Iris (5 page)

The panic moment passed, but it had never existed for either of us at a moment when, ten or fifteen years before, we had swum with a friend, the artist Reynolds Stone, off the Chesil Bank in
Dorset. The Stones lived a few miles inland, and in summer we used to go down to the sea, to the great inshore curve that sweeps all the way from Portland Bill to Bridport and Lyme Regis. The tides
have left there a massive embankment of grey shingle, graduated as if by hand from huge smooth pebbles at the Portland end to fine gravel twelve miles further west. When a sea is running it is a
dangerous place, and even in calm weather the swell and the suction of the undertow make it a tricky beach to go in from. Fearlessly gentle and absentminded, Reynolds Stone never mentioned any
danger nor was apparently aware of it. In we always went together, laughing and talking, and on one occasion Iris missed the pulse of the wave that carried us back on to the shingle, and was sucked
out again as it ebbed. Speaking of Piero or Cezanne, two of the artists he most admired, Reynolds noticed nothing; nor did I. Listening to him as we trod gingerly over the stones to where our
clothes lay, I turned back to include Iris in what he was saying. She was not there. But in a moment she was, and I helped her over the shingle while Reynolds stood gently and imperturbably
conversing.

Only afterwards did she tell me of her moment of incredulous surprise and terror as she felt herself drawn back under the smooth sea. It was deep over her head, but she kept her mouth tight shut
by instinct, and in another moment the next wave had brought her ashore. Had she panicked and swallowed water the next swell of the insidious undertow might well have carried her farther out and
down; and then, easy swimmer as she was, she could have drowned in a few seconds.

She said nothing until we were in bed that night, and then she was not frightened but full of curiosity, and an excitement she wanted to share with me. ‘I’ll put it in my next
novel,’ she said. And she did.

After she had become well-known she never mentioned the novel she was working on in public; nor, I think, to her friends; scarcely to me either. She would say something about it if I asked, but
I soon had no habit of asking. One of the truest pleasures of marriage is solitude. Also the most deeply reassuring. I continued to do my own job, teaching English in the university, writing the
odd critical study. Iris soon gave up St Anne’s – the emotional pressures in that community may have had something to do with it – and entered her own marvellous world of creation
and intellectual drama, penetrating reflection, sheer literary excitement. Something for everybody in fact: just as she had said as we first stood there that late evening, beside our bicycles.

Occasionally she used to ask me about some technical detail she wanted for a novel. Once she enquired about automatic pistols – old army training made it easy to answer that one –
sometimes about cars, or wine, or what would be a suitable thing for a certain character to eat. The hero of
The Sea! The Sea!
required, so to speak, a very special diet, and I had fun
suggesting all sorts of unlikely combinations to which he might be partial: oat bran and boiled onions, fried garlic and sardines, tinned mango and stilton cheese. Some of these found their way
into the novel; and when it won the coveted Booker Prize one of the judges, who happened to be the distinguished philosopher A.J. Ayer, remarked in his prizegiving speech that he had much enjoyed
everything in the novel ‘except for the food’.

Only to one of Iris’s novels, and that was a long time ago, did I contribute a small section myself. It was in her fourth published novel,
The Bell
. For a reason I now forget she
asked me to read the first chapter, which has one of her most sibylline epigrammatic openings. She never used a typewriter, and in her first handwritten version it read: ‘Dora Greenfield left
her husband because she was afraid of him. A year later she returned to him for the same reason.’ I was thrilled by this instant concision, as many a subsequent reader must have been, for the
sentence remained substantially as quoted here. But as I read on I began to feel an immediate inquisitiveness about young Dora Greenfield and her husband Paul which the early pages did not satisfy.
So arresting were they, as characters, that I wanted to know a little more of them at once, to be given a hint by which to glimpse their potential. I said something of the sort to Iris, who said
‘OK then, you write something for me.’ I think she may already have felt herself something of what I, as reader, was now feeling: our sympathy and intuition automatically
intermingled.

