To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  Émile stared down at the letter as he tried to formulate a response. Had he offered him an apprenticeship? He couldn’t remember doing so.

  “I do hope this is satisfactory,” Jamie Arrol said, sensing his hesitancy. “Your colleague, Monsieur Eiffel, suggested it, remember?”

  Émile didn’t. If Eiffel had suggested it, then Eiffel could deal with him.

  “But once I’d spoken to my uncle,” Jamie went on, “we agreed it would be better if I could work with you. Gustave Eiffel must be very busy, and besides, your area is more my area of interest.”

  Émile folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He would speak to Gustave first thing in the morning. This was not acceptable.

  “You’ll be glad to know that we are already installed in Paris,” the young man went on. “We have an apartment near the Champs-Élysées. In fact, I’m ready to start . . .”

  A gust of smoke blew between them and he began to cough.

  “Damn this smoke,” he said.

  “We?” Émile queried when the fit had subsided. “Did you say ‘we’?”

  “I brought the clan!” he said. “Actually, only my sister, Alice. You met her! Made quite an impression.”

  Émile nodded, although in truth, he barely remembered the man’s sister either. But the woman in the balloon—her hand on his sleeve, the look of concern in her wide gray eyes, the shape of her as she had walked down the stairway at Levallois-Perret—he remembered that.

  “Just you two?” he asked.

  Jamie Arrol squinted at him. “She didn’t bring a husband, if that’s what you mean. Not that she was short of offers.”

  Émile smiled but declined to comment. A Parisian would never talk about his sister like this, as if she could be bought and sold like a bag of apples. And he wondered how long Jamie Arrol would last. Paris was a city that could make and ruin you; it could raise you up and then drop you without warning. No wonder Parisians were so guarded, so reserved. The ones who gave themselves away willingly, or who revealed their innermost secrets after a bottle of wine, or who laughed too loudly at the Chat Noir and spent too much money at the casino, weren’t Parisian.

  A train was approaching from the Gare des Invalides along the riverside, and the roar of its engine and the clatter of its wheels made conversation impossible for a moment or two. Émile turned and began to walk back toward a huddle of temporary huts. Jamie fell in step beside him.

  “I have an allowance from my uncle,” he said once the train had passed. “Not hugely generous, it must be said, but what needs must. Eiffel wouldn’t need to pay me a sou, of course. I am here to learn!”

  Did he really think he could just start work on a project of this importance just like that? An apprenticeship was a serious and time-consuming undertaking. He had turned down at least half a dozen applications from highly suitable candidates already. As the young man took his hat off and wiped the sweat from his brow, Émile turned to him.

  “You must understand,” he began.

  But Jamie Arrol’s attention was elsewhere, his eye fixed on a carriage that was waiting next to the Pont d’Iéna.

  “Monday,” Jamie said as he took off across the quai. “I’d say around ten a.m.? I’ll meet you here?”

  “Wait,” called Émile. But his voice was drowned out by the clatter of a passing cab. As he watched, Jamie Arrol gave the driver instructions, climbed into his carriage, and it sped along the river in the direction of Notre-Dame.

  The office at Levallois-Perret was locked up, but the night watchman let Émile in. At the back of a drawer in his desk was a box of the photographs he had taken from the hot-air balloon of the tower site before its construction. He laid them out across his desk. Here was the Champ de Mars with the Trocadéro faintly visible in the distance. And another, looking in the other direction, was the École Militaire. Next were several views of Paris from high above, the radiating avenues around the Place de l’Étoile and the distant rise of Montmartre. Finally there was a plate that he had taken as a test shot. It showed the passengers inside the gondola. And yes, there among the crowd of men in high hats and women in fur, through the distorting heat of the brazier, clinging onto the wicker edge of the basket with her eyes closed, was the Scottish woman. He touched the photograph and left a print. If only he could remember her name.

