To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  “I’ll come and see you again tomorrow,” he said.

  “Only if you can spare the time,” she said, her eyes liquid in the dusk of the room. “Maybe I’ll surprise you and pay you a visit instead. You work too hard. And for what?”

  If she could see the finished tower, then she would know why. His mother would see that he had made the right choices, taken the correct route. As he walked back to the Champ de Mars, he realized that it might not be finished in time. And so he decided that he would bring all deadlines forward and urge the men to work harder, faster. If nothing else he owed her this, the chance to see for herself that there was finesse in his composition of girders and bolts; it was bold and brilliant, it was art.

  23

  ____

  THE SNOW HAD BEEN coming down for hours. Cait hurried along the street as flakes flew into her eyes, collected on the brim of her hat, and found their way into the crevices of her shawl. She turned onto the Quai d’Orsay and there, in front of her, was the black tangle of the tower. Even from a few blocks away, the noise from the site traveled, the clang of iron on iron and the call of men from high up; the smell of molten metal and the bitter choke of woodsmoke. She glanced down toward the river. Although she couldn’t see them, she could hear the sound of unloading from a flotilla of barges, and see a cloud of black grit that had turned the white snow gray.

  “I’m looking for Arrol?” she asked at the gate. “Is Monsieur Arrol on the site?”

  The security guard shook his head no.

  “Monsieur Nouguier, then. Is he here?”

  A boy was sent and she was told to wait. Her fingers were already numb, her feet wet through, but the ache she felt was nothing compared to the one she felt inside. Finally Émile Nouguier appeared. He looked surprised to see her.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” she began, but she was so cold and the words were so hard to say.

  “What is the matter?” he said.

  “I thought”—she swallowed—“I thought Monsieur Arrol would be here.”

  One word, that was all she needed, an affirmation that her doubt was unfounded. Slowly, he shook his head.

  “Not this week,” he said. “And not last week either.”

  The air was suddenly too thin.

  “But you told me,” she said. “You told me it was going well!”

  He had lied. How could he deny it? He didn’t answer but gave a small shrug.

  “And I believed you.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have been rather distracted of late.”

  A workman appeared at the engineer’s elbow and whispered something into his ear.

  “You’re busy,” she said. “I should go. Good day.”

  “At least let someone hail you a hansom cab?”

  Cait tried to regain herself and succeeded in looking, she thought, as if she had.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But I prefer to walk.”

  In the street ahead, the snow still lay untouched but for the thin track of a bicycle and the wander of a cat. From a side street, the footprints of a man and a child walking side by side appeared. The man’s step was larger, heavier; the child’s prints light, the size of Cait’s palm, a perfect record of a tiny foot, a step, a direction, that would soon be trampled by other feet or melt away to nothing.

  Once she was around the corner, out of sight of the tower, she stopped and pulled out the bill she had found that morning on the floor of the cloak­room. The ink was smudged but the words were still legible: M. Arrol, it stated, owes 1,670 francs for Champagne, meals, and services. The address was 12 rue Chabanais, a street near the Louvre. One thousand francs was more money than Jamie had or would ever be likely to earn in a year. What had he done?

  On their grand tour of Europe a year earlier, it had been easy to keep track of him. They never stayed anywhere for more than a couple of weeks, not long enough for anything but the most fleeting of affairs. A chamber­maid in Delft, a dancer in Geneva, an artist’s model in Florence, those were the ones she knew about anyway. But here, in Paris, she had lost him. Until she found the bill, she had no idea where he spent his time and with whom.

  The footprints headed toward a shopping arcade. Apart from the gaslights, the passageway was dark—a layer of snow had collected on the glass of the roof above—but there was a square of light at the other end where a door­way opened out onto another street. There was no sign, however, of the man and the child. The arcade contained a line of shops selling hats and snuff, children’s toys and expensive tea. After a moment, she glanced up and caught the look in the eye of a shopgirl in the hat shop.

  “Can I help you?” the girl asked in English.

  Once more she had marked herself out as a foreigner without even being aware of it. Her clothes were soaked through and her hair was falling in strands around her face; when it rained or snowed, Parisians stayed indoors, or, if they had to go out, they took an umbrella. Cait shook her head and headed back out onto the street. It was less painful not to thaw, not to warm up. She knew what she should do; she should send the bill to William Arrol and admit that she had failed quite spectacularly. He would tell them to come home immediately and they would have no choice but to return.

  She stepped off the curb and a shout bellowed out, making her jump back. A horse-drawn omnibus thundered past only inches away, its iron and brass, glass and paint streaked with mud, its smell—both horse and wet leather—sweet with heat. How easy it would have been, she thought, to have ignored the warning, to have kept walking to where the dirty snow was rutted and the air was thick with animal breath.

  Now the street was empty. She lifted her skirts and picked her way across the slush. What could she do? Confront Jamie? Demand to know how he intended to proceed? But how could he ever pay that amount of money back on his own? It was, quite simply, a disaster.

  A hansom cab had pulled in at the curb ahead. The door opened. A man stepped down. It took a moment before she recognized him. It was Émile Nouguier. What on earth was he doing here? For a moment he stood in the snow, regarding her.

