by John Bayley
I said this, as it made a reasonably smart point, but I knew my position was undermined by Iris’s quiet good sense, by her niceness in fact. I was point-scoring, something she never did in her novels, nor in her daily life. At the same time I think one reason we fell in love, and got on so well, is that both of us have always been naive and innocent, at some deep healing level. Finding it in each other, but not saying so, or even knowing so. Iris is good. I’m not good inside, but I can get by on being nice. A wit remarked of Cyril Connolly, from whose features amiability did not exactly shine, that he was ‘not so nice as he looked’. Iris is just as nice as she looks; indeed in her case the feeble though necessary little word acquires an almost transcendental meaning, a different and higher meaning than any of its common and more or less ambiguous ones.
Knowingness. Have got it in my head today, instead of ‘learning’. Peter Conradi told me that the French word for it is déniaiserie.
And that awkward word, which I can hardly believe really exists, reminds me in some Proustian way of a disgustingly knowing boy at school. Haven’t thought about him for years, if at all. One Sunday his eye lit up with malicious glee when the lesson was read in school chapel. I couldn’t help being curious, and he was delighted to tell me why. It was the story of the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with a precious ointment. ‘Jesus was awfully pleased with himself. When they said the ointment should have been sold and the money given to the poor, he said “Bugger that for a lark – I’m the one who matters, not the poor.” I’m going to take the piss out of God Clark about that.’
‘God’ Clark was the chaplain. When I enquired how, as I was meant to, he said he’d do it in the Divinity Essay we had to write at half-term. He did too. But he failed to get a rise out of the chaplain. Himself all too knowing about the ways of boys, the chaplain returned the essay without comment, merely congratulating the crestfallen youth on the fact that it was ‘well-written’.
‘God’ Clark, a saintly looking old fellow with white hair, had a dark-haired young assistant chaplain with saturnine good looks, who was known as ‘Jesus’ Steed.
Now why should I have remembered that? Having done so, I would once have rushed to tell Iris, sure that the story would amuse her. Now it wouldn’t, alas. I can see her face if I told her, with its bothered and confused look.
We can still have jokes, but only very simple ones. Not anecdotes. Least of all anecdotes about ‘knowingness’.
Iris once telling me she had no ‘stream of consciousness’. She did not talk to herself. She did not say to herself (I had said that I did): ‘I am doing this – and then I must do that. Sainsburys – the clouds – the trees are looking nice.’
No trivial play with the inner words? Did all at once go into the world of creation, which lived inside her?
They say people with a strong sense of identity become the worst Alzheimer patients. They cannot share with others what they still formulate inside themselves. Does Iris speak, inside herself, of what is happening? How can I know? What is left is the terrible expectancy. ‘When?’ and ‘I want ...’.
Is she still saying inside herself, like the blind man in Faulkner’s novel, ‘When are they going to let me out?’
Escape. The word hovers, though she never utters it.
Home is the worst place. As if something should happen here for her, which never does. Anxiety pushing behind at every second. Picking up things, as if to ward it off. Holding them in her hands like words. Wild wish to shout in her ear: ‘It’s worse for me. It’s much worse!’
This after the TV breaks down. It is I who miss it more obviously than Iris does, but in its absence she becomes increasingly restless. The recommended sedative seems not to help.
When are they going to let me out?
4 June 1997
Nightmare recollection of a day in the hot summer last year, just before or after our swim in the Thames. What provoked it, apart from the heat, and a drink or two I had at lunch (when I normally try not to drink: Iris has her few drops of white wine with orangeade)? I must have been feeling unusually low. Rows like that are unpredictable, blowing up like squalls out of nowhere and subsiding as quickly. Then the sun is out, the water calm: one can even forget it is going to happen again. Quite soon.
The cause though? The reason? There must be one. I remember being struck once, when reading Tolstoy, by his description of anger and emotion, which resembles the one theorised about by William James, the novelist’s philosopher brother. According to James, at least as I recall, the anger or fear or pity is itself its own cause. I doubt this means much, but in Tolstoy the notion becomes extraordinarily graphic: as when the movement of the wrinkled tiny fingers of Anna’s baby are imitated involuntarily by Karenin’s own fingers and face. His pity, even love, for this child of another man by his unfaithful wife existed purely in physical terms.
