Iris (27 page)
Authors: John Bayley
Single shoes lie about he house as if deposited by a flash flood. Never a matching pair. Things in odd corners; old newspapers, bottles covered in dust. A mound of clothing on the floor of the
room upstairs where she used to write. Dried-out capless plastic pens crunch underfoot. A piece of paper in her handwriting of several years ago with ‘Dear Penny’ on it.
Rubbish becomes relaxing if there is no will to disturb it. It will see out our time. I think of the autumn in Keats’s poem ‘Hyperion’. ‘But where the dead leaf fell,
there did it rest.’
An odd parallel between the rubbish on the floor and the words that fly about the house all day. Words the equivalent of that single shoe.
Tone is what matters. All is OK with a child or cat or gunga exclamation. ‘The bad cat – what
are
we going to do with her?’ I stroke her back or pull her backwards and
forwards till she starts laughing. I imitate the fond way her father used to say (she told me this long ago) ‘Have you got no sense at
all
?’ In his mock-exasperated Belfast
accent. Iris’s face always softens if I mention her father in this way. Instead of crying she starts to smile.
I rely on the bad child ploy, which can easily sustain some degree of frenzy. ‘You
bad
animal! Can’t you leave me alone
just for one minute
!’ Or sometimes I
sound to myself like Hedda Gabler needling her lover. But if I give it the tone of our child talk Iris always beams back at me.
She never showed any interest in children before. Now she loves them, on television or in real life. It seems almost too appropriate. I tell her she is nearly four years old now –
isn’t that wonderful?
*
The Christmas business. It’s all come round again. Iris has always enjoyed Christmas, and the socialising that goes with it. The festive season always makes me feel glum,
though I go through the motions. Why not get away from it all? In the old days Iris wouldn’t have liked that. Now I am not so sure. Change in one sense means little to her, yet a different
scene of any sort can cause her to look around in astonished wonder, like the Sleeping Beauty when she stirred among the cobwebs and saw – must have seen surely? – spiders and rats and
mice running away in alarm. (I am assuming that the Prince who woke her would have stepped tactfully back into the shadows.)
Wonder on the edge of fear. That shows in Iris’s face if we go anywhere unfamiliar to her. A momentary relief from the daily pucker of blank anxiety. A change only relieves that anxiety
for a few minutes, often only seconds. Then anxiety returns with new vigour. The calmness of routine has more to recommend it. But no choice really – Hobson’s Choice. Routine needs a
change, and change finds some relief again in routine, like the people in Dante’s hell who kept being hustled from fire into the ice bucket, and back again.
Well, not as bad as that. The point about Christmas could be that it combines a change with a routine, a routine of custom and ceremony that has at least the merit of a special occasion, of
coming but once a year. Years ago Brigid Brophy and her husband decided to go to Istanbul for Christmas. ‘To eat our turkey in Turkey’ as they explained. Iris then laughed politely but
she was not really amused. Indeed I am not sure she was not really rather shocked. Christmas to her was not exactly holy, but it meant something more important than the opportunity for a witticism
about turkey in Turkey.
I think she welcomed at that time the idea of inevitability – something that has to happen. Mary and Joseph in the stable could do nothing about it – why should we need to?
Now I must encourage that instinct towards passivity, taking refuge in blest, or at least time-honoured, routines. No point in getting away from it all, nowhere to get away to. Alzheimer’s
will meet you there, like death at Samarra.
So we’ll go to London as usual, visit my brother Michael, have Christmas dinner with him. We’ll do all the usual things.
25 December 1997
And it’s Christmas morning. And we are doing all the usual things. Routine is a substitute for memory. Iris is not asking the usual anxious questions – ‘Where
are we? What are we doing? Who is coming?’
Someone, or something, is coming. The silence it brings makes no demands. London is uncannily silent on Christmas morning. Nobody seems to be about. If there are church-goers and church bells we
see none, hear none. The silence and the emptiness seem all the better.
We walk to Kensington Gardens up the deserted street, between the tall stucco façades falling into Edwardian decay, but still handsome. Henry James lived on the left here; Browning
further up on the right. We pass their blue plaques, set in the white wall. A few yards back we passed the great gloomy red-brick mansions where T.S. Eliot had a flat for many years. His widow must
be in church now.
Our route on Christmas morning is always the same. We have been doing this for years. As we pass their spectral houses I now utter a little bit of patter like a guide. Henry James, Robert
Browning, T.S. Eliot. On former mornings like these we used to gaze up at their windows, talk a bit about them ... Now I just mention the names. Does Iris remember them? She smiles a little. They
are still familiar, those names, as familiar as this unique morning silence. Just for this morning those writers have laid their pens down, as Iris herself has done, and are taking a well-earned
rest, looking forward to their dinners. Thackeray, the gourmet, whose house is just round the corner, would have looked forward to his with special keenness.