  11

  ____

  CAIT SAT ON THE BALCONY and unwound her hair. No one could see her up here, only the starlings in the sky and the bees that flitted from one potted lavender to the next. Her room was on the top floor, the attic, of the house the Arrols had rented—a thin, tall house with pale blue shutters on the rue Cardinet. On the one hand, she would have preferred a room lower down, but on the other, she loved the view. Just as long as she didn’t stand too close to the edge, she felt safe; her vertigo was manageable.

  Below was a small, dark garden with a mossy marble statue beside an ornamental pond filled with carp. The trees, ash and lime, were spindly and sparse, and seemed to spend all their energy reaching skyward. If she had been a tree, she would have done the same; up here you could see for miles, an uneven vista of roofs and chimney stacks, garrets and church spires, of slate and lead, redbrick and green-hued copper. A gentle breeze brought the smell of warm limestone and fresh coffee, of baking bread and lilac from the neighbor’s garden. Cait closed her eyes and felt the soft beat of sunlight on her eyelids and through the fine weave of her white cotton night shift onto her pale Scottish skin.

  She had been waiting to suffer for almost a month now. She had been expecting to feel contrite the moment she had decided to tell Roland Sinclair that she would not marry him. But still nothing came. Her sister, Anne, had burst into tears when she had told her, and said that Cait would pay for it, that nothing good ever came out of a rash decision. Her brother-in-law, normally a taciturn man, had tried to make her change her mind and, when she wouldn’t, suggested that she see a doctor. It was true that she did look different. Ever since her meeting with William Arrol, she couldn’t sit still. To go to Paris for two years was beyond anything she’d ever wished for. And maybe, she told herself, she would come back. And maybe she wouldn’t. No wonder she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t concentrate, she’d lost her appetite. Although she tried to hide it, even a cup of tea had revealed the tremor in her hands.

  “When are you going to break it to the poor man?” Anne had asked her. Cait had momentarily forgotten Roland Sinclair. He seemed to belong to a different life.

  “This afternoon, all being well,” she had said.

  “All being well? How could it possibly be well, Caitriona? Word will get out, people will talk. I wish you’d listened to me. It will be quite awful. For all of us.”

  “I’m sorry, Anne,” she said. “To be the cause of such distress. You do not warrant it.”

  Her sister waved away her explanation with a hand. “If only Saul had never climbed aboard that beastly train. If only you had persuaded him not to go to Dundee, then we’d never be in this situation in the first place.” Cait had blinked; her eyes smarted. How could Anne suggest that the train crash had been avoidable, that what had happened was her fault? If only she knew how much she had paid for it.

  “Don’t you think?” Anne added, defensive in case she’d said too much.

  But then the baby had started to cry and the nanny was calling her and the conversation ended. Having a widow as a sister was clearly a social calamity for Anne. Cait was the thirteenth at table, the odd one out, the lost last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. And yet there was so much that her sister didn’t know. There was so much that no one knew.

  Roland Sinclair had sat in the shade of a banana tree in the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens and fiddled with his mustache. After an initial silence, he’d taken the news equally badly.

  “This is quite a setback,” he had said. “A harsh and bitter blow of a sort I have never experienced before. And let me tell you, Mrs. Wallace, I have had more than my fair share of setbacks.”

&
nbsp; “It was never my intention to cause you hurt.”

  “Well, you have,” he said, taking off his spectacles. “You most certainly have.”

  And he stared at her so she could not miss the reddening of his eyes. Al­though she was not indifferent, it seemed that he had not known her for long enough to warrant such sorrow. If he felt any love for her, and she doubted he did, he had never summoned up the courage to actually express it. She remembered his words united in loss. Their relationship would have been one constructed out of the end point of two other lives, not the best place to start a relationship in any regard.

  Eventually, Roland Sinclair had cleared his throat, blown his nose, and collected himself.

  “My sister will be extremely put out,” he had said. “An announcement has already been sent to the Glasgow Herald.”