At the time I was trying to write a study later titled
The Characters of Love
. I was bewitched by Henry James, who observed to a friend about one of the ladies in the novel he was
writing that he could already take ‘a stiff examination’ about her. Concerning such a personality, he had remarked, the author needs to supply a forewarning, ‘an early intimation
of perspective’. With this in mind, and highly flattered by Iris’s suggestion, I set out to produce some idea of what
might
have happened to Dora and her husband, even if it
was to have no part in the book, whose story as yet I did not know.

My idea was that he as a husband deeply needed and wanted children, even if he was not necessarily conscious of the fact, while she – much younger than her husband – did not. I
suggested that she had it in her none the less to become ‘a prompt and opinionated mother’, and that this would be her only means in their marriage of standing up to Paul. As it was she
was highly alarmed at the prospect of ‘becoming two people’, though in her passive manner she had done nothing to inhibit conception. Indeed she had come back to her husband like an
apprehensive sleepwalker, still unconsciously depending on the ability of her fears to ‘whisk her instantly away, like a small animal’. At the same time she wanted him because she
feared him, and because she knew he had it in him to allay her fears.

I produced something to this effect, and the results are on page ten of the novel as first printed, in a longish paragraph. It reads a bit too much in the Jamesian style, rather than merging
into Iris’s own inimitable originality; but it does none the less perhaps have the function of suggesting alternatives and open spaces, which the scope and intent of the novel will not
necessarily want to occupy. The novel’s theme is the desire and pursuit, whether in true or false ways, of the spiritual life; and I had nothing to contribute to Iris’s own marvellous
feeling for what some people hunger for, and how in consequence they behave. Indeed I have very little understanding of the spiritual life; but that has never stopped me having a passionate
appetite for Iris’s novels, which I have usually read only after publication.
The Bell
, or at least the first piece of it, was an exception.

This sympathy for what was or might be going on in Iris’s mind, together with my inability to understand or enter into it, must have developed quite early on. The sympathy alone was what
was needed in the case of our communing together over the beginning of
The Bell
, and I remember vividly my then unexpected sense of it. Normally it was something which by then I took for
granted in our marriage, like air or water. Already we were beginning that strange and beneficent process in marriage by which a couple can, in the words of A.D. Hope the Australian poet,
‘move closer and closer apart’. The apartness is a part of the closeness, perhaps a recognition of it: certainly a pledge of complete understanding. There is nothing threatening or
supervisory about such an understanding, nothing of what couples really mean when they say (or are alleged to say) to confidants or counsellors, ‘the trouble is that my wife/husband
doesn’t understand me’. This usually means that the couple, or one of them, understands the other all too well, and doesn’t rejoice in the experience.

Still less is such apartness at all like what the French call
solitude à deux
, the inward self-isolation of a couple from anything outside their marriage. The solitude I have
enjoyed in marriage, and I think Iris too, is a little like having a walk by oneself, and knowing that tomorrow, or soon, one will be sharing it with the other, or equally perhaps again having it
alone. It is a solitude, too, that precludes nothing outside the marriage, and sharpens the sense of possible intimacy with things or people in the outside world.

Such sympathy in apartness takes time to grow, however, as well as being quite different by nature from that intoxicating sense of the strangeness of another being which accompanies the
excitements of falling in love. The more I got to ‘know’ Iris, in the normal sense, during the early days of our relationship, the less I understood her. Indeed I soon began not to want
to understand her. I was far too preoccupied at the time to think of such parallels, but it was like living in a fairy story – the kind with sinister overtones and a not always happy ending
– in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing. Eventually he
makes some dire mistake and she disappears for good. At this distance in time that comparison seems more or less true, if a bit fanciful. Iris
was
always disappearing, to ‘see’
her friends (I began to wonder and to dread, early on, what the word ‘see’ might involve) about whom, unlike the girl in the fairytale, she was always quite open. I knew their names; I
imagined them; I never met them.

