To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  “At last,” she whispered. “He’s teething, I think. Now. Where were we? Oh yes, Mr. Sinclair? Well, what do you think of him? He’s rather elderly, but he certainly is eligible!”

  “Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

  “Of course I have!”

  Her sister blinked several times. Cait had to quell the desire to scream, to rage at her sister’s blithe acceptance of so much good fortune: healthy children, a charming husband, a lovely home that was always warm and comfortable. Instead she sipped her cup of tepid tea.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Does Mr. Sinclair have children?”

  Cait shook her head. “He had one, but she died of diphtheria as a baby.”

  “Oh,” Anne said. She reached across and laid a hand on her own child as if she could ward off the disease with a touch. “How sad. But in some ways better. For you, I mean.”

  Cait gazed out the window at the bare winter tangle of trees in the garden. “Maybe,” she said.

  “In my opinion, for what it’s worth,” Anne said, “you just have to take what comes along.”

  “Anne,” she interjected.

  “After all, you have no idea how long it could be before the next one appears. If at all.”

  Cait looked at her sister. She spoke without irony, without guile; she had no idea about life, at least not her life.

  “And about the Frenchman,” Anne went on, “that engineer. Even if you do find yourself thinking about him, you have to make yourself stop.”

  For a moment they were silent. Although what Anne was suggesting sounded mercenary, she was probably right. She should just take what came along.

  “And, I mean,” Anne said with as much tact as she could muster, “nothing actually transpired with the engineer? He made no formal approach?”

  Cait shook her head no.

  “Actually, there was talk of matching him up with Alice,” she said.

  Anne looked relieved.

  “But anyway, he’s bound to have someone already,” Cait went on. “There’s bound to be a woman somewhere.”

  “He’s French. He probably has two!” Anne paused. “Cait?”

  Finally she looked up and met her sister’s eye.

  “I’d say possibly three,” Cait replied. “Or maybe even more?”

  “Not four?” whispered Anne.

  And they started to laugh until they couldn’t stop except to wipe their eyes, and the baby woke and let out an indignant wail at all the noise.

  8

  ____

  AT LEVALLOIS-PERRET, Émile worked seven days a week. While Maurice Koechlin and his team of draftsmen produced page after page of technical drawings, Émile oversaw the fabrication of every single individual part of the tower. Each piece had to have the rivet holes drilled in precisely the right place; on-site, everything had to be an exact fit.

  After work, he usually stopped for a glass of claret at a bar beside the Parc de la Planchette. He hadn’t heard from Gabrielle in more than a month. It was the best way, the clean break. Maybe she had left Paris. He imagined that she might be in New York or Boston, living the kind of life she wanted. He hoped she was happy. Although she would never know it, he had done everything in his power to make it so.

  As he was searching for a few coins to pay the waiter, he noticed a news­paper lying on the bar. It was Wednesday, and on Wednesday evenings, if he was in Paris, he had dinner with his mother. According to his pocket watch he was already an hour late. He left some money on the counter, hurried out onto the street, and hailed a cab.

  Madame Nouguier lived alone in an apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement that was far too large for one person. Most of the rooms had been closed since the death of Émile’s father, the furniture swathed in cot­ton sheets to keep the dust at bay, and the blinds drawn across the windows. Now his mother spent most of her time in a small room at the back of the house that was conveniently placed near the kitchen and the bathroom. She had various afflictions that she alluded to but never fully explained and was regularly called upon by a young doctor whose patience seemed infinite. Émile sometimes suspected that she invented her symptoms just to keep the doctor coming. If that were so, did he know it and humor her? He was sure to over­charge her, and yet who, he wondered, was taking advantage of whom?

  Although a housekeeper came in every day to cook, clean, and sometimes accompany his mother on a short drive in her carriage or a stroll to the lake in the Parc Monceau and back, he knew she must be lonely. He decided then and there that he would visit more often; he would drive her out of the city, maybe even take her on holiday.

  “Maman!” Émile called as he let himself in.

  His mother rose to her feet behind a small cluttered table to greet him. It held everything that she might need for the day: her cologne, her pen and ink, her medicines, her writing paper, her face powder, and boxes of her jewelry. She was almost seventy and although everything about her had softened—her clothes, the food she ate, even the light that filtered in from the window through the permanently drawn blinds—her mind was still as sharp as it had ever been.

  “Émile,” she said, and held out her hand. Even inside, even alone, she wore white gloves. He raised her hand to his mouth, as he always did, and kissed the stiff fabric.

  “At last!” she said. “I was beginning to give up hope!”

  “I’m so sorry. I was held up at work.”

  “Well,” she said with a sigh of disappointment, “you’re here now. I have a few things for you to sign. But you can do that after dinner.”

  As usual, her housekeeper had left two plates of cold food on the counter. This time there was roast beef, tomato farcie, asparagus tart, and a basket of sliced bread, now stale. Once Émile had poured some wine into a couple of dusty crystal glasses, he carried the food to his mother’s little table and sat down opposite her.

  “Is this enough?” she asked. “Is the food to your taste?”

