Iris (14 page)

I think Iris was much moved by the helplessness revealed to her by this strong sardonic reserved woman, whose work she admired without being at all familiar with it, and whose friendship at that
moment she so greatly valued. No doubt she had been unusually confiding in her own turn, and she told me later that Elizabeth had impressed upon her almost with urgency the advantages of the
married state. Before she left she had said something about me, and about her idea of a house in the country. Elizabeth, whom I had not met at that time, sent her best wishes to me, and for the
house.

And now I had to tell Iris that the house had fallen through. I did not tell her that it had been through my own caution, or lack of enterprise and financial spirit. The truth was that apart
from possible feelings of jealousy I had never believed in that house. There was something fishy about it. Iris, carried away by its undoubted charm and the beauty of village and countryside,
perhaps also its proximity to the river Windrush, had been indifferent to all else. As it happened the house agent rang me again a few weeks later to report that the other sale had gone off and
that we could have the house on the old terms. This information too I suppressed, for by that time, fortunately for me, another house had turned up, and it engaged all Iris’s attention.

I had never met Elizabeth, but I had read everything she had written and had lived in the world of her novels and stories with immense pleasure, almost with passion.
The Death of the
Heart
was my favourite. I once made the mistake of telling Elizabeth that, and she looked displeased. She had never cared for
The Death of the Heart
, or its success; she preferred her
fans to find whatever was her latest book her most intriguing, challenging, unexpected. Those things were certainly true of her last two novels,
The Little Girls
and
Eva Trout
, but
what I had specially liked about them was her return to the magic place she had made her own, the seaside country of Romney Marsh and the little town of Hythe. She had lived there as a girl before
her mother died, and after trying Oxford she bought a little house on the hill in Hythe. No doubt she knew well that it is usually a mistake to return to live in a place in which one has been
happy, and about which she had incidentally created so vivid a comedy world. Or perhaps she didn’t know it: she was very simple and uncalculating in some ways. She never spoke of it, but I
had the feeling on our visits to her that the experiment of living in Hythe had not been entirely a success, although she had no trouble there in finding ‘boon companions’ and being at
home in a wholly unliterary and unintellectual world, rather like that of
The Little Girls
and of the Heccomb family in
The Death of the Heart
.

She was far from well when she decided to come back to Oxford, to settle in a couple of rooms in an annexe of the Bear Hotel at Woodstock. She had throat cancer – always a sixty-a-day
smoker, she liked to puff on a cigarette between mouthfuls at lunch and dinner – but she made a good recovery after the operation and often came to visit us. Once I was doing a class on Jane
Austen, and to my great concern she asked if she could come along. I felt overwhelmed at first by her powerful presence, but she could not have been nicer or more quietly helpful, silent most of
the time, but now and again injecting a shrewd query or making some encouraging comment on a point raised by one of the young graduates. Quite unacademic by nature, she was of course well-read, a
sharp and droll natural critic. About this time she had great success as a visiting teacher on campus in America, where the students viewed her queenly presence with delight and awe.

There could indeed be something peremptory, almost alarming, about her. Lord David Cecil, who was a very old friend, told me that he had once asked her to a small dinner party with a carefully
chosen and congenial company, which he was sure she would enjoy. But the party was not a success. Elizabeth could never be silent, but she remained uncooperative and on her dignity all evening.
Afterwards she said to her host severely, ‘David, I think you should know me well enough by now to realise that I want to see you either on your own, or at a large party.’ There was no
answer to that one. She could be jealously possessive of her close friends, and hostile to their wives or husbands; and she could be fiercely loyal to an institution or person, even if she
disapproved of what they stood for.

Her own family was Protestant – ‘Ascendancy’ as it used to be called in Ireland – and she would have attended the Church of Ireland service as a part of her position and
lifestyle, but she never forgave her fellow-novelist Honor Tracy for investigating a financial scandal which had occurred among the local Roman Catholic clergy, and denouncing it in an article
which appeared in the
Sunday Times
. Honor was a Roman Catholic herself, but that was neither here nor there. The point was the indecency, as Elizabeth saw it – and here all her Irish
and local instincts were atavistically at work – of being disloyal to neighbours. By seeking to uncover its scandals Honor Tracy as journalist was guilty of treachery to a hallowed Irish
institution, the Roman Catholic Church.

