To Capture What We Cannot Keep by Beatrice Colin

Author:Beatrice Colin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

19

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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—

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