  Although the smell of what she kept on her table infused the food and wine, and made everything taste of eau de toilette and syrup of figs, he assured her that it was perfect.

  “And how have you been?” she asked once they had sat down.

  “Not bad,” he replied. “You?”

  “Where do I begin?” she said.

  First she recounted family news, babies born and people passing on, bouts of ill health and bad luck, all of which, since she was not immediately involved, she conveyed with unabashed relish. Most of the stories she had told him before, but he feigned surprise and amusement at the right moments as required. Finally a silence fell.

  “You look tired,” she said suddenly.

  “I am, a little,” he replied.

  “Are you eating well?”

  “Well enough.”

  “And your work?”

  She said the word “work” with some disdain. After school, Émile had re­fused to go straight into the family business and help run the factory and instead had studied engineering and architecture at university. It had caused a small scandal at the time. Maison Soucht had been in the family since the sixteenth century and produced glass and lead crystal: wine decanters, enameled lamps, and Christmas tree baubles—all beautifully handcrafted. When Émile had joined Eiffel’s company and begun to design and construct bridges, his parents had believed it was only a phase. The Nouguiers were not employees and never had been. Almost twenty years later, however, she was still waiting for him to grow out of it.

  It hadn’t been an issue until the sudden death of his elder brother, Bertrand, eighteen months earlier. Now, as the only son and sole heir, the factory and everything connected with it belonged to Émile. So far, however, he’d had as little to do with it as possible. Once a week, after dinner at his mother’s, he signed checks, he went over accounts, he tried to foster an interest in the business. Without Bertrand, however, the factory had begun to lose money. Émile blamed the recession, but he knew his mother blamed him.


  “The tower is going well,” he told her. “You must come and visit the site.”

  Louise Nouguier sliced her tomato in two and loaded a small amount of food onto her fork, but didn’t agree to anything.

  “That’s not what they are saying in the newspaper,” she said.

  “Good news doesn’t sell papers,” he said.

  His mother was an avid newspaper reader. But rather than argue with him, she let it drop.

  “So?” she said, and looked up at Émile expectantly.

  The food stuck in his throat as he swallowed. How could so small a word become so loaded?

  “Mother,” he warned, “if I had any news of that nature I would have told you.”

  She sighed, put down her cutlery, and glanced down at the Persian carpet.

  “I must get this carpet cleaned,” she said vaguely. “Before I pass it on to you.”

  Her tone was reproachful. Was this part of the bargain: she passed on the carpet and in return, he did what she wanted? It was a high price to pay for a carpet. Didn’t she realize that he had no strong attachment to the things that she so diligently retained for him?

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I ate a little before you arrived,” she said. “And I find Fauchon too rich sometimes.”

  He finished his food with her eyes on him.

  “Dessert?” she asked. “There is crème caramel on the counter. It will only go to waste if you don’t want it.”

  “Aren’t you having any?” he asked.

  She waved away the idea with her hand.

  “At my age you want very little,” she said.

  But he knew what she desperately did want: for him to take responsibility for Maison Soucht, to provide her with a well-bred daughter-in-law, to produce some grandchildren who would to keep the Nouguier lineage going and confirm that her life had not been an exercise in loss but added up, like the arithmetic she had never been at liberty to study.

  Her marriage to Émile’s father, like most of the marriages in her social circle, had been arranged by their parents. She barely knew Cedric Nouguier when she walked down the aisle and yet the future of both families depended on a successful union. The factory needed to modernize, and it was her dowry that had financed the purchase of a new coal-fired furnace. Her younger sisters remained unmarried—there was no more money for their dowries—and they both still lived modestly on allowances provided by the business. Louise Nouguier seemed to think that her son was unaware of what was at stake, of how much self-sacrifice and good faith had been invested over the decades, of how this unspoken arrangement was a cornerstone of everything she believed in. Women were facilitators, supporting structures, like the wooden scaffolding they were using to construct the tower. And he suddenly felt sorry for her, a life lived out by proxy. Even now she was watching him as he ate, savoring each mouthful as if she could experience the dessert by osmosis.

  “Was it good?” she asked once the sweet custard and dark syrup was gone. He replied that it was excellent, but in truth he had barely tasted it.

  After she had made him a coffee—small, black, strong—she produced a pile of checks, each one already made out to one of the dependents.

  “Your aunt needed a little more this month,” his mother told him. “She has been unwell. Would that be all right?”

  “You know you don’t have to ask,” he replied.

  “Bertrand always wanted to know,” she said, “if the figures changed. And your father never signed anything until he’d checked the books.”

  “I’m sure it’s all in order,” he said, then signed them one by one with a flourish.

  Saying good night was always difficult. His mother’s parting embrace seemed perfunctory enough, but he knew how hard it was for her. He hated to leave her alone in the huge apartment that had once been full of life, and yet he couldn’t wait to escape; the atmosphere was as thick and viscous as burnt caramel.

  “Try not to be late next week,” his mother gently chided.

  “I’ll do my very best,” he replied.

  “And a little good news,” she said, “would do me the power of good.”

