What does Audi Villers make of her husband, John Bayley's, controversial account of amorous widowhood? Elizabeth Grice meets her.IS there a more comfortable, sensible bosom in the world than the one to which Professor John Bayley fled to escape the unwanted ministrations of other women after the death of his wife, Iris Murdoch? Oh, why didn't he think of his old friend, Audi Villers, earlier?
He would have been spared Margot's indigestible casseroles and her suggestive, middle-of-the-night visits to his bed, clad in a blue flannel nightie. The young but scrawny Mella, with her manic cleaning regime and demands for sex, would have been kept at bay. But the nation would also have been deprived of a truly remarkable account of the dangerous state of widowhood.
For those who have somehow missed the most engaging septuagenarian sex sensation of our times, Bayley is the bemused, white-haired author of a book that describes how he found himself pursued by overbearing women while still in an emotional wilderness after Iris's death. Margot and Mella have entered the annals of sexual curiosities. They have inspired alternating hope and terror in the breasts of elderly widowers throughout the land.
It was to escape their excessive kindnesses that Bayley left his home in Oxford, one cold winter's afternoon last year, and took the next flight to Lanzarote. With Audi, at least, he could be sure of sympathy without the stews; laughter instead of the perpetual whirr of the Hoover. Audi was there to meet him at the airport and, after a few, blissful, undemanding weeks with her, Bayley succumbed to the inevitability of it all and proposed marriage.
"We are having the most wonderful time together," she says, joyfully. Far more joyfully than you would imagine possible from a woman caught up in the controversy over her new husband's apparent magnetism for women. Since his book was serialised in The Daily Telegraph, Bayley - 76 next week - has been fodder for every columnist in the country; a subject of disbelief, admiration and affectionate amusement.
Who were these harridans, Margot and Mella? Were they real women, composites of a whole regiment of well-meaning females or figments of Bayley's imagination? Was it right for Bayley, who wrote so movingly of Iris's dementia and death, to capitalise once again on the consequences of her loss?
Bayley, anxious to protect the identities of his real pursuers, has been spectacularly opaque. To The Sunday Times, he is said to have described the women as "both imaginary - a form of consolation for me at a bad time". In The Times on Monday, he assured readers that the characters of Margot and Mella "don't closely resemble any single person. There aren't two such people but there are persons who resemble them in various respects." Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he is adamant that the women are all too real - though, naturally, with various details fictionalised in order to lessen the risks of them being hunted down.
Audi was Bayley's confidante when he arrived, distraught and luggageless, on the run from Margot and Mella. He told her all about them: Margot, the large, middle-aged family friend; Mella the importunate, twig-like postgraduate student.
"He said he was being bothered by all these women and he couldn't get rid of them. He didn't know what to do," she says, chuckling. "Mercifully, I am not a very jealous person. I was very amused. And later, I was very pleased, because if it hadn't been for them, he wouldn't have come to Lanzarote."
She believes the two key women in John's book, Widower's House, are composites of several characters, cunningly mixed to put newshounds off the scent and to protect their identities.
When he read her snatches from it, she remonstrated with him. "But John, you can't do that. It's going to upset these women. Let's face it, you are not being all that flattering." He said: "Oh, don't worry, darling. I'll just change details so they won't recognise themselves."
Perhaps it suited his strategy of obfuscation to claim, as he did in the Daily Telegraph Magazine on March 10, that Margot was dead? Again Audi chuckles. Margot, she is convinced, is alive and well and living "in some place like Devon or Dorset. I would quite like to meet her, some day". In Audi, Bayley has found his perfect autumnal companion. She and her late husband, Borys, had been long-time friends of Iris and John. On her visits to Oxford during Iris's illness, she would help John care for her. Alone of all their friends, Audi was the one person prepared to stay overnight in the famously cramped squalor of their house.