  “You walk fast,” he said. “You’re halfway home already.”

  “You followed me?”

  “That was my intention, but it seemed you gave us the slip,” he said. “We were on the point of returning to the site when we saw you. Would you like a ride instead of walking?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. Single women, even the widowed, did not ride alone with single men. It was not done. He should not have asked.

  “You look cold,” he said.

  “I am perfectly warm,” she said. But even as she said the words, a flake of snow landed on her eyelashes and she shivered. She was wet through. And now the snow was coming down thick again and she had barely noticed.

  “Please?” he asked softly. It was such a gentle request that Cait glanced quickly over her shoulder. No one had overheard. There was no one else there. The snow was so heavy that she couldn’t see the other side of the road any­more. They were cocooned; the rest of the world was adrift in white. Who would see her climb into the cab? No one would ever know. And anyway, what did it matter? It didn’t matter.

  “For a minute,” she said. “Just until the snow stops.”

  He helped her step up into the carriage and then, after signaling to the driver, he climbed in beside her. They moved off, the horse’s hooves on the cobbles muffled now. Émile Nouguier shifted on the seat to keep the distance between them exact. Even without a ruler she knew it would be six inches—no more, no less. And yet the traveling rug he threw over her lap was already warm. The seat too. She sat back and inhaled; oiled wool and old wood plus the faintest scent of almonds.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “A little,” she said.

  She swallowed and felt his eyes on her face, her throat. She could sense his weight on the seat beside her; she was aware of every movement he made, every rise of his chest, every tiny movement of his eyes. Why di
d she have to pretend, disown herself, when everyone else did exactly what they wanted? The city outside had been rubbed out, obliterated by the mist of their breath. She could almost make herself believe that it wasn’t there anymore. She glanced up quickly at the engineer, at Émile Nouguier.

  “Monsieur Arrol isn’t the easiest of charges,” he offered.

  The mention of his name brought her back to the present, back to Jamie and Jamie’s predicament. Alice’s wasn’t much better. How could she hold on to them when they didn’t want to be held? For a moment they were silent. She took a deep breath and let it go.

  “You’re soaked through,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you use umbrellas in Scotland?”

  He had changed topic, swiftly, artfully. She laughed, a bubble of pure unfiltered relief that seemed to come from nowhere.

  “Of course we do,” she replied as she wiped a strand of damp hair from her face. “Rarely a day goes by when one is not in need of one . . . but snow . . . it is too beautiful. One has the sense that it will fall benignly, like cherry blossoms.”

  “How nicely put.”

  He looked at her and smiled. Jamie, the snow, the bill, the tower, all of it seemed to fall away. This, here, now, a moment slipped from a clock.

  Then, without warning, the carriage came to a sudden halt.

  “An accident,” the driver called down.

  Émile wiped the glass of the window with his sleeve. Cait looked out. The snow had stopped. They were only a few streets away from the Arrols’ house. The color rose in her cheeks. She glanced up at Nouguier. What did he really think of her? What role could she possibly play in his life? She sat forward suddenly and called up to the driver.

  “I’ll walk from here.”

  “I can take you home,” Émile said.

  She stopped him with her hand.

  “No need,” she replied.

  With a twist of her wrist, she opened the carriage door and stepped down. From somewhere within, from a place she could no longer look at directly, the engineer bowed his head.

  A crowd of people, a carriage unshackled, a horse on its side, its eyes full of panic and its leg cleanly broken. And she remembered another scene: blood on the snow, her breath rising in plumes, the taste of sorrow mixed with the sharp taste of shame.

  24

  ____

  THAT NIGHT THE SNOW ICED over and was crisp beneath the foot. After work Émile found himself heading north to the Parc Monceau, and after walking through the park, stark and beautiful with moonlight, he paused at the end of the street where the Arrols lived. All the lights were on inside their house, the cracks between the shutters golden seams. He imagined Mrs. Wallace sitting in a pool of light, her dark hair falling around her face, her gray eyes thawed.

  As he was heading home, he paused to let a woman cross the road before him. She turned and looked at him, her figure in silhouette against the yellow flare of the gaslight.

  “Émile,” said the woman. “Is it you?”

  A bolt of shock surged through him. It was Gabrielle. He swallowed, twice.

  “What are you doing in this arrondissement?” he asked as lightly as he could.

  Gabrielle walked toward him and looked up into his face. “I might ask you the same question,” she said.

  Her eyes were running from his eyes to his mouth, searching, he sup­posed, for some indication of guilt.

  “I came out for a walk. I was in need of some fresh air. But now I’m heading home. I’m rather tired.”

  “My dearest Émile,” she said with a tease in her voice, “I know you don’t mean that.”

  They stopped at a café she knew, a place that was filled with artists and writers and foreigners. They sat in a booth and she ordered a bottle of burgundy. Underneath her cloak she was wearing a dress he had never seen be­fore, an evening gown made of black velvet with two narrow straps across her shoulders. It seemed to soak up the light like the pelt of a cat.

