To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  “You’re putting me off. Let me try on my own for a while.”

  “Will you be all right?” asked Cait.

  “Just go! Please?”

  It had been years since Cait had last skated. With the tip of her left blade and all the weight on her right foot, she pushed off. After a moment or two it all came back, the sweet rumble of the ice beneath the steel blade, the rush of wind on her face and the gentle curve of her trajectory as she flew around the rink.

  Did Émile ever come here? she wondered. He would surely laugh at the people and the way they glided around and around with such concentration; if he was here, he would surely laugh at her. He didn’t know, how could he, that she had read his letters over and over again. He had asked them to another exhibition. She hadn’t yet replied but would, as she always did, with the same words, “I regret to inform you . . .”

  What would happen if she didn’t turn him down this time? She skated faster, her ankles aching, her cheeks burning. Once she just missed the prow of a sled as it stopped suddenly right in front of her. She didn’t slow but skated faster, gliding from one foot to the other, around and around, as her mind tumbled with scenarios and images, with situations and possible conversations.

  She made herself think of Bingham’s Pond instead, just off the Great Western Road, where she had learned to skate. Every year the ice was swept and polished for curling matches and social skating. Together with her sister she had skated all winter until the ice was wet with thaw and shot through with cracks. She remembered how they had watched the adults courting with a sense of morbid fascination. It seemed so brief, their physical affection a mere affectation. Once the men were married off, they came alone to smoke and curl, their ice skates put away, perhaps, with their boxes of toy soldiers and skipping ropes. The wives seemed to develop a new fragility that prevented them from skating, or in fact doing any physical activity, as if marriage made them somehow more precious than the unmarried, like the best china that should be dusted rather than used.

  Marriage will never stop me from skating, Cait had decided at the time. But it had. And she had forgotten how much she’d loved it.

  As she skated around the rink alone, several men smiled at her and one offered his arm. She declined him politely; skating was liberating, exhilarating, like dancing without the need of a partner. The skaters shoaled as the orchestra played, individual and yet part of it all: the night, the music, the whole beautiful spectacle.

  Alice wasn’t in the spot where Cait had left her. But she couldn’t have gone far; she couldn’t move more than a couple of feet on her own. The bells in the church at Place Victor Hugo sounded the hour. It was nine o’clock. Cait took off around the rink once again, circling it twice, faster this time, but there was still no sign of Alice.

  Jamie was skating backward in front of two young women who seemed to be doing their best to ignore him.

  “I’ve lost Alice,” she told him.

  He shrugged, caught the eye of one of the girls, then spun around on one leg and was off, skating with all the nonchalance of someone who knows he is being watched.

  “Would you help me look for her?” she asked when she caught up with him.

  “She’ll be in the café,” he said. “And if not, I’m sure she’ll turn up.”

  A few minutes later, Alice did turn up, her face flushed, her eyes shiny.

  “Where did you go?” Cait asked.

  “Go?” Alice repeated. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Alice,” Cait said, “I’ve been looking for you for ages.”

  But Alice merely gave her a small, closed smile. “I’m cold,” she said. “I think it’s time for a chocolat.”

  “How did you know about this place?” Jamie asked Alice as they sat down at the only free table.

  “It used to be a private club,” she replied. “It belonged to the royals until they ran off to Belgium.”

  “Well, they won’t be coming back,” he said. “The monarchy isn’t about to be restored as far as I can tell. But where did you hear about it?”

  Alice’s eyes, however, were following the path of a young woman in green as she made her way from the door to a large bench beside a potted palm, and she didn’t answer.

  “Maybe I should wear emerald,” she mused.

  Jamie waved at the waiter and ordered. Three chocolats were brought almost immediately with a small plate of patisserie.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Whose invitation?” the waiter asked them.

  “Excuse me?” Jamie asked.

  The waiter blinked and glanced around. All the occupants of the neighboring tables had fallen quiet.

  “Who invited you here?” he said.

  Jamie frowned. Alice opened her mouth, closed it again, and then blushed. They didn’t need to respond. It was suddenly clear that they had no invitation.

  “C’est privé,” he said, which needed no translation. “This time, no charge.”

  A woman at the next table cleared her throat. Her husband lit his pipe.

  “Vive la révolution!” said Jamie a little too loudly. “Drink up.”

  To leave now would be worse, much worse than slipping away in ten minutes’ time. And so they sipped the hot chocolate in silence. Nobody touched the cakes.

  As they headed back along the path through the forest to the main boulevard, Cait turned for a last glance at the rink. A light fog had descended, blurring the colored lights and forming a halo around the pavilion. The orchestra had packed up and one could hear the rumble of carriages on the main road through the park and the cry of night birds.

  “I’ve forgotten my muff,” said Alice suddenly. “I’ll have to go back.”

  “Shall I come with you?” asked Cait.

  “No,” she said. “Just wait. I won’t be a minute.”