And there seemed to be so many of them. Persons who were in a sense in my own position. Iris seemed deeply and privately attached to them all. No doubt in all sorts of different ways. I could
only hope that she did not talk to any of the others in quite the way that she talked to me, chattered childishly with me, kissed me. This Iris was so different from the grave being I had seen on
the bicycle, or at a party in the public domain, that I sometimes wondered what had become of the woman I had fallen in love with, as I then supposed. Absurdly, I had imagined our future together
as somehow equally grave, a wonderfully serious matter, and only the pair of us of course, for no one else in the world was or would be in the least interested in either of us. We would simply be
made for each other, and exist on that basis.

The happy child-like girl or woman she had now turned into when she was with me was delightful, but also – as I sometimes could not stop myself wistfully thinking – fundamentally
unreal, like the girl in the fairy story. This could not be the real Iris. But with the hindsight that also saw a parallel with the fairy story I can now feel that I was giving Iris without knowing
it the alternative being that she required: the irresponsible, even escapist persona (‘escapist’ was a word often used in those days, accompanied by a disapproving headshake) which she
had no idea that she wanted or needed. Neither did I have any idea that I was supplying it. I felt I was in love, indeed I was sure of it; and I was innocently sure, too, that it must be the most
important thing for both of us, although Iris never gave any indication that she thought so too. The Iris with whom I talked nonsense and gambolled about, the woman who entered with such joy into
those frolics, was delightful; and yet I could not but feel that she was not the same woman I had first seen and marked out: nor was she the ‘real’ Iris Murdoch, the serious
hard-working responsible being observed and admired by other people.

After our relationship became itself more serious, and as we became aware that we were travelling inevitably towards a separation or a solution we couldn’t anticipate or foresee, Iris once
or twice mentioned the myth of Proteus. It was in reply to my despairing comment that I couldn’t understand her, or the different person she became for the many others with whom she seemed,
in my view, helplessly entangled. ‘Remember Proteus,’ she used to say. ‘Just keep tight hold of me and it will be all right.’ Proteus had the power of changing himself into
any shape he wished – lion, serpent, monster, fish – but when Hercules held tightly on to him throughout all these transformations he was compelled in the end to surrender, and to
resume his proper shape as the man he was.

I used to reply gloomily that I was not Hercules, lacking that hero’s resources of musclepower and concentration. Then we would laugh and become our old secret and childish selves again
for the moment. As we did when we first crawled through the undergrowth and slipped secretly into the river.

That occasion for me marked a turning-point in our relations, although it was one I didn’t grasp at the time, nor could I have defined it until much later. The fact was that on that day
she had let me for the first time into another of her friendships, by asking Maurice Charlton if I might be included in the lunch he had planned for the pair of them. I had no idea of this, nor, as
I said, of the admirable good nature which Charlton himself must have displayed. If he was disappointed he gave no hint of it at all. Because I was there with them both I was not conscious of him
as a rival, nor did I mind at all the way in which he seemed spontaneously included in the relations between Iris and myself. All fitted in, and seemed beautifully natural.

I never asked Iris how I had come to be included in that party. It would not have occurred to me to ask. Now, of course, it is too late. Iris does not remember the lunch party, nor the bicycle
ride, nor the morning swim, nor Maurice Charlton himself. I have sometimes mentioned that occasion, without evoking any response beyond a usual and touchingly anxious interest in what I am talking
about. And yet I think she would recognise Maurice Charlton, or other friends from those days, were they to appear suddenly before her in the flesh. Memory may have wholly lost its mind function,
but it retains some hidden principle of identification, even after the Alzheimer’s has long taken hold.

A woman I sometimes meet, whose husband is also an Alzheimer sufferer, once invited me to share in a brisk exchange of experiences. ‘Like being chained to a corpse, isn’t it?’
she remarked cheerfully. I hastened to agree with her in the same jocular spirit, feeling reluctant none the less to pursue that particular metaphor. ‘Oh, a much-loved corpse
naturally,’ she amended, giving me a slightly roguish glance, as if suggesting I might be thankful to abandon in her presence the usual proprieties that went with our situation.