  Without even waiting for Émile to ask her, she began to tell him every­thing that had happened to her since they had last seen each other, how she had taken the train to the coast, how she had spent the days walking along the long empty beach looking across the sea to the shores of England and wondering if she should throw herself in. And then she told him how she had met a man, a writer, in the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, how he had be­come so obsessed with her that he had promised she was going to be a character in his book.

  Émile poured a glass of wine and then another, and let her words wash over him. She seemed to want something of him, but at that moment he wasn’t sure what it was. The wine addled his mind, dispelling all unbidden thoughts, about his mother, about the glass factory, about Cait, until they were gone.

  “Imagine that!” she said.

  He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to imagine and so he raised his glass in a toast and swallowed it all down in one warm gulp. He ordered a cognac and then another and then, as he was heading to the water closet, he stumbled and almost fell.

  “I should take you home,” Gabrielle whispered when he returned.

  It was late when they arrived at his apartment. As they slowly rose to his floor in the tiny elevator, she stood so close that he could not help but inhale her, old roses and fresh sweat. Her smell was so familiar that it pulled him with a gravity that was stronger than he could have predicted, it pulled him right back to the man he had been before. His rooms were dark, the lamps unlit, the bed unmade, the shutters closed. There wasn’t a moment where either of them hesitated. As he unlaced her, he felt his appetite rise with each pull of the cord. He kissed her shoulder, then ran his cheek along the blade.

  “Let me take everything off first,” she whispered.

  The black velvet crumpled to the floor. She stepped out of layer after layer, until she wore nothing but the pale glimmer of her skin.

  “Come here,” she said.

  And yet when she lay beneath him, when he could feel the cool expanse of her thigh and the swell of her breasts, he had the sense that she was not yet naked after all. Her face was still dressed, still artfully arranged into an expression of complicity. He began to kiss her mouth, her eyes, her cheek, looking for some tiny chink that exposed her. But her face was as smooth as porcelain. And then he remembered Cait.

  “You want to?” she asked as she unbuttoned his shirt. “Or have you drunk too much?”

  The way Gabrielle spoke, the way she moved, was too loud, too mannered. The brandy still burned in his chest, filling him with spite.

  “Let’s get married,” he said suddenly.

  She blinked in surprise, then swallowed it down.

  “All right,” she replied.

  “Divorce your husband,” he went on. “Let’s move to La Villette. I’ll start running the glass factory and in a few years we could have a couple of children, move into the family house.”

  “We could plant flowers?” she suggested. “Build a summer house.”

  The room had started to revolve, a sickening spin that gave the moment the glaze of a dream. But what if it wasn’t such a bad idea after all? She was still young enough to have more children. Who cared what people thought? It would be a business transaction, nothing more. His mother would get what she wanted. But what about the crippled husband? What about the child? Would he have to pay them off? He felt the cold slide of shame inside. What kind of man was he?

  “Émile?” she asked.

  He sat up and began to fasten his shirt again.

  “You shouldn’t joke about these things,” she said. “I might just take you seriously.”

  And she laughed to prove that she hadn’t. “Come back to bed.”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, more harshly than he intended. “What do you need? Money? How much?”

  “That’s unkind,” she said softly. “I wanted to see you, that’s all, Émile. I couldn’t forget you just like that.”

  “Don’t lie! For God’s sake! I know you, remember?”

  For a momen
t there was silence, a dense black silence.

  “There’s someone else,” she said, her voice small. “Isn’t there?”

  For a second he was outraged. What an accusation, coming from her. He turned, already primed to deny it. But what was the point? What tenderness he’d felt for her had always been laced with pity.

  “That isn’t what this is about,” he replied.

  She sat up, turned, and placed both feet on the floor. But she didn’t rise. Instead, she leaned forward, covering her face with her hands.

  “You make me so unhappy,” she said. “I know you don’t think I’m good enough for you.”

  He was suddenly sober, the brandy in his blood distilled into a viscous kind of sadness.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve never thought that.”

  “And we’ve never cared about marriage or conventions. You’re a bohemian, Émile, like I am.”

  She looked at him and her mouth began to slide at the corners.

  “Hold me,” she said, “the way you used to.”

  He held her. What else could he do?

  “You’re still mine,” she whispered.

  “No,” he said. “No, no, no. I’m not.”

  But even as he said the words, his body was moving toward her with an­other, contrary answer.

  He slept deeply, for so long that it was light when he awoke. It took him a moment or two to remember. And then he heard Gabrielle in the bath­room, singing.

  Émile was fully dressed by the time she returned.

  “You startled me,” she said. “I must rush, I have an appointment at the dressmaker’s at noon. What time shall we meet later? Between four and five? Can you get away? And do you have twenty francs for a cab?”

  He stood up and faced her.

  “What?” said Gabrielle. And then she laughed. “Has the tower fallen over?”

  Slowly, he looked at her. Her eyes were already filled with panic.

  “Gabrielle,” he said. “I’m sorry. You were right. I’ve met someone else.”

  A flush rose from her neck to her face. Her breath came fast as she walked over to the chair beside the bed and began to pull on her clothes.