Was it for me some memory of the smell of Iris’s mother when she was daft and elderly, nosed now from Iris herself in the muggy heat, which expressed itself not in love and pity but in repulsion and disgust? Smell, as Proust knew, can certainly coincide with pleasure and relaxation, and become identified with those things. Or with their opposites? Iris is not responsive to subtle smells, I have a very acute sense of them. Perhaps that divides us? I like almost all smells that one becomes conscious of, without having to sniff at them, or recoil from them. All our houses have had their different smells, neither good nor bad in the obvious sense but characteristic – that of Hartley Road, ironically enough, was especially memorable and attractive.
To me the smell of Iris’s mother’s flat, though quite faint, was appalling. I had to nerve myself to enter; but Jack, who for quite a while looked after the old lady, never seemed to notice it, and nor did Iris herself. The ghost of that smell certainly comes now from Iris from time to time: a family odour and a haunting of mortality. But it wasn’t that which caused the row I made, although if William James was anything like right, physical causes are too wrapped up in their emotional results to be disentangled.
The trouble was, or seemed to be, my rage over the indoor plants. There are several of these along the drawing-room window-sill – cyclamen, spider-plant, tigerplant as we called a spotty one – to which I had become rather attached. I cared for them and watered them at the right intervals. Unfortunately they had also entered the orbit of Iris’s obsession with her small objects, things she has picked up in the street and brought into the house. She began to water them compulsively. I was continually finding her with a jug in her hand, and the window-sill and the floor below it slopping over with stagnant water. I urged her repeatedly not to do it, pointing out – which was certainly true – that the plants, the cyclamen in particular, were beginning to wilt and die under this treatment. She seemed to grasp the point, but I soon found her again with a jug or glass in her hand, pouring her water. Like those sad daughters in Greek mythology, condemned for ever to pour their pitchers into vessels full of holes.
I was not put out at the time: I was fascinated. I took to coming very quietly through the door to try to surprise Iris in the act, and I frequently did. Once when her great friend and fellow-philosopher Philippa Foot came to see her, I found them both leaning thoughtfully over the plants, Iris performing her hopeless destructive ritual, Philippa looking on with her quizzically precise polite attention, as if assessing what moral or ethical problem might be supposed by this task. I was reminded of their colleague Elizabeth Anscombe, absently bringing up her immense brood of children, and once amusing her audience at some philosophical gathering with a sentence to illustrate some subtle linguistic distinction. ‘If you break that plate I shall give you a tin one.’
Whether or not the fate of the plants, or the ghost of an odour, had anything to do with it, that day I went suddenly berserk. Astonishing how rage produces another person, who repels one, from whom one turns away in incredulous disgust, at the very moment one has become him and is speaking with his voice. The rage was instant and total, seeming to
come out of nowhere. ‘I told you not to! I told you not to!’ In those moments of savagery neither of us has the slightest idea to what I am referring. But the person who is speaking soon becomes more coherent. Cold too, and deadly. ‘You’re mad. You’re dotty. You don’t know anything, remember anything, care about anything.’ This accompanied by furious aggressive gestures. Iris trembling violently. ‘Well –’ she says, that banal prelude to an apparently reasoned comment. Often heard in that tone on BBC discussions, usually followed by some disingenuous patter that does not answer the question. Iris’s ‘Well’ relapses into something about ‘when he comes’ and ‘Must for other person do it now.’ ‘Dropping good to borrow when ....’ I find myself looking in a mirror at the man who has been speaking. A horrid face, plum colour.
While I go on acting horrible things, as if kicking a child or a lamb, I suddenly think of the Bursar of St Catherine’s College, a charming scholarly man, a financial wizard, a Parsee, who was telling me about his little son Minoo, a year or two old. ‘He’s very tiresome. He’s always breaking things. But it’s not possible to be angry with him.’
