To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  She turned and looked at her expectantly. Cait took a sip of water, then suddenly realized that the longer the pause, the more she incriminated herself.

  “I hardly know him,” she said. “But he seems like a decent sort.”

  Lucy Lamont was still observing her.

  “Has he made a proposal yet?”

  Cait frowned. “A proposal?” she asked. “No, not yet.”

  But it was too late. Lucy Lamont had sensed the whiff of something in­appropriate in her manner.

  “You do think he’s suitable, though,” Miss Lamont went on. “He’s not just after her money. He wants children?”

  “He wants children,” she replied. “Very much.”

  Lucy Lamont sat back. How on earth would Cait know a thing like this?

  “Apparently,” she added, but too late, much too late.

  The conversation turned to the weather and Cait fell silent. Once they had all chosen what they wanted to eat, Lucy Lamont turned her attention back to Cait.

  “It’s hot in here,” she said.

  “Would you like some water, Miss Lamont?”

  “Is it wise?” she said softly.

  “Is what wise?” Cait said, her face beginning to flush.

  “To drink the water?” she said pointedly.

  A Métro train passed deep below the restaurant, making the water in the glasses tremble.

  “The alternative is to go thirsty,” she replied. “Once or twice, however, shouldn’t have any long-lasting effects.”

  A tiny twitch of Lucy Lamont’s mouth and the way she blinked not once but twice, indicated that she had guessed, she had surmised, that Cait had formed an improper attachment to a man who could never be hers.

  “Just as long as you don’t make it into a habit,” Lucy said. “We don’t want you coming down with something, and I know for a fact that William would hate to have to replace you.”

  A waiter arrived with five very small glasses of Champagne.

  “Look at you both,” Arrol said of Jamie and Alice. “Mrs. Wallace was right. Paris seems to be doing you the world of good. It has been a sizable investment, but it looks to me as if the payoff was worth every penny. A toast! To Alice and Jamie!”

  The Champagne was sour and a little flat. It was finished in a mouthful and pronounced very fine by all.

  “How is the tower?” Arrol asked Jamie.

  “Growing,” he replied.

  “Faster than ever, I hear,” Arrol said. “And how is our dear friend, Monsieur Nouguier?”

  Jamie glanced at his sister. “Finally smitten. Took his time, though.”

  “A girl like Alice,” Arrol said appraisingly. “The perfect catch. Probably lining up his ducks in a row as we speak.”

  Alice swallowed and drank from her glass, even though, as everyone could see, it was already empty.

  “Anything worth having is worth waiting for,” she said with a weak smile. Jamie raised his eyebrows and laughed.

  “Oh my, dear sister,” he said. “Coming from you, that is priceless. That reminds me, has he finished? The artist. Has he finished the portrait yet?”

  “Not quite,” she replied. “But I understand that it is a tour de force.”

  “You mean you haven’t seen it?” said Arrol.

  “No,” said Alice. “But I hear it’s coming along nicely.”

  Alice rose and excused herself to the ladies’ room. Arrol busied himself with his cigar. But Lucy Lamont’s eyes switched back and forth as she took it all in.

  36

  ____

  AT THE CHAMP DE MARS, the second platform, la deuxième, had been reached and the final stretch of the tower was under construction. With so much of the work so high, there was less dust to catch in your eye and less noise to shout over. Émile was used to running up and down the metal stair­cases in the east pillar now, pausing only briefly on the first floor to catch his breath, to check all was well on the construction of the gallery or to help himself to a coffee from a worker’s canteen, before pounding up and up and around and around the stairs to the second-floor platform above.

  He looked up through spokes of iron. Smoke from the riveters’ fire circled into the air in wisps of white; a lattice of iron against the deep blue of the sky. He should have brought a camera. Days like these, however, would soon be rare. Winter was here and the weather was less clement. The carpenters and riveters would soon be working at more than two hundred meters in high winds, in snow, in rain. No wonder they’d started to complain. No wonder so many of them had begun to mutter about suffering from vertigo.

