Iris Read Online Free PDF

together in perfect unison. The girl whom the man had been with did not
look best pleased, but she too had no choice but to smile at me as we began to revolve in some sort of way. I felt the dance was already going against me, and that success, whatever it might have
consisted in, had already gone beyond recall.
    The band gave a flourish, and stopped. Iris came back to me at once, looking happy and relaxed. She asked about my room in the college, which she had not yet seen. I asked if she would like to
go up there for a minute, thinking of the bottle of champagne I had bought that morning, and put in my cupboard along with two glasses. She said she would like to very much. I took her arm as we
mounted the stone steps, in case she had another fall. My room was small and spartan: a bed, cupboard, table and wooden chair. But there was a gas fire, which I now turned on. I got the bottle and
glasses out of the cupboard. As I put them down on the table we fell into each other’s arms.
    It seemed as natural as it had been to take her arm when coming up the stairs, or for her to take my hand for a minute when we had left her own room in St Anne’s. We never returned to the
dance floor but sat in my room until two in the morning. We talked without stopping. I had no idea I could talk like that, and I am sure she never knew she could, either. It was endless, childish
chatter, putting our faces together as we talked. I think Iris was accustomed only to talk properly, as it were: considering, pausing, modifying, weighing her words. To talk like a philosopher and
a teacher. Now she babbled like a child. So did I. With arms around each other, kissing and rubbing noses (I said how much I loved her snub nose) we rambled on and on, seeming to invent on the
spot, and as we talked, a whole infantile language of our own. She put her head back and laughed at me incredulously from time to time, and I think we both felt incredulous. She seemed to be giving
way to some deep need of which she had been wholly unconscious: the need to throw away not only the manoeuvres and rivalries of intellect, but the emotional fears and fascinations, the power
struggles and surrenders of adult loving.
    She asked me endlessly about my childhood, and told me about her own. She had been a happy child, attached equally to both her parents. I saw that they had doted on her, but it seemed in a very
sensible way. Her father, who came from Belfast, was a minor civil servant, now on the verge of retirement. His salary had always been extremely modest, and he could never have afforded to send her
to a good school, even with a scholarship, if he hadn’t borrowed money. A cautious and prudent man, he had been as brave as a lion about this, and tears came into her eyes as she told me
about the sacrifices her parents had made. But our talk was too happy and silly to stay long on the actualities of childhood. It was the atmosphere of it that we suddenly seemed to be breathing
together, having rediscovered it mutually and miraculously in each other’s presence. The dance and the dancing, the dinner we had eaten and all that, seemed like ludicrous adult activities
which we had put behind us.
    I had a wish to rub my nose and lips along her bare arms. She made me take off my dinner jacket so that she could do the same to me.
    ‘If we were married we could do this all the time,’ I said, rather absurdly.
    ‘We shall be doing it nearly all the time,’ she answered.
    ‘Yes, but if – .’
    She stopped that by starting to kiss me properly. We remained locked together for a long time. The bottle of champagne remained unopened on the table.
    Long long afterwards I was having to look through her manuscripts and papers to find some stuff requested by the publisher. In the back of an exercise book containing notes for a novel were what
seemed to be a few entries, some dated, others random observations, comments on books, philosophers, people she knew, denoted only by