Iris

by John Bayley

  *

  Iris surprised me when the radio was on and we were having lunch – toast, cheese, beetroot and lettuce salad – by asking, ‘Why does he keep saying “education?” ’ She sounded anxious. Anxiety and agitation are so much a part of her speech now, like the unending query, ‘When are we going?’ But lunch and supper are usually quite peaceful times. Trying to make everything as much a reassuring routine as possible. But now something on the radio has very much unreassured her. Government ministers say ‘education’ so often. It ought to be a soothing word, even if a comparatively meaningless one.

  It occurs to me that Iris is worried that it might mean something different now, which she has failed to grasp. In a sense of course that is true. It refers to skills with computers and such, which we know nothing about. But I think it is the frequency of the word in political speech that bothers her. It becomes almost like her own queries.

  I try to say something about the importance of education, and everyone getting enough of it. Iris still looks anxious. ‘Do they read books?’ I wonder whether education now chiefly means reading books, as it did when she was at school and college. Her coherence perturbs me. Normally now sentences trail off, become deadlocked – start again in another place. Only anxiety queries complete themselves, and this seems to be one. I remember the kindly specialist at the hospital advising that another word suggested from outside can as it were clear the circuit, temporarily allay the language anxiety. ‘It’s a question of learning, I suppose. As we used to.’ Her face does clear a little. Learning is not a word one hears much now, and certainly not ‘book learning’. ‘Education’ has taken over. But learning is, or used to be, the more specific term.

  When land is sold and money spent,

  Then learning is most excellent.

  The old rhyming proverb returns to my head – is it borne on the same mysterious circuitry that has failed in Iris’s case?

  *

  ‘When are we going?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we go.’

  Iris always responds to a jokey tone. But it is sometimes hard to maintain. Violent irritation possesses me and I shout out before I can stop myself, ‘Don’t keep asking me when we are going!’ Only a short time ago, as it seems, this would have registered as a ‘tantrum’, and the circuit would have visibly adjusted itself and responded with that mixture of amusement and forbearance, complete understanding, which survived as an automatic but infinitely welcome response. One notices that a lot of women respond to snappish husbands in public, and no doubt in private too, with what Milton, describing Eve, tellingly refers to as ‘sweet austere composure’. The opposite of understanding. Eve was the first to rail herself off in sex disapproval.

  Iris never did that. She never got cross herself, and never does now: but when I did so in the past she would soothe me by a particular sort of reassurance, implying that I was most lovable and close to her when I was being angry, silly, or tiresome.

  Now her face just crumples into tears. I hasten to comfort her and she always responds to comfort. We kiss and embrace now much more than we used to.

  *

  Often something that Iris says now, or a word she repeats, starts me off too on some more or less dotty train of association. I remember her mother with early Alzheimer’s – not diagnosed or labelled then – used to repeat a word in a touching way, as if it were a talisman or portent. If somebody said ‘journey’ or ‘Baron’s Court’, where she lived, she would go on repeating it at intervals, and the same if the word happened to be ‘shandy’ or ‘ham and cheese’. Once the mind attends to this involuntary habit it becomes a conscious one. I become aware that the word ‘learning’ has been popping up at intervals in my mind, and so play with it idly.

  Significant, perhaps, that it is in some way a competitive word. A learned man stands out from his fellows: an educated man does not especially do so. Hence education is a more OK word, something we can all have if the government goes about it the right way. It used to be normal to try to shine, to have read some book or books that others had not, to be able to quote. Lord Birkenhead or someone like that proclaimed in the 30s – was it in Oxford? – that there were still ‘plenty of glittering prizes for the sharp sword’. The comment was adapted, ironically, by Auden in his poem ‘Oxford’, so attitudes to that sort of thing must already have been changing. If prizes are given now they must be given to all. In theory at least.

