Iris

by John Bayley

  We don’t exactly keep a dust museum, like Dickens’s Miss Havisham. If undisturbed it seems to fade easily into the general background. Like the clothes, books, old newspapers, letters and cardboard boxes. Some of them might be useful some time. In any case Iris has never been able to bear throwing anything away. She has always felt a tenderness for the feelings of torn open envelopes, or capless plastic bottles, which has now become obsessive. Old leaves are rescued, sticks, even cigarette ends smoked not very furtively in the street by the girls at the High School near by. Smoking in our time has become an outdoor activity. Quite a wholesome one I sometimes think.

  It is wonderfully peaceful to sit in bed with Iris reassuringly asleep and gently snoring. Half asleep again myself I have a feeling of floating down the river, and watching all the rubbish from the house and from our lives – the good as well as the bad – sinking slowly down through the dark water until it is lost in the depths. Iris is floating or swimming quietly beside me. Weeds and larger leaves sway and stretch themselves beneath the surface. Blue dragonflies dart and hover to and fro by the river bank. And suddenly a kingfisher flashes past.

  — 4 —

  Rivers featured on our honeymoon.

  We were married nearly three years after we first met. I once worked out the number of days that had gone by since the morning I had seen Iris bicycling slowly past the window; but I have forgotten the number now and it would take me too long to work it out again. We were married at the Registrar’s office in St Giles, a broad street which runs between the Martyrs’ Memorial at its south end and the War Memorial at the north end, at the junction of the Woodstock and Banbury roads. Opposite the Registrar’s office, now disappeared or moved elsewhere, is the Judge’s House, a fine Palladian building which is supposed to have given Henry James his idea for the house in his novel The Spoils of Poynton.

  I talk like a guidebook now because in a way I felt like one that morning. I gazed at these familiar landmarks as if I had never seen them before. In a sense I never had seen them before, because I had always hurried along, going somewhere, late for something, preoccupied with my own affairs, taking no notice. Now I found myself looking round as I waited on a corner near the office, seeing everything very clearly and as if for the first or the last time. I remember that the painter David, who sketched Marie Antoinette in the tumbril on her way to execution, noticed that she kept glancing all round her with vacant curiosity, as if she had never seen these streets and squares of Paris before. I felt rather like that I think. I was also preoccupied, as every bridegroom is supposed to be, with the question of the ring, which I had amongst various other things in my right-hand trouser pocket. It was obviously an unsatisfactory place to keep it, but I could not think of a better one. I was wearing a dark suit, with which I had been issued on demobilisation from the army, nine years previously. It had no waistcoat, or perhaps the waistcoat, a necessary attribute of gents’ suiting in those days, had become mislaid. I had selected the suit from among others lighter in colour, and it had been quite a good choice because I had scarcely ever worn it, except on rare occasions of this kind. Weddings, christenings, funerals.

  I had bought the ring the day before at a pawnbroker’s. It was a solid job, plain and oldfashioned, possibly disposed of by a widower in needy circumstances. It had been my idea. Iris had never mentioned it. She never wore a ring, and I had never thought of giving her one, since we had never been engaged. I had no idea whether this ring would fit, and I was anxious about that. Fortunately it was a beautiful fit, and still is, though it has now worn down from its old robust self into being the slimmest of gold bands.

  After the operation – one could hardly call it a ceremony – which lasted about three minutes, the wife of my senior colleague – they were a very nice couple – said in her rather fussy way ‘I must go and look after Mrs Bayley’. She meant my mother, but her husband said to her with what Iris later described as ‘a grim laugh’, ‘Every woman here is called Mrs Bayley, except you.’ It was true. My mother and sister-in-law, also a Mrs Bayley, were present: no other ladies. Iris said that this was the ghastliest moment of what was for her an extremely gruesome occasion. She was now lumped among a lot of Mrs Bayleys. Her own mother, incidentally, had managed to miss the train from Paddington to Oxford. After the business was over we went down to the station to meet the next train, found her, and cheered up a good deal over a drink at a nearby pub.

