In this town she behaved as if in exile. She moved through the shopping centre unsure of the language. In the bakery and the newsagents they looked blankly at her because of her accent, which was perceived as posh. Her clothes were old but of good quality. That showed in the way they had worn and were worn. She was a Liberty-print island adrift in a town where people wore shell suits to shop. And yet, originally, Iris’s family had come from this place, had owned a farm on the flat, slightly boggy land where Mark and Sam’s council estate had been built. She ought to feel quite rooted.
One morning, about a year ago, Iris had taken a walk with Mark and little Sally to a broad patch of waste ground at the back of that estate. The wind whipped the long yellow grasses as she hunted around for evidence of rubble beneath the undergrowth. She gained her bearings from the trees that were still standing and soon found the ragged foundations of the farmhouse, partially collapsed into the mildewed cellar.
“It’s intact,” she breathed, hands on knees and peering into the hole. She wished she had brought a torch and could explore the dank space where she and her brothers had held hallowe’en parties, ritual sacrifices and pretend opium dens with stolen cigars.
Keeping Sally back at a safe distance, Mark said, “It’s terrible. Somebody could fall and break their neck in that.”
Briskly she chopped broccoli and carrots. She had a heavy chopping board and a good knife so sharp it whistled. “Expensive utensils,” she heard Mark say. “You can’t beat the best.” He would say it as a double-edged compliment; he thought her middle-class and complacent, she was sure. Probably because she went on about Florence and Paris, and so on. In conversation sometimes she could feel Mark cringing and wriggling about.
Iris continued to wield her expensive utensils with aplomb.
When it comes to quality, we have to wrench the best we can out of life. She couldn’t have an ill-equipped kitchen if she tried, and what point would she be proving if she did away with her six-speed blender and coffee-bean grinder? Would it make her more authentically a part of this town where, as far as she could see, salad dressing was as rare and fabulous as homosexuality?
No, there were choices to be made and decisions to be stuck to. Iris dedicated herself to being bourgeois, happy, and loyal to those closest to her with every fibre of her expansive being. Mark might think she was wrong, attempt to spread his own conscience and meagre largesse a little thinner, further afield, but she felt she must be true to her own essential self.
Peggy joined her in the kitchen as Handel’s Messiah began once more—the fourth time that day—on the radio.
“For heaven’s sake, put some clothes on. The windows are open. And isn’t it sacrilegious to prepare Christmas dinner in the nude?”
Hallelujah!
Outside it was pattering on to snow; dry flakes skittered across the box hedges and settled on the grass. The opened windows bloomed on one side with kitchen steam, the other with frost. Their house was warm and fragrant, and surely Peggy could see the bliss in preparing dinner in the nude with the joyous certainty that here she was happy and safe?
And, as the afternoon swept into an evening of a grainy matt grey, Iris took Peggy into her arms and kissed her slowly, not, as she might have liked, under traditional mistletoe, but just beside a vast blue vase of hot-pink lilies.
“You must spend a fortune on flowers,” Sam had sneered, the last pre-feud time she deigned to visit. It was true; in each corner nodded the extravagant heads of the season’s most expensive blooms.
Iris had whirled about. “Yes! I want this house to be like a living Georgia O’Keefe exhibition. Cunts everywhere you look!”
That remark hadn’t gone down at all well. Only Mark smiled politely, half understanding.
Today, outside, the dry snow was clogging the narrow paths and silting up the window ledges, where its crust was starting to melt from the heat of the oven.
IRIS IS AS OLD AS THE HILLS. EXCEPT, IN THIS LANDSCAPE, THERE ARE precious few of those. It is one brisk gallop from the North Sea in the east to the Pennines in the west. Let us say, then, that Iris feels herself to be one of the oldest standing objects in that flattish expanse.
When it comes to official documentation she is extremely cagey, avoiding personal details whenever possible. When a few particulars are required, she uncaps her gold fountain pen with an expression of disgruntlement and fabricates a pack of lies. A number of times now the cottage has been visited by besuited young men with clipboards, come to clear up the discrepancies left in Iris’s wake.
As her partner, Margaret worries about all this. She feels that somehow Iris’s statements about her date of birth, parentage, nationality and other things will land them in hot water. Iris’s insouciance when the subject is raised infuriates Peg. These games Iris plays nag at Peggy late at night, not so much for what they might bode in her own relationship with Iris, but because she fears the consequences. Surely one can’t get through life without being to some extent accounted for in official files?
Peggy imagines the baying of wolves—pencils, clipboards, twitching—all around the magic circle of their cottage. It is as if Iris is refusing, quite literally, to be penned in.
Peggy worries that apparently illegitimacy only compounds the problem of them being lovers. Because, secretly, that is still a problem for Peggy. She would never admit this, but she hopes that maybe authority would turned a blind eye if they were fully documented. Two old women living together; it’s for the company, they don’t want to end up going into sheltered accommodation. They’re supporting each other. It’s sensible, even touching;
