Iris (2 page)

She was looking both absent and displeased. Maybe because of the weather, which was damp and drizzly. Maybe because her bicycle was old and creaky and hard to propel. Maybe because she
hadn’t yet met me? Her head was down, as if she were driving on thoughtfully towards some goal, whether emotional or intellectual. I remember a friend saying playfully, perhaps a little
maliciously, after she first met Iris: ‘She is like a little bull.’

It’s true in a way, although I have never seen it, because of course I have never seen her objectively. But if each of us resembles some sort of animal or bird, as our personalised
bestiary emblem, then I can see that Iris could indeed be a small bull. Not unfriendly, but both resolute and unpredictable, looking reflectively out from under lowered brows as it walks with head
down towards you.

In her first published novel,
Under the Net
, it is remarked of the leading female character that she never lets on to any one of her friends just how closely bound she is to all the
rest of them. Few of them even know each other. That was true of Iris. Naturally enough it made quite a difference to the heroine of the novel, but it has never made any difference for Iris. She
always used to write back to fans who had written to her. Careful long intelligent letters, directed to a person, not just to a fan. They were real letters, even though she had never met, and
probably never would meet, the real person to whom she was writing. I have to try to write letters back to her fans now, and naturally enough I can’t do it like that; although from their
letters, and their attitude towards their adored author, I see why one of them at once replied, after Iris had written to him, that he felt now they had become ‘pals for life’.

Like so much to do with our emotions the egoism of love has something absurd about it, though something touching as well. It was certainly absurd that I should have taken for granted in those
days that Iris was, so to speak, pure spirit, devoted to philosophy and to her job, leading a nun-like existence in her little room in college, devoid of all the dissimulations and wonderings and
plottings and plannings that I took for granted in myself. She was a superior being, and I knew that superior beings just did not have the kind of mind that I had.

Besides there had been something almost supernatural about the way I had actually met her, after I had seen her riding past the window on her bicycle. The following day I had encountered Miss
Griffiths in the street, outside the Examination School where university lectures were given. A diminutive figure, she was just taking off her billowing black gown, preparatory to mounting her own
bicycle and cycling home to St Anne’s College. She had been lecturing on Beowulf. Miss Griffiths had had a soft spot for me ever since my Viva (the face to face oral exam), when she had
congratulated me on my essay on Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale
, but caught me out on a minor question of Anglo-Saxon syntax. After I had obtained my degree she had followed my career,
such as it was, with benevolent interest, and now she seized me by the arm as I walked past and enquired how things were going. Things in fact were barely going at all, as I had no proper job, and
stayed on sufferance in the newly-founded St Antony’s College, where I was supposed to act as a tutor and guide to a few ebullient Frenchmen and Americans who had come to study science or
politics there.

St Antony’s at that time was a study in itself, but its principal interest for me now, and in memory, was its proximity to St Anne’s College, a foundation designed at the time solely
for women students, although like most other colleges it has since become bisexual. Out of the deference I felt for an older and senior member of the English faculty I walked a few yards that
morning beside Miss Griffiths, who showed no immediate disposition to mount her bicycle and be off. I think she wanted to enjoy reminiscing for a moment about the exam and the Viva – like
most dons she was vain of her examination exploits and technique – and to recall with the pleasure of generosity her discernment about the good points of my Chaucer essay, as well as to
remind me, with the pleasure of superior knowledge, about my errors in Old English grammar. Having done those things she suddenly asked me if I would care to come to her college room for a drink
that evening. I was happy to accept.

