Iris (25 page)

‘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?

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?

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.