Iris

by John Bayley

  Iris has heard nothing from a great friend, a novelist whom she had once befriended and inspired, counselled and consoled. Had this now famous friend left her, abandoned in her silence? Was it in resignation or in bitterness of spirit that she spoke those words? Sailing alone into the dark ....

  In my own daily intercourse with Iris words don’t seem to be necessary, hardly appear to be uttered. Because we don’t talk coherently, and because we talk without seeming to ourselves to be talking, nothing meaningful gets said. The clear things Iris does sometimes come out with are intended for public consumption. They are social statements. They have the air of last remarks before all the lights go out.

  1 December 1997 (I think, a Sunday anyway.)

  I always liked a Sunday morning. Iris never noticed them. She still doesn’t, but now I find TV a great help. Looking in on her as I potter about I am relieved to see her sitting intently, like a good child, watching the Sunday morning service. Later she is still there; the service has changed to an animated cartoon featuring bible history, Roman soldiers etc., in which she is equally engrossed. Thank goodness for Sunday morning TV.

  There are occasions when I have such a strong wish to remind Iris of something we did or saw that I find myself describing it hopefully, in great detail. I don’t say, ‘You probably don’t remember, but –.’ Instead I now have the feeling that she is trying to follow something I am myself creating for her. Spring is more vivid when you talk about it in winter, and I find myself telling her about one of our visits with Peter and Jim to Cascob in Wales, at the end of last May. The small school house, where twenty or thirty children were once taught, lies on a rising knoll at the end of a steep and narrow valley. It is an old place, a single large high-roofed room, with the schoolmistress’s house, one up and one down, almost touching but separate. The friends have joined the two, and made some alterations, but left the structure intact. The crown of the hillock on which it stands slopes sharply down to their pond, with a little island in the middle, thick with alder and willow and with flowers in summer. Just beside the school is an extremely old church, half buried in green turf nearly up to the window openings on one side, so that the sheep could look in. An immense yew tree, much older even than the church, makes a kind of jungle beside it, dark red with shadows.

  On that visit to this enchanting place we soon found a special routine. A pair of redstarts were nesting just above the back doorway. If we sat motionless in the little courtyard, or looked out of the schoolhouse window we could see them come and go: small flame-like birds, looking much too exotic to be seen in England. The breast and tail (steort means tail in Old English) are bright cinnamon red, the head jetblack, with a white ring on the neck. When they hovered near the nest-hole, wary of a possible watcher, they were as jewel-like as hummingbirds.

  After watching the redstarts our ritual was to go round to the churchyard, where we could have quite a different experience, though of the same kind. Jim had fixed a nesting box on a great ash tree where the graveyard bordered their copse. He told us a pair of pied flycatchers were nesting there. This is a little bird even more rare and local than the redstart, a migrant who now only comes back to the borders of south and central Wales. We stood by a gravestone, watching. Nothing happened for a long time. Suddenly and soundlessly a neat little apparition, in black and pure white, appeared by the nest-hole. It was motionless for a moment and then vanished inside. We looked at each other, hardly believing we had really seen it. It seemed like a pure speck of antiquity, robed in the hues of the old religion, almost as if a ghostly emanation from the church itself.

  After this we could not keep away from the gravemound by the edge of the copse, the vantage point only a few feet away from the nest on the ashtree. The little birds seemed unaware of us, just as ghosts would have been. Their busy movements had a soft spirit-like silentness. Peter and Jim told us they did have a small song, but we never heard them make a sound. Although we saw both birds, and identified the male and the female, we could not really believe in their physical existence at all. Like the ghosts in Macbeth they came like shadows, so departed.

  In the winter I find myself telling all this to Iris, and she listens with a kind of bemused pleasure and toleration, as if I were making up a fairy-story. She doesn’t believe it, but she likes to hear it. I found myself that these bird memories, and the whole memory pattern of summer sunshine and green leaves, was becoming subtly different from what it had been like at the time. It really was as if I had made the whole thing up.

  I remembered that Kilvert, the Victorian parson who had lived not far off in the same part of Wales, and had so much loved writing his Diary about his days, his walks and his priestly duties, had once confided to it that what he wrote down was more real to him than what he had actually seen that day or the one before, and was now writing about. Only memory holds reality. At least this seems to have been his experience, and that of a lot of other writers too – romantic souls who, like Wordsworth (worshipped by Kilvert), made the discovery that for them to remember and to write was to make their lives, and their sense of living things. The actual experience was nothing beside it, a mere blur always on the move, always disappearing. Proust or D.H. Lawrence must have felt the same, however much Lawrence himself might protest about ‘Life – Life’ being the great thing. Wordsworth only really saw his daffodils when he lay on his couch and viewed them with his inward eye.

  Iris’s genius as a writer is rather different, I think, more comprehensive. Nor does one think of Shakespeare as creating this wonderful vision, after the event. It seems to be a romantic discovery, this sense that all depends on memory. But like all such generalisations that can’t be more than a little bit true: writers and artists (Vermeer for instance) have done it and known it for ages, but without bothering to make a song and dance about it.

