She paused at a flower bed to admire a small bush covered with flowers. The petals were red and purple veined with blue, the colors of a bruise. Maybe Émile saw her only as a woman to be taken, used once and then discarded. How could she possibly risk her position with the Arrols for something so tenuous? She picked a flower, then crushed the petals to release the scent. Alice would make a good match for the engineer; she was young, she was rich, she was malleable. And yet they did not seem to like each other. Although Arrol wanted him as a husband for his niece, there was a limit to how much she could actually do.
She headed toward the double set of gates that led from the park to the street. Here the sidewalks were filled with people rushing home or to work or to meet their wives, their lovers, their children. She stepped aside for a nursemaid pushing a large perambulator, but the woman gave her a startled look, as if she had no right to be walking on that particular sidewalk at that particular time. Maybe she looked different, foreign? Maybe she always looked that way; maybe it was something in her blood, her background, her past?
Her father had been an army chaplain posted to India. Wives were expected to accompany their husbands for the duration. What did Cait remember of her parents now? The smell of mothballs and quinine, the softness of her mother’s cashmere shawls between her fingertips, and strange, haunting sounds of their words, words she had never heard before, like bandana and dharma. Both had perished in the great cholera epidemic of 1863.
Cait and Anne had been brought up mostly by their grandparents. Her grandfather was a judge, a man who could speak Latin and Greek and often quoted Virgil to make a point at the dinner table. He had no time for dancing lessons or needlepoint but believed in education for both men and women. Since he didn’t trust anyone else to provide it, he took it upon himself to teach both girls himself. While other young women their age were learning the polka and embroidering linen for their trousseaus, Cait and Anne, with varying levels of success, were studying French and philosophy, mathematics and the classics. It almost killed him, he joked, until he died quite suddenly of a heart attack while reading up for a lesson on Kant. On his gravestone were engraved an image of an open book and the words MEDICINE FOR THE SOUL, words that had been inscribed above the library in the ancient city of Thebes.
At nineteen, Cait had been restless, overeducated—sharpened, she saw now, like a new pencil. And while her looks attracted considerable attention, her tongue quickly diffused it. Although her cheekbones were high and her eyes large and long-lashed, there was an intensity about her that didn’t translate well to small talk and pleasantries. But what was there for young women of their class aside from marriage?
Her sister, Anne, met George Wallace at a tea party hosted by her piano teacher. He was handsome, witty, and together with his brother, Saul, ran a legal practice in Park Circus. George wasn’t a gifted pianist—neither was Anne—but they both shared a fondness for Bach, especially his easy pieces. He called on her the next evening and the one after that, and within a week, they were officially courting, with her grandmother as chaperone.
Cait was introduced to Saul a fortnight later. She kept quiet, as Anne had instructed. Saul, likewise, said very little but gave her a parting gift, a book of romantic poetry. He was, Cait admitted later to her sister, tall, silent, but utterly beguiling. Saul was twenty-eight, his brother thirty-two, both of an age to take a wife, but it was the former who took the lead. After a courtship so brief that there was barely time to proclaim the banns, Caitriona Rose McNeish married Saul Angus Wallace in St. Andrews on the Square. Cait swore that she would love, honor, and obey before God, twenty witnesses, and a small black dog that sat at the back and watched the entire ceremony until someone realized that it didn’t belong to anyone there and shooed it out. Within three months of meeting, and two months before Anne and George, they acquired a full set of china, a chest of linen, enough cutlery to feed almost sixty guests, and a small villa in Pollokshields that had just been built. There was plenty of room to expand, space to grow.
Why did they marry so quickly? What was the rush? Were both bride and groom consumed with a terror that they would be unmasked, found out? Because neither was quite what they pretended to be. Once he had won her over, Saul seemed to lose interest. And contrary to her expectations, Cait discovered that marriage was not as easy to follow as the iambic pentameter of a sonnet. Love could not be wrought, like words, into a pleasing shape. The silences that had once seemed so mysterious began to grate. She tried to engage him in conversation, in discussions about the novels of Trollope or Dickens, or on the merits of Beethoven over Brahms. One day he admitted that he didn’t care for music or art or even romantic poetry; in fact, her constant chatter exhausted him.
