Iris (7 page)

With the perception that made him an excellent doctor as well as a brilliant classical scholar Maurice Charlton may well have been aware in some sense of all this, while his green eyes went on
surveying us in their merrily convivial but impassive way. He reminded me in some way of the great Professor Fraenkel, whom I had seen once or twice at the time, a venerable almost gnome-like
figure, shuffling up the High Street after giving some class or lecture, surveying the world with a disconcertingly bright and youthful eye. A Jewish refugee from Germany, he arrived in Oxford at
the time Iris became a student, and such was his reputation that he soon acquired a Chair, even though Oxford had by then a glut of distinguished refugees. He had given Iris tutorials, and she
attended his famous Agamemnon class. I had been a mere schoolboy then, and so for that matter had been Maurice Charlton himself, though an older one. But his green glance had much the same light in
it as Fraenkel’s black twinkle. Perhaps that resemblance was what had attracted Iris to him.

She had already told me how fond she had been of Fraenkel, both fond and reverential. In those days there had seemed to her nothing odd or alarming when he caressed her affectionately as they
sat side by side over a text, sometimes half an hour over the exact interpretation of a word, sounding its associations in the Greek world as he explored them, as lovingly keen on them as he seemed
to be on her. She had been pleased it was so, and revelled in the sense of intellectual comradeship she felt. That there was anything dangerous or degrading in his behaviour, which would nowadays
constitute a shocking example of sexual harassment, never occurred to her. In fact her tutor at Somerville College, Isobel Henderson, had said with a smile when she sent Iris along to the
professor, ‘I expect he’ll paw you about a bit,’ as if no sensible girl, aware of the honour of being taught personally by the great man, would be silly enough to object to
that.

Nobody did, so far as Iris knew. She sometimes spoke to me of the excitement of the textual world Fraenkel revealed to her, and mentioned in an amused way how he had stroked her arms and held
her hand. Few girl students had any sexual experience at that time, and Iris was in any case unusually virginal. We sometimes laughed together over her memories of the one ‘bad’ girl in
Somerville, a dark-haired beauty who used to climb back into the college late at night, assisted by her boyfriend. Professor Fraenkel was devoted to his wife, and had told a close friend that when
she died he would follow her. He did, taking an overdose the same night.

My ancient Greek is virtually non-existent; and Iris’s, once extensive, of course has gone completely. I used to try reading the
Agamemnon
and other Greek plays to her in a
translation, but it was not a success. Nor was any other attempt at reading aloud. It all seemed and felt unnatural. I did several chapters of the
Lord of the Rings
and
The Tale of
Genji
, two of Iris’s old favourites, before I realised this. For someone who had been accustomed not so much to read books as to slip into their world as effortlessly as she slipped into
a river or the sea, this laborious procession of words clumping into her consciousness must have seemed a tedious irrelevance, although she recognised and reacted to them, even knowing, as they
appeared before her, the people and events described. But the relation of such recognition to true memory is clearly a painful one. Tolkien and Lady Murasaki had been inhabitants of her mind,
denizens as native to its world as were the events and people who so mysteriously came to her in her own process of creation. To meet them again in this way, and awkwardly to recognise them, was an
embarrassment.

On the other hand she was always roused to the point of animation if I managed to turn some matter from reading into our own sort of joke. Then we would stop at once and I would embroider the
idea into a mini-fantasy, as I did when attempting to interest her again in a translation of the
Odyssey
. The Lestrygonian giants had just sunk eleven of Odysseus’s twelve ships and
devoured their crews. I imagined him calling an office meeting in the surviving flagship next morning, and starting the proceedings by saying, ‘Gentlemen, we shall have to do better than
this.’ She thought that quite funny, and always seemed to remember it if I said to her when she had arranged dead leaves and bits of rubbish from the street in patterns round the house,
‘Come gentlemen, we shall have to do better than this.’ I was unconsciously copying the phrase from some other context half-remembered – possibly the moment in
Pride and
Prejudice
when Mr Bennet remarks to his younger daughter who has been playing her instrument before the company: ‘Come Mary, you have delighted us long enough.’ (The unfortunate
Mary is the only one among Jane Austen’s characters who never gets a fair deal from the author at all, any more than she does from her father.)