  As I create, or recreate, those birds for Iris I wonder what is going on in her head. Is she cognisant of an invention, a fairy-tale, instead of a memory? For a writer of her scale and depth the power of creation seems so much more important than memory, almost as if it could now continue independent of it. And yet the one seems to depend on the other. So what are we remembering when we invent?

  The main thing is she likes to hear me talk about the birds. They must be just a part, a coming-and-going part, of the me she is always with. Once I was right away outside her, a reality quite separate from herself, her mind, her powers of being and creating. Not now.

  Now I feel us fused together. It appals me sometimes, but it also seems comforting and reassuring and normal.

  Reminded of my novel The Red Hat, and the Vermeer portrait that for me haunted our short happy stay at the Hague. When we were there I at once began to have that fantasy about it, which I told to Audi and Iris, separately I think. For Audi I wanted it to be comic, a comical adventure fantasy, with sinister overtones, which we could laugh at together. Could it be that for Iris I instinctively tried to make it sound a bit like something in her own novels? As if I were trying to remind or inspire, or even carry on the torch by a kind of imitation? However that was, the story I wrote about it does not sound in the least like Iris, except perhaps to me. It came out much more like the fantasy I told Audi, who kindly said she enjoyed it when the book appeared a year later.

  Life is no longer bringing the pair of us ‘closer and closer apart’, in the poet’s tenderly ambiguous words. Every day we move closer and closer together. We could not do otherwise. There is a certain comic irony – happily not darkly comic – that after more than forty years of taking marriage for granted, marriage has decided it is tired of this, and is taking a hand in the game. Purposefully, persistently, involuntarily, our marriage is now getting somewhere. It is giving us no choice: and I am glad of that.

  Every day we are physically closer; and Iris’s little ‘mouse cry’, as I think of it, signifying loneliness in the next room, the wish to be back beside me, seems less and less forlorn, more simple, more natural. She is not sailing into
the dark: the voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s she has arrived somewhere. So have I.

  This new marriage has designed itself, as Darwin once speculated that fish perhaps designed their own eyes, to bring to an end her fearful anxieties of apartness – that happy apartness which marriage had once taken wholly for granted. This new marriage needs us absolutely, just as we need it. To that extent it is still a question of ‘taking for granted’.

  The phrase was in my head because I had just received a letter from the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi. Admiring her novels, he had once corresponded with Iris, and his ideas had interested her. As pen friends they had got on, and the three of us had once met in Tokyo. He had read a piece of mine on ‘marriage’ which had been commissioned by The Times. The paper had naturally wanted it to be about Iris’s Alzheimer’s, but I had also made our old point about taking marriage for granted, quoting Iris’s character in A Severed Head who had lamented that her marriage ‘wasn’t getting anywhere’. This had struck the distinguished psychologist, the explorer of amae, the taken-for-granted bond which supplies the social cohesion of the Japanese people, and he had titled the essay which he now sent me ‘Taking for Granted’. Japanese husbands and wives, he said, do not make a fuss about marriage, in the western style, but take it for granted. I wrote thanking him for the piece, and remarked that marriage was now taking us for granted rather than we, it.

  As in old days nothing needs to be done. Helplessness is all. Yet it’s amusing to contemplate ‘new marriage’. Like New Labour, the New Deal etc? Not quite like that. Hard, though, to contemplate one’s arrangements without their becoming, at least to oneself, a private form of public relations. I need our closeness now as much as Iris does, but don’t feel I need cherish it. It has simply arrived, like the Alzheimer’s. The best as well as the fullest consciousness of it comes in the early morning, when I am beside Iris in bed tapping on my typewriter, and feel her hearing it in her doze, and being reassured by it.

  In the old days she would have been up and in her study, in her own world. I am in mine, but it seems hers too, because of proximity. She murmurs, more or less asleep, and her hand comes out from under the quilt. I put mine on it and stroke her fingernails for a moment, noticing how long they are, and how dirty. I must cut them and clean them again this morning. They seem to grow faster by the month, and I suppose mine do the same.

  14 December 1997

  As I am sitting in the kitchen, trying to read something, Iris makes her mouse noise at the door. She is carrying a Coca Cola tin picked up in the street, a rusty spanner – where on earth did she get that? – a single shoe.

  Single shoes lie about he house as if deposited by a flash flood. Never a matching pair. Things in odd corners; old newspapers, bottles covered in dust. A mound of clothing on the floor of the room upstairs where she used to write. Dried-out capless plastic pens crunch underfoot. A piece of paper in her handwriting of several years ago with ‘Dear Penny’ on it.

  Rubbish becomes relaxing if there is no will to disturb it. It will see out our time. I think of the autumn in Keats’s poem ‘Hyperion’. ‘But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.’

  An odd parallel between the rubbish on the floor and the words that fly about the house all day. Words the equivalent of that single shoe.

  Tone is what matters. All is OK with a child or cat or gunga exclamation. ‘The bad cat – what are we going to do with her?’ I stroke her back or pull her backwards and forwards till she starts laughing. I imitate the fond way her father used to say (she told me this long ago) ‘Have you got no sense at all?’ In his mock-exasperated Belfast accent. Iris’s face always softens if I mention her father in this way. Instead of crying she starts to smile.

