Iris

by John Bayley

  There was nothing obviously god-like about this quiet little professor of Ancient History, although he was probably the most distinguished man in his field at the time. In a respectful way I felt quite fond of him, even proud of him. With the other master-figure in Iris’s life, a Dichter of legendary reputation among people who knew, it was another matter. This man held court, as I thought of it, secretly and almost modestly in Hampstead, and Iris was very much under his sway. He had several mistresses whom Iris knew, and she seemed to revere them almost as much as the great man himself. His wife too she revered. Sometimes Iris spoke to me of this woman, her sweet face and air of patient welcoming reserve, who was sometimes present in the flat when the Dichter made love to Iris, possessing her as if he were a god. This she told me later, before we got married, when her close relationship with the man had come to an end, and he had given us his blessing, as she put it. She continued to see him from time to time and her creative imagination continued to be enthralled by him, even though, as she told me, by writing about him in her own way she got him out of her system, and finally in a sense out of her novels too.

  The Dichter was a Dichter in the German sense, not actually a poet but a master-spirit of literature. He had been a friend of another German Jewish writer, a real poet, with whom Iris had been very much in love. She would possibly have married him had he lived, but he had a serious heart ailment, and knew that he could not live long. He died a year before I met her. She grieved for him deeply. He sounded a delightful man, gentle (like all Iris’s close friends, as opposed to her ‘gods’) and humorous. The gods were not funny, I suspect; perhaps it was beneath the dignity of godship. The poet was also in the anthropology department at Oxford, although he was never strong enough to go ‘into the field’, as they called it. At the time he gave his weekly lecture, he told Iris, he invariably found himself confronting a blank page on which he had written ‘As I was saying in my last lecture.’ During the week he had never managed to get any farther, and on the morning of the lecture he always found himself confronting the page. It had been a joke between them, and it became a joke between Iris and me. It still is. She always understands it, and when it comes up I always speak of her dead poet by name, though I am never sure if she remembers him. Only the joke remains alive.

  Iris’s seriousness – a friend once seriously annoyed her, she told me, by implying that her air of gravity was too great for her ever to be imagined as having fun – could, it was true, take disconcerting forms. Greatly to my anguish there was never an actual moment when she told me she had decided to marry me – the matter remained still unsettled a few weeks before it occurred – but there was one occasion when she sat me down in her room and said she had better tell me something of the people in her past. I was reminded of her originally remarking that perhaps it was time to make love. I was startled by her almost portentous air. Had I not heard all about them, the people of her past and present, at one time or another during the period of our own intimacy?

  It appeared that I had not. Unknown figures arose before me like the procession of kings in Macbeth, seeming to regard me with grave curiosity as they passed by. There was so-and-so with whom she had first been to bed, and so-and-so and so-and-so who had wanted to marry her. There was a friend and fellow-student, whose advances she had resisted in her virginal days (she did not of course put it quite like that). At the beginning of the war he had joined the army and asked her half-jokingly to marry him, pointing out that he was sure to be killed before the war was over and she would be able to draw a widow’s pension. Iris’s seriousness broke down in smiles at this point, and also in tears.

  She had said she still did not want to marry him but she would go to bed with him before he went overseas. He was killed in action later in the war, when she was working at an office in Whitehall.

  Incongruous as the memory was at that moment I found myself back for a moment at my first school, when the headmaster gave us each a few moments alone in his study, to tell us about ‘the facts of life’; and here were the ‘facts’ of Iris’s life, in grave procession. Suppressing the impulse to recall this for Iris’s amusement, I found myself telling her instead that even an officer’s widow received only a very small annual sum. I knew, because some of my own contemporaries and fellow-soldiers had been killed before the war was over. It was a feeble attempt to assert myself, and my own meagre experience in the face of what seemed a rich and stately litany of other days, joys, faces, which I would never share. It felt graceless too as I said it, but I could not think of anything else to say.

  It broke the mood anyway. Iris laughed and kissed me. ‘After all that, isn’t it time for me to have a kind word?’ I said, and then we both laughed. Getting ‘a kind word’ had become a regular plea on my part, and a part of our amative speech. It still is, and the phrase continues always to mean something to her. To me at that time, of course, it was wholly different from what I had guessed of her behaviour with others. No doubt it really was different. I could not imagine the god in Hampstead getting a kind word, or giving one. Not even the quiet professor of ancient history, whom I had followed in a dog-like manner back to his hotel. Kind words, in Iris’s style to me, were not for them. That was a kind of consolation. Yet I divined already how good she was at the real business of cheering other people’s troubles. She had present and former pupils some of whom – often the sad-faced ones – I had seen gazing at her with looks of heartfelt gratitude as well as adoration. But that again was quite different from anything she said or did with me in response to my plea for a kind word.