  This was not a very good start; but it was not exactly a start in any case. It seemed more of an anticlimax, the world we knew ending not with a bang but a whimper. At the same time this feeling of détente was very welcome. All tensions, queries and uncertainties, all the things that for months and years seemed to have made up the drama of living, were now over. That was a real source of satisfaction to both of us. At least I knew it was for me; and when Iris squeezed my hand at the station, and said how nice and settled and yet unfamiliar it felt now to be together, it reassured me that all was well. Reassurance was probably what was wanted.

  In another sense it seemed to be there already, in the mere fact of marriage. In his memoirs the novelist Anthony Powell observes that marriage does not resemble in the smallest degree any other comparable human experience. You can live with someone for years and not feel in the least married. Alternatively you could finally take the step, as Iris and I had done, and at once feel you have moved into a wholly different sphere of sensation and behaviour. As Powell puts it, in order to know what it is like you have to experience the thing itself. ‘Nothing else will do.’

  The meeting with Iris’s mother was also reassuring. She was a quite exceptionally nice woman, who looked rather younger than her daughter. She had been only nineteen when Iris was born. She was a Dublin girl, and a young man from Belfast, recently joined up in the army, had fallen in love with her. This was in 1917. Iris was proud of the fact that her father, who had been brought up on a farm, was in a Yeomanry Cavalry Regiment, King Edward’s Horse. That probably saved his life, as the cavalry were rarely able to get into action during trench warfare battles. Iris’s mother, who had been an amateur soprano of considerable promise, gave up her singing when she got married. Iris inherited her singing voice in some degree, and was always sorry that her mother had never gone on with a serious musical career.

  Instead she had Iris, with a difficult birth, following which she had taken a silent decision to have no more children. Iris told me later that she knew this by instinct, although her mother had never said anything about it. I had pointed out that if more children had been born, a son among them, her own life would have been drastically different. As it was she had lived on the happiest terms of equality with her mother and father, who had adored her. After the Irish troubles the small family had moved to England, where her father had obtained a modest job in a branch of the civil service. Iris’s childhood was spent in a small semi-detached house in Chiswick. She went first to a Froebel day school in the same district. Then she was sent to Badminton, an excellent private boarding school for girls near Bristol. Her father’s sacrifices for her education, including the borrowing of money, were something altogether against the instincts of a frugal and godly Belfast upbringing, although by that time neither parent had any interest in religion, or affiliations with any church. Iris’s childhood was happily godless.

  Her appetite for the spiritual developed in her Oxford days, nurtured by Plato and by her studies in philosophy. It was part of the inner world of her imagination and never appeared on the surface. The way she fell in love when young, and the people she fell in love with, resembled in some degree the search for wisdom, authority, belief, which a lot of people feel the need to embark on at some point, whether young or old. At the same time I suspect there was always something both tough and elusive about Iris, perhaps the circumspectness of her Northern Irish ancestors. Falling in love with people who represented for her spiritual authority, wisdom, beneficence, even a force that might seem darkly ambiguous and enigmatic, was an adventu
re in the soul’s progress and experience; she craved it, needed it, but she was far too sensible ever to become enslaved. Like silly young Dora Greenfield in her novel The Bell, she could get away when she wanted: common sense was the final arbiter of her emotional impulses.

  Her sunny adolescence, happiness at school, happy relations with her parents, may well have played their part in giving her this need, as she grew up, for strongly contrasting kinds of experience. But with her parents she always seemed to return, as I felt she did with me, to the cheerful and enterprising innocence which seemed to have been her natural character when young. She behaved with her mother with complete naturalness as if they were sisters, herself the elder. Her father at that time, newly retired, was already an invalid, and died of cancer the next year. (He had always smoked his sixty a day, but so had her mother.) Iris was deeply attached to him, and she grieved for and missed him greatly, while instinctively taking over the role he had played in her mother’s life. I still wish there had been time for me to know him better.

