Time to Be in Earnest (47 page)

I read moving but distressingly frank extracts in
The Times
from a book written by John Bayley about living with his wife Iris Murdoch now that she is suffering from Alzheimer’s. I had never thought that anything either reassuring or optimistic could be said about this terrible disease, which nearly all old people dread, but John Bayley writes that, so far
from diminishing his marriage, it has brought him and his wife even closer. Personally I would feel that closeness had been bought at far too high a price. Other people’s marriages are, of course, always mysterious, perhaps even to the partners themselves. I was surprised by John Bayley writing that one thing which had originally attracted him to his wife was the mistaken belief that she lacked sexual appeal to other men. How could this have been possible? I have always thought her very lovely. I don’t know her well, and on the few occasions when we did meet, felt myself inhibited by the knowledge of her infinitely superior intelligence.

I can remember one summer when she and her husband drove me from Oxford to Penelope and Jack Lively’s garden party at Great Rollright. All the way she asked about my children and grandchildren, rather as if a family were a strange phenomenon of which she had no knowledge and of which she wished, as a novelist, to inform herself. I felt that she had a genuine interest in me and my family but this, I think, was part of her special grace. Another occasion, strong in memory, is when we were both guests at Grand Night at the Middle Temple. Before the procession into the Great Hall, Iris and I were in the women’s cloakroom. It was an occasion for dressing up and I had done my best. I saw that Iris was studying herself in the mirror, but without any apparent interest in her image. She was wearing shoes remarkably like carpet slippers, a dirndl skirt in flowered cotton such as one might have worn on a beach, what was obviously one of her husband’s striped shirts, a black velvet jacket and magnificent amber beads. She looked absolutely wonderful. I don’t know how interested she was in dress but her taste, although erratic, produced a highly individual result.

One Christmas we were both invited to read a lesson at a service of carols and lessons held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in aid of a book trade charity. I found myself sitting beside her in the front row, placed in order ready to mount into the high pulpit when our time came to read. Iris asked me, “Are you a Christian?” I began my usual confused reply to this question. I said that I regarded myself as one and was a communicant member of the Church of England, although I had difficulty with some theological doctrines and could hardly claim to be a good Christian. Iris said simply, “Oh I’m a Christian. I don’t think I believe in God and I don’t believe Jesus Christ was divine, but I am a Christian. I nearly became a Buddhist, but then I said to myself, Don’t be foolish, Iris. You’re a member of the Church of England.” Can I really have remembered that conversation accurately?

Now she inhabits some private world, partly accessible, apparently, to her husband but which no other person is able to enter. One wonders whether it is a world of some contentment; one surely can’t use the word happiness. I hope that she doesn’t know what has happened to her. That would be the final cruelty. It seems to me in my spiritual naïvety that these diseases which destroy personality always raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of the soul.

And should John Bayley have written this book? Until it is published one can’t be sure. But judging from extracts in
The Times
, I think that he was wrong. The biography is a testament of love and perhaps writing it helped him to bear an almost intolerable daily burden. But would the Iris Murdoch of the novels and the philosophy have wanted these intimate and sometimes demeaning details made public? I think not. The great tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.

This evening I was the guest of Sir Brian Shaw, Chairman of the Port of London Authority, and his wife at dinner on the PLA launch
Royal Nore
. Brian and Pennie called for me, their arrival coinciding with a downpour which drenched Brian and myself, although we were under an umbrella, and even penetrated the car when the door was opened. I was last a guest on the
Royal Nore
five years ago, and on that occasion we were driven south of the river to cross Tower Bridge. Unfortunately it had jammed when we arrived and we had to be picked up by the launch farther up-river at Westminster Pier.

I seem to be a Jonah on these occasions as tonight we were held up for fifteen minutes on the Embankment because of an accident. Eventually the police directed traffic on the other side of the road into a single file and allowed cars on the left-hand side to cross the reservation and pass the scene. The ambulance had departed and all one could see were pieces of motor-cycle strewn across the road. I suppose few of us pass the scene of a serious accident without much the same thought; the skeleton fingers reach out momentarily to twitch at our clothes and we face our own mortality and, worse, that of those we love. We think, too, of that unknown
wife or mother now happily oblivious to the police appearance on the doorstep which will change her life forever. I said a brief silent prayer for those concerned, and then the car moved on. Those seconds of sympathy for the unknown victim wouldn’t, as I knew, overshadow a happy evening.

One of the sadnesses of old age is that few experiences ever match the exhilarating excitement of youth, but being on the Thames, particularly at night, can still kindle in me that mixture of awe, wonder and delight which I used to feel as a child when I saw the river. The launch is named after the lightship
Nore
, which marked the former seaward limit of the Port of London Authority, and renamed
Royal Nore
, after the Queen embarked for her River Progress at the time of her Silver Jubilee. The launch is, in fact, used as the royal barge when the Queen travels by the Thames. The journeys must be speedier, and presumably more comfortable, than when Henry VIII was rowed in his glorious royal barge from Westminster to visit his Chancellor, Thomas More, at Chelsea.

We sailed—perhaps an inappropriate verb for a motor launch—upstream as far as Chelsea, then turned and went downstream to the Thames Barrier. The weather was changeable, sudden heavy squalls battering on the roof of the cabin and a turbulent sky which brightened into layers of dark grey and pale azure blue tinted with the red of the setting sun. It was getting dark by the time we reached the Barrier and, for me, one of the most splendid sights of the evening was when the launch turned and we saw through the huge shell-like hoods of the Barrier the gleaming pencil of Canary Wharf.

