Iris

by John Bayley

  Iris wrote Hergé a fan letter, and thanking her in reply he mentioned that he would be signing copies in Hamley’s toyshop, halfway up Regent Street. We were in the shop on the day, and Iris had a long chat with the great man, telling him about her time in Brussels with the relief organisation UNRRA, just after the war ended. She never spoke of this to anyone else. He was a big gangling sandy-haired man, like a scoutmaster as we agreed afterwards, and he spoke excellent English. Iris’s fondness for the boy reporter, and his moderately alcoholic older friend Captain Haddock, had made her suppose that their creator was very likely homosexual. I think she hoped he was, for she had an odd streak of romanticism about gay men, and was apt sometimes to be naive in her assessment of who was what. I doubted she was right about the author of Tintin, and by chance happened to see lately in the paper what was I think an obituary article, mentioning a long and happy marriage, and hinting that he had also been something of a womaniser.

  I recall the day we met him because it was the day we bought a gramophone. We had no TV of course, and it was some years before we even acquired a radio. Our first LP was Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures from an Exhibition’, which was quite new to us; and I can never listen to it now on the radio – the gramophone and LP have long since vanished – without remembering hearing it raptly with Iris that first evening, and how the Great Gate of Kiev seemed to resound in harmony with the spaghetti we were eating, and the red wine. Food and music are very contextual in that way. Later we became fond of song albums, chiefly Scottish and Irish airs, the early Beatles too, and we used to chant together an imaginary pop song whose words had somehow come into existence between us. In its early version it ran something like

  Waterbird, waterbird, I love you

  Waterbird, waterbird hoo hoo hoo.

  I think it may have been suggested by the low clucking call of the moorhens down on our pond. Iris later tidied it up (the song not the pond) and put it into one of her novels.

  When we had a radio we used to listen to the Archers, a long-running soap which came on at twenty to two, during our lunch-time. We put down our books to listen to it. We then discussed the characters and their adventures, or lack of them. I was all for romance: Iris preferred the villains, who always had BBC accents while the honest folk conversed in various sorts of rustic dialect. The Archers is still going, but I have lost interest in it now that Iris can no longer listen with me, to make out who the persons are and what they are up to. The high spot of her radio life was long ago, in the days when the Home Service, as it was then called, used to run a lengthy serial tale between five and six in the evening. Her favourite, featuring the slim dark-haired young heroine Mary McCaskabell, was called ‘Dark House of Fear’. The heroine’s name perhaps reminded her of the north of Ireland, and she became totally gripped every evening by the lurid development of the tale. I loved watching her as she listened.

  I was always intrigued by the ways in which Iris’s creative mind seemed to work, never bothering itself much with ‘highbrow’ literature, however much she might herself enjoy reading Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and so forth, but latching on to unexpectedly simple and straightforward stories with a popular appeal. These her unconscious mind could always make something of, although she never read them in book form but only heard them on the radio. I was reminded of Dostoevsky’s own interest in lurid newspaper stories, which often found their way into his novels.

  — 7 —

  In some way, or so I felt, the house itself let us know when it was time to depart. That was nearly fifteen years ago. Our most ambitious project had been to remove an inner wall and turn round the lower steps of the dark narrow staircase, making a wide and rather too obviously spacious descent into what now became a hall. Young Mr Palmer and his helper had stood precariously on ladders, manoeuvring a gigantic steel girder into position on top of the new brick piers. Owing to some elementary miscalculation this RSJ (‘rolled steel joist’) however massive in appearance, was barely long enough to span the gap, and one of its ends only just rested on the brickwork. After it had been shrouded over with paint and plaster I used sometimes to give it a glance of apprehension as I descended the stairs, wondering if it would come crashing down on top of us, as on the day when Samson pulled down the temple on the Philistines.

