To the River

by Olivia Laing

  I swallowed hard and climbed down. It struck me that singing might prove soothing, so I launched quaveringly into ‘Jerusalem’, a hymn that seemed designed to avert any number of bovine crises. The bull flicked his tail and rolled one small red eye. He wasn’t interested in crushing me to death, or rolling my corpse into the river. Apparently the reason cows startle is that they have poor depth perception and can’t gauge distance well. The best way to approach them is with frequent pauses to allow their vision to adjust. I was too frightened for the Grandmother’s Footsteps approach, but a couple of tub-thumping choruses seemed to do the job just as well.

  I hurtled the last few yards, and dropped down by the stile to recover. Last night’s wash of colours had vanished, the red and violet replaced with the fragmenting green of ash and willow leaves, a design that always seemed on the verge of being pulled hopelessly apart. At the edge of the field there was a bridge that carried an abandoned railway across the river. The line had been junked in the late 1960s, and seemed to have been left untouched ever since. It ran at the top of an embankment and over the years the vegetation had grown up about it to form a green tunnel that concealed a secret garden, perhaps five feet high and shadowed by interlocking branches of ash and scrawny elder. I scrabbled up for a look, climbing over a barbed wire fence and forcing my way through the bushes. The sleepers hadn’t decayed, and the flat yellow flowers of tormentil bloomed between them in mats of silver leaves. You could live here, I thought, undiscovered all summer, snaring rabbits and minnows, feeding on berries and the itchy green of nettle tips. The bridge’s wooden slats had long since rotted through or been removed, and only the iron girders survived. I tried to walk across, but trees had grown up between them and getting above the river would require a saw and some sturdy gloves.

  I could see the Downs through the bridge’s arch, and a fisherman in mechanic’s blue overalls casting by the weir. No one was around by the Anchor, though at weekends the pub hires out flat-bottomed boats like bathtubs and the river rings with shrieks as rowers crash into nettle beds or scrape beneath the stooping willows. The Ouse ran almost full through the open fields, the sky twisting uneasily within it. It was moving at a crawl, the surface a fractious blue that was broken periodically by fish and flies. How deep was it? Seven feet? Eight? There was a measure somewhere upriver; I’d have to check. It was a good twenty-five feet at its widest, I reckoned, though as it sliced through ox-bows and S-bends it sometimes narrowed to almost half that.

  This was the land I loved best, planate with water, their histories conjoined. A little while back I’d come across a tithe map of this area dating from 1824. All the fields bordering the banks were called brooks: Hovel Brook, Ox Brook, Upper Brook, Fatten Brook. The word brook, from the Old English broc, m ore commonly means a freshwater stream, but in Kent, Sussex and some low-lying regions of Germany and Holland it is also associated with waterlogged land. I didn’t know if the field names had survived, but the word remains in circulation. Fishermen in Lewes use it, and the marshes outside Rodmell are labelled The Brooks on even the most recent Ordnance Survey maps. These washlands and water-meadows are accustomed to inundation and the ebbing river has left the soil rich. Wheat and barley have been cultivated here since the Roman conquest, and until a century ago the river also served to drive the mills that once thronged this stretch, grinding the wheat into flour for bread.

  They don’t exist now, though I knew there were a couple of grindstones just past the pub, heaped at the edge of someone’s driveway. But the Domesday Book makes mention of three mills in Barcombe and there was certainly a corn mill and an oil mill here in the nineteenth century, for I’d seen photographs of them. The last to survive seems to have been the corn mill, which was built of pitch pine and used briefly as a button factory before burning down in 1939, a fire that was locally rumoured to be an insurance scam aimed at raising funds for the Italian war effort. Though the breast wheels and grinding stones, the presses, stoves and rollers had all been sold off or destroyed, the landscape was still marked by the millers’ work. Over centuries the river had been split into an elaborate tracery of head and tail streams, cuts and leats, creating a series of islands and miniature peninsulas. The first was just up the path, a fairytale island big enough to hold a white house and a little tangled garden full of apple trees and roses.