  None the less I was really very cast down by everything she had just been telling me. There seemed so many of them, these fortunate persons, and to my amazement I had just learned that some, as I thought of them, quite ordinary people, acquaintances and even colleagues of my own, had at some time or other in the past been recipients of Iris’s kindness. They had desired her, and not been rejected. However different that ‘kindness’ was, and however unimaginable in terms of what I asked and received, it had nevertheless been given.

  Looking back from the standpoint of today, it seems all very unreal, and so oldfashioned. But a woman with a past was different in those days, just as the past itself is always different, and always a foreign country. Today even caring about the past seems an emotion or indulgence that belongs to the past itself, not to the present or future, to the place where we live today. That talk we once had – the way Iris delivered it, and the way in which deep inside me I received it – now seems to me almost mediaeval.

  Could we really have thought and behaved like that?

  It seems that we did. And now, nearly fifty years later, we remain for ourselves the same couple, even though a sort of incredulity comes over me in remembering what we seem to have been like, the ways in which we behaved. Looking back, I separate us with difficulty. We seem always to have been together. But memory draws a sharp divide, none the less. The person I was at that age now seems odd to myself – could I have really been in love? Could I have felt, at least some of the time, all that jealousy, ecstasy, misery, longing, unhopefulness, mingled with a fever of possibility and joy? I can hardly believe it. But where Iris is concerned my own memory, like a snug-fitting garment, seems to have zipped itself up to the present second. As I work in bed early in the morning, typing on my old portable with Iris quietly asleep beside me, her presence as she now is seems as it always was, and as it always should be. I know she must once have been different, but I have no true memory of a different person.

  Waking up for a peaceful second or two she looks vaguely at the ‘Tropical Olivetti’ lying on my knees, cushioned by one of her jerseys. Not long ago, when I asked if it disturbed her, she said she liked to hear that funny noise in the morning. She must be used to it, although a couple of years ago she would have been getting up herself at this time – seven o’clock – and preparing to start her own day. Nowadays she lies quietly asleep, sometimes giving a little grunt or murmur, often sleepi
ng well past nine, when I rouse and dress her. This ability to sleep like a cat, at all hours of the day and night, must be one of the great blessings that sometimes go with Alzheimer’s, converse of the anxiety state that comes on in wakefulness and finds worried words like ‘When are we leaving?’

  Dressing most days is a reasonably happy and comic business. I am myself still far from sure which way round her underpants are supposed to go: we usually decide between us that it doesn’t matter. Trousers are simpler: hers have a grubby white label on the inside at the back. I ought to give her a bath, or rather a wash of some sort since baths are tricky, but I tend to postpone it from day to day. For some reason it is easier to do the job in cold blood, as it were, at an idle moment later in the day. Iris never objects to this; she seems in a curious way to accept it as both quite normal and wholly exceptional, as if the two concepts had become identified for her. Perhaps that is why she seems to accept her daily state as if none other had ever existed: assuming too that no one else would find her changed in any way; just as my own memory only works with her now as she is, and so, as my memory seems to assume, must always have been.

  It seems normal that the old routines of washing and dressing have vanished as if they too had never existed. If she remembered them, which she doesn’t, I can imagine her saying to herself, did one really go through all those unnecessary rituals every day? My own memory, after all, can hardly believe that I once went through all those other rituals of falling in love and becoming agitated, ecstatic, distracted ....

  At the same time Iris’s social reflexes are in a weird way still very much in place. If someone comes to the door – the postman, the man to read the gas meter – and I am for the moment occupied elsewhere, she receives him with her social smile, and calls for me in those unhurried slightly ‘gracious’ tones which married couples automatically use on each other in the presence of a stranger. ‘Oh I think it is the man who has come to read the meter, darling.’ In the same way she deals instinctively with more complex social situations; seeming to follow the conversation and smiling, prepared to bridge a silence by asking a question. Usually the same question: ‘Where do you come from?’ or ‘What are you doing now?’ – questions that get repeated many times in the course of a social event. Other people, visitors or friends, adjust themselves well to these repetitions as soon as they grasp what is happening and what motivates them: they usually manage to adopt the same social part that she is playing.

  I find myself making use of the behavioural instincts that survive. In the old days I would sometimes produce what in childhood used to be called ‘a tantrum’, if something had gone wrong or not been done properly, something for which, rightly or wrongly, I held Iris responsible. She would then become calm, reassuring, almost maternal, not as if deliberately, but with some deep unconscious female response that normally had no need to come to the surface, as it would have had to do on an almost daily basis with a young family. Iris in general was never ‘female’ at all, a fact for which I sometimes remembered to be grateful. Nowadays I have learnt to make on occasions a deliberate use of this buried reflex. If she has been following me all day, like Mary’s bear, interrupting tiresome business or letter-writing (very often letters to her own fans), I erupt in what can seem even to me an uncontrolled fit of exasperation, stamping on the floor and throwing the papers and letters on it, waving my hands in the air. It always works. Iris says ‘Sorry ... sorry ...’ and pats me before going quietly away. She will be back soon, but that doesn’t matter. My tantrum has reassured her as no amount of my own caring, or my calming efforts to reply to her rationally, could have done.

