“Yes, that one. Of course he got all the facts wrong, poor man, but at least he tried. The facts of course were all gone by then. They saw to that ... burning things, rewriting things ... not that I really ever read them ... you know how I am about reading: I prefer a mystery novel any day. But at least Gibbon got the tone right.”
“Yet....”
“Of course Julian was something of a prig, you know. He posed continually and he wasn’t ... what do they call him now? an apostate. He never renounced Christianity.”
“He what ...”
Clarissa in her queer way took pleasure in rearranging all accepted information. I shall never know whether she did it deliberately to mystify or whether her versions were, in fact, the forgotten reality.
“He was a perfectly good Christian au fond despite his peculiar diet. He was a vegetarian for some years but wouldn’t eat beans, as I recall, because he thought they contained the souls of the dead, an old orphic notion.”
“Which is hardly Christian.”
“Isn’t that part of it? No? Well in any case the first proclamation of Paris was intended ...” but I was never to hear Julian’s intent for Iris was in the doorway, slender, dressed in white, her hair dark and drawn back in a classical line from her calm face: she was handsome and not at all what I had expected, but then Clarissa had, as usual, not given me much lead. Iris Mortimer was my own age, I guessed, about thirty, and although hardly a beauty she moved with such ease, spoke with such softness, created such an air of serenity that one gave her perhaps more credit for the possession of beauty than an American devoted to regular features ought, in all accuracy, to have done: the impression was one of lightness, of this month of June in fact ... I linger over her description a little worriedly, conscious that I am not really getting her right (at least as she appeared to me that afternoon) for the simple reason that our lives were to become so desperately involved in the next few years and my memories of her are now encrusted with so much emotion that any attempt to evoke her as she actually was when I first saw her in that drawing room some fifty years ago is not unlike the work of a restorer of paintings removing layers of glaze and grime in an attempt to reveal an original pattern in all its freshness somewhere beneath ... except that a restorer of course is a workman who has presumably no prejudice and, too, he did not create the original image only to attend its subsequent distortion, as the passionate do in life; for the Iris of that day was, I suppose, no less and no more than what she was to become; it was merely that I could not suspect the bizarre course our future was to take. I had no premonition of our mythic roles, though the temptation is almost overpowering to assert, darkly, that even on the occasion of our first meeting I knew. The truth is that we met; we became friends; we lunched amiably and the future cast not one shadow across the mahogany table around which we sat, listening to Clarissa and eating fresh shad caught in the river that morning.
“Eugene here is interested in Julian,” said our hostess, lifting a spring asparagus to her mouth with her fingers.
“Julian who?”