To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  “Let me help?” he said.

  “Don’t,” she replied.

  At the door, he held out twenty francs. She paused, then took it. Finally, she looked back at him, long and hard. She was not upset, he saw now, but furious.

  “Young, is she?” she said. “Rich?”

  “Gabrielle,” he began, “at least stay and have some coffee.”

  She laughed, but it wasn’t pretty anymore.

  “I was wrong about you, Émile,” she said. “You’re not bohemian at all. You’re petit bourgeois.”

  He opened his mouth to make some retort, but the elevator had arrived, and without another word, without even closing his door, she climbed in­side, drew shut the doors of the cage, and began to descend.

  25

  ____

  THE BOAT TRAIN WAS LATE. Cait stood on the platform and watched the arched ceiling of the station slowly reappear through the smoke and steam of a departing train. There was a trunk of Christmas presents expected, plus a box of Scottish delicacies that you couldn’t find in Paris—Selkirk bannock and butter tablet and plum pudding. She would give some of it to the housekeeper in an attempt to sweeten the sourness of her disposition. She doubted, however, it would have any effect. If Jamie woke her up one more time, keyless, in the middle of the night, Cait was certain she would hand in her notice. At present it was a war of attrition. Only the certainty that she could hold out for longer than they could, she imagined, kept her.

  Although it was almost ten in the morning, the day seemed to lull; the morning rush was over and the early lunch rush hadn’t started. As she had stepped from the carriage into the station, she was hit by the faint but unmistakable stink of misfortune. A bundle of grubby blankets was piled up above the grates from the Métro. An old woman’s face looked out from be­neath a filthy bonnet.

  “Madame,” she said, “can you spare a few coins for a bowl of soup? I am a widow. What did I do to deserve this?”

  Cait felt the swell of sympathy for her. For a woman, the fall from respectable to destitute was not as far as people assumed. Besides, she herself had done plenty to deserve a worse fate. There was a time when she wished her husband dead. And afterward, she wished it on herself, a slipping away, a graceful exit, a gentle float into the great beyond. What stopped her? Only the thought that Saul would have won out in the end.

  “God bless you,” the woman said as Cait dropped a few coins into her open hand.

  A gust of wind picked up along the platform and blew the pages of a newspaper off the ground and into the outstretched arms of a stack of empty trolleys. She suddenly saw herself in a parallel life, her face at the window of Roland Sinclair’s house on the Esplanade, as if blown there on an ill wind. She turned away and walked to the end of the platform. She would speak to Jamie, she would find out what could be done. And as for Alice, she would keep her close, she would not let her out of her sight. William Arrol trusted her, he had saved her, she owed him everything she had. And what of Émile Nouguier? She reminded herself of one of her grandfather’s favorite Aristotle quotes: “A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.”

  The boat train arrived and a huge trunk was unloaded, one even larger than William Arrol had warned, with her name on it. As a porter wheeled it to the curb, she had the sudden urge to unpack it here, on the platform, the food, the presents, the sweets, and give it all away. She would give some of it to the old woman. But when they reached the grates above the Métro, the woman was gone and another derelict, a man with a dog, had taken her spot.

  26

  ____

  CHRISTMAS HAD COME AND GONE. Émile’s mother had been too ill to attend Midnight Mass and not well enough to eat the goose the housekeeper had prepared. He visited her almost every day, but she seemed permanently disappointed, sighing as she glanced along the length of the empty table that separated them and shrugging when he suggested a stroll in the park or a ride around the Bois.

  “It will be busy,” she said. “With families, with baby carriages and grand­parents.”

  As he sat at his desk at the workshop, a church bell began to chime the hours—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Everyone had already gone home. It was the sixth of January, the Epiphany, the feast of the Three Kings. Sometimes he wished he had faith; he wished that he could believe that his life had a direction, that one event would lead to the next like a well-turned plot. With work there was certainty, there were angles and gradients and ex­act measurements. And yet even here he had made things complicated for himself. There were problems.

