Iris and the Friends

by John Bayley

  Photo: Telegraph

  John Bayley is the author of Alice, The Queer Captain, George’s Lair and The Red Hat. His trilogy of nonfiction works Iris: A Memoir, Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories and Widower’s House: A Study in Bereavement became international bestsellers. He is also the author of the acclaimed study The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature. He was Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford.

  Also by John Bayley

  IRIS AND THE FRIENDS

  A Year of Memories

  WIDOWER’S HOUSE

  A Study in Bereavement

  THE POWER OF DELIGHT

  A Lifetime in Literature

  This edition 2012

  First published in 1998 by

  Duckworth Overlook

  90-93 Cowcross Screet

  London EC1B 6BF

  info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  © 1998 by John Bayley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may by reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBNs

  Paperback: 9780715643259

  Mobipocket: 9780715644287

  ePub: 9780715644270

  Library PDF: 9780715644263

  For Peter Conradi and James O’Neill

  Contents

  Part I

  THEN

  Part II

  NOW

  PART I

  THEN

  — 1 —

  A hot day. Stagnant, humid. By normal English standards really hot, insufferably hot. Not that England has standards about such things any more. Global warming no doubt. But it’s a commonplace about growing old that there seem to be no standards any more. The Dog Days. With everything gone to the dogs.

  Cheerless thoughts to be having on a pleasure jaunt, or what used to be one. For years now we’ve usually managed a treat for ourselves on really hot days, at home in the summer. We take the car along the bypass road from Oxford, for a mile or two, and twist abruptly off on to the verge – quite a tricky feat with fast moving traffic just behind. Sometimes there are hoots and shouts from passing cars who have had to brake at speed, but by that time we have jolted to a stop on the tussocky grass, locked the car, and crept through a gap in the hedge.

  I remember the first time we did it, nearly forty-five years ago. We were on bicycles then, and there was little traffic on the unimproved road. Nor did we know where the river was exactly: we just thought it must be somewhere there. And with the ardour of comparative youth we wormed our way through the rank grass and sedge until we almost fell into it, or at least a branch of it. Crouching in the shelter of the reeds we tore our clothes off and slipped in like water-rats. A kingfisher flashed past our noses as we lay soundlessly in the dark sluggish current. A moment after we had crawled out and were drying ourselves on Iris’s waist-slip a big pleasure boat chugged past within a few feet of the bank. The steersman, wearing a white cap, gazed intently ahead. Tobacco smoke mingled with the watery smell at the roots of the tall reeds.

  I still have the waist-slip, I rediscovered it the other day, bunched up at the back of a drawer, stiff with powdery traces of dry mud. It is faded to a yellowish colour, with a wrinkled ribbon, once blue, decorating the hem. Could someone, later my wife, have indeed once worn such a garment? It looks like something preserved from the wardrobe of Marie Antoinette. I never gave it back to Iris after that occasion, and I think she forgot all about it.

  In any case we were having a busy day, that day. We had a lunch-time engagement to get back to. By the time we had cycled back into Oxford, and down the Woodstock Road, we were as hot as we had been earlier that morning, before we had crawled through the dense green undergrowth and discovered the river. Still dripping with sweat, and making vague efforts to tidy our hair and clothes, we rang the bell of a flat in Belsyre Court. As we waited we looked at each other expressionlessly, then burst at the same moment into a soundless fit of giggles.

  Our host, who had been getting lunch, was quite a time coming to the door. He was a brilliant young doctor with green eyes called Maurice Charlton. When even younger he had been a classics don at Hertford College, and considered one of the best in the university. So good indeed that he gave it up after three years and turned to medicine. He now held a research appointment at the Radcliffe Hospital. He was supposedly rather in love with Iris. That was why he had asked her to lunch. She had told him she was spending the morning with me – we were going to cycle out together to see Cassington Church – and so could I come too?

  He took it like a man. He had prepared a delicious lunch. The flat was not his own but belonged to a rich older don at Balliol, with whom he may or may not have had an ambiguous relationship. He seemed to able to borrow the flat any time, for his friend lived mostly in college when he wasn’t away in Italy or Greece.

  Fifty or so years ago life in the university was more constricted and formal, but at the same time more comfortable and relaxed. For us, in those days, there was no paradox involved. We maintained public standards and conventions almost without being conscious of them, while leading our own private lives. We worked very hard, at least Iris did: I was more naturally indolent.

  Maurice Charlton probably worked harder than both of us together. But he was totally relaxed, his green eyes sparkling, and with a delightful air – as soon as he saw us – of collusion in something or other: what he had been doing, what we had been doing. This intimate feel, as if we could become naughty children together any moment, was enhanced by the sombre dignity of the flat: full of rare books, good furniture, glass. I still remember the longstemmed green and white wineglasses, out of which we drank a great deal of very cold hock. I think it was the white wine people usually drank in those days.