  When the three of us got back from the station that day, my mother had a moment’s hesitation when introduced to Mrs Murdoch and her daughter. Which of them had her son just married? The instant of confusion was pardonable; and I attempted, perhaps not very wisely, to make a joke of it. How this went down I don’t know, because we were immediately plunged into the business of the party, modest as were the numbers attending it. It was given in a small reception room in my college; and the college butler, a genial patriarch, had suggested to me that he serve some champagne from the college cellars which was already many years past its sell-by date. He wanted to use it up. ‘I don’t mind telling you, sir, that it’s not entirely reliable,’ he warned me, ‘but I can let you have it cheap.’

  In the event every bottle proved delicious, deep gold in colour and without much fizz, but giving just the right amount of conviviality to the few guests, and valuable support to the wedding couple. I can still remember the romantic name of the marque: it was called Duc de Marne. The Duke still seemed to be giving us his benevolent support as we got through the other trials of the day, culminating in a debacle at the posh hotel, The Compleat Angler at Marlowe, where we had been going to spend the night. The name had seemed propitious; and when we had been in to book a room we saw the river Thames pouring itself over a weir outside the windows. The sound of that weir at night would have been a delightful epithalamion.

  When we turned up there, however, the hotel staff were polite but puzzled. They were full up. Had we booked a room? Yes, we had – I had been there in person a week before. (In those days the telephone seemed, at least to me, a not entirely trustworthy instrument to make so vital a reservation.) The young women at the reception desk exchanged a swift look. ‘That must have been when Camilla was on,’ murmured one. I gathered at once and despairingly that Camilla was a delinquent girl, since sacked no doubt, who had forgotten to record the booking. In those days fashionable country hotels prided themselves on the attractive amateur débutantes they employed as part-time staff. Camilla had no doubt been attractive, but not, it appeared, reliable. Profuse in their apologies the hotel booked us by phone into a solid old-world establishment in the main square of neighbouring Henley. It was called The Catherine Wheel.

  Our mothers had hit it off pretty well at the wedding party, and continued doing so on the basis of not seeing much of each other until both were old, when they became closer friends. Iris’s mother seemed to take it for granted that we would not want to have children. I suspect she had not wanted them herself, although Iris as she grew up had become her joy and pride. How such a conclusion could have been reached by me as an outside party is difficult to say; but Mrs Murdoch certainly seems to have assumed from the start that the three of us would form a harmoniously self-sufficient triangle, similar to the one she had shared with her daughter and husband. Nor was she wrong, although her own presence in the relationship was happy but hardly noticeable. She continued to live in London; she never bothered us.

  Although no more intrusive in the affairs of her son and daughter-in-law, my own mother would, I knew, have liked grandchildren. She had three sons and only one produced an heir. But she had too much sense and tact to voice this hope. After some initial uneasiness – she had barely met Iris before the wedding – my mother became very deeply attached to her increasingly famous daughter-in-law, and continued to be so until she died, not so very long ago, in her late eighties. By then Iris’s mother, herself a victim of Alzheimer’s, was also dead.

  It had never for a moment occurred to either of us that the disease, or the gene that brought it about, could be hereditary. Indeed apart from the blanket term ‘senile dementia’ the condition had then no specific name, nor did the specialists we consulted about her mother’s case prove in the least helpful, beyond suggesting various physiological explanations and attempting to treat them. Mrs Murdoch’s own doctor, a hardbitten London GP, merely hinted at a fondness for the gin bottle, a suggestion that upset Iris very much, although it was obvious to me that her mother had for some time been putting away a good deal. Why not? She was never lonely, because we had subsidised an old friend of hers, a sterling character, to live with and look after her, but age and its problems are surely entitled to any aids they can find. Alcohol undoubtedly exacerbates the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in many of those who suffer from it, but where would they have been without the stuff? Iris drinks wine nowadays as she has always done, but in diminished quantity, which for her seems natural. Other bottles of various kinds lie about the house, but she ignores them.

