Andrew Miller - Pure

In the morning, he wakes with his head rolled against the priest’s shoulder. They sit up in the bed, shake hands again. This is life; this is travelling.

A new coach, a new coachman, fresh horses. They reach Douai by early afternoon. Here, the company divides. The old priest is met by young priests from the seminary, the English couple cross the yard to the waiting Calais coach, the sad and elegant woman makes hushed enquiries about the next conveyance to Brussels. Jean-Baptiste, clutching a small valise, is hurried into a crowded box aimed at Valenciennes. Two hours later, he climbs down, stiff with cold, onto the rue de Paris. There is always traffic between the town and the mines. For ten sous, he buys a ride on a cart delivering barrels of high-smelling butter, and they come to the edge of the miners’ colony just as the daylight gutters behind them.

Even in the gloom, it is evident that Lecoeur was right and that nothing important has changed since Jean-Baptiste was last here. The same thick rind of shacks and hovels, like the encampment of a besieging army, one that clings on grimly without the slightest faith in victory. Scores of small fires burn, each attended by its gang of silhouetted men and women. On the verges of the road, children play laboriously, some pausing to look up, wan and incurious, at the passing wagon. The roads were built by the company. The first were given names such as avenue de Charbon, avenue de l’Avenir, even avenue de Richesse. Later roads were simply given numbers: rue 1, rue 2. In the centre of it all, discernible as a darker, denser zone of smoke and muffled din, are the works themselves.

The managers have a compound of their own a little to the east of the works. The prevailing wind brings a steady drift of soot and rock dust. The style of the compound is that of a provincial barracks, each block divided into six, each sixth the home of a manager, most of them single men. It is not a place to bring a wife; it is certainly not a place you might hope to find one. The senior managers live in Valenciennes. The owners and shareholders are in Paris, where the mines might feature in their thoughts as marvellous holes in the ground from which one can simply scoop money.

Snow has been threatening for hours. Now, just as the engineer enters the compound, it begins to fall. He remembers Lecoeur’s place; his own was next to it for nigh on a year, the second and third divisions respectively of the second block. Outside his front window, Lecoeur used to have a small garden, a patch of worked ground in which, in summer, he grew onions and lettuces, some marigolds. There is no trace of it now.

He raps at the door, waits, knocks again. Snow is settling on his shoulders, the brim of his hat. He is about to knock for a third time when the door is dragged open and there is Lecoeur, candle in hand, the flame streaming, flickering.

‘Comrade!’ he cries. ‘Oh, dear comrade! I am almost deranged with waiting!’

The candle blows out. They go down the little passage in the dark. They come to the parlour. The candle, after some searching for the necessary materials, is lit again. Lecoeur stands in the middle of the room, triumphant, fumy, a little unsteady.

‘You remember it?’ he asks. ‘Mmm? Can you not see your old self in that very armchair?’

‘I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He takes in the room — the chair with its blooms of human grease, the mean little fire, the silhouette portraits of mother and sister. . A constancy, a changelessness that, like that of the miners’ colony, is not of a good type.

On the table, a meal has been set out. Some slices of a soused calf’s head, potatoes undressed, bread spread thinly with a previous consignment of the high-smelling butter. At the centre of the table is a bottle containing some clear liquid that Lecoeur now pours into two glasses, draining his own immediately, then passing the other to Jean-Baptiste. They sit opposite each other. Jean-Baptiste saws at the slice of head on his plate (it tastes, poor thing, as though pickled in its own tears). He sips at the stuff from the bottle, sees black flakes of snow collide soundlessly with the window glass.

Three years since they last met — a hurried embrace in the drizzle by the coach-stop in Valenciennes. What rigours have those years imposed that this man should be so hollowed out? He is no more than thirty-five, possibly younger, yet looks fifty and ill. Most of his teeth have gone. His nose is swollen, pitted, strung with swollen vessels. He is pitifully thin and nervous. Once he has started talking, he cannot stop, and what began breezily enough becomes, by degrees, a lament, then a bitter complaint, that has at its heart the mine, that leviathan, that grinder of men’s bones.

Is this how he passes his nights? Alone with a bottle, indicting the air? He has on a waistcoat of clotted brown wool, a garment knitted perhaps by a circle of unmarried female relatives for whom the young Lecoeur, the Lecoeur with teeth, once represented the family’s last great hope. By the time he falls silent and reaches, with a lover’s sigh, for the bottle again, Jean-Baptiste has already decided he must take him to Paris if he can. Here he will not last another winter. And can he really have lost all his former ability? All that good activity of mind he once possessed? With the minister’s money, the minister’s authority, it should not be impossible to extricate him. There is a risk, of course. How far gone is he? But in good conscience, he cannot be left in Valenciennes.

He is thinking it through, trying to construct in his imagination a credible picture of the first day of excavations at les Innocents — himself on some kind of dais or scaffolding, the men below in neat rows with their tools — when Lecoeur suddenly asks, ‘Have you married?’

‘No,’ says Jean-Baptiste, into whose mind — absurdly! — comes the shadow of Héloïse, the whore Héloïse.

‘I thought not,’ says Lecoeur. ‘A married man does not wear a suit such as that.’

‘And you?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘There is some. . involvement?’

Lecoeur smiles, shakes his head, glances into the fire. ‘I have had nothing to do with women for a long time now.’

In the morning, the tocsin rings at three thirty. First shift, first descent, is at four. Jean-Baptiste wakes in the upstairs room. He is looking towards the window, but there is no hint of any light. He swings his legs from the bed. The room is laughably cold. He remembers it all, perfectly.

In the parlour, he finds Lecoeur fully dressed, his face a mask of concentration as he uses both hands to pour himself a glass from the now almost empty bottle. He sets the bottle down, then leans his mouth to the rim of the glass and sucks in the first mouthful while the glass is still on the table.

‘Shall I pour one for you?’ he asks.

‘Later, perhaps,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

They have, the previous evening, talked a little about the scheme for les Innocents, about the men who will be needed. Lecoeur was reassuringly businesslike. He had prepared a list of names and, going down the list (Everbout, Slabbart, Block, Rape, Cent, Wyntère. .), gave Jean-Baptiste a quick assessment of each of them, the approximate age, length of service, moral character so far as it was known, could be known. Nothing was said about adding his own name to the list, but now, in the snow-cold parlour, Jean-Baptiste asks if he might consider it.

‘ Consider it! ’

In his rush to clutch his friend’s hands, Lecoeur strikes the corner of the table with his thigh, almost upsetting the precious bottle.

‘They will name squares after us!’ he cries. ‘The men who purified Paris!’

He breaks into a jig; he cannot help himself. Jean-Baptiste laughs, claps time. He has saved a life today and has not even had his breakfast.