The Bursar looked surprised and interested by his own reaction. I wonder briefly, if we’d had a child, would I have learnt not to be angry with it? In which case would I not be angry with Iris now?
20 November 1997
Anger sometimes seems now to be a way of still refusing to admit that there is anything wrong. Like a sincere compliment. You are just the same as ever, bless you (or curse you) and so shall I be. I wouldn’t insult you by pretending otherwise.
A happy stay with our friend Audi in her little house in the middle of Lanzarote. Getting there is an ordeal, the charter flight always packed to the doors with holidaymakers. Reminded of the old joke about Géricault’s painting, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, with stricken castaways clinging on at all angles in the last stages of exposure and thirst. Reproduced with a Holiday Brochure caption: ‘Getting there is half the fun.’ But Peter and Jim come with us and look after us, so the whole ordeal is almost pleasurable.
Return a fortnight later. I have a heavy cold and feel unnaturally tired, although journey could not have been easier. Peter puts us on the bus for Oxford. Sink back thankfully. Nearly home. Bus cruises steadily on through the dark, seeming to shrug off the rush-hour traffic on either side of it. The few passengers are asleep. But we have no sooner started than Iris is jumping up and down in agitation. Where are we going? Where is the bus taking us? She won’t sit still but rushes to the front and looks out anxiously ahead. I manage to get her sitting down. I say: ‘We’re going back to Oxford. Back home.’ ‘No! No home. Why travelling like this. He doesn’t know.’
Before I can stop her she is speaking agitatedly to the bus driver. She has caught hold of one of the bags, which begins to spill things on the gangway. I pick them up, push her into a seat opposite a sleeping woman. I apologise to the driver, who remains ominously silent. When I get back the woman, a nice-looking person, is awake, and distraught, desperately trying to regain the handbag and other possessions which had been on the seat beside her. I take them from Iris and put them back, apologising again in a whisper. Iris says, ‘So sorry’, gives the woman her beautiful smile. I get Iris into a seat and give her a violent surreptitious punch on the arm by which I am holding her.
Gatwick to Oxford in the late Friday rush-hour is a long way. Every second of it occupied by tormented squirrel-like movements and mutterings. She grips the seat in front and stares ahead. A feeling of general distraction and unease eddies along the calm of the bus darkness. I can see faces now alert and fixed resentfully. As the bus at last nears Oxford I try to show things she might recognise, but the agitation gets worse.
Clumsy escape from the stares of the passengers. Only one ancient taxi left, driven by a villainous looking Indian with a gentle cultured voice. He starts to go the wrong way half-way up Banbury Road, and I distractedly put him right. He says, ‘Oh no I should know better really. Very sorry about that.’ I give him a ten pound note through the wire grille and get very little change, but I can’t be bothered about that. I give some of it back as a tip and he says nothing. Open the door. Get inside the gate. The house feels deathly cold. I find Iris looking at me in a wonderful way, just as she used to do when we came home together from some trying outing. I ignore her look, rush to the central heating switch. Then I come back and say in a cold furious voice, ‘You behaved disgracefully on the bus. I felt ashamed of you.’
She looks surprised, but then reassured, as if recalling an old cue. She would just be defending her corner by the kind old method – that is to say, not defending it. Leaving me to work out my nastiness as if I were a child. ‘Well,’ she says. Her equivalent now of what might once have been a soothing ‘So sorry.’ I have lost my voice, can’t hear, and am drowning in a cold that seems more ominous than an ordinary cold, as the bus driver’s silence seemed more ominous than words. My chest hurts when I cough. After a few more ugly words I say I’ve probably got pneumonia. Hasn’t she noticed I’m ill? She looks uncomprehending again. The moment of realisation and reassurance has gone with my own fit of cold fury that brought them on. My appeal for sympathy leaves her lost and bewildered.
What will she do if I die? If I’m ill and have to go to hospital. If I have to stay in bed – what will she do then? Still exasperated by the bus business I make these demands with increasing hostility and violence. I am furious to see my words are getting nowhere, and yet relieved too by this, so that I can continue to indulge my fury. She knows none of these things can or will happen. While I am still screaming at her she says, ‘Let’s go. There now. Bed.’ She says this quite coherently. We squeeze together up the stairs, huddle under the cold duvet, and clutch each other into warmth. In the morning I feel a lot better.
