Painters had already started on the tower’s legs, each wielding pots of rich terra-cotta red. Each section would be painted a shade slightly lighter than the one below to make the whole structure appear taller. Work had stopped, however, on the lower elevators. Eiffel was locked in an argument with the contractor over the elevators’ brakes. Rather than reach a compromise, the company, which was American, had simply halted construction. Eiffel was furious about it. As Émile climbed the stairs to his office, he could hear Gustave shouting into the telephone.
“It’s in your contract! Of course I’m not going to pay you! Finish the work first!”
The sound of the handset being rammed back into its holder was audible in the empty corridors. There was a short pause and then Gustave’s voice again.
“Good day. I need to speak to the bank.”
Émile had heard rumors that the Panama project was in financial difficulty. There was talk about outbreaks of disease at the excavation sites, and the suggestion that vast sums of money had gone astray. Gustave was trying to play it down—rumors rarely, he said, had any sound basis in reality—but he was nothing if not scandal-averse. The pressure on him, however, was evident in the quickness of his temper and the new set of lines on his brow.
Émile’s office was all as he had left it, his wide desk, the draftsman’s table with its reams of drawings, the wooden box that had once held his camera. There was also a man asleep on the floor. Émile knelt down and pulled back a blanket.
“Monsieur Arrol?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Jamie sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“It’s nothing bad,” he said quickly. “Been burning the candle at both ends.”
He got to his feet and yawned. Émile caught the whiff of alcohol and tobacco.
“Life is wonderful, don’t you think?” he said, and then sank down into the only chair. “When you have a woman.”
Émile opened the window even though the air outside was still cold. Had he really come to his office to tell him this?
“I know,” he said. “Lovely girl. I met her, remember?”
With a sigh, Arrol sat back and stared up at the ceiling.
“Not her, God, no,” he said. “She’s marvelous, beautiful, cultured, rich, a little older but that doesn’t matter. And passionate, I hope you don’t mind me telling you, so passionate that she barely let me sleep.”
Émile sat on his desk.
“But what about Delphine?”
“Ah yes . . .”
“You were going to buy her out? Marry her before Christmas?”
Arrol stood up and brushed down his frock coat. “Anyway, the reason I came, the reason I’m here, is that I wanted to take you out, to thank you for all the help and support you’ve given me. I know I haven’t been here as much as I should have.”
“I’m sorry, but I have a meeting with Eiffel.”
“Nonsense,” said a voice from the door.
Gustave Eiffel stood in the frame.
“Take the day off, Émile. That’s what I wanted to tell you at the meeting.”
“It isn’t necessary,” said Émile. “Besides, I thought you wanted to talk about the elevators.”
“I’ll deal with that. It’s not a request but an order. Go and see your lovely Scottish lady friend. You barely took any leave over Christmas. It will do you good.”
“Alas, I don’t know her whereabouts,” he said.
“I do,” said Arrol.
“A stroke of luck,” said Eiffel. “Well then, it’s settled.”
The artist’s studio was in an apartment block in a street near the railway line. It was in an area called Batignolles, midway between the mansions around the Parc Monceau and the hovels of Montmartre. The rail tracks cut a great swath through the area, and as a consequence, it felt itinerant, with hotels and short-term rentals, tatty pigeons and stray cats. An old man was selling chestnuts from a cart. A beggar, a boy of about fifteen, was playing the violin on the corner. Arrol decided they would wait in their rented cab outside the building until his sister’s sitting was over. Conversation was increasingly awkward. Émile had an inkling that Arrol was going to ask him for something. And he had an inkling too of what it could be.
“Paris,” Arrol said. “What a fine city!”
“It has its moments.”
“I’ll be loath to leave. What a dilemma!”
He let the comment hang. Émile, however, had no intention of providing a solution.
“How long must we wait?” he asked.
“Not long now,” Arrol said. “She’ll be so surprised to see us.”
“So, who is this artist?”
“You’re bound to have heard of him. He has a wasted leg—polio. But the best thing is, we don’t have to actually buy the painting if we don’t like it.”
“Really? What is his name?”
Jamie began to answer but the roar of a train drowned out his words.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” Émile said.
But Arrol didn’t respond. He was staring out at the street. Émile followed the line of his gaze. Coming out of the front door of the apartment block was a smartly dressed man, a man he immediately recognized as the baroness’s brother, Clément. He paused in front of the beggar and began to rifle through his pockets. The boy started playing faster and looked up expectantly. Rather than loose change, however, the count pulled out his pipe and placed it in his mouth. Once he had lit it, he turned and nodded to someone across the street. Émile noticed a second man, who had been waiting under an awning. He started to hobble across the road, dragging himself along with a stick. It was Gabrielle’s husband, the artist. They exchanged a few terse words, a note changed hands, and then the count strode off while the cripple let himself into the building with a key.
“What on earth?” said Arrol.
