Free Iris by John Bayley Page B

married couples automatically use on each
other in the presence of a stranger. ‘Oh I think it is the man who has come to read the meter, darling.’ In the same way she deals instinctively with more complex social situations;
seeming to follow the conversation and smiling, prepared to bridge a silence by asking a question. Usually the same question: ‘Where do you come from?’ or ‘What are you doing
now?’ – questions that get repeated many times in the course of a social event. Other people, visitors or friends, adjust themselves well to these repetitions as soon as they grasp what
is happening and what motivates them: they usually manage to adopt the same social part that she is playing.
    I find myself making use of the behavioural instincts that survive. In the old days I would sometimes produce what in childhood used to be called ‘a tantrum’, if something had gone
wrong or not been done properly, something for which, rightly or wrongly, I held Iris responsible. She would then become calm, reassuring, almost maternal, not as if deliberately, but with some
deep unconscious female response that normally had no need to come to the surface, as it would have had to do on an almost daily basis with a young family. Iris in general was never
‘female’ at all, a fact for which I sometimes remembered to be grateful. Nowadays I have learnt to make on occasions a deliberate use of this buried reflex. If she has been following me
all day, like Mary’s bear, interrupting tiresome business or letter-writing (very often letters to her own fans), I erupt in what can seem even to me an uncontrolled fit of exasperation,
stamping on the floor and throwing the papers and letters on it, waving my hands in the air. It always works. Iris says ‘Sorry ... sorry ...’ and pats me before going quietly away. She
will be back soon, but that doesn’t matter. My tantrum has reassured her as no amount of my own caring, or my calming efforts to reply to her rationally, could have done.
    The lady who told me in her own deliberately jolly way that living with an Alzheimer victim was like being chained to a corpse, went on to an even greater access of desperate facetiousness.
‘And, as you and I know, it’s a corpse that complains all the time.’
    I don’t know it. In spite of her anxious and perpetual queries Iris seems not to know how to complain. She never has. Alzheimer’s, which can accentuate personality traits to the
point of demonic parody, has only been able to exaggerate a natural goodness in her.
    On a good day her need for a loving presence, mutual pattings and murmurs, has something angelic about it; she seems herself the presence found in an icon. It is more important for her still on
days of silent tears, a grief seemingly unaware of that mysterious world of creation she has lost, and yet aware that something is missing. The ‘little bull’ aspect of her, putting her
head down, and herself moving determinedly ahead, used once to be emphasised when she got up in the morning and headed for the bathroom. Dressed, she would visit me, still working in bed, and then
go down to open the garden door and see what was going on in the morning. The weather and the birds, the look and sound of things, were sometimes jotted in her diary as she settled down to work.
She never had breakfast then, although if I was at home I brought her coffee and a chocolate biscuit later in the morning.
    Now that once good morning time has become the worst time. Like ‘stand-to’ in the trenches for soldiers in the two world wars. Trench humour is the natural response, even if one can
only crack the dark joke inside oneself; it would be heartless at that once hopeful hour to try to share it with the victim. While trying to think of ways of getting through the day I feel all the
more comradely at this time, with the woman who had found some relief – at least I hoped so – in being facetious about herself and her Alzheimer