I think this attempt at reading and being read to is also a reminder of the loss of identity; although reminder is hardly the word, for an Alzheimer patient is not usually conscious in any
definable way of what has happened. If it were otherwise the process, however irreversible it becomes in the end, would have developed along different lines, in a different form. Some sufferers do
remain conscious of their state, paradoxical as this seems. The torment of knowing that you cannot speak or think what you want must be intolerable, and I have met patients in whom such a torment
is clearly visible. But when Iris talks to me the result seems normal to her and to me surprisingly fluent, provided I do not listen to what is being said but apprehend it in a matrimonial way, as
the voice of familiarity, and thus of recognition.

Time constitutes an anxiety because its conventional shape and progression have gone, leaving only a perpetual query. There are some days when ‘When are we leaving?’ never stops,
though it is repeated without agitation. Indeed there can seem something quite peaceful about it, as if it hardly mattered when we went, or where, and to stay at home might in any case be
preferable. In Faulkner’s novel
Soldier’s Pay
the blinded airman keeps saying to his friend, ‘When are they going to let me out?’ That makes one flinch: the writer
has contrived unerringly to put the reader in the blind man’s place. Iris’s query does not in itself suggest desire for change or release into a former state of being; nor does she want
to know when we are getting in the car and going out to lunch. The journey on which we are leaving may for her mean the final one; or, if that sounds too portentous, simply some sort of
disappearance from the daily life which, without her work, must itself have lost all sense and identity.

Iris once told me that the question of identity had always puzzled her. She thought she herself hardly possessed such a thing, whatever it was. I said that she must know what it was like to be
oneself, even to revel in the consciousness of oneself, as a secret and separate person – a person unknown to any other. She smiled, was amused, looked uncomprehending. It was not something
she bothered about. ‘Then you live in your work? Like Keats and Shakespeare and all that?’ She disclaimed any such comparison; and she did not seem particularly interested when I went
on to speak (I was after all in the Eng. Lit. business) of the well-known Romantic distinction, fascinating to Coleridge, between the great egocentric writers, Wordsworth and Milton, whose sense of
self was so overpowering that it included everything else, and these identity-free spirits for whom being is not what they are, but what they live in and reveal. As a philosopher I suspect that she
found all such distinctions very crude ones. Perhaps one has to be very much aware of oneself as a person in order to find them at all meaningful or interesting. Nobody less narcissistic than Iris
can well be imagined.

Conceivably it is the persons who hug their identity most closely to themselves for whom the condition of Alzheimer’s is most dreadful. Iris’s own lack of a sense of identity seemed
to float her more gently into its world of preoccupied emptiness. Placidly every night she insists on laying out quantities of her clothing on my side of the bed, and when I quietly remove them,
back they come again. She wants to look after me? Is that it? It may be a simpler sort of confusion, for when we go to bed she often asks me which side she should be on. Or is it something deeper
and fuller, less conscious and less ‘caring’ than that far too self-conscious adjective suggests. She has never wanted to look after me in the past, thank goodness; indeed one of the
pleasures of living with Iris was her serenely benevolent unawareness of one’s daily welfare. So restful. Having a busy personality, I made a great thing to myself about looking after her:
she never needed to tell herself to look after me. But when I broke my leg once in the snow at Christmas, and had to lie up for a few days in Banbury hospital, a dozen miles off, she came and
stayed in a bed and breakfast hotel outside the hospital gate. I besought her to remain at home and work, instead of wasting her time. There was nothing she could do. But no. She stayed there until
I was fit enough to come home with her.