She wasn’t, she knew, the perfect wife. She was bookish and argumentative and he told her so almost daily. In fact, he said, she drove him to distraction. She began to bite her tongue, to swallow her words, to stop asking difficult questions. For a while, at least, the marriage seemed to improve. Cait waited. She waited for him to notice her in the new outfits she’d had made, clothes that took no account of the temperature or the time of the year; she waited for him to come to her at night; she waited for him to love her. And he did, she was sure of it, for a short time at least. She remembered the glaze in his eye and the tenderness in the graze of his lips on the top of her head on their wedding day, she recalled the gentle brush of his hand and the firmness of the press of his body into hers, and she believed the fault must lie with her.
After a few months, however, it was clear that the physical side of their marriage would not play out the way she hoped it would. Unlike her younger sister, who conceived almost immediately, Cait failed to fall pregnant. And gradually, time passed and the numerous rooms in the villa remained empty while the slow drip of frustration and blame, of despair and despondency, corroded her heart like rust. Can one recover, she asked herself now, from the corrosion of the heart? And if so, how could one know it was sound again?
Alice insisted on wearing her gold taffeta ball gown to the exhibition opening. In her hair she wore a small matching hat and, to travel, a long black opera cloak.
“It’s an exhibition,” she explained. “People dress up. Even I know that!”
As they waited for the carriage, Cait was suddenly apprehensive. How would it be to see Émile again? Would he know just how often she had thought of him since the coat cupboard? Would she give herself away?
It began to rain around four, and by the time the carriage arrived, the streets were beginning to flood.
“Where did he say it was being held?” said Alice as she peered out.
“He didn’t,” Cait replied.
As they drove north, the city became increasingly dark, the only light coming from candles placed in windows. Finally they drew up at the Restaurant du Chalet on the boulevard de Clichy, a place that blazed more brightly than any other establishment on the street.
“There must be some mistake,” said Alice. “This isn’t even a gallery.”
The coachman, however, confirmed that they had indeed arrived. Even from inside the carriage they could hear raised voices and laughter, accordion music and singing, coming from the restaurant.
“I can’t go in there,” said Alice. “It doesn’t look at all respectable.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly respectable inside,” Cait suggested. “It’s an exhibition.”
“A low-class exhibition.”
The door to the restaurant flew open. A young man staggered out, leaned down, and was promptly sick in the gutter. Alice blinked and sat back.
“Need I say more?” she said.
“We can’t come all this way and leave again,” said Cait. “Not after he sent a carriage. That would be very rude.”
“I’m not stepping foot in there and that’s final. You’ll have to go. Make up some excuse. Tell him I took ill or something.”
“But it was you whom he invited.”
“Please?” said
Alice. “And can you thank him for me?”
Cait pulled back the thick red velvet curtain at the door of the restaurant and stepped inside. Around a hundred people were gathered, gossiping and drinking glasses of wine, some well dressed, others not. In the far corner, Émile Nouguier was chatting to a man with a pointed beard. What was there about the configuration of his shoulder and the line of Émile’s jaw that drew Cait’s eyes straight to him? He turned, saw her, and smiled. And her face burned as if she had stepped out of the cold and into the heat of a blazing fire.
“Madame Wallace,” he said. “You came. May I introduce you to Georges Seurat?”
“Enchanté,” Seurat said with a bow.
“I was just asking him what he is going to paint next,” Émile explained.
“I’m going to paint your tower. If you ever finish it.”
“Oh, we will,” Émile replied. “We have to. What else will they use for the opening of the World’s Fair? You should come and take a look at the site.”
“I have! It’s like two pairs of legs, women’s legs, wide open.”
Émile glanced quickly at Cait to see if she was offended. She pretended she hadn’t heard. Seurat rocked on his heels, then spotted someone in the crowd he had to talk to and bade them both goodbye.