  The girder is still there and the house still stands, so I suppose that young Mr Palmer’s reassurances to me at the time have been justified. But I felt none the less that the venerable spirit of Cedar Lodge resisted this radical alteration. For one thing the house did not, as we hoped and expected, feel at once roomier and more compact. It merely felt colder, the wide open spaces of the new hall more difficult to heat. Our successors have made more drastic alterations, transforming the old house at some expense into a mansion that has even figured in the magazine House and Garden. But houses, like people, can lose their old character without gaining a new one. Iris’s instinct never to return is probably justified.

  Wanting very much to give her a small pool in which she could swim at all seasons, or at least splash about in, I plotted with young Mr Palmer to make one in the derelict greenhouse. It was only a few feet square but nearly five deep, so that a few strokes were possible in any direction. The place was roofed in a simple fashion with polystyrene, and once filled the pool was kept topped up with rainwater from the roof. The water became brown and clear, with the authentic river smell, the concrete sides deliciously silky and slimy to the touch. The rainwater had a softness not to be found in ordinary swimming pools and remained surprisingly pure; I never needed to put in chemicals. I put in a few small fish, green tench and carp, who seemed happy enough in the dark depths. Surrounded by the delicate greenery which sprouts in abandoned greenhouses it was most agreeable in high summer, a paradisal plunge pool known to some of our friends as ‘Iris’s Wallow’.

  My ambition was to make it possible to swim there all the year round, and I devised a method which would have been an electrician’s nightmare had I allowed any electrician to become involved. The place was wired for some old electric heating pipes; and as the power point seemed in reasonably good condition I installed a couple of immersion heater elements, intended for use in a domestic heating system. They lay on the bottom, and when switched on sent a cloud of bubbles up through the brown water. I was careful to put a notice beside the pool, advising, with the aid of a skull and crossbones, that the power must be switched off before entry into the pool. Even this elementary precaution seemed barely necessary; one does not after all electrocute oneself by dipping a finger in the electric kettle, and these heating elements were designed to operate when immersed. The cables could have caused trouble however, and I did not like the idea of finding Iris floating and insensible, although she herself remained blissfully unaware of any hazard involved, and I was always careful to be present when the pool was being used in its heated state.

  Like so many brilliant and inventive ideas this one was not destined to be a long-running success. It worked beautifully, but Iris’s arthritis was getting worse (today it is inexplicably much better) and a walk in the cold, even to the now heated pool, became uninviting. It was in any case destined to be my final attempt to impose innovation and improvement on Cedar Lodge. After it I relapsed into quietism, and the house seemed to approve of that. Iris had always been pleased for me whenever I had planned anything, but not greatly concerned about it herself. The house and its garden never featured in any of her books. Perhaps in her own way she was too intimate with it, and too close for it to become involved in her own imaginative life.

  The grass of the former lawns grew longer and longer and more tussocky; I never attempted to mow them now. The box hedges, neat and trim when we moved in, had climbed to giant size and height, almost obscuring the front of the house, which faced north and was in any case on the sombre side; the southern ‘aspect’, from which one went down into the garden, was much more sunny and attractive. Letting things go, a principle which we had once followed almost unconsciously,
was now asserting itself as a positive force. The house seemed waiting, with benevolence and without haste or regrets, for its next occupant. It had always made clear in some way that we were not the kind of people who should be living in it. We had not been county people, or even country people, nor did we properly belong to the new race of enterprising commuters who left the village to their jobs in London or Birmingham, returning to improve their properties at the weekend.

  There were still many good moments. A family of kingfishers was reared somewhere by the pond, and I went down one day to find small apparitions in vivid turquoise and red exploding among the willow-trees and uttering thin piercing cries. They must have just crawled out of the fishbone-lined tunnel where they had been born, and they could barely fly. Another time, on a day in February which was as warm and humid as summer, we watched black and white woodpeckers drilling holes for their nest. The tree on which they operated was only a few yards from the drawing-room window.

