Authors: John Bayley
Unfortunately, not having a handy six-year-old child about, I have never managed to programme the video. In any case Iris turns the thing off not because she is bored with it – boredom
doesn’t seem with her a possible state of mind – but out of an instinct to get away, the one that makes her say ‘When are we leaving?’ or ‘Must do go’. She
leaves offered and attempted occupations – all now tacitly given up – for the same reason. When are they going to let us out?
Neither of us ever attempted, from our earliest married days, to do much about the house. A routine of chores never existed. Neither of us felt any need to keep it clean, and we were bothered by
the notion of somebody coming in to do it for us. Now I suppose the house has reached what seems a comfortable point of no return. Once nothing seemed to need to be done, or so we took it all for
granted, and now nothing can be done. If friends notice the state the place is in – a perfectly cosy one really – they don’t say anything. None the less I feel from time to time
that if we had ever developed a habit of working together on the chores we might be able to continue with it now. Self-discipline. And a way of passing the time. But somehow, as the tramp more or
less says in
Waiting for Godot
, the time seems to pass anyway.
We don’t exactly keep a dust museum, like Dickens’s Miss Havisham. If undisturbed it seems to fade easily into the general background. Like the clothes, books, old newspapers,
letters and cardboard boxes. Some of them might be useful some time. In any case Iris has never been able to bear throwing anything away. She has always felt a tenderness for the feelings of torn
open envelopes, or capless plastic bottles, which has now become obsessive. Old leaves are rescued, sticks, even cigarette ends smoked not very furtively in the street by the girls at the High
School near by. Smoking in our time has become an outdoor activity. Quite a wholesome one I sometimes think.
It is wonderfully peaceful to sit in bed with Iris reassuringly asleep and gently snoring. Half asleep again myself I have a feeling of floating down the river, and watching all the rubbish from
the house and from our lives – the good as well as the bad – sinking slowly down through the dark water until it is lost in the depths. Iris is floating or swimming quietly beside me.
Weeds and larger leaves sway and stretch themselves beneath the surface. Blue dragonflies dart and hover to and fro by the river bank. And suddenly a kingfisher flashes past.
Rivers featured on our honeymoon.
We were married nearly three years after we first met. I once worked out the number of days that had gone by since the morning I had seen Iris bicycling slowly past the window; but I have
forgotten the number now and it would take me too long to work it out again. We were married at the Registrar’s office in St Giles, a broad street which runs between the Martyrs’
Memorial at its south end and the War Memorial at the north end, at the junction of the Woodstock and Banbury roads. Opposite the Registrar’s office, now disappeared or moved elsewhere, is
the Judge’s House, a fine Palladian building which is supposed to have given Henry James his idea for the house in his novel
The Spoils of Poynton
.
I talk like a guidebook now because in a way I felt like one that morning. I gazed at these familiar landmarks as if I had never seen them before. In a sense I never had seen them before,
because I had always hurried along, going somewhere, late for something, preoccupied with my own affairs, taking no notice. Now I found myself looking round as I waited on a corner near the office,
seeing everything very clearly and as if for the first or the last time. I remember that the painter David, who sketched Marie Antoinette in the tumbril on her way to execution, noticed that she
kept glancing all round her with vacant curiosity, as if she had never seen these streets and squares of Paris before. I felt rather like that I think. I was also preoccupied, as every bridegroom
is supposed to be, with the question of the ring, which I had amongst various other things in my right-hand trouser pocket. It was obviously an unsatisfactory place to keep it, but I could not
think of a better one. I was wearing a dark suit, with which I had been issued on demobilisation from the army, nine years previously. It had no waistcoat, or perhaps the waistcoat, a necessary
attribute of gents’ suiting in those days, had become mislaid. I had selected the suit from among others lighter in colour, and it had been quite a good choice because I had scarcely ever
worn it, except on rare occasions of this kind. Weddings, christenings, funerals.