Émile said nothing. Surely, he thought, surely not. Alice Arrol had a chaperone. But no, here came Cait around the corner. As she passed the beggar, she dropped a coin in his hat. Then she pressed a doorbell and, after a moment, was admitted.
Émile remembered Gustave’s words. The man who fucked his way around Paris. Arrol turned to Émile and swallowed, his eyes full of alarm.
“I’m sure there is some explanation,” he said with a small smile. “I’m sure it’s not what you think.”
41
____
CAIT WAS DARNING Alice’s stockings in her room when there was a knock at the front door. And then another, louder this time. Where was the housekeeper? She threaded the needle into the silk. When the knock came a third time, she could stand it no longer. She ran down two flights of stairs and opened the door. A well-dressed middle-aged woman she had never seen before stood on the doorstep.
“Mr. James Arrol, please?” she said. Her accent was Irish.
The woman blinked and her mouth drew tighter when Cait told her that Jamie was out at work and she had no idea when he would be back. She glanced over her shoulder as if she was thinking about heading into the house to check herself. But she didn’t move. Her shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell.
“Can I pass on a message?” Cait asked.
“Did you pass on the last one?” the woman asked, her eyebrows raised.
A few weeks earlier, Cait had noticed a young girl on the street outside. She looked as if she had been there for a while, pacing back and forth in front of their house. Occasionally she paused to watch a carriage pass, but when it didn’t stop, she turned and glanced up again at their shuttered windows. Cait had opened the door and stepped outside.
“Mademoiselle?” Cait had asked. “Can I help you?”
The girl turned and looked at her with a directness that was verging on the rude.
“Does Jamie live here?” she asked. “Jamie Arrol?”
Cait admitted that he did.
“Thank goodness.” Her eyes blinked rapidly to try to halt the approach of tears. “Is he all right? Has something happened to him? He’s never stayed a
way for this long. He promised he would come. But the woman, your maid, she told me to go away.”
“He’s fine,” Cait said. “But he’s at work now. Was he expecting you?”
Before she could answer, the girl started to cough, a racking cough that turned rapidly into a fit. Finally it passed, leaving her breathless and pale.
“It’s just a cold,” she said as she wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. “He keeps telling me I shouldn’t sleep with the window open.”
“Would you like a glass of water?” Cait asked. “In fact, why don’t you come in?”
The girl shook her head, shivered, then drew her coat a little tighter around her shoulders.
“Just tell him Delphine was here,” she said. “Are you his sister?”
“His sister’s companion,” Cait replied.
“We haven’t met,” said Delphine. “I’m his fiancée. And thank you.”
It was past midnight before Jamie came home with a slam of the front door that woke everyone up.
“Where have you been?” said Alice on the landing.
“Out,” said Jamie as he came up the stairs.
Later, when Alice was in her room, Cait had knocked softly on Jamie’s door.
“There was a girl looking for you earlier,” she told him.
“Not now,” he said, and rubbed his eyes. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
Cait came into his room and closed the door behind her.
“She said she was your fiancée. Is it true?”
Jamie turned his face away.
“What have you done, Jamie?” she said. “What did you promise?”
Finally he looked at her, his face stone. “Nothing, nothing at all.”
And with that, Jamie turned his back on her and began to take off his boots.
“It isn’t me you should be concerned about, you know,” he said.
Jamie’s words still resounded in her head. What could he have meant?
_________
The Irishwoman was staring at her, waiting for her answer.
“Yes, I passed it on,” she said.
The woman exhaled through her nose and said something Cait didn’t catch.
“Sorry?” she asked.
“I have another message for him,” she said. “Delphine waited. She waited for him until the end. The very end. Tell him that.”
And then she shook her head, turned, and walked down the steps.
42
____
EVEN THOUGH THE ELEVATORS were operational, Émile still preferred to take the stairs. He paused to watch one rise from the ground below; each car had two levels, like an omnibus. It passed by and came to a stop with an almighty clatter at the first platform just above. Every day, journalists and dignitaries, socialites and artists came to take a look. Although the top of the tower wasn’t finished, there was plenty to see; the restaurants, the arcade, the view. And Eiffel was often there to greet them and wax lyrical.
“Monsieur Nouguier,” a man’s voice rang out from above. “At last.”
Sitting on the stairs just below the first-floor platform was Jamie Arrol. Émile felt his heart sink—what did he want now? But he saw immediately that something awful had happened. It wasn’t just that his clothes were dirty and his face was unshaven, it was the look in his face of partially realized horror.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
Arrol stared down at the iron grid beneath his feet while Émile’s mind raced with panic.
“Is it Cait?”
“Mrs. Wallace? No, she is fine. Couldn’t be better.”
“Your sister, then?”
He shook his head no, then swallowed and seemed to gather himself up before he spoke. And when he did, the words rushed out in one great stream.
“They buried her before I could get there. . . . Of course I paid the bill, it was modest, but it was the least, the least I could do.”
Émile suddenly saw it all: Delphine’s room, the stained and sagging bed, the sour smell of death, as if Arrol’s words had conjured up an awful image of such misery and hopelessness that he might have been there himself.