  The lady who told me in her own deliberately jolly way that living with an Alzheimer victim was like being chained to a corpse, went on to an even greater access of desperate facetiousness. ‘And, as you and I know, it’s a corpse that complains all the time.’

  I don’t know it. In spite of her anxious and perpetual queries Iris seems not to know how to complain. She never has. Alzheimer’s, which can accentuate personality traits to the point of demonic parody, has only been able to exaggerate a natural goodness in her.

  On a good day her need for a loving presence, mutual pattings and murmurs, has something angelic about it; she seems herself the presence found in an icon. It is more important for her still on days of silent tears, a grief seemingly unaware of that mysterious world of creation she has lost, and yet aware that something is missing. The ‘little bull’ aspect of her, putting her head down, and herself moving determinedly ahead, used once to be emphasised when she got up in the morning and headed for the bathroom. Dressed, she would visit me, still working in bed, and then go down to open the garden door and see what was going on in the morning. The weather and the birds, the look and sound of things, were sometimes jotted in her diary as she settled down to work. She never had breakfast then, although if I was at home I brought her coffee and a chocolate biscuit later in the morning.

  Now that once good morning time has become the worst time. Like ‘stand-to’ in the trenches for soldiers in the two world wars. Trench humour is the natural response, even if one can only crack the dark joke inside oneself; it would be heartless at that once hopeful hour to try to share it with the victim. While trying to think of ways of getting through the day I feel all the more comradely at this time, with the woman who had found some relief – at least I hoped so – in being facetious about herself and her Alzheimer husband. Although I hadn’t felt inclined to join very heartily in the joke, it was better, far better, than having to sympathise, in a caring po-faced way, from a similar position. In any case those in the same boat have a natural desire to compare notes. A spruce grey-haired man whom I had once known, when we were both eighteen-year-olds and in the army, wrote to me to commiserate. Aside from his job as a stockbroker his chief interests had been girls and vintage cars. When his wife, younger than he, developed the condition and deteriorated rapidly, he looked after her with exemplary devotion. He liked reporting progress, or the reverse, in terms of effective notes. Once he wrote: ‘I used to view the female form divine in a rather different light. Now I just find myself hosing it down every morning.’

  I do it much less often. But I giggle internally if that jest comes into my head when washing between her legs and working over the contours of Iris’s ‘female form divine’. From where had my old army acquaintance obtained that unexpected specimen of Edwardian archness, a comic but also rather lyrical cliché that had also appealed once to James Joyce? No use trying to share this joke with Iris. Not that she would object, but the bounderish absurdity of the idiom has passed beyond her critical faculty. I recently came across a collection of palindromes somebody sent us years ago – ingenious and surreal sentences, appropriately illustrated. One of them, which had amused us as much by the illustration as by the telegraphic simplicity of the palindrome, was ‘Sex at noon taxes.’ Recently I showed this and other one-time favourites to Iris, and she laughed and smiled a bit, out of the wish to share them with me, but I knew that they were not getting through. At the same time she will watch the animated cartoons on children’s TV with something approaching glee. They can be a great stand-by at ten or so – the trickiest time – till eleven in the morning. I usually watch the Teletubbies with her, and become absorbed myself in their odd little sunlit world, peopled with real rabbits, real sky, real grass. Or so it seems. Is some human agency inside the creatures, some actual and cunning little mannikin? It certainly looks like it, and the illusion, if such it is, continues to hold both our attentions.

  We have only had television a few months – it never occurred to us before. Now I listen for its noise from the kitchen and hope it will remain switched on. If there is silence I know that Iris has switched it off and is sitting there without moving. Attention-span does not seem to be the trouble. She will watch with absorption a football game, cricket, bowls, tennis, without knowing the play or the scores, but immersed in the feel of the thing. My woman friend chained to the corp
se told her husband every evening, ‘There’s a snooker programme on.’ Then she played an old one on the video. It was always a new one for him, she said.

  Unfortunately, not having a handy six-year-old child about, I have never managed to programme the video. In any case Iris turns the thing off not because she is bored with it – boredom doesn’t seem with her a possible state of mind – but out of an instinct to get away, the one that makes her say ‘When are we leaving?’ or ‘Must do go’. She leaves offered and attempted occupations – all now tacitly given up – for the same reason. When are they going to let us out?

  Neither of us ever attempted, from our earliest married days, to do much about the house. A routine of chores never existed. Neither of us felt any need to keep it clean, and we were bothered by the notion of somebody coming in to do it for us. Now I suppose the house has reached what seems a comfortable point of no return. Once nothing seemed to need to be done, or so we took it all for granted, and now nothing can be done. If friends notice the state the place is in – a perfectly cosy one really – they don’t say anything. None the less I feel from time to time that if we had ever developed a habit of working together on the chores we might be able to continue with it now. Self-discipline. And a way of passing the time. But somehow, as the tramp more or less says in Waiting for Godot, the time seems to pass anyway.