  Ten passed, however, and still Alice had not returned. Jamie grew impatient and suggested he go and look for their carriage. Cait began to walk back the way they had come in the hope of meeting Alice on the way. The rink was almost empty. A few young men, their knees bent, their bodies curved forward, raced one another around the perimeter. In the center a girl of about fourteen, her heels locked together, slowly revolved. The café was closing up, the chairs were stacked, the doors had been opened to let the cold air chase away the last few remaining customers. Cait scanned the benches, but apart from an elderly couple, one of whom clearly had had too much to drink, they were empty.

  What sounded like Alice’s laugh came from nearby. And there it was again, an explosion of tiny gasps. Cait walked toward the café, but she was not inside. It could only have come from around the back, where little light could reach, where the dustbins were full of coffee grounds and spent tea leaves, where wooden crates were piled with empty wine bottles and tins spilling with the spent ash of hundreds of cigarettes. She peered into the gloom. There was a man and a woman standing beneath an overhanging awning. Although she could see only the back of the woman’s head, the man bore a striking re­semblance to the man from the opera, the man they had seen in the restaurant on the island, the count. He leaned across to the woman’s ear as if to whisper but then kissed her. Cait took a step back. Was it Alice? If so, she should stop it now. But she couldn’t be sure. What if it wasn’t? What if it was? Word would get out, people would talk, and Alice would be disgraced, soiled, unmarriageable.

  She would walk around the rink. She would find Alice; her fears were bound to be unfounded. Sweet, innocent Alice, whose only crime was to for­get her muff. By the time she had walked full circle the couple on the bench had gone. A man on a ladder was extinguishing the lights in the paper lanterns one by one. The darkness of the forest seemed to be closing in on the rink until the ice was nothing more than a faint opaline glow in the night. Alice wasn’t there. Just as she turned to go back to the café, however, a young woman came racing along the path toward her.

  “It was no use, I couldn’t find it,” Alice said. “I’ll have to go back and ask i
n the morning.”

  They rode home in the cab in silence. Twice Cait looked into Alice’s face to search for some change, some shift, but found nothing. Had she arranged to meet the count at the ice rink or was it a chance encounter? Had she been compromised in any way? She didn’t look it. If anything, she looked rather pleased with herself. Maybe she should be happy for her? Maybe Jamie was wrong about the count. Maybe this was the beginning of a courtship with an extremely eligible man. William Arrol would have what he wanted; his niece would be married to someone with money, her future would be secured.

  “Look,” said Alice suddenly. “My blade is broken.”

  She held up the iron blade, and sure enough it was split in half.

  “You were lucky,” said Jamie. “You could have come a cropper!”

  The next morning, a Monday, the Bois was empty and the ice rink was closed. Alice had said she suspected that her muff had fallen underneath the bench where she changed her boots and indeed, there it was, a glaze of frost over the astrakhan, the smell of night air trapped in its curls. As she lifted it, Cait heard raised voices coming from the wood behind. Two almighty bangs sent a rise of birds from the trees all around. A dog started to bark.

  In a clearing just off the main path, a young man lay on the snow. An­other stood twenty feet away, a pistol dangling from his right hand. He looked up and saw her staring at him through the branches. For a moment their eyes met. He looked familiar. Was it the count? She was too far away to be sure. He opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, to deny everything. But before he could say anything, a woman came rushing through the forest, threw herself on the body, and started to sob. “Marcel! Marcel. Marcel!”

  22

  ____

  THE LETTER WAS SITTING on his hall table. He ran his finger over the lettering of her name, searching, perhaps, for an echo of her in the order of the letters and the curls of the script. And he wondered what her real name was, her maiden name, the one she was given by her parents, not by her late husband. He knew, he realized, almost nothing about her.

  He had written the letter a week earlier, composing it countless times, trying to find the right tone. And he still wasn’t sure he had gotten it right. In fact, he still wasn’t even sure he knew what he wanted to say to her any­more; words seemed too heavy, too clumsy, too easily bolted together to make an inelegant form. All he wanted was to see her again. Beyond that he had no grand plan, no big scheme. But there was Alice, her charge, and there were his responsibilities, both of which conspired to make something so simple become seemingly impossible. And so the letter remained on his hall table, unsent.

  At the site he stopped at the bottom of the ladders of the scaffold and looked up. The tower had begun to rise above the city’s rooftops, the thrust of its metal beams reaching through the cloud that enveloped the city, making Haussmann’s grand scale, his ambitious boulevards and étoiles, appear smaller. Unlike the Sacré-Coeur, whose conception had been so controversial and construction so slow that the city ceased to notice it anymore, the tower still provoked a reaction: an involuntary intake of breath, the race of a heartbeat, the point of a finger—look. It was taller than people had imagined it would be, finer, thinner. And while there were some who still droned on about its unmitigated ugliness, many others had changed their minds.

  “Monsieur Nouguier?” a voice called from above. “We need you.”

