Andrew Miller - Pure

He lets go of the pump and walks to the front of the organ. In the pews behind Jeanne and Lisa Saget, in the wash of thin light from their candles, a scatter of ghostly figures are sitting, while others are quietly taking their places beside them. The miners and their whores. The whores with their miners. Men and women under a spell.

‘You have your audience at last,’ says Jean-Baptiste. Armand is watching them in the little mirror he has above the music stand. He turns a page of manuscript, smooths it, orders Jean-Baptiste back to his station.

It begins again: an opening just as delicate as the last (think of seamstresses, watch springs) and then, with no gradation, recklessly huge (think of mail coaches, cannonades), and then. . then something very like a brawl, a riot. The engineer and Lecoeur abandon their oar. A voice — one Jean-Baptiste has been assaulted with before — is booming from the dark directly above them, and missiles, little black books — missals? — are flying down on their heads, now hitting a miner, now hitting a whore, now — stupendous shot! — slapping the flushed cheek of the organist himself.

Among those gathered in the pews there is a moment of pure panic; then the women, young and old, form up and return fire, the priest’s basso damning of them met by a shrill taunting, a mockery, a contempt so well fuelled by historical indignation it is hard to believe the priest will not soon start to shit his own entrails. If they catch hold of him, if they can drag him down from his high place, the night will end with bloodshed. With murder, perhaps.

His arms spread, Jean-Baptiste attempts to herd the women out, but some are fixed like those stout posts sunk into the sides of busy streets for the protection of pedestrians. It is Jeanne who saves the priest’s skin. She takes the hand of the biggest whore, their general, and leads her gently away. The others follow her, their shouts unanswered now, or answered only by their own echoes. By the time they are stepping into the air of the cemetery, the mood has become one of general hilarity. The women press around Armand, petting him until Lisa Saget warns them off in terms they all understand.

The party revives: the teasing, the draped arms, the pairing off. The engineer watches for a while, then, trembling with a sudden fatigue (and wondering how many candles have been left burning inside the church, what alarms might be sounded in the middle of the night), he exchanges discreet nods with Lecoeur, peels himself away from the edge of the group and goes quietly towards the door to the rue aux Fers. He is alone — believes he is alone — but on reaching the door sees that Jeanne is walking with him. They stop. He speaks her name. She smiles. His heart sinks.

‘You will not be troubled by them?’ he asks, gesturing to where, by the fire, the company is growing raucous.

‘They would not hurt me,’ she says.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I cannot believe anyone would hurt you.’

‘I’m not a saint,’ she says.

‘A saint? Of course not.’

‘I wouldn’t even tell anyone if you kissed me,’ she says, and rests a hand very lightly on the sleeve of his coat. Light as a sparrow.

‘I am twice your age,’ he says. ‘Am I not?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘for you are twenty-eight and I am fourteen.’

‘Then I am twice your age exactly.’

‘Do you have a girl?’ she asks, removing her hand. ‘Are you sweet on Ziguette Monnard?’

‘Ziguette?’

‘She is very pretty.’

‘I am not. . I have no interest in Ziguette Monnard.’

‘Good night,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ he says, and she waits as if to see if ‘yes’ is all there is, if ‘yes’ might still lead to something.

He looks across the top of her head. The night is colder than it was, clearer. The stars shine blue over blue roofs. In the cemetery, the walls of heaped bones glint like the armour of some old, defeated army.

‘Will you ask Lecoeur,’ he says, ‘to ensure the door is locked when the women leave? They should not stay much longer.’

She says nothing; she walks away from him. He nods at her back, unable at first to stir himself; then he gets the door open and goes onto the street, throws out his legs in long strides as if he hoped to outpace his own embarrassment. Sweet God, would it have killed him to have kissed her? To have dropped his head a little until their lips touched? Armand would have done it in an instant and she would have gone home happy instead of angry and hurt. And what was it stopped him? Some ludicrous attachment to a woman whose favours he could already have purchased for the price of a new hat? Can he not, once and for all, put his life on some proper, rational footing? Tomorrow — tomorrow without fail! — he must draw something up, a scheme, on paper, such as he has often done in the past. A plan of action to guide himself with, a rational scheme drawn out of the best part of himself, the highest. Do this, but not that. This will lead to success, this to the life of an idiot. . Is he to be nothing but a body ? A briefly animated example of what they dig up every day at les Innocents? Is that how Voltaire lived? How the great Perronet has spent his years, sitting among models and machines in his office at the Ecole des Ponts, a room — in memory at least — always packed with rich morning light?

By the time he opens the door to the Monnards’ house he is starting to feel calmer, more compact, more himself as he can bear himself. On the hall table he fumbles for candle and tinderbox, makes sparks, makes flame. The cat writhes past the kitchen door, follows him up the stairs, seems briefly tempted by Ziguette’s room, then follows the engineer into his own. He puts the candle on the table, takes off his coat and boots, wraps himself with the banyan. Is it midnight yet? Later? His watch is in one of his pockets, but he cannot quite be bothered to fish for it. He prepares his medicine — thirty drops or so in a mouthful of sour wine cold as the room — then undresses under the banyan and, when all is ready, blows out the candle, opens the window, peers down.

Have the women gone? He cannot see or hear them. Gone to the tents perhaps to finish their business. At least the church is not ablaze, and the cemetery appears in good order, though a light still shows in the kitchen window of the sexton’s house. If he owned a sailor’s spyglass, he might be able to see a little way inside, see Jeanne at the table. See her tears? He closes the window, puts the shutters across, worms his way into the bed, feet tucked beside the warmth of the cat. Darkness, darkness and nothing to listen to but the roar of his blood. The drug is working fast. In a minute or two it will sketch the first of the night’s grotesques on the backs of his eyes, but before that, before he descends, before sleep and poppy juice atomise him entirely, he sends out his breath in a fading whisper.

‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. What do you believe in? What do you. . What do. . What. . you. . What. . I. . I. . I. .’

When the assault took place, when precisely, no one could ever say with any certainty. Somewhere between very late and very early, some deep, velvet-lined pocket of a winter’s night. He was dreaming, pressed under the weight of the drug, and then his eyes were open and there was light in the room, a wavering silver light. Behind the light, the figure of a woman standing by the little writing table, candle in one hand, something else in the other. She was perfectly naked, the light restless over her skin, glistening in her hair, glistening in the tight blond curls over her sex. She did not speak. His own voice was travelling towards him but much too slowly. She stepped to the side of the bed and looked down at him. Her face, tilted over the light of the candle, seemed calm and almost tender, a chiaroscuro angel bent over the bed of some ailing hermit. They may even, for an instant, have smiled at each other. Then her arm swung up, swung down and the whole world broke against his skull in a surge of exterminating pain. Briefly, he was aware of a noise, a sort of gasping, that might have been her or might have been him. Then, mercifully, nothing more.