  “What difference does it make?” Eiffel had told them. “You’ll die if you fall from forty meters the same as you would from three hundred.”

  On this floor there would eventually be a refreshment stall and a bake­shop. Eiffel had also negotiated a deal with the editor of Le Figaro. For the duration of the World’s Fair, a printing office would be set up to produce a special newspaper. There was also a post office. Émile was suddenly reminded of the letter from Alice Arrol in his pocket. It had been there for five days already, unanswered. He had met her uncle a few weeks earlier when Jamie had given him a tour of the site. Just as Gustave had told him, William Arrol was a nice man; open, engaging, witty. His hand, when he shook it, was rough to the touch.

  He found a quiet place out of the wind, near the area where the elevators would eventually run, pulled out the letter, and scanned it quickly. In childish loops and curls she wrote that she hoped he was well and that he would pay a visit soon. She so enjoyed their excursions. He folded the letter up again and returned it to his pocket. He knew it was wrong. He was weak, a man of base impulses. But to be near Cait for just an hour or two, even at one removed, it was worth it. He was now a collector of miniatures, of details caught from the corner of his eye, a glance, the point of her toe, the turn of her head.

  Émile looked out over the city, at the river way below, strapped down by its bridges and edged with bright green like verdant lace around a wrist. It was for this the tower was being built, to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, to gift the idea of the city to the people of Paris, for as far as they could see in all directions. While life down there was chaotic, nonsensical, frustrating, up here you couldn’t smell the sewers or the sweet stink of horse manure; up here you could rise above it all; up here you could see the world unfold below, everything in its place, everything laid out to make some sort of sense.

  The last stage, the pinnacle of the tower, which would support the high­est, smallest platform, would be the easiest structurally, but the most problematic for the men. For this, Eiffel had decided on a slightly different approach. A vertical column would be erected in what would become the central elevator shaft for the men to work from. It wouldn’t be possible to use construction machinery to carry up the parts anymore. Instead, each piece would be lifted into place using two small cranes that would be bolted onto the central frame.

  A whistle blew from the lower platform. A couple of men leaped down from where they had been working above. A bucket of water was thrown over the riveters’ fire.

  “What’s happening?” he asked them.

  “Six francs a day,” one called out. “Do you think it’s enough?”

  “We won’t lift our tools again until we get more money,” said another.

  “It’s a strike, Monsieur Nouguier!” another explained. “Get off the site for a day or two. Try and remember who you were before we started to build this monster.”

  “Not again!” he said. “How are we going to finish on time at this rate?”

  His mother was much weaker this month than last. Had she guessed that she wasn’t going to get better? And what if she died before the tower was completed? He would never escape the shadow of her disappointment.

  “Men,” he called out, “speak to Eiffel. We all want the same thing, don’t we?”

  Eiffel was in crisis meetings with the head barrowman, the head carpenter, the painting and mas
onry supervisors, and the foreman. In an attempt to appease them, he had already agreed to accident insurance. He was contracted to finish the tower by April to leave a couple of months for fitting out the interiors before the World’s Fair opened. They couldn’t afford an­other delay. There was nothing anyone could do, however, but wait until the dispute was resolved.

  It was strange to walk through Paris during the day, to pass lines of school­boys being herded along the street by bad-tempered nuns and to have to pick one’s way through the crowds of ladies on the rue de la Paix. He stopped for an aperitif on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and watched women hurry from one milliner to the next in search of the perfect hat.

  “How could you even consider it?” said one young woman with disdain. “It’s identical to what Marie Maussant was wearing last season.”

  The girls fell silent as a cab approached and a woman was helped down by the coachman. Émile pulled his wallet out of his pocket and placed a few coins on the dish.

