Iris Read Online Free PDF Page B

initial. Some notes on pupils too, and on points that had
struck her in their work. One entry, dated June 3 1954, read: ‘St Antony’s Dance. Fell down the steps, and seem to have fallen in love with J. We didn’t dance much.’

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    We trailed slowly over the long field towards the river. The heat seemed worse than ever, although the sun, overcast, did not beat down as fiercely as it had done earlier in
the day. The hay had been carried away some time before, and the brownish surface of the field was baked hard and covered incongruously with molehills. The earth in them was like grey powder, and I
wondered how the moles ever managed to find any sustenance as they tunnelled within it. A pair of crows flapped lazily away as we approached the river bank. Crows are said to live a long time, and
I wondered idly if they were the same birds we had seen there on our bathing visits for many years past.
    I wished we had managed to come earlier, before the hay was cut, and when wild flowers – scabious, white archangel, oxeye daisies – stretched over the whole field among the grass. It
was not a lush river field, probably because a bed of gravel lay just below the surface. There were big gravel ponds not far away, by the main road, but this field was a protected area, a plant and
bird sanctuary of some kind. Not a fish sanctuary however: there were sometimes a few fishermen about, who kept themselves to themselves and remained almost invisible among the reeds.
    Our own little nook was seldom occupied however, and it was empty as usual today. Once we would have got our clothes off as soon as possible and slid silently into the water, as we had done on
that first occasion. Now I had quite a struggle getting Iris’s clothes off: I had managed to put her bathing dress on at home, before we started. Her instinct nowadays seems to be to take her
clothes off as little as possible. Even in this horribly hot weather it is hard to persuade her to remove trousers and jersey before getting into bed.
    She protested, gently though vigorously, as I levered off the outer layers. In her shabby old one-piece swimsuit (actually two-piece, with a separate skirt and tunic top) she was an awkward and
anxious figure, her socks trailing round her ankles. She was obstinate about not taking these off, and I gave up the struggle. A pleasure barge chugged slowly past, an elegant girl in a bikini
sunning herself on the deck, a young man in white shorts at the steering-wheel. Both turned to look at us with a slight air of incredulity. I should not have been surprised if they had burst into
guffaws of ill-mannered laughter, for we must have presented a comic spectacle – an elderly man struggling to remove the garments from an old lady, still with white skin and incongruously
fair hair.
    Alzheimer sufferers are not always gentle: I know that. But Iris remains her old self in many ways. The power of concentration has gone, along with the ability to form coherent sentences, and to
remember where she is, or has been. She does not know she has written twenty-seven remarkable novels, as well as her books on philosophy; received honorary doctorates from the major universities;
become a Dame of the British Empire ... If an admirer or friend asks her to sign a copy of one of her novels she looks at it with pleasure and surprise before laboriously writing her name and, if
she can, theirs. ‘For Georgina Smith. For Dear Reggie ...’ It takes her some time, but the letters are still formed with care, and resemble, in a surreal way, her old handwriting. She
is always anxious to oblige. And the old gentleness remains.
    Once in the water Iris cheers up a bit. It is almost too warm, hardly refreshing. But its old brown slow-flowing deliciousness remains, and we smile happily at each other as we paddle quietly to
and fro. Water-lily leaves, with an occasional fat yellow flower, rock gently at the passage of a pleasure boat. Small bright blue