Iris

by John Bayley

  Elizabeth knew very well that the clergyman involved was a crook, as she privately put it, and she also greatly disliked the role played by the Catholic Church in Irish society; but she would never have said so in public, nor been disloyal to a man of the district which she loved and lived in.

  Honor Tracy was also a great friend of Iris’s. She was a fearlessly independent woman with flaming red hair, flamboyant in manner, unrestrained in the expression of her opinions and prejudices. She came from an older family than Elizabeth’s, the Norman De Tracys, who helped to conquer England and then took part in the conquest of southern Ireland in the twelfth century. The Bowens arrived much later: Colonel Bowen had been one of Cromwell’s trusted officers, presented with the estate and land on which he had begun to build Bowen’s Court. Irish history counted for a good deal in the background of both ladies, and each was redoubtable in her own style. None the less Honor Tracy, as she once told Iris, shook in her shoes at the thought of Elizabeth Bowen’s displeasure.

  Elizabeth, oddly enough, was not really at her best as a novelist when writing about Ireland. Perhaps its sorrows, and her own responsibilities there, inhibited her sense of fun. Her own best novels, including the one she was working on at the time of her death and which survives only as a fascinating fragment, were comedies – sometimes tragi-comedies – of English life and manners. She had been most at home in wartime London: Hitler’s blitz on the city helped produce one of her finest novels, The Heat of the Day, as well as some brilliant short stories. The unearthly light of what was then called a ‘bomber’s moon’ transfigures Mysterious Kor, a story about bombed-out wartime London, which a girl working there sees as the ghost city of a poem she has once read.

  Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand

  The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,

  Mysterious Kor, thy walls forsaken stand,

  Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon.

  I always meant to ask Elizabeth where she had read the poem, but I never got around to it. Years after her death her story was our subject at a class I was giving, and when one of the students asked who had written the lines I had to admit I had no idea. Bowen had perhaps written them herself? My curious student – now a doctor and don at Glasgow University – did not leave the matter there, but investigated in the Bodleian library until he found the answer. The poem turned out to be the work of a minor Edwardian poet and man of letters called Andrew Lang, who had written it to his friend Rider Haggard, explorer and author of many best-selling romantic tales, including King Solomon’s Mines. Most of the poem is poor stuff, but Elizabeth when a young girl had no doubt come across it in some long-forgotten anthology of the period, and it had returned to haunt her imagination in maturity, and create her story.

  Iris’s own creative mind worked the same way. Her novels are full of buried quotations remembered from childhood, or once quoted and discussed between us. (One of them is ‘the ouzel cock so black of hue’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which surfaces in A Severed Head and refers obliquely to a cuckolding which takes place in the novel. We used to chant it, together with other catches, when driving in the car.)

  Both Honor and Elizabeth sometimes stayed with us at Steeple Aston after we had settled in the house there. Honor liked to rest between quite gruelling bouts of investigative reporting, and she usually left us to stay at The Bell at Aston Clinton, a pub where she knew the landlord and where she used to stand us marvellously alcoholic lunches and dinners. After giving up working journalism she lived in a small cottage on Achill Island in the West of Ireland, where she wrote her lively comedies of Irish life. The best of these, The Straight and Narrow Path, concerns an Irish priest who once exhorted his flock ‘always to follow the straight and narrow path between virtue and wrongdoing’. It was a true tale: Honor had heard the sermon herself; but though the Irish can be totally irreverent in private and among themselves, they do not care to be publicly teased. Honor’s delightful novels were not read on her native soil, nor were they obtainable. It is a shame, too, that they never seem to have been reprinted, either in England or America. The peculiar powers of Irish censorship, once paramount in the island itself, are still to be reckoned with elsewhere.

  It turned out to be a blessing that we viewed the house at Steeple Aston, because it at once drove all longings for poetical and rivery Taynton out of Iris’s head. Neither house nor village were as pretty as those she had first fallen in love with, but both were old and solid and friendly. A farmhouse had been built on to in the early nineteenth century, and turned into a gentleman’s residence not far from the church. The grounds were large, almost two acres, and sloped sharply downhill to a stream that ran through the valley. On our side of this were ancient ponds, possibly medieval fishponds. These appealed to Iris at once. So did the sheer impracticality of the place, from the point of view of two teachers working in Oxford, fifteen miles away. That did not daunt her at all: she did not even consider disadvantages. The equal impracticality of Bowen’s Court may have influenced her. Cedar Lodge, as the house was rather primly called, was cheap to buy – startlingly cheap – but we discovered later that it was in bad condition, however solid it looked. Mr Palmer, a veteran builder with very bright blue eyes, was soon in constant attendance. He used to gaze wonderingly at Iris as she sat and wrote in an upstairs room, through the ceiling of which water from an undiscoverable source was apt to drip.

