Andrew Miller - Pure

‘Marie, madame? I did not know she could read.’

‘She could not read her own name, monsieur,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘but she has ears. She can hear better than an owl.’

Instantly — unbidden and perfect — an image of Marie with tufted ears, perched on a bough in moonlight, enters the engineer’s imagination.

‘It was said to her, monsieur,’ explains Madame. ‘She learnt it.’

‘And it is not the only such,’ says Monsieur Monnard. ‘I had Monsieur Gobel in the shop this afternoon, who informed me he had seen something of a very similar character on a wall opposite the Bourse.’

‘There may be hundreds of them,’ says Madame. ‘Could there be hundreds?’

‘That other,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, fork in the air, ‘the one by the Bourse. It made use of the same name?’

‘Bêche,’ says Monsieur Monnard, stabbing at a last square of beef on his plate. ‘And all manner of threats to the king and his ministers. My wife has been very affected, monsieur.’

‘I fear,’ says Madame, who does, suddenly, look very affected, ‘we shall be murdered in our beds. We shall have our throats slit.’

‘I am sure it is all idle,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Nothing but. . a type of game.’

‘A game ? You may say so, monsieur. Yes, you wish to comfort me. You are a very considerate young man. But I shall dream tonight of this Bêche climbing in at our bedroom window. Would you come, monsieur, if we called you? Do you have a sword, monsieur?’

‘I do not, madame.’

‘I thought you would have a sword.’

‘I am an engineer, madame. I have a brass ruler.’

‘I dare say it might serve,’ says Madame, thoughtfully. ‘If it is a large one.’

Marie comes in to clear the plates. All conversation stops. The plates are gathered, piled. She has strong red hands like a man, a working man. And that black hair of hers! That slick female moustache that is, surely, no defect. To Jean-Baptiste she seems to possess a vigour no one else in the room can match, as if her roots were sunk into some richer, blacker soil they cannot reach.

When she goes, pulling the door shut with her trailing foot, Madame and Monsieur exchange glances, then turn their gaze on their lodger, as if some explanation — an explanation for every ill and unsettling thing that has occurred since his arrival on the rue de la Lingerie — was now required of him.

‘I wished to ask you,’ begins Jean-Baptiste, ‘to enquire that is, how your daughter does, madame.’

‘Ziggi? Oh, it is very trying to have children, monsieur. She seems quite to have melted. You should call on her, monsieur. My husband and myself are at our wits’ ends. Ever since — and I pray you excuse us — ever since your work began she will not be comforted. It is as if she felt the shovels on her own skin.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Truly. But the work cannot be avoided. I am trying, madame. . we are trying, to do what is good, what is. .’

The fire snaps; a spark flies out. Jean-Baptiste, rising swiftly, extinguishes it with the toe of his boot.

‘The wood is green,’ growls Monsieur Monnard, and he frowns at the fire as though green wood was the green heart of all that vexed him.

Upstairs, shielding his candle from the dozen draughts that live in the air at the top of the house like so many secret, invisible streams, the engineer stops outside Ziguette’s room and looks down at the line of light at the bottom of her door. It is late, but he is curious to see her, this melting girl. And he would, if he is able, like to give her some reassurance. As a guest, a type of guest in this place, it surely behoves him to offer her his sympathy, and he is about to tap softly on the door when it is opened and Marie is there, the hint of a smile on her face. For a few seconds they stand, blatantly regarding each other; then she steps back to admit him.

Two candles (in addition to his own) illuminate the room: one on the dressing table, the other in a little holder of painted porcelain on the cabinet beside the bed. The room is spacious, at least three times the size of his own, and with a large shuttered window over the quiet street. Put into good order, it would be a pleasant room, the nicest in the house perhaps, but nothing here is in good order. The place appears to have been subject to a private storm, one that has whirled every dress and petticoat, every linen pocket, embroidered apron and set of stays, every mob cap and straw hat, every frill, stocking and furbelow that a cutler’s paternal love can bestow upon an only daughter, whirled it all into the air and then, suddenly ceasing, left everything to rain down in confusion. In the centre of it all, partly covered by it, is Ziguette herself, her body loosely sculpted by a linen sheet, her face flushed with a heat whose source is surely internal. (The room has only a modest fire.) She stares up at the engineer with swollen eyes, her hair — unpinned, uncovered, uncombed — spread over the bolster in a heavy blond tangle. Her mouth has a punched look, and in the stretched white of her neck he can clearly see the pulsing of her blood.

‘It is not too late, I hope, to pay a call?’

She does not answer him. He looks round at Marie, who is standing directly behind him, hands clasped at the front of her thighs, her expression now perfectly blank.

‘Your mother,’ he says, turning back to Ziguette, ‘thought you would not object. I have just come from having supper with her. Your father too, of course.’ He gestures outwards and downwards towards the sitting room. ‘I am sorry to find you unwell. Sorry if I, in any way, unwittingly. .’

She makes a frantic gesture. Marie drags a large pot from under the bed. Ziguette retches. She does not produce much — presumably her belly is near empty — but the noise, amplified by the pot, is impressive. Marie holds the girl’s head, red fingers sunk into the yellow hair, tugging it.

The engineer gets out onto the landing, eases the door shut and crosses quickly to his own room. He sits on the end of the bed, listening for more noises from the sickroom, receives a few faint reports; then the house is quiet, free for a moment even of its habitual small crackings and creakings.

Light a fire? Why bother.

He drags the banyan across his lap like a blanket, looks at the bottle of tincture on the cover of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Volume II , wonders if he should offer some of it, a generous brown spoonful, to Ziguette, then suddenly stands and goes to his coat, the riding coat he was wearing this morning, delves into a pocket, delves into the other pocket and pulls out the piece of bread Héloïse gave to him beside the cemetery wall. It has dried out, has almost the consistency of a biscuit, but he bites it, carefully, lets it soften on his tongue, and is smiling at the memory of that gesture of hers, so graceful, so spontaneous, so simple, when he hears from outside, from below, from — unmistakably — the cemetery, the thrill of a woman’s laughter. He unlatches his window, pushes it open, thrusts out his head. There is nothing to see, nothing obvious. Perhaps the fire by the preaching cross is burning more brilliantly than it should at such an hour, but otherwise. . He leans out further, almost to his waist, focuses his stare. Across the fire’s red light shadows flit. Then it comes again, that wild laughter, rising above the walls, ringing clear as a pedlar’s bell in the cold, stinking silence of the night.

Seven in the morning. Frost on the charnel tiles, a white sun wedged between two houses on the rue Saint-Denis. ‘I heard women,’ he says to Lecoeur. ‘At least, I heard one.’

‘Mmm,’ says Lecoeur, who today has on the heavy, knitted waistcoat. ‘Yes. We must not forget our master has a clear view of us and can spy on us at his leisure.’