I had bought the ring the day before at a pawnbroker’s. It was a solid job, plain and oldfashioned, possibly disposed of by a widower in needy circumstances. It had been my idea. Iris had
never mentioned it. She never wore a ring, and I had never thought of giving her one, since we had never been engaged. I had no idea whether this ring would fit, and I was anxious about that.
Fortunately it was a beautiful fit, and still is, though it has now worn down from its old robust self into being the slimmest of gold bands.
After the operation – one could hardly call it a ceremony – which lasted about three minutes, the wife of my senior colleague – they were a very nice couple – said in her
rather fussy way ‘I must go and look after Mrs Bayley’. She meant my mother, but her husband said to her with what Iris later described as ‘a grim laugh’, ‘Every woman
here is called Mrs Bayley, except you.’ It was true. My mother and sister-in-law, also a Mrs Bayley, were present: no other ladies. Iris said that this was the ghastliest moment of what was
for her an extremely gruesome occasion. She was now lumped among a lot of Mrs Bayleys. Her own mother, incidentally, had managed to miss the train from Paddington to Oxford. After the business was
over we went down to the station to meet the next train, found her, and cheered up a good deal over a drink at a nearby pub.
This was not a very good start; but it was not exactly a start in any case. It seemed more of an anticlimax, the world we knew ending not with a bang but a whimper. At the same time this feeling
of
détente
was very welcome. All tensions, queries and uncertainties, all the things that for months and years seemed to have made up the drama of living, were now over. That was a
real source of satisfaction to both of us. At least I knew it was for me; and when Iris squeezed my hand at the station, and said how nice and settled and yet unfamiliar it felt now to be together,
it reassured me that all was well. Reassurance was probably what was wanted.
In another sense it seemed to be there already, in the mere fact of marriage. In his memoirs the novelist Anthony Powell observes that marriage does not resemble in the smallest degree any other
comparable human experience. You can live with someone for years and not feel in the least married. Alternatively you could finally take the step, as Iris and I had done, and at once feel you have
moved into a wholly different sphere of sensation and behaviour. As Powell puts it, in order to know what it is like you have to experience the thing itself. ‘Nothing else will do.’
The meeting with Iris’s mother was also reassuring. She was a quite exceptionally nice woman, who looked rather younger than her daughter. She had been only nineteen when Iris was born.
She was a Dublin girl, and a young man from Belfast, recently joined up in the army, had fallen in love with her. This was in 1917. Iris was proud of the fact that her father, who had been brought
up on a farm, was in a Yeomanry Cavalry Regiment, King Edward’s Horse. That probably saved his life, as the cavalry were rarely able to get into action during trench warfare battles.
Iris’s mother, who had been an amateur soprano of considerable promise, gave up her singing when she got married. Iris inherited her singing voice in some degree, and was always sorry that
her mother had never gone on with a serious musical career.
Instead she had Iris, with a difficult birth, following which she had taken a silent decision to have no more children. Iris told me later that she knew this by instinct, although her mother had
never said anything about it. I had pointed out that if more children had been born, a son among them, her own life would have been drastically different. As it was she had lived on the happiest
terms of equality with her mother and father, who had adored her. After the Irish troubles the small family had moved to England, where her father had obtained a modest job in a branch of the civil
service. Iris’s childhood was spent in a small semi-detached house in Chiswick. She went first to a Froebel day school in the same district. Then she was sent to Badminton, an excellent
private boarding school for girls near Bristol. Her father’s sacrifices for her education, including the borrowing of money, were something altogether against the instincts of a frugal and
godly Belfast upbringing, although by that time neither parent had any interest in religion, or affiliations with any church. Iris’s childhood was happily godless.
Her appetite for the spiritual developed in her Oxford days, nurtured by Plato and by her studies in philosophy. It was part of the inner world of her imagination and never appeared on the
surface. The way she fell in love when young, and the people she fell in love with, resembled in some degree the search for wisdom, authority, belief, which a lot of people feel the need to embark
on at some point, whether young or old. At the same time I suspect there was always something both tough and elusive about Iris, perhaps the circumspectness of her Northern Irish ancestors. Falling
in love with people who represented for her spiritual authority, wisdom, beneficence, even a force that might seem darkly ambiguous and enigmatic, was an adventure in the soul’s progress and
experience; she craved it, needed it, but she was far too sensible ever to become enslaved. Like silly young Dora Greenfield in her novel
The Bell
, she could get away when she wanted:
common sense was the final arbiter of her emotional impulses.
