Iris (6 page)

But I was not at all thankful. I was repelled – I couldn’t help it – by the suggestion that Iris’s affliction could have anything in common with that of this jolly
woman’s husband. She was a heroine no doubt, but let her be a heroine in her own style. How could our cases be compared. Iris was Iris.

Troubles do not necessarily bring people together. I felt no togetherness at all. This lady wanted – needed – to dramatise her situation and claim me as a fellow actor. I felt I
could not cooperate in the spirit, though out of politeness I made a show of doing so. My own situation, I felt, was quite different from hers. It’s not an uncommon reaction, as I’ve
come to realise, among Alzheimer partners. One needs very much to feel that the unique individuality of one’s spouse has not been lost in the common symptoms of a clinical condition.

But the woman’s figure of speech did not lose its power to haunt me. Her image of the corpse and the chain still lingered. There is a story by Thomas Hardy called ‘On the Western
Circuit’, one of those soberly ironic tales the author obviously enjoyed writing, in which a young barrister meets a country girl while accompanying the rounds of the circuit judge. They fall
in love and he makes her pregnant. She implores the sympathetic married lady in whose house she works as a maid to write letters for her to the young man, she being illiterate. Her mistress does
so, and as a result of their correspondence begins to fall for the young man herself, while he, instead of escaping from his predicament as he had first intended, is so charmed by the girl’s
sensible and loving little letters that he determines to marry her. The outcome, though predictable and characteristic of Hardy, is none the less moving for that. The marriage takes place in
London, and the sole meeting between the young man and the girl’s employer, before she returns to her own lonely and barren married life in Wessex, reveals to him how their involuntary
intimacy has taken place. The love letters she has written have made him love her, not the girl. The poor girl is distracted by her husband’s discovery of the deceit – he had asked her
to write a little note of thanks to one of the guests – and he is left to face the future fettered to an unchosen partner, like two slaves chained in a galley. Hardy’s grim metaphor no
doubt seemed wholly appropriate both to him and to his young hero.

I remembered the story while the woman was speaking. Our own situations were not the same, it was to be presumed, as those of the young man and girl. Fate had not deceived us. We had known our
partners as equals over many years, told and listened and communed together, until communication had dwindled and faltered and all but ceased. No more letters, no more words. An Alzheimer sufferer
begins many sentences, usually with an anxious repetitive query, but they remain unfinished, the want unexpressed. Usually it is predictable and easily satisfied, but Iris produces every day many
such queries, involving ‘you know, that person’, or simply ‘that’, which take time and effort to unravel. Often they remain totally enigmatic, related to some unidentifiable
man or woman in the past who has swum up to the surface of her mind as if encountered yesterday. At such times I feel my own mind and memory faltering, as if required to perform a function too far
outside their own beat and practice.

The continuity of joking can very often rescue such moments, Humour seems to survive anything. A burst of laughter, snatches of doggerel, song, teasing nonsense rituals once lovingly exchanged,
awake an abruptly happy response, and a sudden beaming smile that must resemble those moments in the past between explorers and savages, when some sort of clowning pantomime on the part of the
former seems often to have evoked instant comprehension and amusement. At cheerful moments, over drinks or in the car, Iris sometimes twitters away incomprehensibly but self-confidently, happily
convinced that an animated exchange is taking place. At such moments I find myself producing my own stream of consciousness, silly sentences or mashed-up quotations. ‘The tyrant of the
Chersonese was freedom’s best and bravest friend’, I assure her, giving her a solemnly meaningful look. At which she nods her head gravely, and seems to act a conspiring smile, as if
the ringing confidence of Byron’s line in ‘The Isles of Greece’ meant a lot to her too.

Our mode of communication seems like underwater sonar, each bouncing pulsations off the other, and listening for an echo. The baffling moments at which I cannot understand what Iris is saying,
or about whom or what – moments which can produce tears and anxieties, though never, thank goodness, the raging frustration typical of many Alzheimer sufferers – can sometimes be
dispelled by embarking on a joky parody of helplessness, and trying to make it mutual. Both of us at a loss for words.

