Iris by John Bayley

Author:John Bayley [Bayley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780715644270
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co

— 6 —

‘The house and premises known as Cedar Lodge’, as the old deeds described them, were neither warm nor dry. There were the remains of a huge cedar near the front gate, just a vast plate of rotten wood nearly flush with the earth. Perhaps they had chopped this great tree down and burnt it indoors in a vain attempt to keep warm? We ourselves tried various ways of doing the same thing. An old Rayburn stove my mother gave us, night storage heaters, electric fires, an expensive affair in the front hall, with a beautifully fluted stainless steel front, which burned anthracite nuggets as expensive as itself. Nothing seemed to do any good. When we at last installed some partial central heating, after one of Iris’s novels had been turned into a film, that failed to work properly too. Something about gravity, the position of the oil tank, the installation of pipes ... Our dear Mr Palmer was dead by then, and his son put it in.

But we never minded the cold and the damp; indeed I think we rather enjoyed them. We were always warm in bed, and in retrospect I seem to spend most of my time in bed: I very soon developed the habit of working there. I remember coming home on a snowy evening, and uttering wild cries as we rushed about the garden together hand in hand, watching our feet make holes in the printless snow. It often snowed at Steeple Aston, which is several hundred feet higher than Oxford, where it seldom or never does. Our bed, too, was the one place from which to me the house felt safe and natural. The bed was home, even if unknown creatures might be living at the other end of the long house, perhaps unaware of our existence?

It was when Iris was away for a day or two that I realised that the existence of such beings was not just fantasy. We had never heard anything, but as I came from the garden and went up the dark rather narrow staircase I saw something going up ahead of me. It was a large rat. It reached the top, looked around unhurriedly, and dived with a plop into a wide crack between the oak boards. It had come home.

Those rats were gentlemen. Until that moment we had no idea of their existence. Nor did their presence, once defined, cause us at first any bother. They led their lives and we led ours. But since we knew they were there, and they knew we knew they were there, our relations could never feel quite the same. For one thing their behaviour ceased to be so considerate. Now we often heard them moving about in their own solid subterranean world beneath the floorboards. Although the house was in bad condition it had been built in the solid style of its period, and there must have been plenty of room in that other world, and plenty of massive woodwork to gnaw upon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.