Andrew Miller - Pure

He stops and frowns into the mist. He should by now have come out onto the rue Saint-Denis, a little above the rue aux Fers. Instead he is. . where? A street he does not recognise at all. Has he come too far north? He looks for a left-hand turning, walks what seems a good half-kilometre before he finds one that appears serviceable, sets off along its length, becomes with each step a little less confident of where he is, has the fantasy that he is walking not through the heart of Paris but through the rutted alleys of Bellême, then sees, rearing in the air above him, the buttresses of a church, a big one. Saint-Eustache? The mist is thick as wood smoke now. He goes on slowly, cautiously. If the church is indeed Saint-Eustache, then — in theory — he knows exactly where he is, but he is afraid of being fooled again, of spending what is left of the night trailing through unreadable streets, past buildings like moored shipping.

Ahead of him, the sudden sound of footsteps. Someone else is out here, someone who, from the quick, light clip of his feet, is very sure of his way. There is nothing sinister in it, nothing obviously so, yet the fear grows in him quickly. What manner of man is about at such an hour on such a night? Could he have been followed? Followed all the way from the Porte Saint-Antoine? He digs in his pockets for something he might defend himself with but finds nothing more dangerous than one of the cemetery keys. Too late anyway. The weave of the mist is unravelling. A shape, a shadow, a cloaked shadow. . A woman! A woman deep in reverie, for she is a bare metre from him when she comes to a halt. For three, four seconds they are fixed in some primitive watchfulness; then the stance of each softens a little. He knows her. There can be no mistake. The cloak, the height, that steady gaze lit by the mist’s own odd lucency, a faint blue-like light radiating from everywhere and nowhere. Does she remember him ? He cannot think why she should.

‘I was walking home,’ he says quietly, almost a whisper. She nods, waits. She does remember him! He believes she does. ‘I became lost.’

‘What is your street?’ she asks, her voice as soft as his.

‘The rue de la Lingerie.’

‘By the cemetery.’

‘Yes.’

‘It is not far,’ she says. ‘You can walk through the market.’ She looks past his shoulder towards the turning he must take.

‘I have seen you before,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘You remember?’

‘You were with the musician.’

‘You are Héloïse,’ he says.

‘I was not told your name.’

‘Bêche.’

‘ Bêche ?’

‘Jean-Baptiste.’

He takes a step towards her. Then, after a heartbeat, takes another step. They stand there, quite private in the mist. He lifts a hand and touches her cheek. She does not flinch.

‘You are not frightened of me?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Should I be?’

‘No. There is no reason.’

His fingers rest on her skin. He could not say what he is doing, what he is guided by, he whose experience with women is so little. Is it her being a whore that lets him do it? But in this unlooked-for hour, words like whore, like engineer, like Héloïse or Jean-Baptiste, are empty as blown eggs.

‘So I turn there?’ he asks, suddenly waking to himself, his hand falling to his side.

‘At the corner there,’ she says.

He mutters his thanks, walks away from her. He finds the market easily enough. It is already a city within a city, bantering, spotted with lanterns and rush-lights, though it will be another two hours before any customers arrive. On the other side of it, the corner of the rue aux Fers, the black wall of the cemetery, the fog-damp cobbles of the rue de la Lingerie. .

When he opens the door of the Monnards’ house, something darts in ahead of him. He fumbles with the matches on the hall table, eventually gets a candle to light. Ragoût is by the door to the cellar, his blunt face pressed to the crevice at the bottom of the door. He looks up at Jean-Baptiste as if in hope of some assistance. Jean-Baptiste reaches down, feels the air flowing through the crevice, cold air, cold like the breath of a man in the last stages of a fever. He sets his candle on the board next to the door. Immediately the flame sickens and, before he can raise it again, goes out.

In what is left of the night he lies awake, the inside of his head shiny with the clarity of sleeplessness and unlabelled liquor. Again and again he recalls his meeting with the woman, with Héloïse, until the whole scene becomes impenetrable and he enters some other state, vaguely hypnogogic, in which he is watching the cellar door swing slowly open and himself move, as if compelled, to the top of the cellar steps, steps he has never even seen. .

He dresses in the first of the dawn. Twice he wipes the mirror with his hand before realising the black spots are on his face, not on the glass, his reward for holding Monsieur Renard’s paint pot. He has no washing water. He curses and creeps out of the house.

He is the last to board the coach on the rue aux Ours. He climbs up and sits opposite a silver-haired priest. Beside the priest (who, under his black cape, is gently palpating some discomfort in his belly) is a foreign couple, English it turns out, the woman neat, solidly dressed, comfortable as a hen; the man red-faced, big as an old prizefighter. The remaining passenger is a woman, one of those elegant, mysteriously sad women of a certain age, who travel unaccompanied on the public stages and who immediately become the focus of all manner of speculation for the other passengers. She gazes from the window as if in lingering hope of some figure, someone like Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson, riding out of the rags of last night’s mist to beg her to stay. No one comes.

In the doorway of the coaching office, the coachman is taking his morning dram. The English couple share a boiled egg. The priest reads a little book, the pages almost touching the end of his nose. The elegant woman sighs. Jean-Baptiste — who has eaten nothing since last night’s chicken — shuts his eyes and falls so profoundly asleep he is dead to everything until, abruptly waking three hours later, he sees, through mud-spattered windows, the winter countryside passing by, Paris already leagues behind them. The Englishwoman smiles at him, bobs her head. Her husband and the priest are side by side, snoring, each to his own rhythm.

They come to a hill. The horses struggle. The coachman, peering down through his hatch in the carriage roof, asks if the gentlemen would object to walking to the top. The gentlemen oblige, pick their way through the mud while making observations on the character of the mud-coloured country either side of them. They join the coach again at the crest, spread their mud over the floor, then cling to the straps as the horses make their long, slithering descent into the next village where, to everyone’s relief, they stop for lunch.

In the afternoon, all of them having drunk a good deal of white wine with the food, there is an hour of harmless conversation followed by an hour of napping, the coach rocking like a boat, the world outside the windows passing by, unconsidered and nameless.

They get to Amiens two hours after dark, riding in through one of the old city gates and craning their necks to get a glimpse of the shadow of the cathedral. There is a party of pilgrims staying at the inn. The newcomers must make the best of what space remains. Jean-Baptiste shares a bed in the attic with the priest and is invited, before the candle is put out, to join him in a prayer. He does not wish to pray, would prefer to announce that he is a philosopher, a rationalist, a freethinker, but he politely adds his amens to the priest’s and feels the old comfort of it. They shake hands and snuff the light. The priest’s guts rumble. He apologises. Jean-Baptiste assures him he is not troubled by it.