To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  They came to a fork in the road and slowed.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  Émile didn’t know this park. He looked down at the mud and saw Jamie’s tracks led toward the right-hand fork.

  “The left,” he said.

  The track led them deeper and deeper into the forest and then, just as he thought it might, it petered out. A bird flew out of a tree and rose noisily into the air. The sun was low in the sky and the path was in shadow. He came to a halt and climbed down to steady the bike. She was still holding tightly on to the handlebars.

  “It can’t be this way,” Cait said.

  “You’re right. We should go back,” he said.

  He didn’t, however, make a move to turn.

  “I wish I’d never tried it,” Cait said softly. “Cycling, I mean.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Don’t you like it?”

  “I do. The trouble is that walking will now seem such a poor alternative.”

  He laughed. Finally she let go of the handlebars. He watched the slight rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed, in and out. And then she leaned back, just a little, until the top of her head was inches from his mouth. Was she aware that she was doing it? Was she aware of the effect she was having on him?

  She began to untie her bonnet. A strand of her hair had become entangled with the ribbon.

  “Let me.” He focused on the brown hair and the blue velvet ribbon, thick and thin, glossy and matte, knotted and loose. Minutes later, when her hair was finally free of the ribbon, he stroked it back into place, the strands be­neath his fingertips as smooth and fluid as mulberry silk.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He moved his hand down until, impulsively, tentatively, he let it rest on her shoulder. She didn’t object; in fact she didn’t say anything. For a moment neither moved. Unlike the Seurat painting, she was indeed warm.

  The boy must have been watching them for some moments before they noticed him. His basket was full of mushrooms and his cheeks were flushed with cold. Cait started when she saw him, pulled her hat on, and started to retie the ribbons.

  “Is this the way to the château?” Émile called out.

  The boy shook his head and pointed in the direction of the way they had come.

  They couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes behind Alice and Jamie. It was nothing that was worth pointing out; Nouguier was older, he was slower. Besides, the light was fading and they had to rush to return the bicycles. On the ride back to the boulevard it was decided that although it was fun, cycling would never catch on in Glasgow; too many hills.

  Hours later, Émile still felt the rattle of the ground beneath the wheels and the ache of the pedals in his knees. But days afterward, when those sensations had finally gone, he imagined he could smell the scent of her hair and feel the heat of her shoulder blade through the dark blue serge, he could sense the timbre of her voice reverberating in his chest. And the memory of her spun through him like a wheel on an axle, around and around without any sign of slowing.

  19

  ____

  CAIT SAT BESIDE THE FIRE with an open book in her lap. She had bought a slim volume of poetry by Shelley, a novel by Flaubert in French, and a book on philosophy by John Stuart Mill from Galignani’s, the English bookshop in Paris. Although her eyes moved from left to right over Flaubert’s prose, not a word of it entered her head. It was not her grasp of French that she had lost but the ability to concentrate. She started again at the top of the page.

  Alice was sitting on the other side of the fire, staring out at the rain, rain that made skeletons out of the trees in the garden as it robbed them of their few remaining leaves. Occasionally she dabbed her nose with a cotton hand­kerchief.

  “Why don’t you play the piano?” Cait suggested.

  She shook her head no.

  “Or read a book? How about a cup of tea? It must be nearly four?”

  Alice sighed.

  Cait went back to her novel. She had offered every one she had to Alice, but the girl wasn’t interested in anything but fashion magazines.

  “My uncle has no idea,” Alice said eventually. “About France. I don’t know why he suggested that I come.”

  Alice blinked and turned her head to one side. Her mouth dragged a little at the corners as if she might cry. A billow of wind rattled the ­windows, the fire snapped in the grate, the candle on the mantelpiece flickered yellow.

  “Will it ever stop?” she said.

  The rain was coming down in sheets, a steady downpour that turned the surface of the ornamental pond opaque. Cait felt a weight deep in her chest. What would have happened if she hadn’t told William Arrol about Sinclair’s proposal? Where would Alice have been at that particular moment?

  “How about I read you something . . . a poem?” Cait suggested. “Some­thing by Shelley?”

  Alice shrugged.

  “She left me at the silent time,” Cait read.

  When the moon had ceas’d to climb

  The azure path of Heaven’s steep,

  And like an albatross asleep,

  Balanc’d on her wings of light,

  Hover’d in the purple night,

  Ere she sought her ocean nest

  In the chambers of the West.

  She left me, and I stay’d alone

  Thinking over every tone

  Which, though silent to the ear,

  The enchanted heart could hear,

  Like notes which die when born, but still

  Haunt the echoes of the hill—

  “Stop!” said Alice. “I can’t bear to listen to any more. It’s so gloomy.”

  “It’s a love poem.”

  “Who to?”

  “To Jane Williams. But he couldn’t have her; she was already married.”

  “Do all love affairs have to turn out badly?”

  “Alice—”

  “Because mine do,” she said, then rushed from the room. Cait listened to her footsteps as they pounded up the stairs. A distant door slammed.