  It’s a relief in a way that things have changed. The atmosphere of ‘learning’ is always tiresome, can be oppressive. Even my dear Barbara Pym, whose novels I am so fond of, must have been awful when she was young, and all her set too, because they were always trying to dazzle with clever remarks, or by neatly capping quotations. Innocent enough, and rather charming in her early novels, but it must have been fatiguing in life. Socially speaking, people thought they had to try in those days.

  Iris is a great contrast with all that. When young she was already formidably learned, but I’m sure it never showed. Perhaps considered unsuitable for serious women to show it? Male dons certainly vied with each other, and I remember disliking it while trying to keep up with it. Nowadays Common Room conversation is blessedly untaxing. But does ‘learning’ require some sort of overt display, like a bird’s feathers, to show how important it still is, or should be? It would have been thought odd if Prime Minister Blair had proclaimed his new government’s policy to have been ‘Learning, learning, learning’, instead of ‘Education, education, education’. In spite of its competitive nature learning is ideally an end in itself, and no government particularly wants to encourage that, or to pay for it either.

  15 April 1997

  Moving from stage to stage. How many are there? How many will there be? I used to dread her moment of waking, because the situation seemed to strike her then in full force, at least for a minute or two. Reassuring noises, so far as possible, and then she would go back to sleep, and I would sit beside her reading or typing. The sound of it seemed to help as reassurance. Iris’s greed for sleep had something desperate about it, and yet she slept, and still sleeps, so easily and so long in the morning that it was a great mutual comfort. Lying beside me she is like an athlete who has passed on the torch to a back-up member of the relay. I couldn’t do what she had done, but I was doing something.

  Not a good metaphor though. It would be truer to say that I myself was reassured by her unawareness of anything that I might be doing on my own. It would have been unbearable if she had shown her old friendly interest. Where work was concerned we had always left each other alone, so that being cut off now about such things was positively welcome. The simpler and more primitive our needs and emotions now, like those of babies to mothers, the more absolute they feel. The exasperation of being followed about the house now by Iris is as strong and genuine as is my absolute need for it. Were she to avoid me, or ‘tactfully’ leave me alone, I would pursue her as anxiously, if not quite so obsessively, as she now pursues me. I don’t feel any particular pleasure or emotion when her whole face lights up at the sight of me, when I come back to the car after ten minutes shopping. But I remember it if I wake up in the night, and then reach out to her. The ‘lion face’ of Alzheimer’s used to be transformed in that way when her mother saw daughter Iris. Not that Iris’s face has grown as expressionless as her mother’s used to be. Sitting waiting for me in the car she looks quite alert and amiable, and passing strangers smile at her.

  But thank goodness the stage of that old despair on waking seems to be over. Now she makes a soft chuckling sound and looks at me like the Teletubby baby in the blue sky on TV. No anxious queries. We exchange a few of the old nonsense words before she goes to sleep again. As the condition gets worse it also gets better. It seems to compensate each new impoverishment. Should be more thankful for that.

  *

  The agony of travel nowadays. Iris has always loved travelling, and craves it now more compulsively than ever. I have always detested the business of leaving home, and was so
thankful in the old days to drive her to the station and wave her goodbye. Now I have a fever of travel angst – taxis, tickets, train-times. Iris never worried about all that. She used to arrive at the station like a Russian peasant and wait for the first train to arrive.

  The worst of both worlds. Although Iris is compulsively eager to be ‘going’ – somewhere, anywhere – she is in as much of a flap in her own way as I am. At the station she keeps repeating, ‘Why didn’t you tell me we were going?’ I had told her many many times. Now I tell her again sharply, and with her own degree of querulous repetition. People look round at us. I am fumbling in my wallet, checking the tickets. They are hard to separate, and after shuffling them wildly again and again I can still find only one return ticket. The whole system is absurd; why must they give us four separate tickets when two would do? It’s definitely not there. I rush to the ticket office, where a queue is made to unwind in serpentine fashion between rope barriers. My ticket man has drawn his little curtain and gone off. The customer at the other guichet seemed to want a round the world ticket, and to be in no hurry about getting it. He and the ticket clerk canvass the possibilities in leisurely fashion. Iris clutches me anxiously, urging us to run to a train which has just come in, the wrong train I hope. At last the ticket man is free. I produce the receipt and the delinquent tickets. No, he can do nothing – it wasn’t his sale. I turn away in despair. Why can’t we just go home?

