Free Iris by John Bayley Page A

different in those days, just as the past itself is always different, and
always a foreign country. Today even caring about the past seems an emotion or indulgence that belongs to the past itself, not to the present or future, to the place where we live today. That talk
we once had – the way Iris delivered it, and the way in which deep inside me I received it – now seems to me almost mediaeval.
    Could we really have thought and behaved like that?
    It seems that we did. And now, nearly fifty years later, we remain for ourselves the same couple, even though a sort of incredulity comes over me in remembering what we seem to have been like,
the ways in which we behaved. Looking back, I separate us with difficulty. We seem always to have been together. But memory draws a sharp divide, none the less. The person I was at that age now
seems odd to myself – could I have
really
been in love? Could I have felt, at least some of the time, all that jealousy, ecstasy, misery, longing, unhopefulness, mingled with a fever
of possibility and joy? I can hardly believe it. But where Iris is concerned my own memory, like a snug-fitting garment, seems to have zipped itself up to the present second. As I work in bed early
in the morning, typing on my old portable with Iris quietly asleep beside me, her presence as she now is seems as it always was, and as it always should be. I know she must once have been
different, but I have no true memory of a different person.
    Waking up for a peaceful second or two she looks vaguely at the ‘Tropical Olivetti’ lying on my knees, cushioned by one of her jerseys. Not long ago, when I asked if it disturbed
her, she said she liked to hear that funny noise in the morning. She must be used to it, although a couple of years ago she would have been getting up herself at this time – seven
o’clock – and preparing to start her own day. Nowadays she lies quietly asleep, sometimes giving a little grunt or murmur, often sleeping well past nine, when I rouse and dress her.
This ability to sleep like a cat, at all hours of the day and night, must be one of the great blessings that sometimes go with Alzheimer’s, converse of the anxiety state that comes on in
wakefulness and finds worried words like ‘When are we leaving?’
    Dressing most days is a reasonably happy and comic business. I am myself still far from sure which way round her underpants are supposed to go: we usually decide between us that it doesn’t
matter. Trousers are simpler: hers have a grubby white label on the inside at the back. I ought to give her a bath, or rather a wash of some sort since baths are tricky, but I tend to postpone it
from day to day. For some reason it is easier to do the job in cold blood, as it were, at an idle moment later in the day. Iris never objects to this; she seems in a curious way to accept it as
both quite normal and wholly exceptional, as if the two concepts had become identified for her. Perhaps that is why she seems to accept her daily state as if none other had ever existed: assuming
too that no one else would find her changed in any way; just as my own memory only works with her now as she is, and so, as my memory seems to assume, must always have been.
    It seems normal that the old routines of washing and dressing have vanished as if they too had never existed. If she remembered them, which she doesn’t, I can imagine her saying to
herself, did one really go through all those unnecessary rituals every day? My own memory, after all, can hardly believe that I once went through all those other rituals of falling in love and
becoming agitated, ecstatic, distracted ....
    At the same time Iris’s social reflexes are in a weird way still very much in place. If someone comes to the door – the postman, the man to read the gas meter – and I am for
the moment occupied elsewhere, she receives him with her social smile, and calls for me in those unhurried slightly ‘gracious’ tones which