Audi, it turned out, knew all about the hazards of widowhood. When her husband died in 1992, she received her first proposition at his graveside. "It was a little premature. I was annoyed more than anything. I had two offers of marriage in the first three weeks. They were from very old friends who had been waiting in the wings. I liked them both. I was strong enough to resist, but I could see how very easy it would have been just to fall into somebody's arms.
"You are very vulnerable. You are lonely. You want comfort - and you don't want it. You probably don't know yourself what you want, quite honestly. You don't behave as a rational person."
Perhaps this explains Bayley's habit of hiding lumps of Margot's stew in his trouser pocket rather than offend; perhaps it is the clue to his passionless capitulation when Mella seduces him on the bed ("It was obvious what I had to do, nor, on the whole, did I mind doing it," he wrote with fine economy).
"He just felt he was being taken over by her," says Audi. "He had no spine or will to resist. I think she did all the running. It is very flattering when somebody runs after you and says: 'I can't live without you. Please let me stay', but it can also be annoying."
Audi remembers how it feels to have an empty place in the bed beside you after years of companionable warmth, and says she can understand why Margot's bulky presence was not entirely unwelcome to John. "You miss somebody in bed and it isn't necessarily to do with sex. It's a kind of comfort."
John Bayley has been happy to remain on the fringe of the debate about his affaires - vague, poetical, unflustered and maddeningly prone to offer a variety of interpretations of them. "He is not a fantasist," insists Audi. "The trouble is, he finds it almost impossible to say no to anybody. It gets him into all sorts of trouble.
"He always wants to please people. I've never seen anything like it. He always agrees with you - but I now know from experience that it doesn't always mean anything."
John's general affability has sometimes made him a target for unscrupulous observations. A N Wilson alleged in the Daily Mail this week that, on Desert Island Discs, John Bayley "made the immortal confession" to Sue Lawley: "I've never set much store by the truth." Bayley does not recall the remark - for the simple reason that, as the Radio 4 press office confirms, he has never been one of the programme's castaways.
Bayley is notoriously phone-phobic and, whenever possible, will leave his wife to take calls. It is typical of him that, when called to account, he was initially convinced that he had not spoken to anyone from the Sunday Times. When the writer subsequently produced a partial transcript of their conversation, Bayley remarked with masterly imprecision: "I only remember my wife calling me, reluctantly, to the phone and having a polite chat with somebody, but I have no idea who it was. I must confess I can't remember the detail of our conversation."
So, did he say the two women were "a day-dream"? Notes of the reporter's conversation indicate that he did - but they also show that The Sunday Times ignored Bayley's final words: "I think, in this case, fiction and non-fiction go together."
On that, at least, he has never deviated. The professor is at his still-dishevelled house in Oxford, while his Norwegian wife is spending a few days at her bijou London flat, catching up with relatives. The place is pin-neat, sprinkled lightly with objets d'art and totally at odds with the wild disorder of Bayley's preferred habitat. Audi does not mind the untidiness that prevails whenever John can be persuaded to stay there (he hates London). "It is only superficial," she beams.
Audi says she has no intellectual pretensions - though in the brief gaps when she and John are not chatting, they do try to have serious conversations about literature and music. She was a sickly child, often in bed with asthma and, at the age of 19, was sent to Malaga for a year to improve her health. As soon as she returned to Norway, she fell ill again, so she applied for a job as a courier in the Canaries. There she met her husband, Borys, a wealthy manufacturer of electric blankets.
There was a time, she admits, when she and John worried about the 17-year age gap between them. "It bothered him very much in the beginning, that I was so much younger. He thought there would be all sorts of demands on him, possibly physically.
"I think he has got over that. We are having such a wonderful time together. There is a lot of chat, chat, chat. We talk a lot about Iris." Audi regards this as quite natural. "John thinks about her a lot. It would be very odd if he didn't." She does not feel she is living in Iris's shadow or that they are locked in an uncomfortable threesome. "She was so much a part of my life. If she could look down and see us, I think she would approve."
This article appeared in the Electronic Telegraph (UK) on March 22, 2001.