Iris by John Bayley Page B

party and the river made me too bemused and delighted to see it, but she was not only including me in another part of her social life: she was also indicating to a third
person that I played a role in that life which had begun to possess a public continuity, and was not something to be privately taken up between us and discarded from moment to moment. I was far
from becoming her official ‘swain’, in the quaint old sense, but in the eyes of the world I had come to have some kind of status beyond the sphere of mere acquaintanceship.
    With the perception that made him an excellent doctor as well as a brilliant classical scholar Maurice Charlton may well have been aware in some sense of all this, while his green eyes went on
surveying us in their merrily convivial but impassive way. He reminded me in some way of the great Professor Fraenkel, whom I had seen once or twice at the time, a venerable almost gnome-like
figure, shuffling up the High Street after giving some class or lecture, surveying the world with a disconcertingly bright and youthful eye. A Jewish refugee from Germany, he arrived in Oxford at
the time Iris became a student, and such was his reputation that he soon acquired a Chair, even though Oxford had by then a glut of distinguished refugees. He had given Iris tutorials, and she
attended his famous Agamemnon class. I had been a mere schoolboy then, and so for that matter had been Maurice Charlton himself, though an older one. But his green glance had much the same light in
it as Fraenkel’s black twinkle. Perhaps that resemblance was what had attracted Iris to him.
    She had already told me how fond she had been of Fraenkel, both fond and reverential. In those days there had seemed to her nothing odd or alarming when he caressed her affectionately as they
sat side by side over a text, sometimes half an hour over the exact interpretation of a word, sounding its associations in the Greek world as he explored them, as lovingly keen on them as he seemed
to be on her. She had been pleased it was so, and revelled in the sense of intellectual comradeship she felt. That there was anything dangerous or degrading in his behaviour, which would nowadays
constitute a shocking example of sexual harassment, never occurred to her. In fact her tutor at Somerville College, Isobel Henderson, had said with a smile when she sent Iris along to the
professor, ‘I expect he’ll paw you about a bit,’ as if no sensible girl, aware of the honour of being taught personally by the great man, would be silly enough to object to
that.
    Nobody did, so far as Iris knew. She sometimes spoke to me of the excitement of the textual world Fraenkel revealed to her, and mentioned in an amused way how he had stroked her arms and held
her hand. Few girl students had any sexual experience at that time, and Iris was in any case unusually virginal. We sometimes laughed together over her memories of the one ‘bad’ girl in
Somerville, a dark-haired beauty who used to climb back into the college late at night, assisted by her boyfriend. Professor Fraenkel was devoted to his wife, and had told a close friend that when
she died he would follow her. He did, taking an overdose the same night.
    My ancient Greek is virtually non-existent; and Iris’s, once extensive, of course has gone completely. I used to try reading the
Agamemnon
and other Greek plays to her in a
translation, but it was not a success. Nor was any other attempt at reading aloud. It all seemed and felt unnatural. I did several chapters of the
Lord of the Rings
and
The Tale of
Genji
, two of Iris’s old favourites, before I realised this. For someone who had been accustomed not so much to read books as to slip into their world as effortlessly as she slipped into
a river or the sea, this laborious procession of words clumping into her consciousness must have seemed a tedious irrelevance, although she recognised and reacted to them, even knowing, as they
appeared before