Captain Peter Steen gave us during dinner a brief talk about the Barrier and afterwards kindly let me have a brochure about its building and functioning. The engineering of the flood barrier is simple. There is a series of movable gates positioned across the river, each gate pivoted and supported between concrete piers which house the operating machinery and control equipment. The walls of the Barrier can be sealed when necessary, and when they are not in use the gates rest out of sight in concrete sills in the river bed. If there is risk of a dangerously high tidal surge, then the gates swing up through about 90 degrees from the river bed to form a continuous steel wall facing downriver.

The Barrier is one of the most exciting constructions of our age. On each pier, gleaming hoods of stainless steel conceal the equipment. These hoods are lined with timber and Captain Steen said that the interior was for him almost as beautiful as the roof. The beauty for me resides not only in the power and size, but in that perfect marriage of function and
form. Surely few large modern sculptures can compare with the Barrier and yet we give honour to our artists and architects and few of us, if any, know the names of the engineers responsible for the Barrier. Before its completion the risk to London of severe flooding was very real. In his diary of 7th December 1663, Pepys wrote: “There was last night the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England to have been in this River, all Whitehall having been drowned,” and in 1236 the river overflowed, “and in the great Palace of Westminster men did row with wherries in the midst of the Hall.” During my lifetime the last flood in Central London was in 1928, when fourteen people drowned, but I remember with great clarity the disastrous flooding of the East Coast and Thames Estuary in 1953, when 300 people lost their lives.

From the Barrier we saw the Royal Naval College at Greenwich floodlit. Admiral Sir John Brigstocke, who was one of my fellow guests, told me that the Trinity School of Music was to have half the accommodation, the Painted Hall will be preserved by the Maritime Museum and some of the accommodation will go to Greenwich University. I suppose there could be no justification for retaining the Royal Naval College for the Navy, but I felt a sadness that so much history and tradition will be lost.

As we approached the glittering floodlit wonder of Tower Bridge the helmsman asked if I would like to steer the launch through. He said that the wheel reacted very much like the wheel of a car. I pointed out that I didn’t in fact drive, but he seemed prepared to take the risk although, obviously, he stood very close to my shoulder. There was no other traffic on the river and we sailed through with great ease before I relinquished the wheel to more expert hands as the launch was brought alongside Tower Bridge Pier.

I first met Sir Brian Shaw when I was researching my novel
Original Sin
. We were both guests at a Grand Night at Gray’s Inn, of which he is a member, and I sat beside him at dinner. He asked what I was writing and I explained that I was researching a new novel, which was to be set in the publishing world but on the River Thames. I wanted the Thames to run like a dark, somewhat sinister stream, bearing its weight of history and linking characters, setting and incidents in the book. He very kindly offered to help with the research by letting me explore the river from one of the PIA launches. This I was able to do and learned a great deal from his officers about the history of the river.

During this research occurred one of those coincidences which seem to feature with every book I write. I visited the headquarters of the River
Police at Wapping, which is the earliest police station in the United Kingdom and has its own small but extremely interesting museum. I was able to read newspaper reports of the greatest of all Thames tragedies, when in 1878 the paddle-steamer
Princess Alice
, returning loaded from a trip to Sheerness, was mown down by a collier and 640 people drowned. The passengers had mostly been poor Londoners enjoying with their families an inexpensive trip to the seaside. The mass drowning in the darkness must have been horrific. I used this incident in my book when one of the characters, Frances Peverell, deeply unhappy in her private life and worried about the future of the family firm, stands at her window overlooking the river and seems to hear above the cries of the gulls the screams of those drowning Victorians and, looking down at the dark river splattered with light, imagines the pale upward faces of the drowned children torn from their mothers’ arms, floating like frail petals on the tide.

I wrote the passage on my return home from Wapping as I often do when images and atmosphere are fresh in mind. Then I went to spend the evening with my elderly friend Peggy Causton in her flat on Kensington High Street. She was crippled with bad arthritis and house-bound, and each week we would spend at least one evening, and sometimes two, playing Scrabble. Peggy was one of the few really good people I have known and I miss her. On that evening she gave me a tattered leather-bound book bearing the title
Memorandum Book
. She said it was found among her sister’s effects but had nothing to do with her family and, as it was Victorian and she knew my fascination with the Victorian age, she thought it would be of interest. I have it still and it is, in fact, the memorandum book of a Sergeant of Marines. His name apparently was Westell, judging by the number of entries for the Westell family, and his initial W. It is a curious record in which the purchase of a black silk handkerchief for five shillings and sixpence receives as bold an entry as that of his marriage and the birth of his children. He was much interested in home remedies, and one for bowel complaints was probably effective and would be as useful today if one could get hold of the laudanum: “Rhubarb—one pennyworth, magnesia—one pennyworth, peppermint essence—one pennyworth, Laudanum—one pennyworth.” There are notes on the movements of the ships, the number of dead at the battle of Alma, and odd facts which caught his imagination, such as the entry for 3rd August 1842, that children under eight years of age would not be admitted to the British Museum. But when I first opened the book, it fell open at the following entry: “Wednesday, 3rd September ‘78. My son James was Drowned in the
Princess Alice
which sank. The poor fellow
was found on the evening of 7th September ‘78 and buried at St. Thomas Church on the evening of 9th September ‘78.”