Floating on a single current

John Bayley wrote his majestic memoir of Iris when her mind was sliding into the insidious fog of Alzheimer's disease; when dining out was no longer possible because instead of slipping out to the loo, she wanted to go on the spot; when her body odour and mad, compulsive behaviour sometimes goaded him into near-violence; when the highlight of a day's stimulation for this intellectual giant had become the Teletubbies. And yet, it is hardly possible to read their story and not envy them.

It was simple. They rejoiced in each other's existence, mined the sources of the other's individuality and cherished them. Together, they seemed to float serenely along a single current, like quaint, good-natured children, indifferent to fashion, housekeeping, procreation, ego, criticism, status.

They lived in cold, chaotic, rat-infested houses, where books, clothes and shoes lay in enormous heaps, where empty jars and bottles littered every surface and where finding a matching pair of shoes presented a mighty challenge.

The essence of their life together clearly had nothing to do with order or precisely divided chores (although he did the "cooking", such as it was, devising the oatmeal fried in olive oil with onions and garlic dish for Charles Arrowby in Iris's Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea). Far more significant were the emotional watersheds. Bayley recalls the dawning awareness in their early married life that they were beginning that "strange and beneficent process in marriage by which a couple can `move closer and closer apart' ". Childless and equal, their most precious gift to each other would be a shared solitude. And that gift would be based on honesty and fidelity.

He was a virgin when he first laid eyes on her in 1953, pedalling past his window on a creaky bicycle, clad in a grubby brown skirt; a lady with no past, he liked to imagine, waiting for him to arrive in her life. But it was never going to be that easy. He discovered that Iris seemed almost compulsively drawn to older male intellectuals and though not remotely physically attracted to them - "not surprising when you think what they looked like", he commented acidly - was enslaved by their minds. "They were very egotistical, but she felt the need to sleep with them coming over her like an illness."

During their life together, she produced 26 of her 27 novels as well as books on philosophy, garnering doctorates and becoming a Dame of the British Empire along the way. "The extraordinary intellectual process of planning a novel was so meticulous and complete", he recalled, "that she would announce: `I've finished'. I'd say: `You can't be'. She'd say: `I've only got to write it'. It was all in her head".

And then, as the lights went out on her brain, he continued to love, protect and cherish her like the sweet-natured little child/animal into which she had evolved. Tone was what mattered, he found: playful, jokey, childish. "I tell her she is four years old now - isn't that wonderful?" And with every day, John and Iris, whose 40 year marriage had flourished on "being closer and closer apart", grew physically closer together, as her "little mouse cry" from the next room signifying the wish to be back beside him, "seemed less and less forlorn, more simple, more natural".

Even in those darkest days, they were still floating on a single current, still cherishing what made the other different. "She is not sailing into the dark;" he wrote then, "the voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's she has arrived somewhere. So have I."