  As regards children, more than forty years ago, her attitude seemed equally natural. We hardly spoke of the question, because I suppose we knew we both understood it. Iris’s attitude to procreation, as to sex, was not dismissive: it was detachedly and benevolently indifferent. She herself had other things to do. How many women feel the same, but feel also that it is unnatural to do so, as if motherhood were an achievement they could not let themselves do without? Stevie Smith, the poet, whom Iris knew and liked, used to say in her rather deliberately elfin way, ‘My poems are my kiddo.’ Iris would never have spoken of her novels as her children: she would never have said anything about the matter at all. Her reserve was deep, and as natural to her as it was deep.

  D.H. Lawrence worship was getting into its stride in the mid-fifties, reaching a sort of climax in 1963, the year in which the failure of an Old Bailey court case against Penguin Books licensed Lady Chatterley’s Lover for unlimited printing; the year in which, according to a sardonic poem of Philip Larkin, ‘sexual intercourse began’. There was a sense in which this was true for England, where the matter had not previously been much discussed, or thought suitable for discussion. And so to the post-war generation Lawrence appealed less as a writer than as a cult figure, like the newly famous Beatles, a symbol of enlightenment and modernity. For Iris it was only as a writer that he mattered. I remember hearing a philosophical colleague complaining to her about Lawrence’s ‘half-baked religiosity’ in matters of sex. Iris mildly demurred, saying she thought he was such a marvellous writer it didn’t matter what he wrote about, or how. But sex certainly did become one of the new religions of the sixties and seventies; and when disillusionment set in it was succeeded by a crudely Faustian view: sex as a performance sport, for ever striving after new records, new achievements in the state of the art. All this passed by us, and our own cosy and quietistic approach to the matter.

  There have been moments when I found myself wondering how Iris got on in bed with lovers whose approach was more ambitious or more demanding than my own; and on one occasion I accidentally received an unexpected hint from an acquaintance who had, as I knew, been for a brief period a successful admirer. I did not greatly care for this character, a highly distinguished figure in his own sphere, with a weakness for keeping his friends a trifle overinformed about a current love affair, and how painful or ecstatic or both it was turning out to be. On this occasion he made some remark ab
out how important it was to get the girl proficient at what you wanted to do yourself, indicating that if she was gone on you enough she would – whatever it was. ‘Nothing more discouraging than a partner who won’t enter into the spirit of the thing,’ he observed sagely, and then gave me a sudden guilty look as if he might have given something away. It was unlikely that he knew I was aware of his one time walk-out with Iris, but that brief hangdog look gave me a strong suggestion that he was thinking of her and her shortcomings in bed, thoughts which he realised were now not best communicated to the husband.

  Certainly our bedroom habits (the deep deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly on the chaise longue, as Mrs Pat Campbell noted) were always peaceful and unbothered by considerations of better, or more. The lady in Iris’s novel A Severed Head who complained that her marriage ‘wasn’t getting anywhere’ would probably have made the same observation about her sex life. We expected neither sex nor marriage to get anywhere: we were happy for them to jog on just as they were.

  Although Iris remained quite untroubled by any wish to have a family life of her own she had a touching desire to join in any family activities that might be going on around her. As an only child she greatly welcomed the prospect of having two brothers-in-law, although neither of them showed much interest in her. She bore this patiently, and was rewarded in the course of time by the increasing regard, almost devotion, given her by my middle brother Michael, a bachelor and brigadier in the army, now retired. He had a distinguished military record, but his occupation since retirement has been the repair of monuments in churches derelict and no longer in use: some of them magnificent buildings, mainly in East Anglia. Nothing seemed to give him more pleasure than to take us on tour and to show Iris round any work he had been doing, commenting on the finer points of alabaster restoration – his speciality – and proudly showing off any neglected statue or cherub’s head he had unearthed in the course of his work.