  “Monsieur Nouguier? Is that you?” A woman dressed in black fur and white velvet stood in front of him with a wide smile on her face. “It is you! Are you alone or is that clever Monsieur Eiffel here too?”

  It was the baroness who’d held the salon, the one who was in love with the cad of a half brother. Émile rose to his feet, took the hand she offered, and gave it a kiss.

  “You have a good memory,” he said.

  “For both faces and names, I know.” She laughed and placed her hand on his forearm playfully. “But the truth is that some are more memorable than others.”

  He wondered if she was making a subtle pass at him.

  “I’m very glad we met,” she went on. “I’m holding a charity ball at my house next Saturday evening. It will celebrate the opening of the petite saison and raise money for homeless orphans. Please do me the pleasure. And bring that Scottish girl that I hear you’re stepping out with. Her brother too.”

  “I’m afraid I’m extremely busy,” he said.

  She stared at him, in the café, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and let out a short, curt laugh.

  “Like hell you are,” she whispered.

  37

  ____

  CAIT SAT IN A LINE of chairs at the back of the ballroom with the other chaperones. Most of them had assumed the mantle of old or late middle years, regardless of their real age, and some carried walking sticks or peered at the world through scratched spectacles. Nearly all wore black or purple crepe gowns and matching straw bonnets. They were mirror images of the girls they looked after, in dress, in age, and in attitude. And Cait was aware of a smell that rose from their collective beings: lavender and silver tarnish, old cake crumbs and sour milk. The lady beside her pulled out her knitting and the needles began to click steadily out of time with the music on the dance floor. Another hummed an atonal accompaniment.

  The ballroom was enormous. Two pillars painted to look like marble flanked the main door. At the far end, a double staircase that swept up in two graceful curves led to a balcony where the small orchestra played. Vast gilt mirrors, tilted slightly to catch the light from the crystal chandeliers, adorned the walls. Cait looked up at the ceiling. Against a backdrop of billowing clouds and blue sky were gods and impish cupids, golden chariots and silver bugles. Someone said it was by Tiepolo. She had once thought that the Merchants’ Hall in Glasgow was grand. It was shabby in comparison with this.

  In one of the rooms off the ballroom a long table had been laden with plates of food, huge floral decorations, and bowls of fruit punch. None of the chaperones, however, had been invited to eat or drink anything. An invisible line separated them from the guests. Occasionally one of the girls would return and her chaperone would hold her glass while she pinned up a stray strand of hair or plumped up a ruffle, or a woman, a married one, would let out a gasp of recognition and come over and make a fuss. But that was it. Decorum meant that their presence was necessary, but it was symbolic rather than physical. Who knew what went on in the darkened corners of the formal gardens or in the library when the door was closed? As long as no one saw, an eye, a blind one, was turned.

  In the two hours Cait had been sitting there, however, the room had gradually lost its allure. It was too hot, the air too close, and the smell of perspiration and shoe leather had become overpowering. The gold and paint, the glass and crystal, were as cloying as the scent of the white lilies that had been artfully displayed in a vase on the mantelpiece. She felt her­self slowly fading, the color of her dress seeping into the wallpaper behind her. Without enough air, her head felt light and began to spin. She looked at the clock. It was after ten. Surely the dance would not go on beyond mid­night?

  Alice was wearing a white dress with a large bow at the back. Her hair had been decoratively twisted up in rolls and curls with white feathers in a style that had taken a coiffeuse several hours to perfect. At one point, Émile had passed close by, his arms around Alice as they waltzed. She had pretended she hadn’t seen him. It was too awful, too humiliating. It felt like she was waiting, not for the evening to end, but for life itself to cease.

  “It’ll be a long one,” the old lady beside her said. “People like to put on a good show if it’s for charity. Nobody wants to be the first to leave.”