  I used to be besotted with this house, which is across a stream from where the oil mill stood. For years it was half-falling down, the home of an old lady I’d sometimes see gardening in a housecoat, armed with secateurs or pruning shears. The island was overrun by geese, which lived among the trees in goose-green sheds and shacks. After the last big floods, the house stood empty for a time, and now it gleams, the old wooden windows replaced with uPVC, the weatherboards glossily white. The geese were out when I passed by, pottering to and fro between the fruit bushes, as smart as if they too had been dipped in paint.

  A bridge led onto the largest island, a vast empty meadow marked Primmer Brook on the tithe map. It stood open to the sky, fifteen acres of grassland ringed distantly by trees. On autumn evenings I’ve often watched a barn owl here, quartering the field, and once I startled it face on. It was dusk, a moon three days before full caught just above the treeline. The owl took a rough zigzagging path up the meadow, hovered a beat or two, and came to within ten feet of where I stood. Then it paused, and the full intent stare of that tiny, ghostly face rested upon me, until it registered what it was looking at and with silent smoke-gold wings flew on.

  It was too early for owls now, and too hot for anything else. The sheep were calling miserably as I sat down by the stream. The river had cleaved in two, and the navigable channel ran on the other side of the field. This was nothing more than a wallow, filled with yellow lilies and fringed with rushes and purple loosestrife. I looked around. There was no one in sight, not even a sheep. I tugged off my jeans and pulled on my old black Speedo, hauling the straps up beneath the shelter of my top.

  The water looked as if it had been enamelled, in little licks of gold and blue. I took a breath and skidded down the bank, streaking my thighs with mud and panicking the minnows. Jesus, it was freezing. I staggered forward a couple of steps, feet sinking deep into the clay, and then cast off, chest hammering with cold. Two strokes and it switched to a pleasurable burning, as if each cell were fizzing. I paddled out to the lilies and rolled onto my back. There were damselflies skittering in circles above me, their wings a powdery blackened blue that made it seem as if they’d escaped from a fire.

  It was in a wallow like this that Iris Murdoch and John Bayley began their courtship, or perhaps more accurately consummated it, for the first swim is not dissimilar to the first time a couple spends a night in bed. This swim – in a stretch of the Thames that glides unshowily through the countryside north of Oxford – is the opening scene of Iris, Bayley’s memoir about his wife. No, that’s not quite true. It opens with two river swims, not one, separated by a gulf of forty-five years. In the first, the couple are young. They slither in like water-rats, hop out again and dry themselves with Iris’s petticoat, which he describes prettily as a waist-slip, before darting off for lunch. In the second, they are old. It’s hot, the dog days of summer, and this time John has to undress his wife. She’s wearing a two-piece swimsuit, no slip, but she won’t take off her socks. No matter. They clamber in and loll contentedly enough in warm water full of lilies. Iris seems calm, but when John hauls himself out, holding his hands for her to grip, she gazes at him with unalloyed terror. Alzheimer’s disease has begun to obliterate her memory and it seems entirely possible that she might forget how to swim and be drowned, though such instinctive, deeply known activities are often maintained long after the rest of the mind has unravelled. Either way, it’s the last time they swim in the river.

  John Bayley and Iris Murdoch were married for forty-three years, until her death in 1999, and for most of that time they lived in a sprawling and quite spectacularly filthy house near Oxford, where with a grand
disregard for health and safety John dug a swimming pool in the greenhouse and heated it by dangling an electric radiator in by its flex. In Iris he describes the world they inhabited as a sort of kingdom of childhood, in which they communicated via a private babble quite separate from the professorial fluidities they employed elsewhere, and where the central act of intimacy seems to have been a kiss and cuddle rather than any more adult act. Martin Amis, observing both this and the dirt of Cedar Lodge, once wrote that the couple suffered collectively from nostalgie de la boue, literally the desire to return to the sticky mud of one’s origins, the ooze and squalor of infancy.