  The letter arrived a few moments later, damp with rain. Monsieur Nouguier requested the pleasure of their company the following Sunday. She stared down at the words he had written. This had to stop. It wasn’t fair. To Émile. To Alice. To William Arrol. She could not ignore Émile’s advances, no matter how seemingly small they were. And more than that, she was scared—scared that she would feel compelled to return them.

  She sat down at the writing table with a sheaf of new paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink.

  “Dear Monsieur Nouguier,” Cait wrote. “We enjoyed our last excursion greatly. Unfortunately, due to a matter of a personal nature we are not able—”

  Cait stared down at her words. Shelley’s verse, “Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici,” still played out in her head, simple, beautiful, true. The poet had drowned in that bay only months after writing the poem. She tore up her letter and threw it in the fire.

  “Dear Émile,” she wrote. “Half of me is lightness and air, speed and height. The other half is weighed down with guilt, with shame, with confusion. Forgive me if I speak with more directness than a lady should, but neither of us is young, both of us are aware of—”

  She stopped. Aware of what? What was she trying to say? This was a letter she knew she would never send but she still didn’t have the right words at her disposal. She put down the pen and closed her eyes. She let herself go back over the day they went cycling, the speed of the machine as they rumbled through the park; the moment they had taken the wrong turn and ended up alone; the memory of his hand cupping her shoulder, his hot breath on her neck. And later, she remembered later, how they had met a friend of Émile’s at the gate of the park, a man with a wife and two children who had both run to him and clung to his legs until he had lifted them up and spun them around until they were dizzy with laughter. She remembered that.

  “Dear Monsieur Nouguier,” she wrote. “As you may know I am a hired companion for Alice Arrol. I must stress that
she is a very fine girl, accomplished in many ways. As you may have noticed she is extremely—”

  “What are you writing?”

  Alice had come into the room without Cait noticing. She was staring down at the letter. Cait swept her hand across the paper.

  “Just a letter to my sister,” she said.

  “You’ve smudged it,” Alice said.

  “It was a rough draft,” she said as she screwed it into a ball.

  “Anyway,” said Alice, as if continuing the conversation they’d had earlier. “It’s stopped raining, so let’s go out.”

  “For a walk?”

  “Not quite,” she said.

  Even on a Thursday in the early evening, the department store, Bon Marché, was crowded. Beneath a huge vaulted and glazed ceiling, the central atrium, three stories high, was lit by glass globes on stalks like giant upside-down cherries. On the ground floor were stands selling hats, gloves, buttons, and bags. On the floors above were areas for eveningwear, children’s clothes, footwear, and corsetry. It was a place of glass and polished brass, of sweeping staircases and balconies, of shop walkers and delivery boys. Despite so many people, however, the shop felt subdued. People spoke in whispers, as if they were at church.

  Once they had climbed down from the carriage and made their way through the doors, Alice paused on the threshold and inhaled.

  “Isn’t this the most perfect place?” she said.

  They wandered around the perfume stalls, then took the stairs up to the first floor, to the department for ladies’ wear. On a plinth at the top was a wedding dress, an ivory silk gown covered in embroidery. Alice stopped so suddenly that the sea of people behind her had to part and stream by on either side.

  “That, Mrs. Wallace,” said Alice, “is the one.”

  A shop walker appeared at her elbow. Despite Cait’s protests, Alice was whisked away to a salon at the far end, where several girls and their mothers sat on divans and fanned themselves with newspapers. Ten minutes later, Alice stood in the middle of the salon in the dress, a pair of ivory shoes, and a full-length silk veil, while the shop assistant spread out the lace train behind her. Nothing had been forgotten; there was even a wax crown of orange blossom for her hair and a pair of ivory gloves.

  “How do I look?” said Alice.

  Cait nodded.

  “Lovely,” she said, “but I fail to see the point—”

  “Pig-nose proposed,” she burst out. “In a letter.”

  Alice blinked twice and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Is that what you want?” Cait asked softly.

  “Of course not,” she cried. “But who else wants me?”

  She kicked off the shoes and started pulling off the veil and the wax crown from her hair before two shop assistants rushed to her and took over.

  “You know I can’t go back to Glasgow without a husband,” Alice said. “I just won’t do it.”

  20

  ____

  AN EARLY FROST COVERED the city, glazing the sidewalks and casting a lace of ice onto windows and glasshouses. Émile knew that the iron beams of the tower would be contracting in the cold, shrinking just a little in the freezing temperature. But they had made allowances for that; it wouldn’t affect the rigidity of the construction. The site at the Champ de Mars was still an eyesore, a mess of horizontals and verticals, of wood and iron, the ground below pitted with holes now opaque with ice. From a distance it looked like a metal claw rising out of the ground. It was impossible to see what it would become, how these ugly metal struts that leaned inward, tilting as if they might fall over, would eventually form four elegant legs. No wonder people still looked so horrified as they passed. The older ones could remember Baron Haussmann’s demolitions and the years of dust and mess that followed them, when he pulled down the overcrowded slums of old Paris to make way for his new boulevards and wide-open spaces.