Philosophers once used to argue the question of whether I could have a pain in your foot. Iris certainly could not. Presumably the point of the argument, if it has any, is to investigate the
possibilities of physical sympathy. ‘She may not understand you, but she always feels with you,’ remarked Coleridge fondly of his ideal woman. One doesn’t need to be a feminist to
find this nonsense. Either sex may or may not be able to feel the pleasure or pain of other persons, just as either sex can possess or lack a sense of smell. Iris, as it happens, has no sense of
smell, and her awareness of others is transcendental rather than physical. She communes with their higher being, as an angel might, and is unconcerned with their physical existence, their sweaty
selves. I have often been struck by the brilliant accuracy with which she can notice details about the lives of the characters in her novels, their faces and bodies, without any instinctive sense
of how those characters function in themselves, on the humbler level.

But of course she was instantly aware of emotion, and quick to respond to it. Misery or mere sadness in her friends she intuited at once, and was always able to help it, often by letting it put
on for her some dramatic appearance, gently encouraging it to assume some form gratifying or reassuring to its owner. She never participated in the drama of themselves put on by others, but she
could feel intensely herself emotions of love, jealousy, adoration, even rage. I never saw them myself but I knew they were there. In my own case she could always take jealousy away simply by being
with me. In early days I always thought it would be vulgar – as well as not my place – to give any indications of jealousy: but she knew when it was there, and soothed it just by being
the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.

In those early days as I now think of them, about a year or eighteen months after we first met, she was engaged every Saturday evening with a Jewish Italian professor, another wartime refugee,
from London University. He loved her deeply, an affection she sweetly and reverently returned. He was a gentle little man, neat and elderly, and they did not go to bed together (I believed that)
but sat talking all evening about the ancient world while he kissed her sometimes and held her hand. He had a wife and grown-up daughter in London, whom Iris knew well and was greatly attached to.
His wife accepted their relationship with complete understanding. Punctually at half-past eleven the professor would leave her room – she was then living not in college but on a top floor in
Beaumont Street, close to the centre of Oxford – and walk to his small hotel in the Banbury Road. I knew, because I was usually there. Sometimes I would follow him back – he never
guessed my presence: he did not know about me – or sometimes I continued to stand in the street looking up at her lighted window.

There was nothing obviously god-like about this quiet little professor of Ancient History, although he was probably the most distinguished man in his field at the time. In a respectful way I
felt quite fond of him, even proud of him. With the other master-figure in Iris’s life, a
Dichter
of legendary reputation among people who knew, it was another matter. This man held
court, as I thought of it, secretly and almost modestly in Hampstead, and Iris was very much under his sway. He had several mistresses whom Iris knew, and she seemed to revere them almost as much
as the great man himself. His wife too she revered. Sometimes Iris spoke to me of this woman, her sweet face and air of patient welcoming reserve, who was sometimes present in the flat when the
Dichter
made love to Iris, possessing her as if he were a god. This she told me later, before we got married, when her close relationship with the man had come to an end, and he had given
us his blessing, as she put it. She continued to see him from time to time and her creative imagination continued to be enthralled by him, even though, as she told me, by writing about him in her
own way she got him out of her system, and finally in a sense out of her novels too.

The
Dichter
was a
Dichter
in the German sense, not actually a poet but a master-spirit of literature. He had been a friend of another German Jewish writer, a real poet, with
whom Iris had been very much in love. She would possibly have married him had he lived, but he had a serious heart ailment, and knew that he could not live long. He died a year before I met her.
She grieved for him deeply. He sounded a delightful man, gentle (like all Iris’s close friends, as opposed to her ‘gods’) and humorous. The gods were not funny, I suspect; perhaps
it was beneath the dignity of godship. The poet was also in the anthropology department at Oxford, although he was never strong enough to go ‘into the field’, as they called it. At the
time he gave his weekly lecture, he told Iris, he invariably found himself confronting a blank page on which he had written ‘As I was saying in my last lecture.’ During the week he had
never managed to get any farther, and on the morning of the lecture he always found himself confronting the page. It had been a joke between them, and it became a joke between Iris and me. It still
is. She always understands it, and when it comes up I always speak of her dead poet by name, though I am never sure if she remembers him. Only the joke remains alive.