  From that moment onward he thought of little else but how to solve a series of logistical problems that came thick and fast as the day progressed. The structure was incredibly intricate, constructed piece by piece. In which order should the pieces be assembled and where should the riveters be deployed next? Would the foundations on the side of the river, where the ground was softer and shot full of clay, hold? If they sunk just a couple of inches, the tower would tilt. And what about the wind? What if the city were hit by winds of a speed much higher than their calculations? Although it was assumed that the wind would pass straight through the structure, or, at most, make it sway up to six inches in any direction, what if it swayed so far that it toppled? And yet, although a tower this size had never been built out of iron before, the mathematics were correct; it would be stable, it would hold fast no matter what.

  A boy appeared breathless at the top of the scaffold. It took a moment for him to be able to get any words out, and in that brief space of time Émile had run through all the awful things that could have happened. But it was the one he most dreaded that the boy eventually stuttered.

  “Your mother,” he said. “There was an urgent message from her concierge. You need to go to her. Quickly.”

  The apartment was almost completely dark this time. The housekeeper was waiting at the door to take his coat and hat. She didn’t meet his eye.

  “The doctor is with her,” she told him. “She’s had a bad night.”

  “You should have called me earlier.”

  “She didn’t want to disturb you.”

  Daylight spilled around the shutters in his mother’s bedroom, making long stripes across the floor. It took him a moment to locate her, her face almost as white as her bedding. Louise Nouguier raised a pale, thin hand to greet him. The doctor waited at the bedside with his head bowed.

  “My dearest boy, I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Maman,” he replied. “What’s the matter?”

  She glanced around at the doctor. He remained mute.

  “Well,” she began. “I didn’t like to say anything—you’ve been so preoccupied with work, but I haven’t been feeling too well recently. Monsieur Fauré, my esteemed physician, thinks I may have—”

  Her eyes wandered as she searched for the word. And so the doctor began to talk, about chronic inflammation, about cells and lymph nodes. None of it made much sense.

  “I have a tumor,” his mother pronounced.

  Émile struggled to comprehend. He looked at the doctor for confirmation.

  “But you can remove it?” he offered. “Can’t you?”

  The doctor cleared his throat. His mother asked for a sip of water.

  “Do you like that mirror?” she said after she had swallowed. “The one above the fireplace? It needs a polish, a little of the gilt replaced on the frame. Your father bought it in Venice.”

  As he located the doctor’s hat, shook his hand, and showed him out, Émile wondered what Fauré really thought of him and his mother, of the shuttered rooms and the smell of his mother’s perfume mixed with medicinal preparations for her digestion.

  “She has the tendency to exaggerate,” Émile said with a smile.

  The doctor, however, looked at him as if he had just told a joke in very poor taste.

  “I’m afraid this time she has no need. She has cancer. Of the breast. At quite an advanced stage.”

  “But surely with surgery—”

  “The success rate is poor. Due to her age and her state of health, I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “So what do you recommend, Doctor? To cure her?”

  He sighed and gave his head a small shake. “I’m so sorry.”

  The sound of rushing water filled Émile’s ears, the roar of a tide that threatened to submerge him as he tried to process the doctor’s words. For so long his mother had been on the periphery of his vision, a stone in his shoe, a splinter under the skin, her voice like the buzz of a wasp in his ear. How could she be gone, absent, silenced? It seemed impossible that the world could continue to exist without her. He came back with a jolt. The doctor had laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Monsieur Nouguier?” Fauré asked softly. “If I were you I would take the rest of the day off.”

  “Does she have long?” he asked.

  “Months, I’d say. A year at most.”

  “Does she know?”

  The doctor paused. “I thought, when the time is right, you could tell her.”

  From the balcony in his mother’s bedroom you could see right across Paris. It faced south, and the sun streamed in all day long, much
to the consternation of the housekeeper, who claimed that it faded all the carpets. That was what had persuaded his father to buy the apartment all those years ago: the view. As he sat at the end of his mother’s bed, he wondered if the tower site was visible. Or if it lay slightly too far to the east.

  “You don’t have to sit with me all day,” his mother said. “I know you’re busy.”

  “I have time,” he said.

  “You never had time before. Has something happened? That’s the trouble with working for someone else. As well as making all the money, they can dismiss you at the drop of a hat.”

  “I haven’t been dismissed,” he replied. “It won’t happen.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” she said.

  Only his mother knew how to rile him with a few words. Already he could feel himself bristling with annoyance.

  “Do you have any idea what we’re building? It will be magnificent, groundbreaking, monumental.”

  “A tower,” she said flatly.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “You know what your father used to say? In a beautiful piece of glass you can see the breath of the man who blew it, and they breathe the same air as the first glassblowers of Syria thousands of years ago. He was proud to be part of such an ancient tradition.”

  “Mother—”

  “With a little investment you could modernize the factory. The family house needs a bit of work, but it wouldn’t take much. It would be nice to bring up your children in the countryside rather than the city.”

  He let her go on, making plans and hatching schemes.

  “I could live with you,” she said. “Your children could come and sit with me and I could feed them bonbons.”

  He swallowed down a lump. How could he tell her, how could he not? Instead he said nothing. He kissed her softly on the hand.