  It was almost midday but still the mist that covered the city hadn’t lifted. Émile could feel the chill beneath his feet, rising up through the soles of his boots. His toes and his fingers were already numb. The cold didn’t grip or grab; its effect was much more subtle. It provoked a contraction, a loss of feeling, an anesthesia.

  After the cycling trip, he had written to Cait Wallace and suggested an­other excursion. She had written back to say that alas, they were not avail­able. She offered no reason, no false hope, no incentive. And yet he knew she knew that he was being disingenuous. Alice Arrol was the eligible one, the one his mother would have picked out for him. Cait was the chaperone, the hired help.

  Although he told himself to forget Mrs. Wallace, to dismiss her face, her voice, her image from his memory, she still came to him in his dreams; in one he undressed her, lace by lace, releasing her from the scaffolding of the somber clothes that constrained her. In another he kissed her in the coat closet. In one more, he took her home and introduced her to his mother, but halfway through dinner his mother had told him that she was wrong in every way. And then he had turned and found that Cait had turned into Alice Arrol and he had married her by mistake.

  A week earlier at the races at Longchamps, he had watched as a beautiful gray gelding he had bet ten francs on, a horse whose odds were two hundred to one, outran all the others, crossing the finishing line with such a stride of joy that he was tempted to let out a cheer.

  “He won!” he said.

  “He lost his rider three stiles ago,” said Gustave. “It doesn’t count. You’ve lost your money, I’m afraid.”

  “I didn’t notice,” said Émile.

  “Next time bet on one of the favorites,” Gustave told him. “No matter what your heart dictates, do the sensible thing.”

  But he had never done the sensible thing; it wasn’t in his blood.

  Coal smoke and tar caught in the back of his throat. As always, he could smell the site before he could see it. The air rang with the music of the riveters high above, an orchestra of metal hitting metal underlined by the timpani roar and crack of their fires. By the time he had climbed the wooden scaffold to the level where sparks cascaded down from the workers’ hammers, his eyes were watering with the smoke. The men were balancing on the narrowest of ledges as they worked. Height seemed to mean nothing to them. One even turned, raised his hat, and wished him good morning.

  “How much higher?” he asked the foreman.

  “Twenty meters to go until we reach the first platform,” he replied.

  “It’s going well. Against all predictions.”

  “Just shows you,” the foreman said. “You have to risk something in order to gain anything in this life.”

  Émile looked out at the city below. Cait was down there somewhere, brushing her hair or reading a book, walking through empty parks or looking up at the rise of the tower. The Arrols would remain in Paris for as long as it took to finish the construction. He would write another letter, he would propose another exhibition, he would suggest another excursion.

  “Let me try?” he asked the foreman.

  A riveter was instructed to hand him his tool. A red-hot rivet was placed in a hole with tongs and Émile hit it once, twice, three times until it was flush.

  21

  ____

  THE ICE AT the Cercle des Patineurs in the Bois de Boulogne could have been made of sugar. Strings of paper lanterns swung in the night wind, casting their colors, a confection of red and green, yellow and blue, across the crystalline surface below. The pavilion on the far side of the rink was lit up with electric light. From inside, the smell of coffee, hot chocolate, and mulled wine mixed with the sharp, almost mineral pinch of the ice and the deep, dark scents of the surrounding forest.

  “Now, this,” said Alice, “this is where the people come.”

  An orchestra was tuning up in a small gazebo. On the ice, about fifty skaters circled clockwise while two men with brooms skated the other way, sweeping up loose snow and single gloves, discarded dance cards and lost buttons. Some skaters held hands or formed troikas; others pushed
their partners in ice sleds, the prows carved like swans’ necks. A man with an abundant mustache raced past, turned sharply, and then lost his balance, his body hanging momentarily horizontal before he crashed heavily onto the surface of the rink.

  The orchestra started to play “Les Patineurs” by Waldteufel. With its sleigh bells and gentle, playful melody, this waltz could be heard all over the city that winter. Ice-skating was fashionable, and the rink was the best place to show off the cut of new clothes, the slenderness of an ankle, or one’s dexterity on skates. Alice was wearing a new skating dress made of deep red velvet with astrakhan trim and a matching muff. Her hat, also made to match, was tied with a huge satin bow under the chin. It had looked a little too fancy when she had first put it on. But here in the Bois, compared to all the other young women, it was almost demure.

  “Isn’t this place pretty?” Alice said. “Why did no one tell us about it before?”

  It was, Cait agreed, like a scene from a children’s picture book.

  “Who told you about it?” she asked.

  But Alice’s attention was distracted as she pulled on her boots and made sure the blades were attached tightly.

  “Who?” Cait repeated.

  “I really can’t remember,” she replied. “Let’s go.”

  At the side of the rink, however, Alice hesitated.

  “I’m not very good,” she said. “Will somebody teach me?”

  Jamie didn’t offer. As soon as he had tied up the laces of his own skates, he was off, cutting between other skaters and stopping so suddenly in front of a group of young women that he sent up a spray of ice crystals onto the hems of their skirts with the edge of his blade. Alice clutched on to the side of the rink; she gripped Cait’s arms and walked on the ice rather than glided. Twice, her feet skidded from under her and she fell. The first time she laughed. The second time she snapped.