  I feel admiration now for the way Charlton must have apprehended that we had been up to something together, and not only took it in his stride but encouraged us in some way to enjoy it with him. We had never got to Cassington Church, we said. It had been far too hot. We had cycled back in an exhausted state, and it was wonderful to be here in the cool, drinking the wine. We both said something like this without looking at each other. Iris jumped to her feet to go over and kiss Maurice Charlton, and it seemed just the right and spontaneous act, making us all three laugh: we two men laughing both at and with Iris as she gazed delightedly round the dark and as it seemed rather mysteriously grand flat, as if she were Alice in Wonderland on the threshold of a new series of adventures.

  As we sat laughing and eating – I remember lobster and the delicious garlic mayonnaise our host had made – I was conscious of my soaking trouser-pocket, where Iris’s undergarment reposed, rolled up. I hoped the wet wouldn’t get on the dining-room chair, which was covered in some sort of damask. As lunch went hilariously on we seemed more and more like a family. Through a bewitching miasma of hock I was conscious of Iris as a kind sister, fond of both her brothers, equally close to them. Maurice had the air of a brother, but also looked like a sort of patriarch as he sat grinning benignly at the top of the table.

  Maurice Charlton died young, of cancer I believe, more than twenty years ago. My impression is that he never married, but I may be wrong about that. He certainly looked at Iris with his green eyes as if he liked her very much. It was possible he had borrowed the flat and prepared the lunch with a purpose, and that my presence had thwarted his plans for the afternoon. In that case I admire his behaviour all the more, at this distance in time. He carried off perfectly what might well have been for him a frustra
ting situation.

  I mention the lunch with Maurice Charlton, and that enchanted Sunday morning when Iris and I had our first swim together, because I remember it all very vividly, not because it had any great importance in itself. Although I had met Charlton a few times, and admired him, that lunch was probably our only social occasion together. He continued to work in Oxford but we lost touch, which is why I don’t know what happened to him later, except that he was a distinguished man when he died. It was typical of my relations with Iris at that time that I had very little idea of the other people in her life, or what they might mean to her. That was probably due to the ecstatic egoism of falling in love for the first time. For me it was the first time, though I was not exactly young. Iris was thirty-four, Maurice Charlton about the same age. I was twenty-eight. Difference in age, which means a good deal at school and not much in later years, was only a part of the atmosphere of that lunch party, because we seemed for the moment like a family. And a family takes such differences in age for granted.

  But, as I say, I still had very little idea of the other people in Iris’s life, or what they meant to her. That was instinctive on her part, I think, rather than deliberate. There was a lot of privacy about in those days. An ‘open’ society is what we aim for now, or say we aim for, as an enhancement of our all being more classless and democratic. We were not consciously undemocratic, I think, in the fifties, but we took private life for granted. That was particularly true in Oxford, still a scholastic society in which one could be on good terms with a large number of people, meeting them most days in college, at dinner in hall or in lecture rooms and laboratories, without having any idea of how they were situated domestically, or socially, or sexually. Other peoples’ lives might seem intriguing, which was part of the fun of privacy, but they remained what was on the whole an accepted and comfortable blank.

  By some emotional paradox being in love made me, at least at first, not less but more incurious about this. Iris existed for me as a wonderful and solitary being, first seen about six months before, bicycling slowly and rather laboriously past the window in St Antony’s College, where I was living. Trying to work, and gazing idly out at the passing scene on the Woodstock Road, now intolerably full of traffic but then a comparatively quiet thoroughfare, I noted the lady on the bicycle (she seemed at once to me more of a lady than a girl) and wondered who she was and whether I would ever meet her. Perhaps I fell in love. Certainly it was in the innocence of love that I indulged the momentary fantasy that nothing had ever happened to her: that she was simply bicycling about, waiting for me to arrive. She was not a woman with a past, and an unknown present.

  She was looking both absent and displeased. Maybe because of the weather, which was damp and drizzly. Maybe because her bicycle was old and creaky and hard to propel. Maybe because she hadn’t yet met me? Her head was down, as if she were driving on thoughtfully towards some goal, whether emotional or intellectual. I remember a friend saying playfully, perhaps a little maliciously, after she first met Iris: ‘She is like a little bull.’

  It’s true in a way, although I have never seen it, because of course I have never seen her objectively. But if each of us resembles some sort of animal or bird, as our personalised bestiary emblem, then I can see that Iris could indeed be a small bull. Not unfriendly, but both resolute and unpredictable, looking reflectively out from under lowered brows as it walks with head down towards you.

  In her first published novel, Under the Net, it is remarked of the leading female character that she never lets on to any one of her friends just how closely bound she is to all the rest of them. Few of them even know each other. That was true of Iris. Naturally enough it made quite a difference to the heroine of the novel, but it has never made any difference for Iris. She always used to write back to fans who had written to her. Careful long intelligent letters, directed to a person, not just to a fan. They were real letters, even though she had never met, and probably never would meet, the real person to whom she was writing. I have to try to write letters back to her fans now, and naturally enough I can’t do it like that; although from their letters, and their attitude towards their adored author, I see why one of them at once replied, after Iris had written to him, that he felt now they had become ‘pals for life’.