“I’m sorry about that,” Émile said.
“No need,” she said. “Is he well known?”
“No, not really,” he said. “We met at an exhibition. I bought one of his paintings, a study really. Where is Miss Arrol?”
“Miss Arrol decided to wait in the carriage. I’m afraid she developed a headache on the journey.”
“That’s a shame. Maybe she could come back another day when she feels better?”
“I’ll certainly suggest it.”
The moment stalled. Cait was suddenly aware of his eyes on her.
“Well,” Cait began, “thank you for the invitation. Alice and I are most appreciative, but I really should be getting back—”
“You’re here now. Let me show you around.”
“That’s kind of you but—”
“It won’t take long,” he said. “I insist.”
Émile directed her to the main salon and steered her toward the first painting.
“The show was organized by a Dutch artist called Vincent van Gogh,” he explained. “He formed a loose group he calls the Impressionists of the Petit Boulevard. They’re younger than the well-known Impressionists. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Toulouse-Lautrec? Signac? Bernard?”
“I haven’t,” she admitted.
The paintings were depictions of bars and city streets, some painted in bright dots of color and others in fluid lines. They were unlike anything she’d seen before, like images of the world through the refraction of her headaches but without the pain.
“So?” he asked. “What do you think?”
“They seem to move before the eyes,” she said. “They shimmer. The effect is rather beautiful.”
“Exactly! I knew you’d like them!”
Cait glanced out of the window at the carriage outside. How long had she been? Five minutes? Ten?
“There are other ways of regarding the world,” he continued. “The transient nature of light, the way the sun strikes when you’re least expecting it, bringing parts of the world to life until they look like nothing you’ve ever seen before. They break all the rules.”
“Is that allowed?”
He laughed. “Surely rules in life serve only one purpose?”
Émile’s eyes were watching for her reaction, looking into her face as if he could guess what she was thinking. And then a volley of raised voices came from the other side of the room as an argument broke out. A bottle smashed, a woman screamed, a dog started to bark.
“I must go,” she said. “Alice is waiting—”
“Let her,” he replied softly.
A door slammed and the gallery fell quiet again. Someone started playing the piano in another room. Her heart was thumping, out of time. She could not meet his eye. Instead she focused on the curve of his collar and the fold of his necktie, the deep blue of a magpie’s wing.
“Nouguier!” a voice shouted. “So this is where you got to! I hear you want to make a purchase?”
A gentleman—a dealer, she presumed—appeared at Émile’s elbow with a notebook and pencil in his hands.
“Excuse me,” the man said when he saw Cait. “I’ll come back later.” “Actually, I was just leaving,” she said.
Finally she let herself look Émile in the eye. It was safe now; she was saved by formality.
“It has been a pleasure,” she said.
“I’m glad,” he replied. “May I show you to the carriage?”
Cait shook her head. “It’s just outside,” she said.
“Then please pass on my regards to Mademoiselle Arrol. May I wish her a quick recovery?”
For a moment she was puzzled. What on earth was he talking about?
“Her headache?” he prompted.
“Of course,” she replied.
“You’re all right!” Alice said as Cait climbed into the carriage. “I thought you’d been kidnapped! You were such a long time. Was it awful?”
“No, it was fine,” she replied.
“It didn’t sound fine.”
“The paintings are worth seeing. We should go back another day.”
But by the look on Alice’s face, she knew that they never would. As they drove home along the boulevard de Clichy, Alice winkled off her shoes and rested her head on Cait’s shoulder. And then, lulled by the motion of the wheels on the cobbles, she dozed. Their uncle had given Alice and Jamie everything, the best start in life. They were luckier than they knew. And now Arrol expected Alice to marry well. If only it worked that way. If only they were chess pieces on a board and not unpredictable, fallible, imperfect people.
Cait stared out at the empty streets as the rain lashed down. She suddenly wished she were outside, soaked to the skin, her clothes saturated, her face, her mouth, her eyes blurred with rain.