  “Why did you make the angles curve so?” one of the draftsmen had asked him. “Why not make the sides straight, the tower like an elongated pyramid? How can we possibly fit the elevators?”

  He thought it was obvious why. Because it would be too ugly, inelegant, too easy. That wasn’t what he had designed. He had wanted lines that even from a distance invited the eye to run down them like the curve of a waist.

  As he ruled out gradients with his pencil and calculated angles, he let his mind dwell on the sweetest thing it contained, an image he had been saving: Cait’s face in the underwater light of his carriage, a flush in her cheeks, her hair wet and her skin as smooth as sand beneath shallow water. He could still remember her smell, snow and fresh air and the trace of the dried lavender that must hang in her armoire. He could still remember the soft chime of her accent: “I’ll walk from here.”

  A Parisian woman would never have climbed into the hansom cab with a man no matter what the weather. But then again, a Parisian woman wouldn’t have gone out when the weather was bad and her clothes would be ruined. Cait was as different from a Frenchwoman as iron was from stone. Her eyes, her gaze—not coy, not in the slightest. She looked at him directly when he spoke, as if seeking him out, as if trying to read everything he had ever been and ever would be.

  When he returned to the sheet of paper he had been working on, he saw he had drawn the same section twice. With both hands he ripped the page in two. He would have to begin again. This was all that mattered. The tower. Everything else was ephemeral, unknowable, unreliable. Who knew what secrets Cait Wallace carried around inside her? The tower would be built to stand for twenty years. The load-bearing qualities of the human heart, he knew only too well, were not nearly as robust.

  He opened his desk drawer to look for a protractor and found a photo­graph instead. He had promised Cait he would give her the print. Before he changed his mind, he wrote out a short note, folded it into an envelope, and then dropped the note in the company’s mailbox.

  A knuckle rapped on his door.

  “Come in,” he called out.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you?” Jamie Arrol stepped into the office.

  Émile took a deep breath and tried not to let it turn into a sigh. “No,” he said. “Not at all. Come in.”

  Arrol closed the door behind him softly.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said.

  Émile raised his eyebrows and waited for him to continue.

  “I know I haven’t been a very good apprentice,” he said. “My time-keeping has been poor and my attendance erratic.”

  Émile put down his pencil and opened his desk to pull out a bottle of brandy and two glasses. At last the Scot was going to resign. Reason enough for a drink.

  “And . . .” Jamie went on.

  And? His hand paused.

  “Would there be any chance you could take a look at a few drawings I’ve made? It’s for a friend. Once I’ve got this thing out of the way, I’ll be able to concentrate fully on the tower!”

  Émile sighed openly and closed the drawer.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Arrol said. “If this isn’t a good time?”

  Émile rolled the words he had been thinking around in his mouth but couldn’t actually bring himself to say them. He would like to tell Jamie Arrol that he was an ill-mannered young man who squandered every opportunity he was handed and wasted the g
oodwill of others. He remembered how distraught Cait had been and felt angry on her behalf.

  “Very well,” he said. “Let me have a look.”

  “I’ve got them here,” Jamie said as he pulled out a grubby tube of paper and unrolled it.

  It was not a building, or in fact anything architectural. The drawings detailed a small room with a large rotating screen set behind a four-poster bed.

  “My friend works in a theater,” Jamie said by way of explanation.

  “A set? So what kind of a play is it?”

  “One with a bed in it.” He shrugged.

  It was hardly an explanation.

  “You see the screen will rotate and the bed will ascend,” Arrol said.

  “Ascend where?” Émile asked.

  The Scot blushed and rubbed his nose. “Ascend the tower. It’s an optical illusion.”

  “So the room is . . .”

  “A lift. That’s right.”

  “But there will be no beds in any of our lifts. Why on earth would anyone want a bed in a lift?”

  Jamie guffawed. “Well,” he began, “people ask for the strangest things.”

  Émile considered the drawings. They were poorly calculated and carelessly drawn.

