Andrew Miller - Pure

‘She is barely more than a child.’

‘Barely will do. Our beloved queen was wed at fourteen. And she’d go with you. You could smuggle her up to your room at the Monnards’. Though no doubt it would put Ziguette’s nose out of joint.’

‘It is you, I think, who is interested in Ziguette.’

‘If you mean would I do it with her if the opportunity presented itself, the answer is yes. So, I assume, would you. Which makes me think we should go and ogle our Persian princess. What do you say?’

‘Not today.’

‘No? You are being very dull, Monsieur Bêche. You want to beware of dullness. It is not modern. But it shall be as you wish. When you’ve paid for the brandy, I will do you the honour of escorting you to your lodgings.’

At the edge of the market, as they are crossing the top of the rue des Prêcheurs, they encounter the Austrian. She is carrying a small parcel of books, wrapped and neatly tied with black twine. She gives the impression of being only a very little disturbed by the cold, the slush on the cobbles, the eddying wind others scowl into. Armand salutes her, then catches something of the glance, the second’s worth of to-and-fro between the whore and the engineer.

‘Oh, no. Not her as well?’ he asks. And starts to laugh.

The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping. How much has changed in two hundred years? Did the people not live much like this in the days of Henri IV? They may have lived better, with fewer of them and the land less tired and the lords, with their just glimpsable chateaux, less numerous.

He is going home! Home for the first time in eleven weeks, though in his heart it might as easily be eleven years, himself a grizzled Ulysses straining his eyes for the blue shadow of Ithaca.

The roads, thank God, are passable. Last week’s snow has thawed and the new weather — a low, icy sun, the air cracking at night — has turned the mud to stone.

He has changed coach twice. The driver of this one is worryingly drunk, but the horses know their way. He looks out at the wall of a forest, frets when they are held up by a flock of geese being herded on the road ahead by some dreaming girl with a stick. Then a final hill, a church tower purple in the afternoon light and the coachman’s voice bellowing, ‘Bellême! Bellême!’

He climbs down in the market square. His bag is unlashed, dropped into his arms. As ever, a small group of townsfolk are stood nearby, arms folded, watching. In Bellême, curiosity will never go out of fashion. One of these watchers, a widow who deals in cures for the toothache, for palsy, wet ulcers, recognises him and he speaks to her and hears of the deaths of two or three whose names he knows, of the wedding of a local girl to a cloth-shearer in Mamers, of a man caught poaching on the cardinal’s estate and sent for trial at Nogent. Nobody, it seems, is making any money. The soil grows only stones. And yet somehow everyone is managing and the church clock is being repaired and God will grant them a better year next year, for they are not bad people and their sins are only small ones.

‘And what of you?’ she asks, finally drawing breath. ‘You have been somewhere?’

He has some distance still to go. He shoulders his bag, marches down the hill, crosses the stream on the stepping stones, walks warily through the corner of a field where once he was pursued by a white bull. From the woods at the side of him, he smells the smoke of the charcoal-burners’ fires, those mysterious people who belong only to themselves; then he passes the holly tree — thick this year with berries — crosses Farfield, hears the dogs begin their clamour, and there is the house, the yard, the patched outbuildings, all the stone and mud of home exactly where it should be, must be, and yet, at the same time, all of it somehow surprising. He quickens his pace; a figure appears in the doorway. He raises an arm; she raises hers. For the last minutes of the walk he is watched by her. It is as if her gaze was the path he was walking up, as if at the end of it he might walk clean into her grey eyes.

When they have greeted, he sits by the fire, holds his hands to the heat. There is a moment, a little span of seconds, in which he is simply and passionately happy and nothing in the world is any more complicated than a picture in a child’s book. He is home! Home at last! And then the moment passes.

His mother is making things for him, bringing things to him, asking him questions, thanking him for the money he has sent. She looks, he thinks, a little pinched about the eyes and mouth. And is there not more grey to be seen under the linen scallops of her cap? He would like to ask if she has been quite well, but she would only smile and say she has been well enough. Suffering is a gift from God. It is not a matter to complain of.

His sister comes in, Henriette, cold hands tucked under her arms. She has been in the dairy and smells like a wet-nurse. She wants, she says, to know everything. Her interest flatters him and he listens to himself with some astonishment, his fluent refashioning of the recent past. To hear him, anyone might imagine he and the minister spent their mornings together strolling between the fountains in the gardens of Versailles. The Monnards become a simple bourgeois family, amiable, irreproachable, while Armand is exactly the sort of companion his mother — who has always fretted that he will be lonely — would wish for him, and one who could never be suspected of living conjugally with his landlady or having a taste for preserved princesses. About his work at les Innocents he repeats only what he has already said in his letters, that he is charged with improving the health of a populous quarter, and with some structural alterations to an ancient church there. There is no good reason not to tell them everything, nothing forbids it, the work is not indecent , yet when it comes to it, he is afraid he will see something in their faces, will glimpse some imperfectly concealed reflex of disgust.

His sister wants to know if he has seen the queen. ‘Yes,’ he says, the bluntest of his lies so far. Naturally, he is required to describe her, in detail.

‘She was at some distance from me,’ he says, ‘and surrounded by her ladies.’

‘But you must have seen something?’

He describes Héloïse. Mother and sister are delighted, his sister especially.

‘She cannot have been so far away,’ she says, ‘for you have made a perfect portrait of her.’

An hour later, amid the banging of doors, the reckless jollity of dogs, his brother, Jean-Jacques, bursts in on them, as alike in his looks to their dead father as Jean-Baptiste is to their living mother. He leans his gun — father’s old Charleville musket — against a side of the dresser and greets his brother with an undisguised and manly affection that has the immediate effect of strengthening in Jean-Baptiste that sense of strangerhood that has been growing in him almost from the moment he sat down.

‘I hit a rabbit,’ says Jean-Jacques. ‘Just a small one, up by the hollow. Blew the poor thing to pieces. Let the dogs have it.’

‘To have hit anything. .’ says Jean-Baptiste, nodding to the musket.

‘The secret is to aim half a metre to the left. You could calculate it for me, brother. A bit of your Euclid.’

‘It’d be easier to buy a new gun. Something with rifling.’