  And yet, for all these favouring distractions, the moment seemed to have come. I remembered Mary Queen of Scots, just before her execution, telling her ladies in waiting that it was time to go. Anachronistic fancy might imagine her raising a black-sleeved arm and looking at a watch. Mustn’t keep Queen Elizabeth and her executioner waiting. For us too it was time to go, but we didn’t know where. Should we try to find another place in the country? That seemed pointless – nothing could be so good as what we had. To Oxford then? Yes, that seemed the obvious choice. I still had my job: Iris was deep into what proved in the end to be the most lengthy arduous project she had yet undertaken – the Gifford Lectures, to be delivered in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Later she was to incorporate them in her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

  In retrospect we seem to have become absentees about this time, like the rentiers in The Cherry Orchard who spend their time in German resorts while feeling a real and profound nostalgia for their estates back in Russia. Cedar Lodge was still very much home, but we seemed less and less to be there. Almost unconsciously we came to spend more and more time with hospitable friends, who themselves appeared to take for granted that we had become permanent waifs and strays, needing a home now rather than a home from home. We spent weeks in this way at Cranborne with my old tutor and colleague David Cecil, whose wife Rachel, to whom I had dedicated my first novel, had recently died. He was often visited for tea in the afternoon by Janet Stone, herself now a widow, living in a small house in an old street on the riverbank, just outside the close in Salisbury. We could bathe there in the river from her tiny garden, in the shadow of the ancient stone bridge which had once taken the high road over Salisbury Plain past the cathedral and down to the coast. I was never much impressed by the cathedral, but it always made me think of Thomas Hardy and that haunting tale of Salisbury ‘On the Western Circuit’, the story of which I was to be reminded in sadder circumstances after Iris had developed Alzheimer’s.

  From Janet Stone’s drawing-room window, opening on the river, we fed the Avon’s busy population of coots and mallards and swans. Janet would stand there to watch us bathing, her gravely beautiful face always sad in repose. She had never got over the sudden death of her husband Reynolds; nor, I think, the move from Litton Cheney, the magic vicarage under a Dorset hill where they had lived for years. A wonderful hostess, also an outstandingly good photographer, she seemed made to live among a lot of people, caring for them, amusing them. Widowhood did not suit her at all. She loved visitors; she taught Iris grospoint embroidery, a simple skill but one to which Alzheimer’s, alas, swiftly put a stop. When she died at last, quietly in her big four-poster bed, she looked like a medieval saint stretched on a tomb.

  We had also taken to going abroad again, not on our own as we used to do when younger, but shepherded and looked after by a pair of great friends, Borys and Audi Villers, the dedicatees of one of Iris’s novels. Audi, a Norwegian – Borys was Russian Jewish Polish – had formerly been a travel courier. She suffered from severe asthma, which was why they had built themselves a charming little house in the interior of the Canary Island of Lanzarote, where the volcanic air – that at least is what it feels like – is particularly pure and dry. Their house, high up, is surrounded by black hills and fields of lava, growing the tenderest and mildest garlic and onions in the world. This seems inexplicable, as it never rains, and the only other vegetation is an occasional withered looking fig or palm tree. Lanzarote is a nice place if you avoid the beaches, which are black not only with lava but with German and British tourists. Audi used to take us to swim in the small harbour where the steamer left for the next island. The fish population there was considerable; an extremely handsome purple fish who sometimes appeared in the dark blue depths was my undoing. In my excitement at the sight of him through the glass mask I took in water, and inadvertently spat out with it my lower plate of teeth. For the remainder of that stay I had to give up eating delicious crisp tapas and crustacea. Even a mild Canary onion was too much for me. It was like trying to cut with one half of a pair of scissors. Ironically my dentist was himself on a Canary holiday when we got home, but on his return he regaled me with warning stories. Watch out for your dog if you are a denture wearer, he told me: the airedale belonging to one of his patients had once found and eaten his master’s set. He also tried to cheer me up by pointing out the timelessness of tooth acrylic: it is the last thing to go in the crematorium. My teeth, uncorrupted, would lie five fathom in the harbour ooze for evermore.

