Iris (19 page)

Iris was always happy to stop for a chat, never minded being interrupted, whereas if I was trying to type something in bed I used to find interruptions fatally dismantled whatever insecure pile
of syntax my mind was endeavouring to set up. If it collapsed like a house of cards I had trouble starting over again, or remembering what I had been trying to say. But Iris, good-natured as ever,
never minded my snarling at her briefly if she put her head round the door to ask some question about the day’s activities. She would murmur something pacific and withdraw. Nowadays I
remember those occasions when she comes anxiously after me in the house, or if I look up from a book and see her peering at me in the doorway.

Once when I was standing by her side while she wrote I saw a fox strolling about on the lawn and pointed it out to Iris, who was always glad to see the creature, even though our foxes were a
well-known family, as much in residence in a corner of the wild garden as the rats had once been in the house. Our neighbour’s cats were also frequent visitors. A cat was crossing the lawn
when we heard, a few moments later, a tremendous sound of screeching and spitting. A fox was dancing round the cat, which revolved itself to face it, making these noises. Impossible at first to say
whether the fox had intended to attack and perhaps even to eat the cat, or if it was all in play, an idea suggested by the way the fox would lie down between its leaps and manoeuvres and put its
muzzle between its front paws. Finally it seemed to weary of the game, if such it was, and strolled off, leaving the cat to its own devices. While the confrontation was going on I had the greatest
trouble to dissuade Iris from tearing downstairs and rushing between them, like the Sabine women between their embattled Roman husbands and their Sabine relatives. Fascinated, I had longed to see
how the situation would end, even though Iris kept distractedly saying, ‘Oh we must separate them – we must.’

Her instincts were always pacific, and she hated the idea of animals harming each other as much as she did human beings doing so. When the local hunt killed a fox in the neighbouring field she
was up in arms at once, remonstrating with a civil and perplexed huntsman who sat his horse with an apologetic air saying, ‘Oh I’m so sorry, Miss Murdoch, I understood you were a
supporter.’ This was perfectly true, but there was a difference between being mildly in favour of country sports and hearing one of her own foxes, as she supposed it must be, despatched close
by, especially as she might well have known the creature when it was a cub. If we walked very quietly to that secluded corner of our garden by the drystone wall, where bramble-bushes and elder
flourished, and mounds of earth had been mysteriously raised, we would often see a small face with myopic pale-blue eyes peering out at us. The vixen usually raised five or six young there each
year.

Iris felt the foxes were part of her household. To me they were signs, as the rats had been, that the place didn’t belong to us, that we were there on sufferance. This didn’t trouble
Iris at all. She was often away, seeing her mother and her friends in London. Possessions sat lightly upon her; she once said to me that she was no more concerned with their existence than she was
with her own. I saw what she meant, and yet it was not really true. She was jealous of her things, like her stones, roses and pictures, and yet it never occurred to her to nourish or to visit them,
to clean them as real householders clean silver or china, and to give them loving attention. They must never be got rid of or moved, and that was all. So the house always had a look of dereliction,
as did the very small pad or perch we acquired later in South Kensington, at the time we found someone to live with Iris’s mother in her London flat and look after her.

I myself felt no more at home in this London pad of ours than I did in the house at Steeple Aston, although oddly enough I settled down at Steeple Aston much more readily on the days when Iris
was away. When in 1980 or so she had her visit to China (going with quite a highpowered delegation and meeting Deng Shao Ping the Chairman) I found myself making serious efforts to clean the house
up. It was during the vacation, no teaching in Oxford, and I used to work on Shakespeare in the morning and clean and tidy in the afternoons. I got into quite a bachelor routine, all the more
readily from knowing it wouldn’t last.

Iris was greatly impressed when she got home, and touched too. I think she felt, with a momentary pang, that this was the way I had always wanted things. Not true: I had no idea what I wanted in
this or any other respect provided she was there; and her own lack of identity with self or place precluded me from feeling at home there except when she wasn’t. Her novels, and her ceaseless
invention, from day to day and month to month, were where she lived. And so, after my tidy interlude as a bachelor householder, married demoralisation swiftly and comfortably returned.