Although it was just across the road from St Antony’s I had never been into St Anne’s, which I regarded as an all-feminine province, likely to be virtually out of bounds to males and
male students. I wasn’t wholly wrong about this. Incredible as it may seem today, there were then fairly strict rules governing the conduct of men who had the nerve and temerity to go
visiting in these female strongholds. They had to remain in the public parts of the college, and the girls were not allowed to receive them in their rooms. The matter was in any case of little or
no interest to me. Students like myself, who had been in the army at the end of the war, were older than the new generation of undergraduates, whom they were sometimes employed temporarily to
instruct, owing to the post-war shortage of teachers. Oxford at the time seemed to me like a school; apart from having to teach a few of them I took no account of its younger denizens. The cinema
was my resort for relaxation and refuge, and cinemas were cinemas in those days. In the afternoon they were church-like spaces dense with tobacco smoke, inhabited by couples, or by solitary
worshippers motionless in the darkness, illuminated from time to time by the glowing tip of a cigarette.

The idea of a drink with funny wizened little Miss Griffiths – I imagine she was only a year or two over forty, but if I thought of it at all I thought of her as having passed the
boundaries of age – was a decidedly agreeable one. Drinks were drinks in those days, just as cinemas were cinemas, and I had heard that Miss Griffiths – ‘Elaine’ as I
afterwards came to know her – liked a good strong drop of gin. Besides it could only be a good thing to be on social terms with a senior member of the English Faculty, to which I aspired in
time to belong.

All such prudential considerations vanished when I presented myself at six o’clock that evening. Miss Griffiths was just finishing a tutorial, and as I knocked on the door a young girl in
a scholar’s gown came out, dropping her eyes demurely at the sight of a man standing there. I barely glanced at her, for through the open doorway I had caught sight of the person on the
bicycle – the woman? the girl? the lady? – standing and talking to some unseen character, with a well-filled glass in her hand.

She looked different from the bicycle lady, naturally enough. This was a social scene and she was not wearing an old macintosh. Her short fairish hair, unkempt and roughly fringed on the
forehead, looked both healthy and greasy, as it still does. Later on I was to cut and shampoo it for her now and then: at that distant time she hardly bothered. Indeed I have the feeling that women
then – certainly academic women – were nothing like so attentive to appearances as they are today, when girls may look like scarecrows, but only of set purpose. Slovenliness in those
days was next to seriousness, at least in university circles. It was rare, however, for women in those circles to wear trousers. Iris had on a worn and grubby tweed skirt, rather overlong and
ungainly. I noticed her legs were short and robust, clad in brown cotton stockings. Nylons were still uncommon in the early fifties.

This woman certainly had a serious look, and it dawned on me that my bicycle lady, who this clearly was, must be an academic of some sort. That gave me an immediate feeling of despondency. Just
as my fantasy when I first saw her was that she had neither a past with others nor a future without me, so now I was reluctant to feel that she could be anything so commonplace as a university don.
It placed her; and I disliked the idea that she should be placed, even by myself. At the same time I was heartened by her general appearance, and its total absence of anything that for me in those
days constituted sex-appeal. There was nothing so conventional as that about this woman. She was not ‘a girl’, and she had no girlish attractions. That made the fact that I was in love
with her much more exciting; and it also seemed highly satisfactory, for what, as I instantly realised, was a rather ignoble reason. Since she had no obvious female charms she was not likely to
appeal to other men.

Why I was so convinced at first that there was nothing sexually attractive about Iris is a complete mystery. Other people, of both sexes, certainly didn’t think so. It was my naive and now
inexplicable assumption that she could only appeal to me, and to no one else, that stopped me seeing how fearfully, how almost diabolically attractive everyone else found her. They knew more about
such things, I suppose.

‘Ah there you are, John. I may call you John, mayn’t I?’ Miss Griffiths gave a characteristic small giggle. ‘Meet Miss Ady, and Miss Murdoch. Iris, this is one of the
more promising young ones in the English School. Very good results in Finals. I caught him out over Old English grammar, his weaker side I fear, but he did a beautiful piece on the
Knight’s Tale
.’

That bloody
Knight’s Tale
. Was I never going to hear the end of it? Iris Murdoch gave me a kindly look, said ‘Hullo’, and continued talking to Miss Ady. Miss Griffiths
handed me a glass, from which I at once took a desperate swig. I coughed, and felt myself going scarlet in the face. It was a strong gin and french, the English equivalent of an American martini
– no ice in those days of course. Although I had become accustomed to strong drink in the army I had barely touched it during my student days. I had lost the taste, and besides it was too
expensive. Iris and her friends drank a lot of it, and for me that was the first of many.