  “You can always cancel it,” she suggested.

  He shook his head and stroked his hair bracelets.

  “Amelia hates to cancel anything,” he replied. “She feels as if it is tantamount to some sort of personal failure. Ridiculous, I know, but one gets into habits. I’m not sure how I’m going to break it to her.”

  “I hadn’t actually,” Cait said carefully, “accepted.”

  “But as my sister said, why would you decline?” he replied. “My offer was of the sort that does not come twice in one lifetime. Especially, and please don’t take this the wrong way, Mrs. Wallace, especially not to a woman in your circumstances. Amelia said you would have to be mad not to jump at the chance.”

  Amelia Sinclair had given Cait one long stare when they first had been introduced, as if she could tell just by looking if she was trustworthy, if she was sincere, if her circumstances were reduced enough to make her acceptance of her brother’s proposal a foregone conclusion. She seemed to think that they were.

  “No children,” Amelia had clarified.

  “That’s right,” Roland had replied.

  Tact clearly wasn’t her forte. She was proud of saying what she meant and meaning what she said. Dinner had been long and awkward.

  “Our guest speaks French,” Roland had told Amelia.

  “Not much use to her up here,” she had replied. “So I hear that she’s been married before?”

  At this point Cait had begun to realize that Amelia was going to refer to her in the third person for the entire meal.

  “I was,” she said carefully. “Sadly, he died.”

  “In the Tay Bridge disaster,” Amelia replied. “I heard.”

  For a moment they all sawed away at their brisket.

  “Ask her if they found the body,” she said to Roland.

  “Please!” he replied. “Not while we’re eating.”

  In the Kibble Palace, a boy of about six ran past them. And then another.

  “It’s not fair,” the second one shouted. “You’re not playing by the rules! No one likes a cheat!”

  Cait and Mr. Sinclair sat staring into space, both still united in loss, him with wet eyes and her with dry.

  “I should go,” she said eventually. “Before the rain starts.”

  “The forecast is good,” he replied. “But then again, the forecast could be wrong. Facts can be read in such a way as to provide the wrong impression.”

  “Mr. Sinclair,” she began.

  “You know,” he interjected, “I really did like you, Caitriona.”

  “I liked,” she began, “I mean, I like you too.”

  “Isn’t that enough? A fondness. A friendship. A compatibility of sorts. Love may arrive at a later date.”

  He reached across and took her hand. His palm was as soft as tissue paper.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Really sure? Paris is all very well, but you’d be nothing there—a chaperone. Surely you’re more than that? And what will happen when you come back? You aren’t getting any younger. There is always the possibility, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but without a man to support you, there is the possibility that you end up destitute.”

  She inhaled, long and slow. Everything he said was true. And she had seen those fallen gentlewomen at church, their mouths pinched with worry, their pockets full of stale crusts and sugar lumps. Mr. Sinclair was looking at her, his irises magnified, big and blue as children’s marbles. Maybe he was right. She was being rash and impulsive and foolhardy. Hadn’t she learned anything?

  “Because, as my sister always says,” he added, “ ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ ”

  And then Cait knew that no matter what the circumstances, no matter the cost, no matter how foolhardy the alternative was, she could never be happy with a man who uttered inanities at a moment of crisis. Especially if they came from the mouth of his sister. He was still looking at her hope­fully. She removed her hand from his and turned to face him.

  “I have already given my word to the Arrols,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. Now he had his final answer. She glanced at her watch. He took it as a prompt to rise from the bench.

  “I was going to catch the seventeen forty-three,” he said. “But there’s a chance I’ll make the sixteen oh-seven. Would you mind?”

  They paused at the gates of the gardens. She was going one way, he the other.

  “Well,” he said.

  “You should catch your train,” she replied. “If you hurry.”

  Only, Mr. Sinclair seemed to have lost his sense of urgency.

  “Maybe I’ll come out to Paris and pay you a visit?” he said.

