It’s twenty-five years since the death of Iris Murdoch, so I’ve been rereading John Bayley’s Iris Trilogy, one of the strangest memoirs in literary history. The books, written as if in a fugue state, are about Bayley in bed, a subject of intrigue to his friends. Despite the marriage being largely companionate, Bayley having a minimal sex drive and Iris juggling secret affairs, he is determined to show us their bedroom. ‘Our marriage was shared’, Bayley writes in the first book of the trilogy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, ‘but the bed was mine … I read in it, ate and drank in it, wrote reviews in it.’ Only when he was alone in bed, ‘secure and, as it seemed, protected from the world’, did Bayley ‘feel that this was marriage, the true nirvana of the wedded state’.

He also wrote his books in bed, the typewriter balanced on his lap. It was here, with his back supported by a rubber cushion, that he typed Iris while his subject, deep into Alzheimer’s, snored like an ‘animal’ by his side. We must imagine her fully clothed, wearing even her shoes, because Bayley had given up the battle of getting her out of her trousers and jersey and into her pyjamas. In the third book of the trilogy, Widower’s House, he reveals that he too dislikes getting out of his ‘odd assortment of raggedy vests … socks and … support stocking’ and resents the obligation to do so for the sake of two women, Margot and Mella, who want to take Iris’s place in the Bayley bed now that she is dead (having presumably first washed the sheets). 

There’s a remarkable passage in the second book, Iris and the Friends, where Bayley relates how, as a child, he found the family cook (a German as ‘solid and secretive’ as Iris) in bed during the day, also fully dressed. Raising her ‘suety arms’ in invitation to the small