Confessions of a cloth-capped casanova

BY JOHN WALSH

Look at the cherubic features of Professor John Bayley and you can see why he's become a national treasure. With those exiguous wisps of hair around the ears, that astonishingly white cranium, that puckish mouth and the deep lines of melancholy that run south to his chin, those quizzical hooded eyes, that humorous taste in working man's flat caps, he resembles one of the Cheeryble brothers, Dickens's genial philanthropists in Nicholas Nickleby, gone to seed.

He is the country's favourite widower, the relict of Iris Murdoch, keeper of her flame and chronicler of their 44-year marriage in two bestselling memoirs. In their - now his - overgrown, ramshackle cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside, in the chaos of his domestic debris, in his old-duffer tweeds and corduroys, he is sweetness personified. A kindly, inoffensive soul, his academic rigour long abandoned, he sits by the fire in his dotage, nodding gently, as his life enters its December days...

Well, actually, no, it doesn't do anything of the sort. Far from turning into a lean and slippered pantaloon, lonesome and fretful to join his beloved Iris in the Elysian Fields, Professor Bayley has been rather busy. First, he surprised friends and Iris fans with the speed and determination with which he remarried within a year of her death. Then, a lot of tut- tutting was heard about his decision to sell the contents of the cottage, which his more sentimental readers had come to regard as a Murdoch shrine. And now, there's the stuff about the women.

Widower's House is published next week and tells the world about the harpies that invaded Bayley's life after Iris's death. We read about Margot, "a big, awkward, enthusiastic woman who combined a natural gift for goodness and kindness with being slightly comical in everything she said and did".

Successfully portraying Margot as both ungovernably stupid and horribly determined, the professor describes her prolonged "siege" of his ramshackle home. She summons him to Norfolk. She feeds him claret and indigestible casseroles. She insists on coming to stay at the cottage. She moves into the spare room, vacuums the Augean stable that is the living-room carpet, and consumes a lot of Bulgarian red. The professor lies in his marital cot, quaking with apprehension, for he sees Margot as "a dismasted ship in a gale drifting on to a lee shore". With good reason, as it turns out. On the third night, Margot clambers into his bed at 3am, as bulky as ship's cargo dangling from a crane, and suggests they spend more time together, huskily promising she could "do so much" to help him. Just as the prof is wondering if he's expected to have sex with her, Margot falls asleep; and the next morning, their relations return to normal. "Margot had only wanted to be kind," Bayley concludes modestly, while leaving the distinct impression that the poor woman was temporarily deranged by lust.

She isn't alone. No sooner has the hot-bloomered Margot skedaddled, taking her "serviceable flannel nightdress, blue in colour" with her, than Bayley is rung up by she shadowy "Mella", a plain, skinny but fatale former Russian student in her early thirties.

Mella sends the prof a saucy condolences card of Waterhouse's Mermaid, who sits on the rocks pensively combing her hair and revealing her left breast. Mella visits his cottage but is rebuffed by Bayley, who jumps into his car and speedily reverses out the gate a la James Bond. Undiscouraged, Mella (what kind of name is that? Pamella? Carmella? Mellancholia?) returns and sets to work, cleaning up the house. Like Margot, she is a white tornado in the kitchen and no slouch in the sack. She kisses the professor impulsively, cleans his windows, scrubs the floor while he inspects her "meagre behind" rhythmically thrusting over the tiles.

Then, one afternoon, in a scenario borrowed from a thousand B-movies, Mella plots a seduction. She has a funny turn. She suggests going upstairs for a little lie-down. Minutes later, Bayley innocently wanders up to his bedroom and is set upon in a flurry of limbs and burning kisses. Mella disappears to the bathroom and returns starkers. She dives under the duvet, and the widower calmly considers his position. "It was obvious what I had to do, nor, on the whole, did I mind doing it... "

At which point one cries out, like that Dutch film director in the Grolsch commercial, "Schtopp! Schtopp! This blue movie is not ready!" And one thinks, "What the hell is going on here? Why is the former Warton Professor of English Literature and Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, telling us all this? How do we come to be reading the deeply unerotic seductive adventures of a retired, tatterdemalion, septuagenarian academic who, last time we looked, had forged a lucrative career as the dignified memorialist of his eminent wife? Where has he come from, this late-flourishing Lothario, this cloth-capped Casanova, reversing his car down country lanes to escape the clutches of love-maddened Oxford dames?"

It seems only the other day that Anthea Turner made the miscalculation of telling the world, in her autobiography, that her husband was no great shakes in bed and how her then-married boyfriend, Grant, showed her what she was missing. Her compulsion to tell the world slightly more than it really needed to know was her downfall.