  I suppose you could see the love of swimming as part of this desire to retreat or be immersed, to enter that pre-literate continuous world that Kenneth Grahame, himself no stranger to childish prattle, also fetishised. Whether this is accurate or not, it’s notable that water had a quickening effect on Iris Murdoch’s imagination, for her novels brim over with rivers and pools and chilly grey seas. Her characters are forever in a frenzy of undressing, teetering on freezing beaches with a bathing suit beneath their dress. In The Sea, The Sea, a novel I find otherwise faintly ridiculous, there’s a great deal of meticulous writing about swimming and its effect on the human heart. ‘Trembling with emotion I tore my clothes off and walked into the sea. The cold shock, then the warmth, then the strong gentle lifting motion of the quiet waves reminded me terribly of happiness.’ Though she also wrote of drowning, this association between water and happiness remained palpable throughout Iris’s life. Her first memory was of swimming in Ireland with her father, and her last words on the subject, written in her diary as Alzheimer’s disease began to erode her capacity to access the past, were: ‘Indescribable. Holiness.’

  A brain affected by Alzheimer’s atrophies, losing its function and complexity. The Iris of Bayley’s memoir is, like Alice, in the process of shrinking, the silent engine of her mind winding down, until at last she resembles a mystified and mystifying child, tagging perpetually behind her husband uttering mouse cries, collecting pebbles and scraps of silver foil and asking again and again When are we going? The house – a different house by now – is filled in addition to its usual chaos with odd objects she’s gathered on her excursion: dried worms, twigs, bits of dirt; the indiscriminate final mutation of a lifelong fondness for inanimate objects. Sometimes John leaves her watching television, only to discover her later standing on the other side of the room, motionless save for her hands, which are busily rooting through this unappetising debris.

  In his book Bayley describes a fantasy in which these half-comforting, half-disturbing objects are lost. ‘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 riverbank. And suddenly, a kingfisher flashes past.’ If this is an attempt to enter imaginatively the experience of memory loss it is decidedly consoling, even pleasurable. But then Iris also described what was happening to her in liquid terms, twice telling her friend Peter Conradi that she was ‘sailing into the dark’.

  This marriage, in which a clever and kindly man takes care of his more brilliant wife, bears a distinct resemblance to that of Leonard andVirginiaWoolf, who also lived rather sluttily. Virginia, Leonard once wrote, was a ferocious creator of what he called filth-packets: ‘those pockets of old nibs, bits of strings, used matches, rusty paper-clips, crumpled envelopes, broken cigarette-holders, etc., which accumulate malignantly on some people’s tables and mantelpieces’, while Leonard himself had a marmoset called Mitz that regularly relieved herself down his back.

  Grubbiness aside, the resemblance goes deeper than the superficial similarity of trajectory, for all marriages must end in bereavement of some kind. Instead, it’s something about the mechanics of the two relationships, for they each resemble delicate instruments that rely on careful weighting and a judicious use of space. Both women were pulled in two opposing directions throughout their lives: inward, towards the intense, almost febrile life of the mind; and outward, towards a mélange of external love affairs and passions. Despite this both felt their husbands to be the steady centre of their lives, something I think Amis had in mind when he wrote that Iris settled, in all senses of the word, for Bayley.

  These two couples nurtured a kind of fertile separateness, a solitude à deux that seems wholly at odds with our modern conception of marriage. It is striking how frequently Virginia Woolf and John Bayley in particular write of the pleasure of writing alone in a room, knowing that somewhere else in the house, in their own private sphere, their spouse is also happily at work. Illness collapses these divisions, particularly illness of the mind; either, in Virginia’s case, by making public and exposed what was hitherto secret, or, in the case of Iris, by obliterating the mind’s hidden world altogether.

  Either way, the sense of the spouse as co-traveller is destroyed. All that remains, when the beloved at last departs, is a clutter of objects and a sink of memories. In an interview after Iris’s death, Bayley caught at the painful ambivalence of the latter when he described it as both ‘a cool river into which he could plunge’ and ‘a cancer eating away at the present’. I don’t doubt that Leonard Woolf would have known exactly what he meant.

