She doesn’t know how old Iris is and daren’t ask in any way other than jokily. And jokily always get the reply, “Four hundred and seventy-three years exactly.” She knows that her partner must be of pensionable age. Iris’s flesh bears the signs of a dignified depreciation. Like wood that has been refined with continuous use into an elegant, very nearly baroque, curvature. A wood strengthened by the giving and taking of bodily oils; a tensile strength lovingly transmitted. Her skin has the texture of vellum so expensive that you could ponder your opening sentence for ever. Touching this is a luxurious possibility, endlessly deferred, richly indulged. Its mature flawlessness brazenly exhibits a zero degree of writing; Iris reclining naked presents her lover with a fabulous display, a promise of an experience beyond words, beyond language. This is why the pair of them—at least, while at home and with the windows on winter mornings shut—are nudists. Peggy’s body is not quite so smooth and inarticulate. Wrinkles, stretch marks and various scarrings speak volumes. Although it is as brazen a body as Iris’s, it speaks a very different story.
So, how old is Iris?
HALLELUJAH…
She is still holding her in the kitchen on the morning of Christmas Eve.
She is still holding her. Iris mulls this phrase over as she continued to hold Peggy, rocking gently back and forth to Handel.
When Iris used to be a novelist, many, many moons ago, she never really hit upon this problem of pronouns and representation because of the simple fact that she never wrote explicitly about lesbian relationships. And in fiction, especially when documenting something more casual than carnal knowledge, it is easy to separate the pronouns out—like sifting flour—and not to let them clash in ambiguity.
It might prove a problem, should she take up the pen again some day and, in this much more enlightened age, dabble with a spot of authentic realism. She might relish the quandary of pronoun etiquette.
She finds herself stroking the flesh of Peggy’s forearm. She hadn’t realised she was doing it, and when she does she starts to consider the elasticity, the durability of flesh and how it will decide what it fancies doing. Her own has seen her through a great number of scrapes.
As if in response, Peggy starts up the old, jokey conversation.
“How old are you tomorrow then, Iris?”
She murmurs this into Iris’s shoulder. Her skin smells of brandy as if she has been using it as a scent.
Christmas Day is Iris’s birthday. Even this sounds implausible to Peggy, though she submits to it as a mutually convenient fiction.
“Let me see. Well, I believe I’m four hundred and seventy-four this time.”
“I thought you might be. And when do I get a proper answer?”
“Was mine improper?”
“I mean, true.”
Iris looks at her with a frown. Concernedly she asks, “Have you ever read Orlando?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, prepare yourself for a shock.”
Peggy read Orlando a couple of years ago because Iris told her to. All her reading has been directed by Iris these past few years, and Iris knows it.
“I’m like Orlando,” Iris declares, and Peggy is embarrassed by her earnestness.
“You mean heterosexual?”
“No.”
“You mean transsexual?”
“No. Yes. I mean…I’m four hundred and seventy-four years old.”
“Is that how old Orlando was, then?”
“That’s beside the point,” Iris snaps. “What I mean is, I’m very, very old.”
“I see,” Peggy says flatly.
Iris asks gently, “Is that what you wanted to know?”
“I suppose so. Yes.”
“Why now?”
“Oh.” Peggy buries herself in their embrace once more. “The census people have been around. We’re going to have a hellish council-tax bill.”
“Oh.”
The hallelujahs on the radio have petered out by now.
“Iris?”
“Yes?”
“Have you changed sex, too? Like in the novel?”
Iris nods solemnly. “Four—no, five times.”
We’ll leave them for a little while. As I said earlier, Iris knows all about the multiplicitious choices available in a lifetime, the absolute terror of the roads not taken. The reason she knows is that, on the whole, she has taken most of them.
Let us draw a veil of darkening air and random clots of wet sleet to allow Peggy to digest the idea of so many decisions in one, terribly prolonged lifetime. Or, alternatively, to digest the fact that her lover is insane. There is a lot to take in.
In any event, whether old or mad, Iris has abruptly declared her seniority.
Imagine Peggy in this situation.
When your lover is so much older than you, older than the hills, and really, you had no idea, no conception, that you had been hoodwinked by a flesh that is vellum and rich in a manner you thought only youth could possibly be, you feel, perhaps, a little dwarfed in the complex shadows cast by these hypothetical hills.
NINE
CHRISTMAS EVE AFTERNOON SAW MARK WITH A GLASS OF GIN IN ONE hand, watching a rerun of Rebecca on Channel Four. A pale orange light, refracted through the messy weather outside, shone off each of the living room’s mirrors in turn and, for a good half-hour, rendered the TV screen opaque. Mark stared at the grey cube, listened to the voices, and waited for the light to die. He sipped his drink and dangled his other hand in a carton of Turkish delight. The powdered pink and yellow sweets rubbed icing sugar onto what now seemed to him startlingly blue, mimeographed hands.
Only at particular moments did he remember his blueness. Not that he was wholly blue; closer inspection revealed him to be intricately multi-coloured, as a number of people had found. However, from a distance, Mark read as simply blue.
He was worried about getting tonight’s dinner ready in time. Not that it was his responsibility. Sam had taken over the whole affair and was insisting on dealing with it by herself. He was pleased, really, but time was creeping on and
