Pilgrim Read Online Free PDF Page B

know them by heart. Everyone is a liar—one way or another—to one degree or another. No one can tell the truth about themselves. It is quite impossible. Something must always be justified. Always, something must be justified. We do each other dreadful harm because we refuse to justify the foibles of others—only our own. And this is sad. And so…” there was an eager light in his eye as he concluded “…that is where I come in. Because I am able to see, articulate and justify the lies of others.”
    “And yours, Mister James?” I said. “Your own lies?”
    “I have none,” he replied. “None has been left to me. I have betrayed them all on the page.”
    “I see.”
    “Don’t go away with the wrong impression, Mister Pilgrim. I do not mean there is no deceit in me—only that I no longer lie to myself. I no longer justify. I merely record.”
    I believe him. And though it may seem presumptuous, I now forgive him for Isabel Archer’s fate. If he had made the ending I had thought I wanted, he would have betrayed the lot of us by painting The Portrait of a Lily —not a Lady.
    As we parted, moving on to other conversations, he said to me: “thank you for Mister Bleat. I hope I shall meet him again.” He smiled. “In town, perhaps.”
    “Yes,” I told him. “In town. I shall give him a call, and bring him round.”
    “In his overcoat, I trust.”
    “In his overcoat, for certain. I shall roll him into it myself.”
    Harry Quartermaine took James away to the library, to inspect his collection of antique books. I might have been inclined to join them if I hadn’t noted Harcourt beetling after them. Harcourt the bore. “Harcourt of the Bodleian,” he always says, when introducing himself with, I trust, an inadvertent imitation of Uriah Heep—all tipped over on his toes, bobbing like something dead in the water. And he actually does rub his hands together in the same Heepish manner—as if hewere giving himself a dry wash. I cannot bear the man—nor his prating wife, the dreaded Rose. I can’t imagine why they are here, having watched Sybil suffer their endless presence at Portman Square. It must be Quartermaine who invites them, since he suffers fools so gladly. Fools and connivers. Thieves. Sadly, Harcourt may well have a bequest for the Bodleian of Harry’s antique books before the evening is out.
    Eleanor and Stephen Copland were packed off early to the games room with Margot and David. Being cousins and roughly of an age, they have known each other all their lives. The other Quartermaine children—“our Prydes,” as Sybil calls them, using their family name—had been with us briefly at teatime, but Margot and David had been allowed to sit at table in the evening with the adults. Watching them depart—herded away with Susan Copland following—still and apparently ever wearing black—I could not but feel sorry for them all, having lost their father and their uncle two months ago and never knowing why. I suspect that Susan’s having gone with them had to do with her concern that none of the wrong questions be asked, and none of Margot’s irresponsible speculations.
    Death is always provocative and the young require so many answers which none of us can provide. Not so much what is it? as why? And, of course, in the case of Symes Copland, every question offers the dreadful possibility of a betrayed truth.
    I knew him, though not well. He did a masterly jobat the Tate, so recently opened. Such a tragedy, following such a triumph. The popular notion is that exhaustion killed him, leaving him run down and prone to a dozen diseases. He had gone off to Venice, where the plague lurks in every sewer and under every stone. That was one story. Or he had gone to Biarritz, made so popular by the Prince of Wales and Mrs Keppel—where Symes, as some would have it, had died of a poisoned mussel! These were the sort of penny-novel stories Rose Harcourt delighted in hearing and spreading from salon to salon.