  But some lessons are, as it were, too improbable to be learnt. I forgot this one when swimming in Lake Como a couple of years later. We were guests at some academic conference; I contrived to repeat the accident. This time it was a school of perch, cruising sprucely striped among the lake weeds, who were my undoing. Italian doctors of philosophy were charmed by what they regarded as a peculiarly English misfortune. Hearing of my accident the waitress in the villa dining-room trilled with mirth like a stage soprano. Niente al dente per il professore inglese! she would cry merrily. Only Iris remained firmly sympathetic, and did her best, wearing my mask and up-ended like a duck, to probe the shallows where the teeth had vanished. No luck of course.

  Borys and Audi loved to visit Italy and often took us with them. Since they were also picture lovers we saw again the Piero Resurrection, and we became knowledgable about frescoes, and the isolated churches that cherish a single masterpiece. Audi had once taken her flock on guided tours of Capri and the Amalfi peninsula, and one year she decided to revisit. My instinct was to shun such picturesque places, but ‘Just you wait,’ said Audi, with a smile like the goddess Freya’s, and she was right as usual. Iris fell specially for Sorrento; I think the old-fashioned seafront reminded her of Dublin, the Kingstown harbour of her childhood and the saltwater baths where her father taught her to swim.

  The bathers down below our hotel room windows were all deeply bronzed, but on our first morning there suddenly appeared a tall woman – she must have been well over six feet – with black hair and a very white skin. Wearing a deep purple bikini she looked immensely dignified but also rather sinister, like the goddess of death herself, come to claim a victim. I was fascinated, and pointed her out to Iris, whose less romantic view was that she must be a female drug-dealer. I knew better than to try to nudge Iris’s inspiration, which rarely or never began with an incident from real life, but I hoped none the less that the scene below might alchemise at some time into one of her plots. To my surprise however, she nodded down at the woman and said ‘Why don’t you write a story about her.’

  From their balcony Borys and Audi had also glimpsed the apparition, which made a little fantasy for us to laugh about at breakfast-time. Encouraged by them all I dreamed up a possible scenario which ended as a novel, Alice, the first I had tried to write for nearly forty years. Alice produced a sequel, The Queer Captain, and eventually the third of a trilogy, George’s Lair.

  Although it was not until two or three years later that the Alzh
eimer symptoms became fully apparent, I have sometimes wondered if Iris knew that her own career as a novelist was nearly over. Was she encouraging me to start again? Sorrento was somehow a sad place, in spite of its charms. It was also, alas, Borys’s last holiday. He died a few months later and Audi missed him terribly. She went on living in Lanzarote, and we went on seeing a great deal of her. For me too one of her holiday schemes was again a source of inspiration. She took us to The Hague for the Vermeer exhibition. The crowds made it difficult to see the actual pictures, but the ‘Girl Wearing A Red Hat’ was reproduced on posters and tickets. A story suggested itself. I told it to Audi and Iris as we sat in a peculiar little restaurant which itself began to take part in the plot.

  I arranged for the novel to end in a locale we knew well. Stephen and Natasha Spender had acquired the ruin of an old stone farmhouse in Provence, which Natasha had skilfully rebuilt over the years. It was very isolated, up in the limestone Alpilles district near St Rémy, and at first there was no water. Iris and I enjoyed fetching cans from the well in the nearest village. In the great heat of July we used to plunge into the ice-cold ‘agricultural’, an old irrigation canal that wound through the steep contours of the hills, running swiftly among the dense thickets of green canes and rosemary and cypress that bordered abandoned apricot and olive groves. They seemed to have reverted to a wild state. Nightingales sang there in June, even in July. A gripping sequence in Iris’s novel Nuns and Soldiers was inspired by our discovery of a tunnel in the maquis-covered hillside. We could see light at the end of it and ventured to wade through. The hero of the novel had a more exciting adventure in a subterranean stream. But the magic place, the overpowering heat of midday, and the grey alpine water rushing on its mysterious course through the abandoned country – these were just as Iris described them.