  “I don’t mind the long nights,” another chaperone told her. “But I do mind the fallow seasons. I once had one of my nieces for eleven. I thought I’d never get her off my hands, she was a real ‘ fête de la Saint-Catherine.’ And then she met a rich Jew at the races at Longchamps and that was that. But this one”—she pointed out a girl dancing with a soldier—“this one will be snapped up before she is twenty. Mark my words!”

  The girl glanced at her chaperone as if she had heard her name mentioned and smiled expectantly.

  “And then we get a short respite,” the chaperone said. “Until the next one.”

  She gave Cait a friendly pat on the arm. Cait looked down at the old lady's­ hand. Her own weren’t old like that yet; the skin hadn’t thinned and started looking like cracked wax. But it would. The other chaperones started to gossip about who was courting whom and about a rich American heiress who was on the lookout for a titled husband.

  “She looks like a frog,” one said. “But money makes even the ugly ones desirable, you know.”

  “I don’t know who to feel more sorry for,” said another. “The heiress or the poor soul who ends up with her.”

  “I hear the baroness’s brother had made a play.”

  “Clément? Is he here? Surely she’s not that stupid.”

  “She’s an American!” And they all laughed.

  “One less thing to worry about,” said the elderly chaperone with the papery hands.

  Cait had seen the count. He didn’t dance but kept to the smaller apartments, the smoking room, and the bar. She hoped that Alice had the measure of him now. She hoped she’d come to her senses. But what would that mean? How far would Émile take it? He couldn’t court Alice indefinitely.

  As she watched the dancers, a shadow descended; the center of her vision started to throb and black out. She closed her eyes. Why, she asked herself did her headaches come at the most inconvenient times? Or maybe it was the right time, incapacitated, as she was, with the other semi-invalids of her chosen profession. After a few moments, however, the blindness shifted and the throb moved to the periphery and hung there, a curve of rainbow in the corner of her eye.

  “I’m going out for a breath of air,” Cait said, and rose to her feet. Glances were exchanged; eyebrows arched.

  “She’s going where?” a very ancient lady called out from the end of the row.

  The branches of trees in the baroness’s garden were hung with tiny Japanese lanterns. The lawn was crisp with frost. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the ballroom threw rectangles of golden light onto the stone terrace. Cait inhaled, in and out, letting the night air fill her lungs, her head, her mouth, and in a few moments, the aura had faded. Soon, she knew, her head would ache, but in the inte
rim she was bestowed with a clarity, a perceptiveness; the world was a dirty pane of glass that had just been cleaned.

  The music was fainter out here, and the noise of chatter, laughter, and the pop of Champagne corks inside vied with the cries of foxes and the rustle of the wind in the trees. It was a beautiful December evening, almost too beautiful to be real.

  “What did I do?”

  She turned. It was Émile.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Then why?” he asked. “Why did you . . . did you stop coming?”

  She shook her head.

  “I really don’t think it’s appropriate for you to ask,” she said.

  “I think it is extremely appropriate. Your letter didn’t illuminate, I’m afraid.”

  “I didn’t promise anything, Émile.”

  “Maybe not in so many words.”

  He smelled of fresh air and pepper. Her eyes were level with his clavicle, his collarbone, and she was struck by the physical sensation of the graze of her lips across it. The body, she realized then, retains memories more vividly than the mind.

  “I only see Alice Arrol because I want to see you. You know that.”

  “Then you must stop!”

  He swallowed, then turned away.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  For a moment they stood at the stone balustrade in silence. She was aware of him, every tiny breath, every single beat of his blood, every passing impulse, because they were echoes of her own. She took a deep breath in and let it out in a frozen cloud.

  “Why?” he asked. “At least tell me why. Was it so bad?”

  She shook her head. The hours she had lain with Émile had been the sweetest, most perfect she had ever known.

  “Well?” he asked. “Did it mean nothing?”

  He had a right to demand an explanation. Music spilled out of the door­way and the sound of a hundred feet on the polished mahogany floor stamped the air like punctuation.

  “Well?” he said again.