Free Iris by John Bayley

she had decided to marry me – the matter remained still unsettled a few weeks
before it occurred – but there was one occasion when she sat me down in her room and said she had better tell me something of the people in her past. I was reminded of her originally
remarking that perhaps it was time to make love. I was startled by her almost portentous air. Had I not heard all about them, the people of her past and present, at one time or another during the
period of our own intimacy?
    It appeared that I had not. Unknown figures arose before me like the procession of kings in
Macbeth
, seeming to regard me with grave curiosity as they passed by. There was so-and-so
with whom she had first been to bed, and so-and-so and so-and-so who had wanted to marry her. There was a friend and fellow-student, whose advances she had resisted in her virginal days (she did
not of course put it quite like that). At the beginning of the war he had joined the army and asked her half-jokingly to marry him, pointing out that he was sure to be killed before the war was
over and she would be able to draw a widow’s pension. Iris’s seriousness broke down in smiles at this point, and also in tears.
    She had said she still did not want to marry him but she would go to bed with him before he went overseas. He was killed in action later in the war, when she was working at an office in
Whitehall.
    Incongruous as the memory was at that moment I found myself back for a moment at my first school, when the headmaster gave us each a few moments alone in his study, to tell us about ‘the
facts of life’; and here were the ‘facts’ of Iris’s life, in grave procession. Suppressing the impulse to recall this for Iris’s amusement, I found myself telling her
instead that even an officer’s widow received only a very small annual sum. I knew, because some of my own contemporaries and fellow-soldiers had been killed before the war was over. It was a
feeble attempt to assert myself, and my own meagre experience in the face of what seemed a rich and stately litany of other days, joys, faces, which I would never share. It felt graceless too as I
said it, but I could not think of anything else to say.
    It broke the mood anyway. Iris laughed and kissed me. ‘After all that, isn’t it time for me to have a kind word?’ I said, and then we both laughed. Getting ‘a kind
word’ had become a regular plea on my part, and a part of our amative speech. It still is, and the phrase continues always to mean something to her. To me at that time, of course, it was
wholly different from what I had guessed of her behaviour with others. No doubt it really was different. I could not imagine the god in Hampstead getting a kind word, or giving one. Not even the
quiet professor of ancient history, whom I had followed in a dog-like manner back to his hotel. Kind words, in Iris’s style to me, were not for them. That was a kind of consolation. Yet I
divined already how good she was at the real business of cheering other people’s troubles. She had present and former pupils some of whom – often the sad-faced ones – I had seen
gazing at her with looks of heartfelt gratitude as well as adoration. But that again was quite different from anything she said or did with me in response to my plea for a kind word.
    None the less I was really very cast down by everything she had just been telling me. There seemed so many of them, these fortunate persons, and to my amazement I had just learned that some, as
I thought of them, quite ordinary people, acquaintances and even colleagues of my own, had at some time or other in the past been recipients of Iris’s kindness. They had desired her, and not
been rejected. However different that ‘kindness’ was, and however unimaginable in terms of what I asked and received, it had nevertheless been given.
    Looking back from the standpoint of today, it seems all very unreal, and so oldfashioned. But a woman with a past was