None the less she loved the place in her own way, far more than I did. Apart from her refusal to go back there, a visit in which I would have felt retrospective fascination and morbid enjoyment,
Cedar Lodge was the Camelot where she had the original comforting future in her head: her vision of the badgers breaking in, and herself rushing out to tell me about it when I got home. Perhaps
that was her sole wifely vision; and after the vision dissolved and departed with the sale of the house she never wanted to see either again. I once teased her by saying it was the foxes who in
fact had broken in, not the badgers, but, as she pointed out, that wasn’t the same thing at all. Oddly enough I did once see a real badger there, though in a wholly inconclusive manner. It
was a shabby elderly creature, but unmistakably a badger, who once shuffled past when I was sitting in the long grass down the slope, looking as if he had lost his way and didn’t want
attention drawn to himself while he tried to find it. In general they are exclusively nocturnal creatures.

I told Iris about him, but she was not really interested. I suppose it was the Platonic idea that counted with her, not the real example. When UFOs became the fashion she claimed to believe in
their existence at once. And she was convinced of the reality of the Loch Ness monster, a fabulous creature adored and probably invented by the British Press, reputed to live in the unfathomable
depths, surfacing at intervals to be sighted by local ghillies and lucky tourists. When we visited friends in the Highlands, John and Patsy Grigg, Iris could not be dissuaded from sitting for hours
in the heather above the loch, staring down hopefully. I don’t think she was ever disappointed when nothing happened.

Since a child I had myself taken pleasure in submarines and aeroplanes, without becoming seriously interested in them, and Iris ordered for me a magazine series about the two world wars which
lavishly featured the various types. She never wanted to study them herself, but she liked to see me looking at my ‘aeroplane books’, as we called them, and she liked me to tell her
about them. She herself was devoted at that time to the adventures of Tintin, the perky young Belgian ‘boy reporter’ invented by Hergé, whose comic strip stories are illustrated
with an inspired contemporary detail, reminiscent of some of the old Flemish masters. Iris was introduced to these by the same Greek friend who had once told her how to cook the legendary
stefados
. Both of us became hooked at once; I think partly because of the French dialogue, which is extraordinarily witty and apt, and does not come over at all into English. I have learnt
a lot of French from the Tintin books, mostly idioms now outdated, which we used to repeat to each other on suitable occasions. There was a moment when the villains had hired a diver to go down and
attach a limpet mine to the good characters’ ship. Just as he is fixing it the anchor happens to be released from up above, banging him on the head and knocking him and his mine down into the
depths. ‘
Fichu métier!
’ he remarks philosophically into his diving helmet. A comment whose pithiness is as untranslatable as poetry.

Iris wrote Hergé a fan letter, and thanking her in reply he mentioned that he would be signing copies in Hamley’s toyshop, halfway up Regent Street. We were in the shop on the day,
and Iris had a long chat with the great man, telling him about her time in Brussels with the relief organisation UNRRA, just after the war ended. She never spoke of this to anyone else. He was a
big gangling sandy-haired man, like a scoutmaster as we agreed afterwards, and he spoke excellent English. Iris’s fondness for the boy reporter, and his moderately alcoholic older friend
Captain Haddock, had made her suppose that their creator was very likely homosexual. I think she hoped he was, for she had an odd streak of romanticism about gay men, and was apt sometimes to be
naive in her assessment of who was what. I doubted she was right about the author of Tintin, and by chance happened to see lately in the paper what was I think an obituary article, mentioning a
long and happy marriage, and hinting that he had also been something of a womaniser.