Iris, I think, has never felt bad. She didn’t catch the cold, as if the Alzheimer’s is a charm against mere mundane and quotidian ailments. Jim washed and cut her hair in Lanzarote; Audi gave her a shower and a bath. She said to Audi as they stood together in the shower, ‘I see an angel. I think it’s you.’ Having caught the cold the poor angel was in fact suffering from asthma and a serious chest infection for which she had to start taking tetracycline, fortunately available over the counter in Spain. How sensible, because Audi has never found a proper doctor there, though she has lived on the island on and off for years. Her temperature went up to nearly 103, but then came down quickly, much to our relief. I think we were all grateful in some way that Iris knew nothing about it. She reassured us by not knowing of troubles, and the tears of things.
Or rather they touch her heart in invisible and mysterious ways. To Audi’s cats, which she was once very fond of, she now seems almost indifferent. She strokes them absently. Peter and Jim’s dog Cloudy, whom she loved once to make much of, now seems to have for her the distance and impersonality of an angel. When she sheds tears, softly and for short periods, she hides them with an embarrassment which she no longer feels about any other physical side of herself.
In old days she used to weep quite openly, as if it were a form of demonstrable and demonstrated warmth and kindness. Now I find her doing it as if ashamedly, stopping as soon as she sees I have noticed. This is so unlike the past; but disturbing too in another way. It makes me feel she is secretly but fully conscious of what has happened to her, and wants to conceal it from me. Can she want to protect me from it? I remember as a child finding my mother crying, and she stopped hastily and looked annoyed. In Proust the grandmother has a slight stroke while taking little Marcel for a walk in the park, and she turns her face away so that he should not see it all puckered and distorted.
There are so many doubts and illusions and concealments in any close relationship. Even in our present situation they can come as an unexpected shock. Her tears sometimes seem to signify a whole inner world which Iris is determined to keep from me and shield me from. There is something ghastly in the feeling of relief that this can’t be so: and yet the illusion of su
ch an inner world still there – if it is an illusion – can’t help haunting me from time to time. There are moments when I almost welcome it. Iris has always had – must have had – so vast and rich and complex an inner world, which it used to give me immense pleasure not to know anything about. Like looking at a map of South America as a child, and wondering about the sources of the Amazon, and what unknown cities might be hidden there in the jungle. Have any of those hidden places survived in her?
Showing me a tracing from the most elaborate of the brain scans Iris underwent a year or so ago, the doctor indicated the area of atrophy at the top. The doctors were pleased by the clearness of the indication. I thought then – the old foolish romantic idea of the Amazon – that her brainworld had lost its unknown mysteries, all the hidden life that had gone on in it. It had been there, physically and geographically there. And now it was proved to be empty. The grey substance that sustained its mysteries had ceased to function, whatever a ‘function’, in there, can possibly mean.
Twice Iris has said to Peter Conradi that she feels now that she is ‘sailing into the darkness’. It was when he asked her, gently, about her writing. Such a phrase might be said to indicate the sort of inner knowledge that I had in mind. It seems to convey a terrible lucidity about what is going on. But can one be lucid in such a way without possessing the consciousness that can produce such language? And if consciousness can go on producing such words, why not many more, equally lucid?
Were I an expert on the brain I should find it hard to believe in such flashes of lucidity revealing, as it were, a whole silent but conscious and watching world. It would be as if – to use a clumsy analogy from my hidden city in the jungle – a flash of lightning were to reveal its existence, and then the explorers found that it didn’t exist after all. The words which Iris used with such naturalness and brilliance cannot be stacked there silently, sending out an occasional signal. Or can they? I notice that the eerie felicities which Iris has sometimes produced, like ‘sailing into the darkness’ or ‘I see an angel’, seem to come, so to speak, with a little help from her friends. They are like the things a young child suddenly comes out with, to the delight and amusement of parents and friends. But it was the friends or parents who unconsciously did the suggesting. Must have been.