  Like so much to do with our emotions the egoism of love has something absurd about it, though something touching as well. It was certainly absurd that I should have taken for granted in those days that Iris was, so to speak, pure spirit, devoted to philosophy and to her job, leading a nun-like existence in her little room in college, devoid of all the dissimulations and wonderings and plottings and plannings that I took for granted in myself. She was a superior being, and I knew that superior beings just did not have the kind of mind that I had.

  Besides there had been something almost supernatural about the way I had actually met her, after I had seen her riding past the window on her bicycle. The following day I had encountered Miss Griffiths in the street, outside the Examination School where university lectures were given. A diminutive figure, she was just taking off her billowing black gown, preparatory to mounting her own bicycle and cycling home to St Anne’s College. She had been lecturing on Beowulf. Miss Griffiths had had a soft spot for me ever since my Viva (the face to face oral exam), when she had congratulated me on my essay on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, but caught me out on a minor question of Anglo-Saxon syntax. After I had obtained my degree she had followed my career, such as it was, with benevolent interest, and now she seized me by the arm as I walked past and enquired how things were going. Things in fact were barely going at all, as I had no proper job, and stayed on sufferance in the newly-founded St Antony’s College, where I was supposed to act as a tutor and guide to a few ebullient Frenchmen and Americans who had come to study science or politics there.

  St Antony’s at that time was a study in itself, but its principal interest for me now, and in memory, was its proximity to St Anne’s College, a foundation designed at the time solely for women students, although like most other colleges it has since become bisexual. Out of the deference I felt for an older and senior member of the English faculty I walked a few yards that morning beside Miss Griffiths, who showed no immediate disposition to mount her bicycle and be off. I think she wanted to enjoy reminiscing for a moment about the exam and the Viva – like most dons she was vain of her examination exploits and technique – and to recall with the pleasure of generosity her discernment about the good points of my Chaucer essay, as well as to remind me, with the pleasure of superior knowledge, about my errors in Old English grammar. Having done those things she suddenly asked me if I would care to come to her college room for a drink that evening. I was happy to accept.

  Although it was just across the road from St Antony’s I had never been into St Anne’s, which I regarded as an all-feminine province, likely to be virtually out of bounds to males and male students. I wasn’t wholly wrong about this. Incredible as it may seem today, there were then fairly strict rules governing the conduct of men who had the nerve and temerity to go visiting in these female strongholds. They had to remain in the public parts of the college, and the girls were not allowed to receive them in their rooms. The matter was in any case of little or no interest to me. Students like myself, who had been in the army at the end of the war, were older than the new generation of undergraduates, whom they were sometimes employed temporarily to instruct, owing to the post-war shortage of teachers. Oxford at the time seemed to me like a school; apart from having to teach a few of them I took no account of its younger denizens. The cinema was my resort for relaxation and refuge, and cinemas were cinemas in those days. In the afternoon they were church-like spaces dense with tobacco smoke, inhabited by couples, or by solitary worshippers motionless in the darkness, illuminated from time to time by the glowing tip of a cigarette.

  The idea of a drink with funny wizened little Miss Griffiths – I imagine she was only a year or two over forty, but if I thought of it at al
l I thought of her as having passed the boundaries of age – was a decidedly agreeable one. Drinks were drinks in those days, just as cinemas were cinemas, and I had heard that Miss Griffiths – ‘Elaine’ as I afterwards came to know her – liked a good strong drop of gin. Besides it could only be a good thing to be on social terms with a senior member of the English Faculty, to which I aspired in time to belong.

  All such prudential considerations vanished when I presented myself at six o’clock that evening. Miss Griffiths was just finishing a tutorial, and as I knocked on the door a young girl in a scholar’s gown came out, dropping her eyes demurely at the sight of a man standing there. I barely glanced at her, for through the open doorway I had caught sight of the person on the bicycle – the woman? the girl? the lady? – standing and talking to some unseen character, with a well-filled glass in her hand.

  She looked different from the bicycle lady, naturally enough. This was a social scene and she was not wearing an old macintosh. Her short fairish hair, unkempt and roughly fringed on the forehead, looked both healthy and greasy, as it still does. Later on I was to cut and shampoo it for her now and then: at that distant time she hardly bothered. Indeed I have the feeling that women then – certainly academic women – were nothing like so attentive to appearances as they are today, when girls may look like scarecrows, but only of set purpose. Slovenliness in those days was next to seriousness, at least in university circles. It was rare, however, for women in those circles to wear trousers. Iris had on a worn and grubby tweed skirt, rather overlong and ungainly. I noticed her legs were short and robust, clad in brown cotton stockings. Nylons were still uncommon in the early fifties.