Now we can see the Park, and beyond it the handsome Williamite façade of Kensington Palace. When Princess Diana died the whole green here was a mass of cellophane, wrapping withered
flowers. And the crowds were silent too. As quiet, the media said in an awed way, as it is in this morning’s calm. The grievers were like good children at bed-time, folding their hands in
ritual prayer. It was a tranquil ceremony, like our Christmas, as we wander now vaguely over the deserted road, usually a mass of traffic, and up the expanse of the Broad Walk.
A few dogs here, unimpressed by Christmas, but seeming merrier than usual in contrast with the silence. There is one bell now, tolling somewhere on a sweet high note. Up in the sky the jet
trails move serenely on, seeming more noiseless than usual, their murmur fainter when it comes. Christmas morning in London is always calm and mild and bright. I can only remember one time when it
rained, even snowed a bit. I ask Iris if she can remember that Christmas. She smiles. No need to remember, as this ritual that has replaced memory goes on.
The Round Pond. Canada geese standing meditatively, for once making no demands. The same path as usual, downwards, to the Serpentine. Nobody round the Peter Pan statue. Not even a Japanese
couple with a camera. One Christmas we met two middle-aged ladies from New Zealand here, who told us this statue was the one thing they really wanted to see in London.
Young Pan himself, bronze fingers delicately crooked, his double pipe to his lips, has the sublimely sinister indifference of childhood. Captain Hook, his great enemy, was always made nervous by
that pose. He considered Peter to have Good Form without knowing it, which is of course the best Form of all. Poor Hook was in despair about this. It made Iris laugh when I told her, years ago,
before we were married. I read a bit of the book to her (the book is much better, and funnier, than the pantomime play). Iris, I recall, was so amused that she later put the Good Form business into
one of her own novels.
Iris’s amusement may even have been shared, in a quiet way, by the sculptor himself, who covered the base of the group with elves and rabbits and snails in the Victorian fairytale
tradition, but at the top put the elegant figure of a much more worldly young woman, scrambling determinedly over the plinth to proposition Peter, giving the bystander an agreeable view of her
polished bronze derrière. It is clad in a modishly draped and close fitting Edwardian skirt, and she looks much too old for Peter anyway. Could it be that Sir George Frampton, as well as
being an excellent artist and sculptor, had a sense of humour about these matters? It certainly looks like it, on such a quiet sunny Christmas morning, with real squirrels hopping about all round
the statue, vainly soliciting the nuts which the fat little beasts have no trouble in getting from tourists, on ordinary busier days.
As we walk round and admire I tell Iris that my mother assured me that if I looked hard enough over the railings, into the private dells where the bluebells and daffodils come up in spring, I
might see fairies, perhaps even Peter Pan himself. I believed her. I could almost believe her now, with the tranquil sunshine in the Park making a midwinter spring, full of the illusion of flowers
and fairies as well as real birdsong.
Iris is listening, which she rarely does, and smiling too. There have been no anxious pleas this morning, no tears, none of those broken sentences whose only meaning is the dread in her voice
and the demand for reassurance. Something or someone this morning has reassured her, given for an hour or two what the prayerbook calls ‘that peace which the world cannot give’.
Perhaps it is the Christmas ritual. It is going somewhere, but it is also a routine, even though a rare one. It is both. And now it will go on. We shall return to my brother, who has attended
matins this morning at Chelsea Old Church, where Sir Thomas More used once to worship. We shall eat sardines and sausages and scrambled egg together, with a bottle or two of Bulgarian red wine
which goes with anything. The sort of Christmas dinner we all three enjoy, and the only time of the year Michael permits a little cookery to be done in his immaculate and sterile little kitchen.
The sardines are routine for him, but the eggs and sausages represent a real concession. I shall do them, with Iris standing beside me, and we shall bring the wine.
A snooze then. Iris will sleep deeply. Later we listen to carols and Christmas music. I have the illusion now, which fortunate Alzheimer partners must feel at such times, that life is just the
same, has never changed. I cannot now imagine Iris any different. Her loss of memory becomes, in a sense, my own. In a muzzy way – the Bulgarian wine no doubt – I find myself thinking
of the Christmas birth, and also of Wittgenstein’s comment, once quoted to me by Iris, that death is not a human experience. We are born to live only from day to day. ‘Take short views
of human life – never further than dinner or tea.’ The Reverend Sydney Smith’s advice is most easily taken during these ritualised days. The ancient saving routine of Christmas,
which for us has today been twice blessed.
1. Iris not long after we married. She seems much younger than she did when we first met.
4. In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
8. Janet Stone wearing my cap – she loved dressing up and often wore a sort of Edwardian costume.
10. Cedar Lodge in 1965 – it became less respectable looking later on.
11. At the Villa Serbelloni, Como, Italy, in 1965 – the time of my first fishy mistake.
12. With the Buddhists – Iris always admired them. This was before the days of Peter and Jim . . .
13. Elizabeth Bowen by André Durand, 1969 (national Portrait Gallery)
15. Iris’s friend Brigid Brophy (Hulton Deutsch Collection)
16. On one or our visits to Japan.
18. Borys and Audi Villers, a wonderful couple for whom we always felt the deepest affection.
22. Swimming near Sorrento in 1992, snapped by Audi Villers.