Professor Bayley seems to share a similar impulse. But then, he always has been drawn towards excess. Among the chorus of praise for his book Iris: a memoir of Iris Murdoch were a few fastidious complaints that he had described his wife's decline into Alzheimer's disease in too much, too pitiless, detail - her "mouse cries" of despair, her inability to communicate except in baby-talk or remember anything about her books, her panic attacks on the bus, his undressing her, feeding her, cleaning her up in the bathroom, her dazed, compulsive viewing of the Teletubbies... This was not, some critics said, the way to remember one of the century's finest novelists, nor how this Homerically untidy but majestic woman would wish to be objectified. "I would rather be tied to my cot in the grimmest of grim long-stay wards than that my wife should broadcast details of my dementia to the world," was one outraged reaction. Others felt there was something slightly treacherous about writing in such a way about your wife while she sat, oblivious, in the next room. Bayley said he didn't give two hoots for such criticism.

Myself, I thought it a beautiful, if unsparing, close-up portrait of a condition rather than a person, just as a minute inspection of a wound can reveal a kind of grotesque beauty. What seemed more of a problem was Professor Bayley's lack of discrimination between embarrassing physical detail and high- table allusion. Even when he complains about his wife's peculiar smell (about which he felt "repulsion and disgust"), he interleaves the narrative with contextual chit-chat about William James, Greek mythology, Tolstoy, Proust. You wonder if Bayley fatally lacks that mental filter, possessed by most sensitive people, that would tell him when inappropriate juxtapositions are about to emerge from his pen.

One of his most trenchant critics, however, is himself. A characteristic of Bayley's writing is its occasional note of disgusted self-criticism. You can call it merely British modesty gone slightly rancid. Or you can see it as a chronically unselfconscious man's fascinated look at what he has turned into, as though describing a stranger. "What a shit I was, or had become!" he remarks of the Margot episode, "but more and more, these days, I had begun to suspect that I always had been one." We aren't the only ones to feel appalled when he decides that, if he gives Mella a bit of a seeing-to, she would at least desist from any more house-cleaning. "It seemed a crude bargain but that was the way I saw it."

There's a form of words to which he is attached by way of explaining himself. "Iris is good. I'm not good inside but I can get by on being nice," he writes in Iris. One of his wife's novels is titled The Nice and the Good, and the difference is essential to him. When his friend and ex-student AN Wilson once impetuously told him, "You're so good," Bayley replied, "No - I'm nice, which is easier than being good."

Rude, crude, nasty, fake-nice - it's a hard life being Professor Bayley and knowing that one has unaccountably evolved into a desperate customer. But, of course, that hasn't happened. What we are witnessing here, I suspect, is not the vanity of the old lecher, nor the frankness of the repentant sinner, but something quite different. It's an extraordinary example of second teenage. It's like second childhood but more fraught.

Bayley always claimed that there was something childish about the 44- year marriage. "I think one reason that we fell in love, and got on so well, is that both of us have always been naive and innocent at some deep healing level." He has told the world how, when they met, he was a sexual innocent, while Iris was a veteran of affairs with both sexes. Their own physical relationship he used to describe as "indeterminate". To meet Bayley, as I did once or twice, was to encounter a man determined to make himself agreeable, a chronic giggler and smiler, a brilliant critic who none the less seemed to agree with everything you said to him. Years and years of being a big kid gave him his enviable facility for blank and unsparing scrutiny of grown-up behaviour ("It is a nice party. I marvel, as I have often done before, at the way in which guests enjoy being guests...") and for saying it all out loud, just like a subversive 11-year-old. When Iris died, his response was eerily like that of a small boy, wholly unable to grant death the respect it traditionally commands. He didn't feel upset. Instead, "I wished to play with her wonderful eyes, so I spent some time opening and closing them. It wasn't a bit alarming."

And now, two years after the death, Professor Bayley has moved into a world he never lived in before. Sheltered and protected by Iris Murdoch, he could be Mr Nice Guy, Mr Agreeable to All. Without her, he is learning the ways in which the world lays plans and sets traps for you, lessons most people learn at 17. And he is picking up indications of the glory of selfishness, as teenagers discover the guilty joys of masturbation.

The story ends happily, however. Bayley is blissfully remarried, to an old friend called Audi. In Widower's House he describes how he fled to Audi's Lanzarote home in retreat from the importunate Mella. But it was also a symbolic leaving-home in a way he had never left before - a ceasing to cling to the familiar, an essentially teenage flight. And, as so often in these narratives, he is convinced that Iris is involved with Audi and him and approves of their union, just as she would have winked her approval as Bayley disappeared under the duvet with Mella. Where once he had a playmate and then a child to deal with in Iris, she now occupies the role of his indulgent, absent mother.

One thinks of John Updike's book The Witches of Eastwick, in which three foxy suburban babes fall for the charming Satan. It was filmed with Jack Nicholson ("just another horny little devil"). Reading "The Witches of Steeple Aston" - as one comes to think of Widower's House - one marvels at this spectacular piece of self-reinvention. Richard Eyre is now making a film of the Murdoch-Bayley marriage, with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as Iris old and young, and Jim Broadbent as Bayley. Jim Broadbent? Surely Brad Pitt should be checking his availability.