  “The angle’s all wrong here,” he said. “Unless you had some sort of supporting structure, the screen would fall over. You don’t want to kill any of the actors.”

  He picked up his pencil and began to draw.

  “There,” he said finally. “That’s better.”

  Arrol looked over the corrected drawings and nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “So when can I come and see it?”

  Jamie looked puzzled.

  “See what?”

  “The play?”

  Jamie raised his eyebrows and began to rock back and forth on his heels. “Ah. When I said it was a play, I didn’t mean a play exactly.”

  “Well, what did you mean?” Émile asked. “Exactly?”

  Jamie swallowed.

  “Can I sit down?” he asked.

  The story that Jamie Arrol told him was saturated with blatant self-pity. He had gambled, he had gotten drunk, he had spent more than he should have.

  “‘Why?’ you’re asking yourself,” he said. “‘Why is he such a fool?’”

  Although Émile shook his head no, this was, in fact, exactly what he had been asking himself. Jamie pulled out a small daguerreotype, an image of a young girl.

  “I paid for it to be taken,” he explained. “In a photographer’s studio on the rue du Barry. Her name is Delphine.”

  Émile looked at it briefly and then handed the picture back. “She’s very pretty. Is she an actress?”

  Jamie ignored the question.

  “The thing is, I owe almost a thousand francs,” he said. “To Le Chabanais. It’s a . . . a—”

  “It’s a brothel,” said Émile.

  For a moment they were both silent.

  “Do you have anything to drink?” asked Jamie.

  Émile opened his desk drawer again, and this time he took out the brandy. He poured them both a generous measure. From the canal, a steam whistle let out a long low blast.

  “Are you asking me for a loan?” Émile said.

  “No, oh no!” said Jamie. “The madame is willing to accept, partly in lieu of payment, a new room.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She already has a Japanese room and one in the style of Louis XVI,” he explained. “Why not offer clients a replica of an interior of what will soon be one of the most famous structures in Paris?”

  “For—?”

  “Quite,” said Jamie.

  Émile blinked and took a small sip of his brandy. He wasn’t sure whether he should be shocked or amused.

  “And if you build this,” he said, “then you will pay off your debts?” Here the Scot looked a little shifty.

  “Not all,” he admitted, “but it will be a major proportion. But please, please don’t tell anyone. If my uncle found out about the situation, he’d make us return to Scotland immediately.”

  Émile poured himself another measure. He felt suddenly breathless. It wasn’t his business; it wasn’t his problem. But he had been drawn in. He remembered Cait Wallace’s face in his carriage again. He recalled something he had overlooked at the time; the small crease of worry on her brow, a tiny blink of panic in her eyes.

  “Does anyone else know?” he asked. “About your situation.”

  “No.” Jamie sat back in his chair, then shook his head. “No. Of course not.”

  “Are you sure?” Émile asked softly.

  27

  ____

  CAIT TOOK OUT HER pencil and stared down at the piece of perforated telegram paper. The sense of urgency that she had felt the day before, the certainty that the right thing to do was to send a telegram immediately, had now dissipated. Which words should she choose? How could she explain? It had to be brief, to the point, direct. She started to write. To: William Arrol, Proprietor. Dalmarnock Iron Works, Glasgow. Message: Alice and Jamie well. And then what? Tell him the truth. Jamie in serious debt. Should she reveal how much? She wasn’t supposed to know. Nothing has gone to plan. All three of us are lost.

  Quickly, she ripped up the paper and threw it in the wastepaper basket. What was she thinking? Now she would have to queue again and ask for another sheet of telegram paper. The post office was busy in the early evening. Dozens of people, both Parisian and foreign, were lining up to send letters, parcels, and telegrams abroad. Letters for the evening trains to London and Berlin and Rome had to be posted here by 5:30 p.m., or the sender had to go to the station direct. It was 5:25, and in the air was the chafe of impatience as the lines grew longer.