Elizabeth knew very well that the clergyman involved was a crook, as she privately put it, and she also greatly disliked the role played by the Catholic Church in Irish society; but she would
never have said so in public, nor been disloyal to a man of the district which she loved and lived in.

Honor Tracy was also a great friend of Iris’s. She was a fearlessly independent woman with flaming red hair, flamboyant in manner, unrestrained in the expression of her opinions and
prejudices. She came from an older family than Elizabeth’s, the Norman De Tracys, who helped to conquer England and then took part in the conquest of southern Ireland in the twelfth century.
The Bowens arrived much later: Colonel Bowen had been one of Cromwell’s trusted officers, presented with the estate and land on which he had begun to build Bowen’s Court. Irish history
counted for a good deal in the background of both ladies, and each was redoubtable in her own style. None the less Honor Tracy, as she once told Iris, shook in her shoes at the thought of Elizabeth
Bowen’s displeasure.

Elizabeth, oddly enough, was not really at her best as a novelist when writing about Ireland. Perhaps its sorrows, and her own responsibilities there, inhibited her sense of fun. Her own best
novels, including the one she was working on at the time of her death and which survives only as a fascinating fragment, were comedies – sometimes tragi-comedies – of English life and
manners. She had been most at home in wartime London: Hitler’s blitz on the city helped produce one of her finest novels,
The Heat of the Day
, as well as some brilliant short stories.
The unearthly light of what was then called a ‘bomber’s moon’ transfigures
Mysterious Kor
, a story about bombed-out wartime London, which a girl working there sees as the
ghost city of a poem she has once read.

I always meant to ask Elizabeth where she had read the poem, but I never got around to it. Years after her death her story was our subject at a class I was giving, and when one of the students
asked who had written the lines I had to admit I had no idea. Bowen had perhaps written them herself? My curious student – now a doctor and don at Glasgow University – did not leave the
matter there, but investigated in the Bodleian library until he found the answer. The poem turned out to be the work of a minor Edwardian poet and man of letters called Andrew Lang, who had written
it to his friend Rider Haggard, explorer and author of many best-selling romantic tales, including
King Solomon’s Mines
. Most of the poem is poor stuff, but Elizabeth when a young girl
had no doubt come across it in some long-forgotten anthology of the period, and it had returned to haunt her imagination in maturity, and create her story.

Iris’s own creative mind worked the same way. Her novels are full of buried quotations remembered from childhood, or once quoted and discussed between us. (One of them is ‘the ouzel
cock so black of hue’ from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which surfaces in
A Severed Head
and refers obliquely to a cuckolding which takes place in the novel. We used to
chant it, together with other catches, when driving in the car.)

Both Honor and Elizabeth sometimes stayed with us at Steeple Aston after we had settled in the house there. Honor liked to rest between quite gruelling bouts of investigative reporting, and she
usually left us to stay at The Bell at Aston Clinton, a pub where she knew the landlord and where she used to stand us marvellously alcoholic lunches and dinners. After giving up working journalism
she lived in a small cottage on Achill Island in the West of Ireland, where she wrote her lively comedies of Irish life. The best of these,
The Straight and Narrow Path
, concerns an Irish
priest who once exhorted his flock ‘always to follow the straight and narrow path between virtue and wrongdoing’. It was a true tale: Honor had heard the sermon herself; but though the
Irish can be totally irreverent in private and among themselves, they do not care to be publicly teased. Honor’s delightful novels were not read on her native soil, nor were they obtainable.
It is a shame, too, that they never seem to have been reprinted, either in England or America. The peculiar powers of Irish censorship, once paramount in the island itself, are still to be reckoned
with elsewhere.