  Iris has not understood the problem and keeps urging me towards the wrong train. At that moment a man comes up to us and holds out a ticket. It is the original ticket man himself, strangely naked and unrecognisable now he’s not behind the counter. He doesn’t explain what happened but gives me a small collusive smile and walks rapidly back to his place of work.

  On the train I keep counting the tickets. The elderly couple opposite look sympathetically at Iris. I am clearly the one who’s become a problem.

  Utterly exhausted and drenched in sweat. Vague heart sensations too. And the whole thing so trivial. Alzheimer’s obviously has me in its grip, and the ticket man too. As well as Iris, and probably everyone else.

  Does the carer involuntarily mimic the Alzheimer condition? I’m sure I do.

  Sitting exhaustedly in the train I suddenly recall a droll moment at the time when Iris seemed more or less to have decided to marry me. She was going down to her old school – to give the prizes or something – and suggested I should come along. After her business there was over she wanted to call on the retired headmistress, a famous old white-haired lady, who lived in a flat on the school premises. In her bleak way she had been very kind, regarding schoolgirl Iris as the jewel in her crown. I was introduced, and after a few minutes managed to slip away, leaving the pair of them together. When Iris came out she was looking much amused. ‘Do you want to know what BMB thought about you?’ she asked. I expressed a natural curiosity. ‘Well,’ said Iris, ‘she just said: “He doesn’t look very strong.” ’

  I didn’t bother about being strong in those days. Now I have to try, but I’m sure the attempt wouldn’t deceive BMB.

  Kind friends up our street are giving a Sunday morning drinks party. I used to enjoy the quiet of Sunday mornings, the Sunday paper, leisurely breakfast with Iris working upstairs, absence of morning anxiety about what I had to do that day. In those days I should have made some excuse, Iris acquiescing. She wouldn’t have minded going, but knew I wouldn’t want to. Now it offers a welcome distraction. I say nothing about it until 11. If I did she would panic, demand why I hadn’t told her sooner. She does not distinguish now between what she wants to do and what is happening.

  ‘Are we going to London?’

  ‘No, just up the street. You’ll know them when we get there. They’re very nice. You’ll like it.’

  I know this is true, but it produces a ‘trouser grimace’ as I now call it in my mind. Every evening we have the battle of the trousers. She wants to go to bed in them, and everything else she is wearing too. My resistance to this is half-hearted, compared with the determination she shows on the issue. Sometimes I win, more or less dragging them off. Iris gives up the struggle, but produces a frightful grimace, an expression wholly new and different from anything her face ever did in the past. It always unnerves me, and is becoming more frequent in other situations.

  Not that I care about her trousers. Our habits have never been exactly hygienic; and yet distinguishing day from night now seems vital to our saving routines. Twice in the day, at ten in the morning and five in the evening, panic and emptiness descend, not because there is something we have to do but because there isn’t. Routine has no suggestions to make. All I can do then is to promise the next thing soon. A drink. Lunch, or supper.

  Iris’s fear of other people if I’m not there is so piteous that I cannot bring myself to arrange for carers to ‘keep her company’, or to take her to the age therapy unit. All that will have to come. Meanwhile I am ruthless about getting her ready for the party, confident that she will enjoy it when she gets there, as they used to tell us in childhood.

  She does. It is a nice party. I marvel, as I have often done before, at the way in which guests enjoy being guests. Standing opposite someone and keeping going, holding eye contact in the same practised precarious way that one holds glass and canapé. Like a naval battle in Nelson’s times: ship to ship, yardarm to yardarm. Sometimes another ship looms up through the noise of battle. Should I switch targets, or redouble broadsides against the present opponent? There is something remorseless about the concentration required. No one wants to be drifting aimlessly through the battle, guns silent, disengaged ....