  All the post offices in Paris had blue lamps outside. This one, on the rue de Louvre, was the biggest, the Poste Centrale. A line of counters stretched along both sides of the length of the hall beneath a vaulted ceiling. There was a queue, of sorts, although locals seemed to think they had the right to skip the foreigners, elbow tourists out of the way, and then ignore their pleas by loudly claiming, “Je ne vous comprends pas.” It was Friday evening and they had more important things on their minds; plans still had to be confirmed, meeting places decided, suppers arranged.

  “Tell him I’ll meet him in the Jockey Club at nine,” one man dictated to the telegraphic officer as he pulled on his hat and prepared to make a dash for his carriage. “Failing that, the Art Club in rue Volney.”

  “Mother died last night,” read out the man next in the queue to the same operator. “Send money for funeral.”

  Although the gas lamps were turned up full, the smoky yellow light they emitted made the occupants look wearier, the surroundings more dingy. Apart from those few who used the post office to sort out their hectic social life, it seemed as if this place was a refuge for the desperate, the lonely, or the recently bereaved, and you could almost taste it. Alongside the smell of glue and the sourness of overhandled paper were the reek of stale wine and the sharp, unmistakable odor of anxiety.

  Behind the counters the operators emanated indifference as they accepted messages of an intimate nature in French and handwritten cards scrawled in languages that they did not understand. Births, deaths, marriages, or the most common, pleas for money; they had all scratched out the words countless times, and, as a consequence, had cultivated a tangible air of disinterest.

  As Cait waited, a tall young man at the front of the queue bought three cards for the pneumatic postal system at thirty centimes apiece. They came already attached to their own special box. First he checked over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking; then he furtively wrote out three short messages, placed each in its box, and watched as the attendant shoved them one by one into a pressurized tube and they were sucked away. Who was he writing to? His lovers? His creditors? His family? She imagined the cards rattling through pipes underneath Paris to three separate destinations with whatever news, good or ba
d, they contained.

  Once she reached the front of the queue, Cait asked the cashier for more paper and it was grudgingly handed over for a small fee. Once more she stood at the long marble counter and tried to compose a telegram. And once more her hand hovered above the page but she could not find the words she knew she had to write. Ever since she had seen the bill for the brothel she had searched Jamie’s face for any sign of tension. It was true that he seemed to hardly eat anymore. At mealtimes, he wolfed down a mouthful or two and then excused himself, claiming he had eaten already at the site. One morning, they had passed on the stairs and she had reached out and touched his arm.

  “How are you, Jamie?” she had asked.

  He had seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.

  “Well, thank you,” he had replied.

  She teetered on the edge of words, on the brink of telling him that she knew. She blinked as she tried to compose the accusation as gently as possible. He took this as a signal to leave.

  “Mustn’t loiter,” he said as he carried on down the stairs. “I’ll be working late tonight. Send Alice my apologies and tell her I won’t be back for supper.”

  Who knew where Jamie really went anymore? He spent less and less time at home. And when he did come back, his eyes were red with exhaustion and his face was pale. And yet he wasn’t depressed, far from it. He seemed to live on nerves and air, on coffee and tobacco. She’d seen him like this before and recognized the signs. But it had never lasted for more than a day or two; no woman had ever managed to keep his interest for any longer. This one, she guessed, was different.

  She wanted to be happy for him, to congratulate him on finding some­one for whom his feeling had become sustainable. And yet it was doubtful that they would ever meet. Cait wasn’t naive; she knew that men had mistresses, whores, demimondaines. She also knew that Jamie couldn’t afford her.

  And what about Alice? Ever since the evening they had spent at the Cercle des Patineurs in the Bois de Boulogne, Alice had been restless, her mood an arc that had risen high and then plummeted. It was obvious she had been expecting a card, an invitation, some kind of communication. No matter what had happened or been promised at the ice rink, nothing ever arrived. And yet Alice still waited for the mail three times a day, she still leaped up at every knock at the door or rattle of a carriage outside, she still hoped, even though the likelihood of anything was looking increasingly slim.