To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  “You’re English?” he said as he pulled a thin metal plate from inside the box.

  “Scottish,” she replied.

  He smiled, then consulted his pocket watch.

  “I’m exposing the plate,” he explained. “It must be kept very still for twenty seconds exactly.”

  She held her breath as he counted out the seconds.

  “Voilà!” he said as he wound the shutter closed again. “Just in time.”

  She looked up and noticed that a thin mist had begun to descend, enveloping the balloon in white.

  “We’ll have to imagine the view instead,” she suggested.

  He turned and gave her his full attention again.

  “Then imagine a tower,” he said. “The tallest tower in the world. It will be built right here on the Champ de Mars for the World’s Fair, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. You won’t have to come up in a balloon anymore.”

  “That!” she said. “But everyone says it’s going to be awful, just a glorified pylon.”

  He laughed and began to put away his camera.

  “Or a truly tragic lamppost,” he said.

  There was a sudden tug and the balloon dropped a couple of feet. The passengers let out a cry of alarm, followed quickly by a show of amusement. Maybe they weren’t all quite as fearless as they appeared.

  “That was short,” said Jamie, appearing suddenly at her elbow. “And you can’t see anything now. Not sure it was worth the price of the ticket.”

  “You should take the steamboat, a bateau-mouche,” the Frenchman suggested. “The route from Charenton to Auteuil is the best and only costs twenty centimes. It takes you through the whole city by the river.”

  The two men began to chat, as men do, about professions and prospects. Cait felt a spike of disappointment; she wished that Jamie hadn’t come looking for her.

  “You’re an engineer,” said Jamie. “What a coincidence! You might have heard of my uncle, William Arrol. Our company is working on the Forth Bridge near Edinburgh. And we’ve almost finished one across the Tay, to replace the one that collapsed.”

  He glanced briefly in Cait’s direction. The balloon was yanked down an­other couple of feet. Something within her plummeted in tandem. She had forgotten herself. She was thirty-one years old; she’d had her chance.

  “What are your current projects?” Jamie asked the engineer.

  “A tower made of iron,” he said, and smiled at Cait.

  “Not Eiffel’s tower?” said Jamie. “The one they’re going to build some­where around here?”

  “I designed it,” he replied. “Together with my colleague, Maurice Koechlin. We work for Gustave Eiffel.”

  Cait covered her mouth with her hand. Beneath her fingertips her cheeks burned.

  “You should have told me,” she said. “There I was, calling it a truly tragic lamppost.”

  Jamie glanced at her. Clearly she had spoken out of turn. The French­man, however, didn’t seem offended, but amused.

  “I called it that, not you. Today I was trying to take some photographs of the site for our archive,” he explained. “We start digging the foundations next week.”

  “Really! And how long do you expect construction to take?” Jamie asked.

  “It must be ready for the Great Exhibition, so two years at the most. And once she stands, you will be able to see her from all over the city.”

  “Impressive! You know, I’m training to be an engineer myself.”

  Cait was surprised to hear Jamie say it. His uncle had paid for school, for university, and when he had dropped out, he had given him an apprentice­ship in his company. A directorship was promised, but first Jamie would have to prove himself, working his way up, like his uncle had, from the shop floor. He had learned the basics of civil engineering by drawing endless plans and drilling rivet holes, but he had not shone, coming in late and going home after lunch. After several strained conversations with his uncle, it was agreed that he would take a sabbatical to think things over. While traveling for the last six months around Europe, he had considered careers such as wine merchant or chocolate importer.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name?” Jamie asked.

  “Émile Nouguier,” the Frenchman replied.

  “So if you designed it, why isn’t the tower named after you?” Cait asked.

  “Eiffel bought the patent from us,” he replied. “And now as well as building it, he is paying for most of it.”

  “I heard it was going to cost him millions of francs,” said Jamie. “Is that true?”

  “It is. Although he hopes he will recoup most of it through ticket sales.”