  I was getting cold in the wallow and to my intense annoyance I realised I hadn’t brought a towel. In the absence of a handy waist-slip I lay in the grass to dry and as I basked there a buzzard came up from behind the trees and worked its way overhead in a series of linking circles. The clouds were tightening up into cotton wool balls, the precursor to a mackerel sky. A pheasant was coughing in the hedge, and the omnipresent wood pigeon slurred sleepily from the bridge. The present, the present. It never stops, no matter how weary you get. It comes unstintingly, as a river does, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll be swept off your feet. I should have warned the wood pigeon. It skimmed down to the bank, got tangled in a nettle, and toppled comically into the water, a masterclass in how not to fly.

  Voices were coming from downstream, and at Barcombe Mills I found a crowd so strange it took a while to separate them out. Three men were playing with a rubber dinghy. One had a twisted face, and the speech of all three sounded distorted, their mouths moving exaggeratedly as they towed the little boat back and forth. Further on, a white-haired woman and a girl with dreadlocks were sitting on the bank in swimsuits, their legs invisible beneath the cloudy water. As I approached they slipped in together, as seals do when startled. Under the big willow, a boy was sitting full-lotus in a nest of sheepskins, naked except for his trunks. He was tanned and very beautiful, his back straight, his eyes closed. The air was heavy with meadowsweet, that funereal, sneeze-inducing scent.

  I plopped in too, undressing more discreetly this time. Isn’t it wonderful, the old lady sang out. It was. The river seemed warmer here and I trod water in the wide pool by the rushes, leaning my head back till the silt soaked into my scalp. The boy jumped in too, and disappeared towards the weir. As I dried off he returned, and stood on the bank for a long time, enfolded in a tight embrace with the younger of the women. When she turned to go he called after her: Hey Jen? Something else we should do while we’re on this summertime nature thing? It’s a practice Jesus taught for healing? To go down to the river and cover ourselves with the clay where it’s warmed in the sun? There was something about his voice that made me uneasy. He had that singsong intonation I knew from festivals and retreats, high on its own visions: the antithesis of the joyous splash with which he’d launched himself into the river.

  I’d been visiting this patch of ground consistently for over a decade, alone or with friends. I’d last come – it seemed astonishing that I’d forgotten this – wi
th Matthew the weekend that we split up. It was the only time the river failed to work its spell. I felt I was walking somewhere I’d never seen before, that I was not connected to in any way. The sun was shining, there were the usual swimmers and cavorting dogs, the horses grazed by the Bevern, and I walked and breathed and wept without even really feeling any pain. It was the localised numbness that follows immediately upon upheaval, the consequence of a benevolent tincture of endorphins and adrenalin. The world seemed enormously far away, and at moments its unfamiliarity was terrifying, as if the sky hung yellow or the sun set in the east.

  How long ago was that? Two months, I thought, for it had been a few days after my thirty-second birthday. We’d courted here too. I remembered kissing in the rain by the weir, and lying together in Primmer Brook one August years ago, the pinkish grasses grown over our heads so that we were hidden in a cavern away from the world, the river running north to south a few yards beyond our feet. I felt as if I were shuffling memories like cards in a deck. They fell onto the bank: a king and a jack, a four of clubs. This is, I suppose, why people go abroad after a change of some troubling sort, to walk on ground untenanted by ghosts.

  Memory is a funny business. Sometimes, moving through water, I feel I’m washed of all thoughts, all desires: content to luxuriate like a starfish, rocking on my own pulse, sensate to no more than the wavering light as it sinks through space to reach my eyes. I might as well have never been born; I’m not sure I know even my name. And then, on other days, the opposite occurs. There have been times when, sunk in a river or a chalky sea, I have felt the past rise up upon me like a wave. The water has loosened something; has dissolved what once was dry; weighted as if with lead, it filters now through my own veins. The present is obliterated, but what the eye sees, what the ear hears, it is not possible to share.