  Apart from Mr Palmer, who constituted no sort of social burden, we had the place to ourselves. The previous owner was going to live on the island of Guernsey, in a small modern bungalow her son had bought for her. She was an old lady who had lived long in the village, and she recommended various persons who might come to help or ‘do’ for us. We both felt disinclined to be done for. For the thirty years and more we lived at Cedar Lodge we had no help in the house or garden, and both were presently in a state in which help of any kind would have come too late. That seemed to suit us, or at least to suit Iris: I was less sure of the benefits of what the authoress Rose Macaulay – Iris met her once or twice – used to call ‘letting things go to the devil and seeing what happens when they have gone there.’

  At first I made strenuous efforts to assert the will – my will – over the place. I cleaned, mowed, chopped, painted, tried to repair the electricity. But I soon gave up. Iris always helped me, and seemed herself to enjoy the idea of doing all the things women do in houses, but it was a dream occupation, a part of her imagined world, of the worlds she was creating in her novels as she sat in her dusty sunlit room upstairs, submerged by old letters, papers, broken ornaments, stones she had picked up, or which had been given her by friends. It grieved me then, and still does, that these stones, once so naturally clean and beautiful from continual lustration in a stream, or by the tides of the seashore, should have become as dusty and dead-looking as everything else in the house. But this never seemed to bother Iris in the slightest. The stones for her were Platonic objects, living in some absolute world of Forms, untouched by their contingent existence as a part of the actual and very grubby still life that surrounded us.

  Stones were not the only Platonic objects in our daily life, or – so close that it came to the same thing – in Iris’s imagination. Cooking pots, never properly cleaned in practice, had the same status. So, I felt, did those imaginary badgers which she had invoked once when I had tried to suggest to her what the rewards of married life might be like. ‘Yes,’ she had replied with a sort of wistfulness which gave me a sudden hope that she might be prepared to take the idea of marriage seriously. ‘I do like to imagine your coming home, and me meeting you, and saying “Darling, the badgers have broken in”.’ Her ancient badger fantasy, with its image of a cosy domestic drama, has probably been forgotten, but she used sometimes to say with a smile to friends, or even to interviewers, that she originally had every intention of doing the cooking after we got married. ‘But after a few days John suggested it might go better if he took over.’ The image of herself as cook
and apron-wearer stayed in her mind less long than the to me delightful and hopeful one of herself as wife rushing down to greet her husband with a kiss, and with the mock-horror news that the badgers had broken in.

  And yet her intention of becoming the cook was no idle boast. Iris could cook – could have cooked – magnificently, just as she could have done all sorts of other practical things. While working at the treasury, the most prestigious branch of the civil service, she had made herself an expert during the war years on a tricky concept known as ‘notional promotion in absentia’, which involved assessing pay-rises and promotions which would have accrued, had they remained in their old jobs, to functionaries called up at that time into the armed forces. Senior colleagues consulted her on this question and accepted without demur what she told them. Had she concentrated on any of those careers she could have become a doctor, an archaeologist, a motor mechanic. It used to be thought at one time that Shakespeare might have started off as a horse-holder outside the theatre. A nineteenth-century scholar had observed that, if so, one could be sure that the Bard had held his horses better than anyone else. A really great artist can concentrate and succeed at almost anything, and Iris would have been no exception. If she had borne a child she would have looked after it better and more conscientiously than most mothers, and no doubt would have brought it up better too. But in that case she would not have written the books that she did write.

  I can’t recall myself saying that I would be the cook. To me it just happened, and in any case it was not really cooking. The point was that Iris was working – properly working – and I was determined she should not be distracted from this. Getting something to eat was easy, and we often used to go to a pub on the main road where a good plain dinner could be had cheap. That was long before the present situation in England, when cooking has at last become an art to be treated seriously – overseriously. There was no fiddly nouvelle cuisine forty years ago.

  Yet there had been one occasion when Iris took as many pains as any acolyte in the media-haunted kitchens of today. Well before we were married, and when I really thought she never would marry me, she decided to entertain to supper the same pair – the academic lawyer and his wife – at whose table we had eaten our first meal together. She had another guest too, and made no apology for not including me in the party. She was living in her Beaumont Street flat at the time, on the top floor. There was no dining-room and her attic kitchen was barely a room at all. I had been a little hurt, none the less, and had suggested that if she must entertain the Johnsons, couldn’t she take them to a restaurant? She’d said pacifically she didn’t want to do that: they’d asked her to supper so many times, and she felt the least she could do was to make a special effort of her own. Iris, as I saw then a little gloomily, could be very conscientious about such things.

  She took immense trouble. First of all she bought herself at great expense a red enamel casserole, a boat-shaped one with a close-fitting lid. It weighed about a ton. I think it was the first time either of us had seen such a thing. I gazed at it in awe: Iris with all the pride of new possession. A culinary-minded friend of hers who was partly Greek had told her this was what she needed to prepare the very special Attic dish called stephados. He had told her that if properly done, which only very rarely happened, it was the most delicious dish in the world. He was a philosopher, a follower of Plato, but his real interest was in cooking and telephones. Since he was the inspiration of the dish Iris proposed to prepare it was natural that he should be one of the three guests invited.