  The gondola landed with a thump on the sand of the parade ground. The American passengers gave a spontaneous round of applause.

  “It’s been a pleasure, Monsieur Nouguier,” Jamie said. “Is your wife on board?”

  “Alas, there is no one that fits that description.”

  “We’re in the same boat, then,” Jamie said. “You must meet my sister.”

  Émile Nouguier bowed in Cait’s direction.

  “No, I’m just a family friend,” she said. “Caitriona Wallace.”

  “Forgive me,” he said softly in French. “Caitriona.”

  A small jolt raced through her. He had addressed her by her first name. It was better, she decided, to ignore it. It was better to appear oblivious to his overfamiliarity.

  “Well,” she said, “good luck with your tower.”

  “Thank you,” he replied.

  Almost all the passengers had disembarked. The crew were coiling ropes and piling sandbags. Water was thrown over the basket of hot coals.

  “Mrs. Wallace!” said Jamie, standing on the platform steps, waiting to help her down. “Can’t wait all day!”

  Alice was standing at the bottom, her face doll-blank. The ladies with the parasols had gone.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  “You should have come,” Cait replied.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” Jamie called out from behind.

  Alice looked at Cait in horror. Who on earth, her face seemed to say, could be worth meeting on a hot-air balloon attraction?

  “May I present my sister,” Jamie said once the engineer had reached the bottom of the steps, “Miss Alice Arrol. This is Monsieur Nouguier, the highly esteemed engineer.”

  Jamie was hardly subtle; the young unmarried sister, the blatant advertising of her availability, the implication that Nouguier might be of the right social standing to take an interest. But if the engineer was aware of any of this, his face didn’t reveal it.

  “Mademoiselle,” he said with a small bow.

  “Enchantée,” Alice replied.

  There was a small, expectant silence.

  “How long are you staying in Paris?” he asked Jamie.

  “Just until the weekend. We’re on a Grand Tour, of sorts. After meandering through the Low Countries, we spent too long in Rome. We had to miss Venice entirely. But our stay in Paris has been thoroughly worthwhile now we’ve met you.”

  Cait was painfully aware, as she had been many times in Paris, of their poor mastery of social etiquette, of how clear it was that they had come from a less sophisticated place. Their manners were parochial, so parochial that they didn’t even realize it.

  “If you have time before you leave, I would be happy to receive your call.” Nouguier handed Jamie his card. “As an engineer you might be interested in seeing the workshop in Levallois-Perret.”

  “I would indeed,” said Jamie. “Thank you.”

  Once Émile had taken his leave, Alice rolled her eyes.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t drag us to a workshop.”

  “Do you know who that was?” Jamie whispered. “He works with Gustave Eiffel, the Gustave Eiffel. And he’s unattached!”

  “Jamie!” she said. “Before you start your matchmaking, I’d like to point out that he wasn’t even wearing a hat!”
/>   “Shh,” said her brother. “He might hear you.”

  But Émile Nouguier was already halfway across the parade grounds, heading toward the Seine, his figure a dark stroke against the sand. As Cait watched, it started to snow, and within a minute he began to disappear, fading from black to gray to nothing at all.

  2

  ____

  AND ALL WAS WHITE. Émile looked up into the space where the tower would stand, into the slow swirl of snow as it gracefully descended. Ice flowers, as snowflakes were sometimes known. He caught one in his hand and watched as it melted into a drop of water. Were beautiful things more beautiful when you couldn’t keep them? The tower wouldn’t stand for long: twenty years. Compared to other structures of its size, it was a blink of the eye, a single heartbeat, an ice flower.

  He pictured Gabrielle lying on his bed that morning, her dark hair undone and her clothes unlaced. How much longer would their affair continue? A week? A month? Surely not much more? He suddenly longed for simplicity, for honesty, for a lack of artifice and an open-eyed gaze like that of the woman he’d just met in the balloon. But this was Paris and nothing was simple. Relationships always came with caveats.