At happy moments she seems to find them more easily than I do. Like the swallows when we lived in the country. Sitting on the telephone wire outside our bedroom window a row of swallows would
converse animatedly with one another, always, it seemed signing off each burst of twittering speech with a word that sounded like ‘Weatherby’, a common call-sign delivered on a rising
note. We used to call them ‘Weatherbys’. Now I tease her by saying ‘You’re just like a Weatherby, chattering away.’ She loves to be teased, but when I make the tease a
tender one by adding ‘I love listening to you’, her face clouds over. She can always tell the difference between the irresponsibility of a joke, or a straight tease, and the note of
‘caring’ or of ‘loving care’, which however earnest and true always sounds inauthentic.

All this sounds quite merry, but most days are in fact for her a sort of despair, although despair suggests a conscious and positive state and this is a vacancy which frightens her by its lack
of dimension. She mutters ‘I’m a fool’ or ‘Why didn’t I’ or ‘I must ...’ and I try to seem to explain the trouble while rapidly suggesting we must
post a letter, walk round the block, go shopping in the car. Something urgent, practical, giving the illusion of sense and routine. The Reverend Sydney Smith, a benevolent clergyman of Jane
Austen’s time, used to urge parishioners in the grip of depression who appealed to him for help, to ‘take short views of human life – never further than dinner or tea’. I
used to quote this to Iris, when troubles began, as if I was recommending a real policy, which could intelligibly be followed. Now I repeat it sometimes as an incantation or joke, which can raise a
laugh if it is accompanied by some horsing around, a live pantomime of ‘short views’ being taken. It is not now intended to be rationally received, but it gets a smile anyway.

That is something to be tried for all the time. It transforms her face, bringing it back to what it was, and with an added glow that can seem almost supernatural. The Alzheimer face has been
clinically described as the ‘lion face’. An apparently odd comparison but in fact a very apt one. The features settle into a leonine impassivity which does remind one of the King of
Beasts, and the way his broad expressionless mask is represented in painting and sculpture. The Alzheimer face is neither tragic nor comic, as a face can appear in other forms of dementia: that
would suggest humanity and emotion in their most distorted guise. The Alzheimer face indicates only an absence: it is a mask in the most literal sense.

That is why the sudden appearance of a smile is so extraordinary. The lion face becomes the face of the Virgin Mary, tranquil in sculpture and painting with a gravity that gives such a smile its
deepest meaning. Only a joke survives, the last thing that finds its way into consciousness when the brain is atrophied. And the Virgin Mary, after all, presides over the greatest joke of the lot,
the wonderful fable made up, elaborated, repeated all over the world. No wonder she is smiling.

The latest smile on Iris’s face seems to come from association with another Mary. Trying to cheer her up one day I thought of an inane childhood rhyme, forgotten for years.

Iris not only smiled – her face looked cunning and concentrated. Somewhere in the deserted areas of the brain old contacts and impulses became activated, wires joined up. A significance
had revealed itself, and it seems only to work with jokes, particularly silly jokes, which in the days of sanity would have been received with smiling but slightly embarrassed forbearance. Iris
always mildly disliked and avoided what used to be called vulgar or risqué jokes. Maybe the innocence of the bear rhyme pleased her – who can say what subtle feelings and distinctions
from the past can be summoned back to her mind by something as childish – but perhaps as touching too – as the bear rhyme? My own memory had retained it despite my conscious wishes,
which is something that often happens. I could recall now the small boy at school – I secretly thought him rather repulsive but was too polite to say so – who told me the rhyme with a
knowing air of complacency, sure that it would be a hit with me. I resolved on the spot to forget it at once, but here it was back again.