  The extraordinary thing is that Iris can, as it were, serve her guns and return fire just like everybody else. I shouldn’t have brought her if I hadn’t known it would be so. Her face becomes animated – no trace of trouser grimace; she is playing her part just like the rest of us. Mustn’t this be good therapy? I should like to think so, but exercise in that sense would imply improvement, recovery. This happy distraction can only be for the moment. I close cautiously on the stern (still automatically Nelsonian) of the guest who is talking to Iris. He is giving a tremendous impression of being good at his work, and happy at it. Half listening, while at the same time engaging my own opponent closely, I overhear a lively account of the way things are done in an Insurance Adjustment office. Smiling Iris listens closely – her attention must be flattering. Then I hear her say: ‘What do you do?’ From the face opposite her it is evident that the question has been repeated several times in the last few minutes. Undiscouraged he begins all over again.

  Some people might actually find it more restful at a party to talk to someone more or less with Iris’s condition. I think I should myself. Apart from making you feel you are performing a service to the community it is also in the short run less demanding and taxing than the conventional art of party intercourse.

  Coming up to me the hostess says: ‘Isn’t Iris wonderful?’ She sounds surprised, perhaps thankful that there is no squeaking or gibbering going on. I am conscious of a base sense of annoyance, even exasperation. People who see Iris on such occasions assume there must be nothing much to worry about. Suppose I were to say to our hostess, ‘You should see how things are at home.’ Thank goodness one cannot or does not say things like that at parties.

  When we get home I try to keep Iris interested in the party, saying how much people had liked seeing her. In retrospect the party does seem to have been a happy time, I am already looking back on it with nostalgia. But it is not remembered. Iris begins to say anxiously, ‘When do we go?’ I wonder how many times she asked the insurance man what it was that he did.

  10 May 1997

  Continually surprised by the way in which the most unexpected people look a little embarrassed if I make some flippant remark about the caring services, the welfare ethic, even ‘lone’ mothers (previously single mothers). Can it be that nice people don’t mock such things, even as a joke? No one needs to be nice about sex any more, or r
eligion. But the modern feeling about social or state ‘compassion’ is uncannily like the old silence about sex, or the reverence about religious beliefs. It’s puritanical too, blasphemy not now recognised as a part of faith, as it was in the older religions.

  ‘Niceness’ is always with us, and a good thing too, but it shifts its ground, even though still clinging precariously on to its ambiguities of meaning. Iris’s novel The Nice and the Good implied these in a masterly way, with as much humour as precision. Does that novel, her others too, none the less demonstrate in some way the inescapability of innocence, perhaps arising from a secure and happy childhood? Iris was both a nice child and a good one, and her parents were the same. None of the three had religion; all were, in the theological sense, naturally Christian souls. Like many philosophers Iris is impatient of wickedness, its commonplaceness, its knowing conceit.

  The bad despise the good: confident, and with some justification, that the hapless good may think they ‘understand’ the bad, but in fact can have no true awareness of them. In the characters of her novels Iris substitutes the desire for power, which fascinates her, for commonplace disgusting wickedness, which she is neither fascinated by nor understands. To understand wickedness you must resemble it, possess some at least of its knowing conceit and its inherent dullness. You must be, as Isaiah Berlin said of Dostoevsky, ‘not a very nice man’.

  An argument with Iris once about that, or rather about the good man, Alyosha Karamazov. A projection of the author’s will, I said, whereas Dostoevsky’s Underground Man slides effortlessly and absolutely into existence. Why? Because Dostoevsky was as boringly familiar with his Underground Man as he was with himself, while Alyosha is basically an idea, a good idea of course. Iris objected that great novelists were explorers as well as natural knowers. Wasn’t Dostoevsky going to send Alyosha into the pit of hell in a later volume, make him commit all the sins of man? Not real sins I objected, because they wouldn’t have been dull enough, nor conceited enough. Not natural. They would have been sins in the author’s will, not in the book’s reality.