  Gabrielle thought him lucky to have her. She moved in the kind of circles in which he was not welcome; she modeled for artists and had been intimate with most of them, or so she led him to believe, name-dropping Degas, Renoir, and Monet, and the boat parties they had thrown for her at Maison Fournaise. She made it no secret either that she was married to a lesser-known painter who didn’t mind what she did. Once she’d mentioned a daughter, a girl of about eight, whom they farmed out to grandparents.

  The affair had begun three months earlier when she and Émile had hailed the same cab outside a theater on the Place du Châtelet. It was raining hard, and both had insisted the other take it until a gentleman in a top hat jumped in front and took it himself. To quell their mutual outrage, a cognac or two in the theater bar had seemed like a good idea. Later, Émile hailed another cab and this time they both climbed inside.

  Of course, he knew that the relationship was unsustainable, untenable, indefensible, but it suited them both, for the moment. He gifted her with nice clothes and jewelry and she returned the favor in other ways. If he ever felt guilty, he paid a visit to her favorite shop, Boucheron, on the Place Vendôme.

  “Are you coming to the opening?” Gabrielle had asked him that morning. She stood in front of a small mirror, adjusting her hat and fixing it with pins.

  “Will your husband be there?” he had asked.

  “He is exhibiting twelve paintings. So yes, I expect he will.”

  “Then no.”

  He turned, lay flat on his back, and stared up at the ceiling.

  “He is still upset that he wasn’t chosen for the Impressionist show in New York,” she went on, oblivious.

  “And are there any paintings of you?” he asked.

  She stopped what she was doing and looked over at him.

  “A few,” she replied. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  He climbed out of bed and began to dress. And as he fastened his collar and buttoned his braces, he remembered the rush of his heart beneath the palm of her hand, the capitulation of his body beneath her fingertips. Possession in the beat of the blood but not in the heart. So why did the idea of her being with another man rile him?

  Gabrielle was watching him in the mirror. Finally she turned.

  “Émile,” she said, “you’re in a temper, aren’t you?”

  “No! I must go to work, that’s all. I’m going to be late.”

  “But it’s not even eight.”

  She took off her hat and cast it aside. She undid his collar, she kissed his neck, his ear, his mouth; then once more she took his hands and drew him toward the bed.

  “I’d like to paint you,” he had whispered after.

  “But what on earth would I look like?” She laughed. “A steel girder for a face, perhaps, with two rivets for eyes?”

  This was what she really thought of him; he was an engineer, not an artist. And yet there was art in his work, in the soar of a structure and the arch of a bridge, in every framework of light and air and iron.

  “You might think differently of me when you see our tower,” he said.

  “How can metal bolted to metal be art?” Gabrielle replied.

  “Wait and see. Wait until you stand at the top and look out at the whole city below.”

  “But why would I want to do that?” she insisted.

  “Why wouldn’t you?” he replied. “Because you can!”

  She looked at him, her chin raised and her eyes narrowed. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said, and rolled away from him.

  His father had had several mistresses over the years. They came to the glass factory after hours, when the furnaces were cooling and the glass blowers had gone home for the day. Émile remembered them all clearly, Isabelle with the red hair; Chantelle, the wife of the baker; Miriam, who had a beautiful singing voice. His mother must have known—everyone else did—but dealt with it stoically. Cedric Nouguier was a factory owner, an important man in the small town of La Villette on the outskirts of Paris. As long as he avoided scandal, he could do what he liked.

  At his age, however, Émile needed a wife, not a mistress. But what could he offer her? Although he had inherited an apartment in Paris in the fifth arrondissement, he rarely used it. He traveled for work—Portugal, America, Hungary, Russia—and lived for months on end in hotels. The tower construction would be one of his first jobs in Paris, and he sometimes wondered if he saw the city, the world, his life, like a visitor might—fleetingly, as if he were just passing through. A blink or two and it would be gone. And yet he must marry and have children soon—a rich woman, preferably, with money to invest in his family’s factory. He was reminded of these facts weekly when he visited his mother, who lived in the hope that she could one day die peace­fully, safe in the knowledge that the Nouguier family with all its elderly dependents and antiquated business was still a going concern.