It turned out to be a blessing that we viewed the house at Steeple Aston, because it at once drove all longings for poetical and rivery Taynton out of Iris’s head. Neither house nor
village were as pretty as those she had first fallen in love with, but both were old and solid and friendly. A farmhouse had been built on to in the early nineteenth century, and turned into a
gentleman’s residence not far from the church. The grounds were large, almost two acres, and sloped sharply downhill to a stream that ran through the valley. On our side of this were ancient
ponds, possibly medieval fishponds. These appealed to Iris at once. So did the sheer impracticality of the place, from the point of view of two teachers working in Oxford, fifteen miles away. That
did not daunt her at all: she did not even consider disadvantages. The equal impracticality of Bowen’s Court may have influenced her. Cedar Lodge, as the house was rather primly called, was
cheap to buy – startlingly cheap – but we discovered later that it was in bad condition, however solid it looked. Mr Palmer, a veteran builder with very bright blue eyes, was soon in
constant attendance. He used to gaze wonderingly at Iris as she sat and wrote in an upstairs room, through the ceiling of which water from an undiscoverable source was apt to drip.

Apart from Mr Palmer, who constituted no sort of social burden, we had the place to ourselves. The previous owner was going to live on the island of Guernsey, in a small modern bungalow her son
had bought for her. She was an old lady who had lived long in the village, and she recommended various persons who might come to help or ‘do’ for us. We both felt disinclined to be done
for. For the thirty years and more we lived at Cedar Lodge we had no help in the house or garden, and both were presently in a state in which help of any kind would have come too late. That seemed
to suit us, or at least to suit Iris: I was less sure of the benefits of what the authoress Rose Macaulay – Iris met her once or twice – used to call ‘letting things go to the
devil and seeing what happens when they have gone there.’

At first I made strenuous efforts to assert the will – my will – over the place. I cleaned, mowed, chopped, painted, tried to repair the electricity. But I soon gave up. Iris always
helped me, and seemed herself to enjoy the idea of doing all the things women do in houses, but it was a dream occupation, a part of her imagined world, of the worlds she was creating in her novels
as she sat in her dusty sunlit room upstairs, submerged by old letters, papers, broken ornaments, stones she had picked up, or which had been given her by friends. It grieved me then, and still
does, that these stones, once so naturally clean and beautiful from continual lustration in a stream, or by the tides of the seashore, should have become as dusty and dead-looking as everything
else in the house. But this never seemed to bother Iris in the slightest. The stones for her were Platonic objects, living in some absolute world of Forms, untouched by their contingent existence
as a part of the actual and very grubby still life that surrounded us.

Stones were not the only Platonic objects in our daily life, or – so close that it came to the same thing – in Iris’s imagination. Cooking pots, never properly cleaned in
practice, had the same status. So, I felt, did those imaginary badgers which she had invoked once when I had tried to suggest to her what the rewards of married life might be like.
‘Yes,’ she had replied with a sort of wistfulness which gave me a sudden hope that she might be prepared to take the idea of marriage seriously. ‘I do like to imagine your coming
home, and me meeting you, and saying “Darling, the badgers have broken in”.’ Her ancient badger fantasy, with its image of a cosy domestic drama, has probably been forgotten, but
she used sometimes to say with a smile to friends, or even to interviewers, that she originally had every intention of doing the cooking after we got married. ‘But after a few days John
suggested it might go better if he took over.’ The image of herself as cook and apron-wearer stayed in her mind less long than the to me delightful and hopeful one of herself as wife rushing
down to greet her husband with a kiss, and with the mock-horror news that the badgers had broken in.

And yet her intention of becoming the cook was no idle boast. Iris could cook – could have cooked – magnificently, just as she could have done all sorts of other practical things.
While working at the treasury, the most prestigious branch of the civil service, she had made herself an expert during the war years on a tricky concept known as ‘notional promotion
in
absentia
’, which involved assessing pay-rises and promotions which would have accrued, had they remained in their old jobs, to functionaries called up at that time into the armed forces.
Senior colleagues consulted her on this question and accepted without demur what she told them. Had she concentrated on any of those careers she could have become a doctor, an archaeologist, a
motor mechanic. It used to be thought at one time that Shakespeare might have started off as a horse-holder outside the theatre. A nineteenth-century scholar had observed that, if so, one could be
sure that the Bard had held his horses better than anyone else. A really great artist can concentrate and succeed at almost anything, and Iris would have been no exception. If she had borne a child
she would have looked after it better and more conscientiously than most mothers, and no doubt would have brought it up better too. But in that case she would not have written the books that she
did write.