  Iris took two days to prepare that dish. I cannot recall exactly what was in it, as neither she nor I ever attempted to prepare it again, but there was a lot of high-quality beef from the market, and olive oil and aubergines and spices and herbs and tomato puree. It was, of course, a colossal success. She allowed me to finish it with her, cold, the following day, and I honestly don’t think I have ever eaten anything more delicious in my life.

  So Iris could cook, and to perfection, just as she might have done all sorts of other things superlatively well. But as I sat eating it with her the following day – and to my great satisfaction she admitted it was even better cold than hot – I had not been able to avoid a feeling of disappointment. Somehow it was not like Iris to have done such a thing, to have pulled off a culinary coup that must have staggered the Johnsons, accustomed as they were to thinking Iris an odd but lovable lovable and unworldly person, a philosopher, a hopeful writer of novels, whom they had got the measure of, whom they could patronise in their own fashion. Was that why she had done it? If so, I could not escape a fellow-feeling with the Johnsons. Friends, who fill their own allotted place in your life, should not behave wholly uncharacteristically. Still less so if you are in love with such a friend, as I was.

  Perhaps Iris knew this too: perhaps that is why it was such a one-off occasion? It surprised me none the less, and continues to do so, trivial as the occasion might now seem. My memory of it could be the difficulty I now feel in writing about Iris as she was. Is it that I can only think of her as she now is, which is for me the same as she has always been? In any case no description of anybody, however loving, can seem to do anything but veer away from the person concerned, not because it distorts their ‘reality’, whatever that may be, but because the describer himself begins to lose all confidence in the picture of the person he is creating. The Iris of my words cannot, I know, be any Iris who existed. In writing about the stephados (or should it be stefados?) episode I can no longer believe in my own account of the Iris who willed it, who so uncharacteristically made it happen.

  The words in which to talk about it are in any case becoming muddled in my mind, because Iris is stirring out of her doze beside me, making me attentive to her, and not to what I am trying to write. And this is the Iris I now know, the unique one as it seems: the one who has been here always: thus the only one I have ever known.

  As for the expensive red casserole boat, it was never used again. Or hardly ever. Maybe it was cooked in by me once or twice, without conviction and without much success. I may have made a few stews eaten without comment by our guests, or perhaps with some kindly routine commendation by one of the women present. Like so many other things in the house it is lost now, undiscoverable, although I remember that the last time I saw it, covered with cobwebs at the bottom of a cupboard, it looked as if worn out, terribly old and tired, with rust patches coming through the red enamel from the iron underneath. But when new it once housed the most perfect dish in the world, made by the person who then seemed, and in a sense was, the least likely person to make it.

  I could record one other cooking experience in Iris’s life, and one I still find quite upsetting to remember. It must have taken place about the time I first met her, or perhaps before I met her. Two friends of hers, the strong-minded female philosopher who practised ‘telegamy’, and a mathematical logician of international standing who was a bachelor, had asked to borrow her room for a day while she was absent. The room she then lived in had a gas-ring and wash-basin but not much else, and they required it not for secret sexual congress but because the mathematician wanted to indulge himself in a culinary experiment. Why they should have required Iris’s room for this purpose I still cannot fathom, except that the room was handy and they knew they could presume on her discretion and her unbounded good nature. (They were right of course, but I still grind my teeth when I think of it, even though they are not my own teeth any more but false ones, a denture.) The experiment was in the manufacture of herring soup, which the mathematician, Viennese but possibly with Baltic origins, swore he was on the verge of perfecting. The philosopher affected not to believe him, and swore in her turn – she was a lady with a strong streak of puckish humour – that she could never be induced under any circumstances to partake of such a dish, however exquisitely prepared. The very idea of it was repellent to her. So they made what amounted to a bet.

  The mathematician won the bet. The soup was a triumph: the philosopher capi
tulated and said that it was so. Indeed she consumed it with relish. When Iris returned a few days later it was to find her room in the most gruesome possible disorder, smelling strongly of fish, and her landlady furious. Other tenants had complained of the noise and the smell. Miss Murdoch’s reputation, once immaculate, was now in ruins. In the eyes of the landlady she was, and remained, a fallen woman: one who allowed the most unspeakable orgies to take place in her room, and no doubt participated in them herself. Iris left the house not long after, although its position and amenities had suited her very well. But that was not what upset me when Iris told me the tale, which she did in a tolerant amused way, without a trace of resentment.

  Indeed she remained, and still does, on the best possible terms with both parties, even though neither attempted an apology for what had taken place, or even seemed to think one might be appropriate. It annoys me intensely that she should still revere them, none the less. But what upset me even more, and for some reason can still go through me like a spear, was that Iris found one of her most treasured possessions lying on the floor of the room, hideously violated. It was a blue silk chiffon scarf which her mother had given her as a special birthday present. Its state when discovered was so repulsive that Iris had no choice but to take it straight out to the dustbin, holding her nose while she did so. The logician had required the finest possible sieve to strain the end product of his masterpiece, and the philosopher, casually opening a drawer, had handed him the scarf.