Svetlana Toderova, Ann Toulmin, Professor Stephen Toulmin, Jeremy Trafford, Jeremy Treglown, Nancy Trenamen, Professor Rachel Trickett, General Slavcho Trunski, Jane Turner, Garth Underwood, Anne Valery, Anne Venables, Nicholas Veto, Ed Victor, Audi Villers, Sir John Vinelott, Margaret Vintner (later Rake), Janice Wainwright, Rosemary Warhurst, Baroness Warnock, Harry Weinberger, Lord Weidenfeld, Dee Wells, Anne-Louise Wilkinson (later Luthi), John and Anne Willett, Professor Sir Bernard Williams, Charlotte Williams-Ellis (later Wallace), Susie Williams-Ellis (later Cooper-Willis), A.N. Wilson, Colin Wilson, Anne Wollheim, Professor Richard Wollheim, Professor David Worswick, Max Wright, Werner Wunsche, Pat Zealand (later Trenaman).
My agent Bill Hamilton gave unstinting support and excellent advice; I’m grateful to Phillida Gili, Emma Beck and Humphrey Stone for helping me find, and allowing me to use, the photos taken by their mother Janet Stone; and to the Schiller National-museum, Marbach-am-Neckar, for the transparency of Conversation in the Library, 1950. While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright-holders of photographs, in some cases this has proved impossible. I would be grateful for any information which would enable me to rectify such omissions in future editions.
Michael Fishwick and Robert Lacey’s scrupulous editing has improved the text. Sarah Lee and Anne Roberts gave invaluable assistance. Douglas Matthews compiled the index and helped me correct a number of mistakes. Jane Jantet produced the family trees, and she and Daphne Turner worked with heroic ingenuity, energy and patience to find answers to myriad questions. Without their extraordinarily hard work, the task of writing would have taken at least twice as long. Any and all mistakes are my responsibility, and no one else’s. My partner Jim O’Neill kept me sane. Without his love and support I could not have begun. I amassed so much material that an archive will accommodate the overflow.
3
In November 1999 in Bulgaria, Philippa Foot, who had brought Iris the news of Frank Thompson’s murder in 1944, and I met Frank’s partisan General Trunski, fourteen days before his death. We also listened to Naku Staminov’s eye-witness account of Frank’s execution, and stood in silence by his grave. Philippa handed me a red carnation to leave there, as from Iris. I owe more than I can convey to John Bayley and Philippa Foot, whose roles in Iris’s story what follows makes clear. Each read the book in draft and saved me from errors. To both this book is dedicated.
* She profited more from Andrew Harvey’s understanding of Buddhism (see Chapter 20).
* Sydney Afriat saw her outside the Collège Franco-Brittanique in Paris in 1949. She was strikingly not as others are, with a straw-coloured fringe, not beautiful, immobile, having a quality of stillness. Three years later at St Anne’s he told her he’d seen her, with an older woman, and when and where. ‘Yes, that was my mother,’ IM replied without surprise. Such stories of strangers being struck by one sighting and remembering it are common.
I INNOCENCE Fairy-Tale Princess 1919–1944
‘I get a frisson of joy to think that I am of this age, this Europe – saved or damned with it.’
Letter to Marjorie Boulton from Brussels,
6 November 1945
1 ‘You ask how Irish she is?’ 1616–1925
One day in 1888, on the North Island of New Zealand, a runaway horse with an alarmed and excited girl on its back galloped into Wills Hughes Murdoch’s view. He was twenty-seven years old,1 and had been quietly tending his sheep. He managed to race after the horse, to jump out and grab the reins, calm and finally stop it. The girl, Louisa Shaw, who was on her way to school, was that November to be his bride. She was only seventeen when they married.2
This mode of meeting and instantly falling in love sounds like something invented by his future granddaughter. Her novels test to the point of self-parody the literary convention of the coup de foudre, or love at first sight: the chance meeting between kindred souls that changes lives for ever. It was as much a family tradition. Wills and Louisa’s eldest child Hughes was to meet and fall for his nineteen-year-old future bride on a Dublin tram in 1918, towards the end of the First World War. And John Bayley was first to sight Wills’s granddaughter Iris bicycling past his Oxford college window in 1953. In three successive generations the girl at least is on the move, while the man – and twice also the girl – is love-struck, and nothing again is quite as it was.
The Murdochs are a staunchly Protestant Scots-Irish family who crossed the Irish Sea to Ulster from their native Galloway in Scotland in the seventeenth century. The name ‘Murdoch’ is essentially Scots Gaelic – from Mhuirchaidh, though an Irish Gaelic version, O’Muircheartaigh, meaning navigator, sometimes written Murtagh, is also common. They farmed modestly in County Down, where they prided themselves on having been for seven generations. In the 1880s Wills John Murdoch left the family farm for his spell in New Zealand, to learn about sheep-rearing, and probably also to make good on his own. It was a period of agricultural unrest and depression, and of Irish emigration generally.3 Family tradition suggests that Wills’s uncle had left for Indiana twenty-five years earlier, while his elder brother Richard was also in New Zealand, working as a teacher, and died there, unmarried, not long before the First World War.
Wills and Louisa’s first baby, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, was born in Thames, seventy miles south-east of Auckland, on 26 April 1890. When Hughes was a year and a half old, on 9 January 1892, Wills’s father died, and Wills came back to help run the family farm in County Down. Legend has it that on the journey home baby Hughes was nearly washed overboard in a storm, but was saved by a vigilant sailor.
2
The farm was Ballymullan House, Hillhall, in County Down, eight miles outside Belfast, and at that time ‘real country’. Even today it has not become suburban, but away from the old main road to Lisburn that cuts through it, it is a quiet country hamlet. Ballymullan House had been left by Wills’s greatgrandfather, another Richard, described in his will as ‘merchant and farmer’,4 to Wills’s father Richard (1824–92) and uncle William John (1825–1908). The five-bay, two-storeyed, shallow-roofed eighteenth-century house – ‘Georgian’ suggests something too English, insufficiently atmospheric and provincial – has dressed-stone corners, some old panelled windows, a large kitchen with a small-windowed ‘gam’ wall, a grey marble fireplace in the drawing-room, two fine old oak-panelled doors, an orchard and an old yard with a pump that produced ‘the most beautiful well water’.5 There were at least sixty acres of mixed farmland.
Louisa, whom Iris knew well – she died aged seventy-five, living at 8 Adelaide Avenue in Belfast, in 19476 – is remembered by her grandchildren as a cheerful, always youthful person. She was happy and had the gift of making others so. At twenty-one she had to leave her entire family and known world, to sail across the seas to a wholly strange place, and to live in a house with unknown in-laws. She was to share – contentedly – Ballymullan with her mother-in-law and three sisters-in-law – Margaret, Sarah and Annie.7 There is an echo of her journey in Chloe, also a New Zealander, ‘the girl from far-away’ in The Good Apprentice.
Two aspects of the household Louisa bravely travelled to join are striking.