The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online Page B

could do was to catch up with myself.
    Billy McLeod became my tour guide and cruise director. He took me to lunch at an inn in his home town. He drove me to Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness. He drove me to look at Ben Nevis, the highest point in the British Isles, and was constantly angry that I never brought my camera along.
    On these excursions Billy talked about his girlfriend, Marina. He described her as Botticellian, which I took to be the sort of hyperbole used by youthful romantics, but he showed me her photograph and I saw that he was only being accurate. He told me that they had made a pact to write to each other only by candlelight, and to this end Billy carried a candle stub in his back pocket so that if the mood struck him away from home, he could honor the pact and the impulse at the same time. Their last night together had been conducted by candlelight, he said, an all-night candle-lit vigil.
    He said: “When I think of Marina I get this sort of dream picture of her asleep. She sleeps with her hands tucked under her cheek like a little child. Sometimes I can’t bear it that she dreams. I mean, I don’t know her when she dreams or what she dreams about. There’s a sort of exquisite intimacy that isn’t possible but which one aspires to. Isn’t it sad, sleep, when you love somebody?”
    I found this impossible to answer.
    â€œDon’t you think?” Billy said.
    I realized that there were times when the only appropriate response to Billy would have been to strangle him.
    I said: “I’m too old to know what you’re talking about.”
    â€œToo old! My God, I’m too young. I mean, love is like a voyage and this is my first time out. I mean, you ripen as you travel through it. I’m just an infant but when I’m thirty I’ll know things I don’t know now. Like pathos and heartbreak. Those are things worth knowing.”
    I said I did not believe that he would find pathos and heartbreak all that rewarding.
    â€œWell, that’s what most people think, but most people are stupid. Love isn’t all jolly laughs and good times in bed. You have to ripen it. Pain ripens it. But of course the only pain I know is the pain of separation.”
    These rides made me long for my hotel room, the only place I felt I belonged, except with Raggy whom I felt I no longer deserved. Once a month he wrote to me—a long, newsy letter to keep me up-to-date, as if I were on some pleasant journey. These letters filled me with anguish and gratitude. Somewhere life was going on in a straight line. Francis, on the other hand, had fired off a barrage of angry letters during my first three months in Scotland, telling me what I appeared to be: witless, destructive, and cavalier. Finally, I got a letter from his lawyer informing me that I was being divorced on grounds of abandonment.
    Meanwhile, I was losing strength. I wasn’t finding out anything at all. My life floated before my eyes and underneath those visions of moral right, of constancy, of fidelity, was simply a person who had fallen into sin. No lessons of seriousness or purpose were being revealed to me. I had acted out of whim, and since that was a notion I could not bear I had let the whole thing get out of hand. Perhaps heartbreak and pathos do ripen love. Perhaps nothing had ever happened to challenge me, and so I had made it happen. Perhaps I had been a terrific prig, holding the world at bay to spare myself the sight of an ordinary mortal—myself—doing mortal things that don’t make sense. I had nothing to offer. I only wanted to go home.
    I wrote to Raggy and told him how I felt. He wrote to say that I was the same woman he had married and would always be. We agreed to meet in New York to have some time alone, since I feared going back to Despelles. But then Raggy’s clan was much freer about human action than I was. Hadn’t they understood Aunt Bettine’s animal art museum and her