“I’m so sorry,” Émile said.
Jamie bit his lip and he suddenly looked so young, nothing more than a boy really, that Émile reached out with both arms and held him. Arrol sobbed into his shoulder, deep shuddering sobs of a grief beyond words, beyond explanation or reason.
Only a few meters above, a crowd of people gathered at the rail, looking out at the view and pointing out the Sacré-Coeur and l’Étoile.
“I told my husband it would be safe, but he still wouldn’t come,” said one woman.
“Oh my,” said a man when he spotted Arrol and Émile below.
Finally Arrol pulled away and wiped his face with his sleeve.
“I must look such a fool,” he said. And then he headed back down the stairs again, around and around and down and down. Émile followed and caught up with him just above the ticket booth on a small platform several meters above the ground. For a moment they said nothing. Below, a man was running for a tram. A child was screaming, “Not yet, not yet, not yet.” A woman was laughing.
“I loved her, you know,” Arrol said. “Much more than all the others.”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
They were silent for a moment. Émile was suddenly reminded of Arrol’s recent euphoria.
“Have you seen the baroness recently?” he asked.
Arrol let out a short, bitter laugh. “What do you think?” he said.
The wind blew cold and strong. It began to rain.
“I can’t stay here and I can’t go home,” he continued. And then he turned and looked at him flat-on. “Émile, will you help me? I need Eiffel to send me to Panama. To work on the canal. I need to get away.”
Émile took in a deep breath and then let it out. He knew what it was to take one’s eye off the ball, to be distracted. It was easy to fool oneself, to cloak up unpleasant facts, to think that situations and people could be fashioned into whatever we desire, when the opposite is in fact true. He recalled that day a few weeks earlier, the day that Arrol had taken him to the painter’s studio. Cait had been polite but distant.
“May I see the painting?” he had asked when the awkward silence was too much to bear.
“Not yet,” said the artist from the sink as he washed his brushes. “It isn’t finished.”
But Émile didn’t, wouldn’t, listen. Instead he’d pulled the white sheet from the easel where the unfinished canvas was propped. It was completely blank. The artist fussed and scolded and muttered about sketches and preliminary works as he covered up the canvas again before anyone else saw.
“Is it very hard work?” he had asked Alice once she was ready. “Modeling for your portrait?”
She conceded that yes, it was, and smiled. She had fooled Cait, but she did not fool him.
“But there is some pleasure in it,” she went on. “And more than a little pain too.”
His eye slipped down the side panel of her dress to a row of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. They were fastened wrongly—the top one had been missed, which left a single one at the bottom.
“He has such skill,” she went on, “such a mastery of the human form. He is quite the expert, you know.”
“Strange he is not more well known,” Émile said.
“But he is,” Alice had retorted a little too vehemently, “among the artistic set.”
From high above on the tower a man shouted out. With a roar of grinding metal and the hiss of water, the elevator was beginning to descend again from the first floor. As it passed by, Émile saw that, apart from the operator, it was empty.
“Will you?” Arrol asked again. “I heard that there’s a ship leaving the day after tomorrow. I could catch the mail coach. Will you ask Eiffel?”
His face was flushed and his eyes were red.
“Very well,” Émile said. “If that’s what you wish.”
“I wish for many things,” Jamie said softly. “Only some of them are possible. In this life, at least.”
A few moments later, the lift passed them by once more, this time full of men in beaver hats and women in traveling cloaks. For a moment their eyes were drawn to it, to its swaying metal chains against the rigid iron struts of the tower’s leg, before it came to a grinding halt high above.
43
____
February 1889
CAIT RAN HER FINGER over the calendar of Alice’s appointments, the dress fittings and French lessons, portrait sittings and coiffeuse sessions. This afternoon the corsetière, who had a reputation as the best in the city and a waiting list of several months, was finally coming. Cait’s eye strayed to the month, the year. Could it be 1889 already? Time had slipped by like a silk rope through her hands. In less than three months, their time in Paris would be over, and unless something unexpected transpired, they would be going home. Cait had saved up most of the money that William Arrol had paid her and had about seventy pounds in the bank, enough for a passage at least. Single women, widowed or unmarried, were regularly recruited, she had heard, for missionary work in Johannesburg or Basutoland, Natal or Kaffraria. She would not go back to Scotland. At least, not for longer than she had to.
Now she avoided looking at herself in the mirror. She took a walk every morning, no matter what the weather. It helped to clear her head, to keep herself in check. Because she was sad, sadder than she had ever been. And she knew she had no right to be, no right at all. Hopefully it didn’t show, the ring of darkness that she carried around inside didn’t manifest itself in the tone of her voice or the slump of her shoulders. Just in case, she spoke more brightly, she stood straighter, she pretended. When it all became too much, however, she would make her excuses and go up to her room and curl up on her bed like a dying thing. She would go to Africa, she told herself, and she would never come back.
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