  I rely on the bad child ploy, which can easily sustain some degree of frenzy. ‘You bad animal! Can’t you leave me alone just for one minute!’ Or sometimes I sound to myself like Hedda Gabler needling her lover. But if I give it the tone of our child talk Iris always beams back at me.

  She never showed any interest in children before. Now she loves them, on television or in real life. It seems almost too appropriate. I tell her she is nearly four years old now – isn’t that wonderful?

  *

  The Christmas business. It’s all come round again. Iris has always enjoyed Christmas, and the socialising that goes with it. The festive season always makes me feel glum, though I go through the motions. Why not get away from it all? In the old days Iris wouldn’t have liked that. Now I am not so sure. Change in one sense means little to her, yet a different scene of any sort can cause her to look around in astonished wonder, like the Sleeping Beauty when she stirred among the cobwebs and saw – must have seen surely? – spiders and rats and mice running away in alarm. (I am assuming that the Prince who woke her would have stepped tactfully back into the shadows.)

  Wonder on the edge of fear. That shows in Iris’s face if we go anywhere unfamiliar to her. A momentary relief from the daily pucker of blank anxiety. A change only relieves that anxiety for a few minutes, often only seconds. Then anxiety returns with new vigour. The calmness of routine has more to recommend it. But no choice really – Hobson’s Choice. Routine needs a change, and change finds some relief again in routine, like the people in Dante’s hell who kept being hustled from fire into the ice bucket, and back again.

  Well, not as bad as that. The point about Christmas could be that it combines a change with a routine, a routine of custom and ceremony that has at least the merit of a special occasion, of coming but once a year. Years ago Brigid Brophy and her husband decided to go to Istanbul for Christmas. ‘To eat our turkey in Turkey’ as they explained. Iris then laughed politely but she was not really amused. Indeed I am not sure she was not really rather shocked. Christmas to her was not exactly holy, but it meant something more important than the opportunity for a witticism about turkey in Turkey.

  I think she welcomed at that time the idea of inevitability – something that has to happen. Mary and Joseph in the stable could do nothing about it – why should we need to?

  Now I must encourage that instinct towards passivity, taking refuge in blest, or at least time-honoured, routines. No point in getting away from it all, nowhere to get away to. Alzheimer’s will meet you there, like death at Samarra.

  So we’ll go to London as usual, visit my brother Michael, have Christmas dinner with him. We’ll do all the usual things.

  25 December 1997

  And it’s Christmas morning. And we are doing all the usual things. Routine is a substitute for memory. Iris is not asking the usual anxious questions – ‘Where are we? What are we doing? Who is coming?’

  Someone, or something, is coming. The silence it brings makes no demands. London is uncannily silent on Christmas morning. Nobody seems to be about. If there are church-goers and church bells we see none, hear none. The silence and the emptiness seem all the better.

  We walk to Kensington Gardens up the deserted street, between the tall stucco façades falling into Edwardian decay, but still handsome. Henry James lived on the left here; Browning further up on the right. We pass their blue plaques, set in the white wall. A few yards back we passed the great gloomy red-brick mansions where T.S. Eliot had a flat for many years. His widow must be in church now.

  Our route on Christmas morning is always the same. We have been doing this for years. As we pass their spectral houses I now utter a little bit of patter like a guide. Henry James, Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot. On former mornings like these we used to gaze up at their windows, talk a bit about them ... Now I just mention the names. Does Iris remember them? She smiles a little. They are still familiar, those names, as familiar as this unique morning silence. Just for this morning those writers have laid their pens down, as Iris herself has done, and are taking a well-earned rest, looking forward to their dinners. Thackeray, the gourmet, whose house is just round the corner, would have looked forward to his with special keenness.

  Now we can see the P
ark, and beyond it the handsome Williamite façade of Kensington Palace. When Princess Diana died the whole green here was a mass of cellophane, wrapping withered flowers. And the crowds were silent too. As quiet, the media said in an awed way, as it is in this morning’s calm. The grievers were like good children at bed-time, folding their hands in ritual prayer. It was a tranquil ceremony, like our Christmas, as we wander now vaguely over the deserted road, usually a mass of traffic, and up the expanse of the Broad Walk.

  A few dogs here, unimpressed by Christmas, but seeming merrier than usual in contrast with the silence. There is one bell now, tolling somewhere on a sweet high note. Up in the sky the jet trails move serenely on, seeming more noiseless than usual, their murmur fainter when it comes. Christmas morning in London is always calm and mild and bright. I can only remember one time when it rained, even snowed a bit. I ask Iris if she can remember that Christmas. She smiles. No need to remember, as this ritual that has replaced memory goes on.

  The Round Pond. Canada geese standing meditatively, for once making no demands. The same path as usual, downwards, to the Serpentine. Nobody round the Peter Pan statue. Not even a Japanese couple with a camera. One Christmas we met two middle-aged ladies from New Zealand here, who told us this statue was the one thing they really wanted to see in London.