“I think I’m going to have to disappoint Uncle William,” Alice said softly. She had not been sleeping after all. “I don’t think I will ever be Madame Émile Nouguier, no matter how much he wishes it.”
“I’m sure your uncle would like you to marry the man of your choice,” she replied. “And not his.”
“Surely you don’t believe that?” Alice said.
The horses were slowing. The carriage stopped in front of their house. The coachman climbed down and opened the door, an umbrella held aloft. As he waited for Alice to pull her shoes back on, a man on a bicycle wobbled past, his wheels cleaving through the puddles, the brim of his hat tipping with water. He stopped abruptly a few feet away and dismounted. It was Jamie.
“My brother’s bought a bicycle,” said Alice. “What an idiot!”
“Good evening!” he cried out when he saw them. “Fancy coming for a ride sometime?”
“You must be joking!” said Alice.
“I don’t know,” said Cait. “They say that everyone will be riding one soon, both men and women. We should try it.”
Alice found it hard to swallow her amusement. Clearly the idea of her chaperone on a bicycle was hilarious.
“Would you really?” she asked.
“Of course! In fact, let’s make an afternoon of it.”
“I know! You could ask Monsieur Nouguier,” said Alice. “One last try for my uncle’s sake?”
The coachman was waiting. Cait folded up the rug and smoothed down her skirts.
“I’m sure he’ll be too busy,” she replied as she rose.
“Dearest Cait,” Alice said, taking her hand and holding it, “I’m so glad you’re here, with us, in Paris. Why not ask him and see?”
18
____
THE AIR SMELLED OF BURNING leaves and wild mushrooms. As they sped through the forest, Émile caught a glimpse of groups of foragers searching the damp ground for girolles and cèpes. Jami
e Arrol was farther ahead of them now, the wheels spinning as he pedaled as hard as he could. It wasn’t a race, although he seemed to act as though it were. His sister let out the occasional scream when they hit a pothole or veered off the bridle path and onto the grass verge.
“Be careful!” she yelled. “Look where you’re going.”
Miss Arrol hadn’t wanted to learn to ride a bicycle, so they had taken tandems. Now she was perched in front of her brother, while Cait Wallace sat in the seat in front of Émile, hands gripping the handlebars at either side of her. Her letter had arrived the day after the exhibition, two lines, one thanking him, the other wishing him well and suggesting they meet on a Sunday afternoon to go on an excursion by bicycle.
At first the two tandems had trundled along side by side before one shot ahead and the other fell behind, and vice versa, the girls laughing, the two men gasping with the effort of it. And then the road had narrowed and become a path and Jamie had taken the lead.
“Is this too fast?” Émile called out.
Cait shook her head no.
Émile had to admit that cycling was indeed wonderful; the wind in his hair, his speeding heart, the rush of danger. Cycles had improved dramatically over the last twenty years. Now there was what was known as the “safety bicycle.” The wheels were both the same size, the seat was lower, and there was a chain-driven back wheel. For the first time, he was considering buying one. But it was undeniably hard work; the tires were thin and every single shard of stone beneath the wheels sent a judder up the frame. No wonder they were once called bone shakers.
The back of Cait’s neck was visible to him despite the height of her collar. She wore a dark blue serge outfit—sober, elegant, a perfect contrast to the luminosity of her pale skin. As he caught his breath, he thought he detected the faintest trace of perfume from her hair, all tucked and looped into her straw hat. And he had to stop himself from leaning forward to inhale.
The study he had bought from Seurat was still wrapped in brown paper on his hall table. It was a small painting of a model, captured from behind. Her head was bowed forward a little, and from her shoulders to her bottom the skin was so perfectly rendered that he had the sense that were he to touch the painted wooden panel, it would be warm. Apart from their position, however, there was little similarity between Seurat’s study and the woman in front of him on the bicycle; one was fully clothed, one naked. And yet, it struck him as he coasted down the path, it seemed that he had fallen in love with both of them.
To Capture What We Cannot Keep Page 15