  The snow hadn’t settled, and it melted into the cobbles as soon as it landed. Émile walked along the Seine past lines of barges heading into the city. They were moving so slowly that they left nothing more than gentle ripples on the surface. Most of their weight was below the waterline. He looked down and saw himself in the black water, reflected, fragmented, pulled apart and put back together again over and over until the water smoothed, dark as glass.

  3

  ____

  EVEN THIS FAR out of the city, the river was full of paddle steamers and river barges, light yawls and chain tugs, with great wheels heaving up dripping lengths from the riverbed. Several bateaux-mouches were tied up at the pontoon when they arrived, but only one, a stream of smoke coming from its chimney, looked ready to depart.

  “Quand partez-vous?” asked Cait.

  “In two minutes,” the captain replied in English.

  According to a timetable pinned inside a wooden frame, it would take about an hour and a half to reach Auteuil on the other side of Paris, and a little less to return. While Jamie arranged a time with the carriage driver to pick them up, Cait looked out across the water. It was a breathless day, the winter light the color of green tea. A string of small rowing boats bobbed in the swell. A little farther down were a floating restaurant, a bathing house, and a wash house. Several women were lathering sheets in the freezing water from a wooden platform. As she watched, a shaft of sun broke through the early-morning haze.

  “We could sit outside?” suggested Cait once they had bought their tickets and had them stamped.

  “Too cold,” said Alice.

  And so they found a bench inside the cabin next to a steamed-up window. The boat wasn’t busy; several elderly couples who sat staring straight ahead in silence, a woman with three small children, and a nun. The air was thick with the smell of mildew and tar and engine oil and, underneath it all, the faint, fetid stink of the river.

/>   “It doesn’t look like much at all,” Alice said as she wiped the window and stared out. “Where are we again?”

  “A town called Charenton,” Cait replied.

  “I know that. But is there anything here apart from the river?”

  Cait opened the guidebook and looked in the index.

  “ ‘Situated between the Bois, the Marne, and the Seine,’ ” she read out, “ ‘a place chiefly known for its lunatic asylum.’ ”

  She looked up at Alice and they both started to laugh.

  “So much for the quest to find the chic,” said Jamie, “the elegant, the je ne sais quoi.”

  “I told you we should have gone shopping,” said Alice.

  “Give it a chance,” said Jamie. “We haven’t even left the dock yet. And I’m determined to see as much of Paris as I can in the time we have left, not just the insides of department stores or hansom cabs.”

  Cait stared down at a map of Paris’s canals and rivers, blue snakes on brick red. In two days they would be heading back to Dover, crossing the Channel, and taking the train from London back to Glasgow. And she was filled with apprehension, with dread, with an almost unfathomable melancholy.

  She had left her tenement flat in Glasgow in the autumn of the previous year, covering all the furniture with dust sheets and canceling all the deliveries. On the day of their departure it had been raining heavily and the gutters were filled with fallen leaves and the black swirl of city dirt. She sent her small case ahead and made her way from Pollokshields into the city on foot, following the route of the railway line. As she waited for Alice and Jamie at the station, it was only the rain and the thought of getting wetter than she already was that prevented her from walking home again. Why, she asked herself, had she accepted the role of lady’s companion, of chaperone to Alice Arrol? But she knew why; it was the type of job taken by women who have no other option.

  The villa had been sold, along with the wedding silver, years earlier. After being badly advised, however, Cait’s financial investments had dwindled to almost nothing. She lived in a modest one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building that looked across the railway. Once she realized that her savings wouldn’t cover the bills for much longer, she had answered an advertisement in the Glasgow Herald.