When I quoted Byron’s certainly very memorable line about the old Greek hero Miltiades, Tyrant of the Chersonese and victor at the Battle of Marathon, I thought involuntarily again of
Maurice Charlton, and the enchanted lunch on that hot summer day. He had been this fabulous young Greek scholar, before he had become a medical doctor. No doubt Iris had admired him, as she had
admired all high skill and learning. And had he been going to attempt seduction that warm afternoon, a project thwarted by his own courtesy in acceding to her suggestion that I should come along
too? I had no idea, and still have none. Clueless as I still was I did know by then that Iris had several lovers, often apparently at the same time. I also intuited – quite how I don’t
know but it turned out to be correct enough – that she usually gave her favours out of admiration and respect: for, so to speak, the godlike rather than the conventionally attractive or
sexual attributes in the men who pursued her. Men who were like gods for her were also for her erotic beings, but sex was something she regarded as rather marginal, not an end in itself.

I had no illusions about being godlike. I realised that she loved to be with me as if we were children again, and was tender when she saw with what childlike eagerness I had
come to desire her. She sensed I had next to no knowledge of lovemaking (how absurdly oldfashioned it all seems today!) A little while before our own swimming expedition on that hot morning she had
remarked with brisk indulgence ‘Perhaps it’s time we made love,’ and she had shown me how, although as I had no condom with me (they were known as French letters in those days and
a good deal of guilt and secrecy hung about their supply and use) she did not permit me to get very far. We had done better once or twice after that, but in a genial and wholly unserious way that
did not in the least mar for me the unfamiliar magic of the proceedings: doing this odd and comical thing with someone whom one really loved. The paradox was itself comical, though not at all
depressing.

What was a trifle depressing was the growing knowledge that I was far from being the only one with whom she was doing it – probably only on occasion: she was much too busy and interested
in other things to make a habit of it, so to speak. But to me in those days she seemed at the negligent disposition of these unknown and godlike older men, whom she went humbly to ‘see’
at times when it suited them. Here, I began dimly to perceive, was where her creative imagination lay, and it was to feed it – almost, it seemed, to propitiate it – that she would make
what appeared to me these masochistic journeys to London; and chiefly to Hampstead, for me the abode and headquarters of the evil gods.

As my own feelings became closely involved I saw all such matters in an absurdly lurid light. In reality the people Iris went to see were not gods or demons but intellectuals, writers, artists,
civil servants, mostly Jewish, mainly refugees, who knew one another and formed a loose-knit circle, with its own rivalries, jealousies and power struggles. They loved Iris and accepted her as one
of themselves, although she remained inevitably an outsider, living and teaching as she did in humdrum academic circles, away from their own focus of attention. In time I met most of them and got
on with them well, surprised and in later days amused when I looked back at the storm of fears and emotions they had once aroused in me. It was Iris’s own imagination which had in a sense
created them, and continued to create and nurture them as the strange and unique characters of her wonderful novels. It was the second of these,
The Flight from the Enchanter
in 1955,
which first showed me how the genius of Iris’s imagination did its own work, in its own way. And all the teeming complex variety of her later novels continued in its own mysterious fashion to
be distilled from the alembic of those original obsessions and enchantments.

But Maurice Charlton was quite different: a sunlit character whose spiritual home was that hot but never oppressive Oxford summer, even though he lived for the moment, as if himself the
beneficiary of some enchantment, in that gloomy exotic flat, surrounded as it seemed to me by heavy glittering cutlery and tall green Venetian wineglasses. When first in love one feels attended on
all sides, almost jostled, by such unexpected and incongruous symbols of romance. That morning marked a turning-point, however little I realised it at the time, in the way in which Iris behaved
towards me. The lunch party and the river made me too bemused and delighted to see it, but she was not only including me in another part of her social life: she was also indicating to a third
person that I played a role in that life which had begun to possess a public continuity, and was not something to be privately taken up between us and discarded from moment to moment. I was far
from becoming her official ‘swain’, in the quaint old sense, but in the eyes of the world I had come to have some kind of status beyond the sphere of mere acquaintanceship.