are not always gentle: I know that. But Iris remains her old self in many ways. The power of concentration has gone, along with the ability to form coherent sentences, and to remember where she is, or has been. She does not know she has written twenty-seven remarkable novels, as well as her books on philosophy; received honorary doctorates from the major universities; become a Dame of the British Empire ... If an admirer or friend asks her to sign a copy of one of her novels she looks at it with pleasure and surprise before laboriously writing her name and, if she can, theirs. ‘For Georgina Smith. For Dear Reggie ...’ It takes her some time, but the letters are still formed with care, and resemble, in a surreal way, her old handwriting. She is always anxious to oblige. And the old gentleness remains.

  Once in the water Iris cheers up a bit. It is almost too warm, hardly refreshing. But its old brown slow-flowing deliciousness remains, and we smile happily at each other as we paddle quietly to and fro. Water-lily leaves, with an occasional fat yellow flower, rock gently at the passage of a pleasure boat. Small bright blue dragonflies hover motionless above them. The water is deep, and cooler as we move out from the bank, but we do not go out far. Looking down I can see her muddy feet, still in their socks, moving in the brown depths. Tiny fish are inquisitively investigating her, and I can see and feel them round me too, gently palpating the bare skin.

  Once, if there had been little river traffic about, we would have swum at once the hundred yards or so across the river and back. Now it is too much trouble, and a possible producer of that endless omnipresent anxiety of Alzheimer’s, which spreads to the one who looks after the sufferer. Not that it would be dangerous; Iris still swims as naturally as a fish. Since we first entered the water here together, forty-four years ago now, we have swum in the sea, in lakes and rivers, pools and ponds, whenever we could and wherever we happened to be.

  I recalled now a moment in Perth, Australia, when we managed to get into the Swan River, scrambling down a shelving concrete slope from a busy arterial road. The famous Swan brewery was just up at the broad river’s next bend, and the water flowing past us was peculiar, to say the least, but we enjoyed our swim. We saw the faces of motorists going past up above, staring at us with surprise, and, presumably, disapproval. In fact there was a swimming-pool at the hotel the University had put us into, but that would not have been the same thing. It was always fringed with strapping Australian girls sunning themselves. We never used it: I think we felt too shy.

  Iris was never keen on swimming as such. She never swam fast and noisily or did fancy strokes. It was being in the water she loved. Twice she came quite close to drowning. I thought of that, with the anxiety that had now invaded both our lives, as we approached the bank again, to scramble out. This had always been a more difficult and inelegant operation than slipping into the river, but it had never bothered us in the past. The river was as deep near the bank as in midstream, the bank itself undercut by the water’s flow. It shelved a little in our own corner, the soft clay occasionally imprinted by the hooves of drinking cattle. I pulled myself out first and turned to help Iris. As she took my hands her face contracted into that look of child-like dread which so often came over it now, filling me too with worry and fear. Suppose her arm muscles failed her and she slipped back into deep water, forgetting how to swim, and letting water pour into her mouth as she opened it in a soundless appeal to me? I knew on the spot that we must never come to bathe here again.

  The panic moment passed, but it had never existed for either of us at a moment when, ten or fifteen years before, we had swum with a friend, the artist Reynolds Stone, off the Chesil Bank in Dorset. The Stones lived a few miles inland, and in summer we used to go down to the sea, to the great inshore curve that sweeps all the way from Portland Bill to Bridport and Lyme Regis. The tides have left there a massive emb
ankment of grey shingle, graduated as if by hand from huge smooth pebbles at the Portland end to fine gravel twelve miles further west. When a sea is running it is a dangerous place, and even in calm weather the swell and the suction of the undertow make it a tricky beach to go in from. Fearlessly gentle and absentminded, Reynolds Stone never mentioned any danger nor was apparently aware of it. In we always went together, laughing and talking, and on one occasion Iris missed the pulse of the wave that carried us back on to the shingle, and was sucked out again as it ebbed. Speaking of Piero or Cezanne, two of the artists he most admired, Reynolds noticed nothing; nor did I. Listening to him as we trod gingerly over the stones to where our clothes lay, I turned back to include Iris in what he was saying. She was not there. But in a moment she was, and I helped her over the shingle while Reynolds stood gently and imperturbably conversing.

  Only afterwards did she tell me of her moment of incredulous surprise and terror as she felt herself drawn back under the smooth sea. It was deep over her head, but she kept her mouth tight shut by instinct, and in another moment the next wave had brought her ashore. Had she panicked and swallowed water the next swell of the insidious undertow might well have carried her farther out and down; and then, easy swimmer as she was, she could have drowned in a few seconds.

  She said nothing until we were in bed that night, and then she was not frightened but full of curiosity, and an excitement she wanted to share with me. ‘I’ll put it in my next novel,’ she said. And she did.