  Outside he inhaled deeply, desperate for a rush of fresh air to fill his lungs. If only Bertrand had not died. If only his older brother had married and had had a son or two then he wouldn’t be in this position. Rather than hail a cab, Émile decided to walk, to clear his head. As he made for home he gradually calmed down; he tried to see the situation objectively. He was only forty-one; he had plenty of time to find a girl, marry her, and have children. Or a woman, a woman like the Scottish one. At the thought of her, how­ever, he felt a chime of regret; he would never see that one again.

  The allumeurs de réverbères lit the gas lamps along the great boulevards and avenues with their long poles. The lights glowed like golden orbs compared to the brilliance of the spluttering electric-arc illuminations on the Place de l’Opéra. But the rest of Paris was dark at night, the city spread out beyond the bright streets like a bolt of the blackest cloth. Walking home had seemed like a good idea at the time, when the sky in the west was still ablaze with the setting sun. But night had fallen faster than a theatrical curtain, he had lost his bearings, and he had ended up in the narrow pitch-black streets of the Marais. He started to walk more quickly than before, each footstep taken with a heavy, deliberate stride to deter any potential robber or murderer or thief who could be lurking in a doorway. Even though his mind urged him to run, he kept a steady pace and cleared his throat or coughed at regular intervals, just to give an impression—untrue—that he was unafraid. At one point, a door opened suddenly—a luminous rectangle of yellow light—and made him jump. A man appeared in silhouette and was pushed out by a large woman, who yelled that he was never to come back. The door slammed, and for a moment both he and the man were left in total darkness. And then the door opened again, the woman moaned, and the man was pulled back through the door into her ample embrace.

  Émile hurried on: left, then right, then left until, to his profound re­lief, he stumbled upon the gray stone facade of the Louvre. He managed to reorient himself; it was not far, he realized as he crossed Pont des Arts and strode along the Quai de Conti, not far at all. Finally, there was his own street, there was his building, and there at last, the door to his apartment.

  There was a lamp lit in his bedroom. Although he couldn’t remember leaving it on, he was glad of its illumination as he slipped his key in to the lock. He glanced quickly behind him to check he wasn’t being followed, then opened the door and stepped into the internal courtyard as quietly as he could so he wouldn’t wake the concierge, a bad-tempered man from Avignon.

  He took the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. On the landing be­low his own he could hear the sound of someone singing softly. It was coming from his apartment. Although he’d never heard her sing before, he recognized Gabrielle’s voice. The concierge must have let her in. His head swam with a mixture of the claret he had drunk and his own unease as he unlocked the door.

  Gabrielle lay on his bed, her eyes closed, her hair loose, and her dress pushed up around her thighs. Around the walls, every single one facing the wall, were the paintings he had bought at the Société des Artistes Indépendants­ exhibition. They had been stacked in the hallway, the canvases parceled up and unopened since they had been delivered. And now the floor was covered in torn paper and pieces of string, testimony to how frantically the wrappings had been ripped off.

  For a moment he didn’t move. He waited for her to sense his presence. But it was soon clear that she was oblivious, she was distracted, delirious. As he watched, she sat up, pulled a metal syringe from her bag and slowly rolled down the top of her stocking. Émile seized her wrist before she could push the plunger. Her head fell back as she turned and tried to focus on him, her eyes half-closed and her mouth ajar.

  “You!” she said. “I thought it was just me and the dark muse.” She glanced down
. The white of her thigh bloomed blue and purple where the needle had already entered.

  “What have you done?” he whispered.

  “My dear Émile,” she replied, “I could ask the same question of you?”

  And now he saw that each of the paintings around the walls had been ripped, the canvas torn from top to bottom. A kitchen knife lay on the ground below the window.

  “You could have told me,” she went on. “Why did you buy them, you of all people? And I thought, I thought at last that all this meant something—”

  “Gabrielle,” he butted in.

  “Don’t speak. You’re only making it worse.”

  Émile crossed the room and picked up the kitchen knife. He ran his finger along the torn edge of one of the canvases, the surface now slack and curling, the paint cracked and peeling. As he cleaned the blade, he finally let the surge of indignity, of self-righteousness, race through him. Was it so bad, what he had done? Her husband hadn’t seemed to think so; in fact, he had been very persuasive.

  Gabrielle was still sitting motionless on the bed with the syringe in her lap. She looked small, vulnerable, pathetic. He wondered if a single centime of his money had gone to her child.

  “Chérie,” he began, “if I did anything that hurt you, it wasn’t intentional.”

  “You knew exactly what you were doing,” she replied. “You wanted to humiliate me.”

  “I wanted to help—”

  “Like hell you did.”

  He blinked as his eyes welled and his throat narrowed. What right did she have to speak to him like this?

  “I’m sorry,” he began, “but I never intended . . .”

  “Stop!” she yelled.

  She covered her face with her hands and started to sob, to cry in great heaving gasps. It was unbearable. He went to her; he knelt before her, cupping her bare shoulders with his hands.

  “Gabrielle,” he whispered.

  “Don’t touch me!” she yelled, pushing him away and rubbing the top of her arms as if his fingers had scalded her. “Get out!”