Her sunny adolescence, happiness at school, happy relations with her parents, may well have played their part in giving her this need, as she grew up, for strongly contrasting kinds of
experience. But with her parents she always seemed to return, as I felt she did with me, to the cheerful and enterprising innocence which seemed to have been her natural character when young. She
behaved with her mother with complete naturalness as if they were sisters, herself the elder. Her father at that time, newly retired, was already an invalid, and died of cancer the next year. (He
had always smoked his sixty a day, but so had her mother.) Iris was deeply attached to him, and she grieved for and missed him greatly, while instinctively taking over the role he had played in her
mother’s life. I still wish there had been time for me to know him better.
When the three of us got back from the station that day, my mother had a moment’s hesitation when introduced to Mrs Murdoch and her daughter. Which of them had her son just married? The
instant of confusion was pardonable; and I attempted, perhaps not very wisely, to make a joke of it. How this went down I don’t know, because we were immediately plunged into the business of
the party, modest as were the numbers attending it. It was given in a small reception room in my college; and the college butler, a genial patriarch, had suggested to me that he serve some
champagne from the college cellars which was already many years past its sell-by date. He wanted to use it up. ‘I don’t mind telling you, sir, that it’s not entirely
reliable,’ he warned me, ‘but I can let you have it cheap.’
In the event every bottle proved delicious, deep gold in colour and without much fizz, but giving just the right amount of conviviality to the few guests, and valuable support to the wedding
couple. I can still remember the romantic name of the
marque
: it was called Duc de Marne. The Duke still seemed to be giving us his benevolent support as we got through the other trials of
the day, culminating in a debacle at the posh hotel, The Compleat Angler at Marlowe, where we had been going to spend the night. The name had seemed propitious; and when we had been in to book a
room we saw the river Thames pouring itself over a weir outside the windows. The sound of that weir at night would have been a delightful epithalamion.
When we turned up there, however, the hotel staff were polite but puzzled. They were full up. Had we booked a room? Yes, we had – I had been there in person a week before. (In those days
the telephone seemed, at least to me, a not entirely trustworthy instrument to make so vital a reservation.) The young women at the reception desk exchanged a swift look. ‘That must have been
when Camilla was on,’ murmured one. I gathered at once and despairingly that Camilla was a delinquent girl, since sacked no doubt, who had forgotten to record the booking. In those days
fashionable country hotels prided themselves on the attractive amateur débutantes they employed as part-time staff. Camilla had no doubt been attractive, but not, it appeared, reliable.
Profuse in their apologies the hotel booked us by phone into a solid old-world establishment in the main square of neighbouring Henley. It was called The Catherine Wheel.
Our mothers had hit it off pretty well at the wedding party, and continued doing so on the basis of not seeing much of each other until both were old, when they became closer friends.
Iris’s mother seemed to take it for granted that we would not want to have children. I suspect she had not wanted them herself, although Iris as she grew up had become her joy and pride. How
such a conclusion could have been reached by me as an outside party is difficult to say; but Mrs Murdoch certainly seems to have assumed from the start that the three of us would form a
harmoniously self-sufficient triangle, similar to the one she had shared with her daughter and husband. Nor was she wrong, although her own presence in the relationship was happy but hardly
noticeable. She continued to live in London; she never bothered us.
Although no more intrusive in the affairs of her son and daughter-in-law, my own mother would, I knew, have liked grandchildren. She had three sons and only one produced an heir. But she had too
much sense and tact to voice this hope. After some initial uneasiness – she had barely met Iris before the wedding – my mother became very deeply attached to her increasingly famous
daughter-in-law, and continued to be so until she died, not so very long ago, in her late eighties. By then Iris’s mother, herself a victim of Alzheimer’s, was also dead.