I resented Miss Griffiths referring to me as one of the ‘young ones’ in the English school. I was not particularly young. Were these women so much older? – for I now saw, and
with a certain satisfaction in spite of my embarrassed state, that I was the only man in the room. There were four or five women at the party, and as a result of my confusion and fit of coughing
they were all looking at me in a kindly way. Obviously they took it for granted that I was a clueless young creature, and that it behoved them, as sophisticated women of the university world, to be
nice to me.

But they all seemed to want to talk to Iris. I was left with Miss Griffiths, who was herself looking at Iris with a wistful expression which even at that awkward moment surprised me.

What I had not the slightest idea of was that St Anne’s, at that time, was a hotbed of emotion. The dons in general were not, so to speak, professional lesbians. Many were, or had been,
married: they led domestic as well as academic lives. They were nice clever donnish women, hard-working and conscientious, but a lot of feelings ran beneath the surface, and I had the impression
later on that they seemed to catch such emotional intensities from each other, like germs or fashions. Some time afterwards I heard the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who had become a great friend of
Iris’s, describe an acquaintance as ‘an oldfashioned lesbian of the highest type’. Elizabeth Bowen’s inimitable stutter on the ‘L’ made this sound both grand and
comic. The ladies of St Anne’s were not grand exactly, but their type, I’m sure, was both high-minded and sound. Whatever they felt among themselves was never communicated to their
pupils, nor were their pupils ever roped in. I had Iris’s word for that, much later on. Any suggestion that one of their girl charges had been made advances to, or encouraged in a crush for
one of them, would have been universally frowned upon.

In any case I had simplistic ideas about sex at that time, supposing that everybody must be either one thing or the other. When it dawned on me, a short time after the party, that they had all
seemed to be in love with Iris, I had a sensation of despair. If they all felt like that about her, didn’t it follow that she must feel the same about them? – at least about one or two
of them? Iris was, as I realised later, much too kind to discourage affection, even yearning affection, but she was apt to draw a line if a woman expressed it too physically. She never went to bed
with any of her colleagues, or indeed with any other woman, although the novelist Brigid Brophy tried very hard indeed to persuade her. That was both before and after we were married.

Miss Griffiths seized her colleague in the English department, a lady with a resounding Polish surname, introduced me to her, and made thankfully off to join the little group around Iris. I saw
the dashing Miss Ady, dark-haired and with beautiful eyes, tap Iris playfully on the wrist while emphasising some point to her, perhaps about their teaching: for Miss Ady, as I afterwards
discovered, taught politics and economics, while Iris handled the philosophy. The Polish-sounding lady, who wore a black coat with a scarlet lining and seemed to me equally dashing, departed from
the party’s air of cheerful frivolity by asking in an intense and as I thought foreign tone a serious question about my ‘research’. My reply failed to carry conviction to myself,
or, it seemed, to her. Her gaze was forgiving but also I felt a little reproachful.

Instead of talking to the person I had fallen in love with, or even meeting her properly, I seemed destined as a result of Miss Griffiths’ heaven-sent invitation only to make a decidedly
mediocre impression on another of my senior faculty teachers. I discovered afterwards that Miss Griffiths’ colleague was well known for her air of severity among pupils and colleagues alike,
but that she was in fact a kind as well as a devoted teacher, married to a Polish officer during the war. She was herself from Yorkshire and bore some sturdy name like Sidebotham, but preferred to
retain the more romantic patronymic she had acquired from a husband, now absconded.

I never managed to talk to Iris at that party, although at a later stage, and after two or three other men had arrived, I hovered vainly near her, seeming to exchange words with every other
person present. After a few of those gins and frenches I felt I could have made a good impression, but no opportunity arose, and Iris excused herself and departed well before the gathering
dispersed, amid much conviviality.