  “You’d be very welcome.”

  “I may do that.” Roland Sinclair’s mouth smiled, but his eyes remained unmoved. He would never come to Paris. They both knew it, but it seemed the right thing to say under the circumstances.

  A woman strolled by in the direction of Byres Road, a woman with strands of gray in her hair and a black dress. Roland Sinclair’s eyes followed the swish of her bustle. Despite what he had just told her, she was sure he would recover.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Sinclair,” she said, and shook his hand.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Wallace,” he said, then turned and took his leave.

  Within ten minutes, the sidewalks were dotted with spots of rain.

  Every day since they had arrived in Paris, the sun had shone. Gradually, Cait felt the muscles in her shoulders, in her jaw, and in her back relax. Without being aware of it, her body had been coiled and sprung against the Scottish climate, where even in summer the air was cut with a chill wind or the edge of damp, the rain always just about to blow in from the west.

  Although the sun blazed outside, everything inside the rented house was dark. It wasn’t just the mahogany furniture, the sagging divans, the curtains, or even the ancient oil paintings on the walls; it was also the fact that the shutters were kept closed to keep out the sunlight. A long-serving housekeeper and a gardener had been retained to keep the place in order. After breakfast, Cait would walk through the rooms opening the windows to let fresh air circulate. The housekeeper would follow her around, after a suitable interval, closing them again.

  That morning, she could hear the murmur of voices downstairs. Alice was learning conversational French with a tutor, an elderly man who gazed at her over his glasses as she mispronounced words with more patience than Cait could have mustered.

  “At school we said je suis,” she could hear Alice saying. “With an s at the end.”

  “And in France,” the tutor replied evenly, “we don’t say it. It is gone, dropped. Like oui or ‘yes,’ we said suis.”

  “Are you quite sure?” Alice asked.

  “Oui,” he replied.

  “So it’s settled?” Arrol had confirmed that day in his office in Dalmarnock several months before. “You’ll chaperone them.”

  It wasn’t a question but a statement. Long columns of pale Scottish sun­light fell across the room, illuminating the float of a thousand dust motes. Arrol rose out of his chair and offered her his hand.

  “I know I can trust you,�
�� he had said. “A woman of your caliber.”

  How quickly, she thought at the time, everything changes. How fast a problem can metamorphose into a solution. And she felt a stretch inside, as if something within her reached out to something beyond, a soar of iron into thin air.

  “One more thing,” Arrol had suddenly added. “I hear that there is a man, one of Eiffel’s engineers, no less, who has shown an interest in Alice. Could you help her a little, do a little social engineering? He sounds suitable and she is twenty now, a critical age for a young woman, as you know.”

  The sun passed behind a cloud, leaving the room in darkness again.

  “Rather him than that confounded butcher who keeps sniffing around,” Arrol went on. “What was the Frenchman’s name again? Émile something- or-other?”

  Émile Nouguier. Why not? she asked herself later as she walked back toward the city along the London Road. Alice Arrol was young; she was pretty, she was well provided for. And maybe all that had passed between Émile Nouguier and her that day at the top of the stairs was the giddiness of half-remembered vertigo.

  They had been in Paris for almost a month and still their paths had not crossed. Jamie had forbidden them from the tower site for the time being. He told them he wanted to establish himself with Nouguier before he started complicating things with his sister.

  “He’s not going anywhere, Alice,” he said. “Be patient.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” said Alice, “that I may want to visit the site because I’m interested?”

  “In the tower?” he said. “No, I have to say it never did.”

  Jamie had a point. As soon as they had arrived, Alice had bought every fashion publication she could find. And then she had visited a dressmaker and a corsetière, a shoemaker and a milliner, and ordered underskirts and overskirts, bodices and petticoats, corsets, capes and trains, plus hats and boots and slippers. All she needed, she had complained to Jamie, were the occasions to wear them.

  “We have months and months,” he had told her. “There will be plenty of occasions.”