I recall the day we met him because it was the day we bought a gramophone. We had no TV of course, and it was some years before we even acquired a radio. Our first LP was Mussorgsky’s
‘Pictures from an Exhibition’, which was quite new to us; and I can never listen to it now on the radio – the gramophone and LP have long since vanished – without
remembering hearing it raptly with Iris that first evening, and how the Great Gate of Kiev seemed to resound in harmony with the spaghetti we were eating, and the red wine. Food and music are very
contextual in that way. Later we became fond of song albums, chiefly Scottish and Irish airs, the early Beatles too, and we used to chant together an imaginary pop song whose words had somehow come
into existence between us. In its early version it ran something like

I think it may have been suggested by the low clucking call of the moorhens down on our pond. Iris later tidied it up (the song not the pond) and put it into one of her
novels.

When we had a radio we used to listen to the Archers, a long-running soap which came on at twenty to two, during our lunch-time. We put down our books to listen to it. We then discussed the
characters and their adventures, or lack of them. I was all for romance: Iris preferred the villains, who always had BBC accents while the honest folk conversed in various sorts of rustic dialect.
The Archers is still going, but I have lost interest in it now that Iris can no longer listen with me, to make out who the persons are and what they are up to. The high spot of her radio life was
long ago, in the days when the Home Service, as it was then called, used to run a lengthy serial tale between five and six in the evening. Her favourite, featuring the slim dark-haired young
heroine Mary McCaskabell, was called ‘Dark House of Fear’. The heroine’s name perhaps reminded her of the north of Ireland, and she became totally gripped every evening by the
lurid development of the tale. I loved watching her as she listened.

I was always intrigued by the ways in which Iris’s creative mind seemed to work, never bothering itself much with ‘highbrow’ literature, however much she might herself enjoy
reading Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and so forth, but latching on to unexpectedly simple and straightforward stories with a popular appeal. These her unconscious mind could always make something
of, although she never read them in book form but only heard them on the radio. I was reminded of Dostoevsky’s own interest in lurid newspaper stories, which often found their way into his
novels.

In some way, or so I felt, the house itself let us know when it was time to depart. That was nearly fifteen years ago. Our most ambitious project had been to remove an inner
wall and turn round the lower steps of the dark narrow staircase, making a wide and rather too obviously spacious descent into what now became a hall. Young Mr Palmer and his helper had stood
precariously on ladders, manoeuvring a gigantic steel girder into position on top of the new brick piers. Owing to some elementary miscalculation this RSJ (‘rolled steel joist’) however
massive in appearance, was barely long enough to span the gap, and one of its ends only just rested on the brickwork. After it had been shrouded over with paint and plaster I used sometimes to give
it a glance of apprehension as I descended the stairs, wondering if it would come crashing down on top of us, as on the day when Samson pulled down the temple on the Philistines.

The girder is still there and the house still stands, so I suppose that young Mr Palmer’s reassurances to me at the time have been justified. But I felt none the less that the venerable
spirit of Cedar Lodge resisted this radical alteration. For one thing the house did not, as we hoped and expected, feel at once roomier and more compact. It merely felt colder, the wide open spaces
of the new hall more difficult to heat. Our successors have made more drastic alterations, transforming the old house at some expense into a mansion that has even figured in the magazine
House
and Garden
. But houses, like people, can lose their old character without gaining a new one. Iris’s instinct never to return is probably justified.

Wanting very much to give her a small pool in which she could swim at all seasons, or at least splash about in, I plotted with young Mr Palmer to make one in the derelict greenhouse. It was only
a few feet square but nearly five deep, so that a few strokes were possible in any direction. The place was roofed in a simple fashion with polystyrene, and once filled the pool was kept topped up
with rainwater from the roof. The water became brown and clear, with the authentic river smell, the concrete sides deliciously silky and slimy to the touch. The rainwater had a softness not to be
found in ordinary swimming pools and remained surprisingly pure; I never needed to put in chemicals. I put in a few small fish, green tench and carp, who seemed happy enough in the dark depths.
Surrounded by the delicate greenery which sprouts in abandoned greenhouses it was most agreeable in high summer, a paradisal plunge pool known to some of our friends as ‘Iris’s
Wallow’.