Andrew Miller - Pure

There is a chair by the door. Jean-Baptiste drops his parcel onto its seat. The parcel starts to unwrap itself as though it contained something living. ‘I should like to have my old suit again,’ he says. ‘The one I wore when I came to you with Saint-Méard.’

Charvet looks at his assistant, then back to the engineer. ‘Your old suit? But that was sold, monsieur. To a gentleman in trade, I believe. Is that not so, Cédric?’

The assistant confirms it.

Jean-Baptiste nods, lets his gaze travel slowly round the shop. On one of the wooden mannequins (an adjustable torso on a wooden pillar) is a suit of neatly cut black wool. He goes up to it, handles the cloth, takes in the size. ‘This, then. This will do.’

‘In that ,’ says Charvet, speaking now as if explaining something to a child, not a good child but a foolish one, ‘you will appear like a Geneva parson. It is here only because it is necessary to show a range of styles. A wide range, you understand. But for you, monsieur, it will not. .’

‘And this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, unbuttoning his coat to show a line of green silk, ‘I have no use for any more.’

Charvet makes a curious bridling movement, lengthens his neck, blinks extravagantly. ‘Yet I remember, monsieur, how well you liked it when you first had it.’

‘You do?’ It is a genuine question.

‘You wished to be more à la mode .’

‘More modern?’

‘Exactly. You. . cannot recollect?’

‘I remember being drunk. I remember being flattered.’

‘It is still an excellent suit.’

‘It is a suit I no longer want. And I have brought the banyan back,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The rest too. There. On the chair.’

Charvet and the assistant look at the chair, at the parcel, the tongue of red damask lolling from the paper.

They fit him with the black. With a few tucks the fit is surprisingly snug, the colour immediately restful, though it is true that he does indeed look something like a Geneva parson. Charvet leaves the alterations to his assistant. He stands to one side, arms folded. Now and then he glances, with some disgust, at the engineer’s battered head.

‘This suit,’ he says at last, ‘may be simple, but it is not inexpensive. And the other has been much worn, has, I see, some stains on the sleeve. Grease stains if I am not mistaken. Grease or something worse. I will be forced to sell it at a discount. A considerable—’

‘That old one of mine you had,’ says Jean-Baptiste, carefully shrugging himself into his riding coat again and starting to button it, ‘the one you sold to a man in trade. It was worth more than the whole of your shop. That I recollect perfectly.’ He looks at Charvet until Charvet turns away. He goes to the door. The assistant hurries to open it for him. Sheer force of habit.

In the pocket of his coat he has the key to the cemetery, to the door from the rue aux Fers. With his hands in his pockets, he holds the key in a fist and crosses the market. He wonders if he is hungry — he has eaten nothing but some soup for breakfast, a medicinal broth when the day was still half dark. He pauses by the entrance to one of the fish sheds. The market is different to him in some way, strikes him differently, though he cannot say exactly how. It looks the same — same stalls, same red-faced, raw-fingered stall-holders, same hoarse shouts, same muck. He goes inside the fish shed, stands in the dripping shadows among pools of water bright with fish scales, breathes deeply. On the lining of his nose there is a sensation of coolness, of dampness, but nothing that could be called a smell, a stink. So that too has gone! It is at least a symptom he can, without risk of repercussion, confess to Dr Guillotin. .

And then he is there, the rue aux Fers, where brown smoke coils above the cemetery wall and the black letters — still fresh-looking — are waiting for him: ‘FAT KING SLUT QUEEN BEWARE! BECHE IS DIGGING A HOLE BIG ENOUGH TO BURY ALL VERSAILLES!’

Is he reading or remembering? He is not sure. What he does know, does not need to question, is that when he first saw it, she was here, almost exactly where he is now, standing with her loaf of bread, a piece of which she offered to him and which he snatched from her like some big, awkward bird, a big, yellow-eyed gull. And then afterwards, in the charnel with Armand, whom he meant to upbraid, to accuse of frivolity, of undermining him, he was himself accused, told he was concerned solely with his professional character, that his politics were the politics of ‘undrawn conclusions’.

Had he understood what Armand meant by such a phrase? There had not been much opportunity to think on it. First that business with the men’s pipes, then Lecoeur and Armand coming back drunk. That and a hundred other worries. But yes, he had understood well enough. Had felt the justice of it. Had resented it. .

The door of the cemetery opens. A man — a wiry man with a flow of yellow beard that looks more youthful, more vigorous than the face it hangs from — steps into the street. When he sees the engineer he stops, tenses, stares.

‘Block?’ says Jean-Baptiste, stepping closer. ‘Block?’

Block nods. Under his arm he has two rolled sacks, bread sacks from the dust of flour on them.

‘You are sent on an errand?’

Block nods again.

‘Jeanne has sent you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have your strength back.’

‘Yes.’

They look at each other a moment, on their faces some fleeting recognition of shared experience, of dissolution and uncertain reassembly. Then, with a brushing of shoulders, they pass each other by.

Inside the cemetery, the men are gathered about a pit close to the north wall. Pit eight? Nine? A man lifting a clogged, mushroom-brown pelvis onto the bone wall sees him first. He stops, straightens (as far as a miner can). Lecoeur follows the man’s gaze, lets out a yelp of delight and hurries over, speaking so rapidly, so confusedly, his words seem to overlie each other. Are those tears in his eyes? From the smoke perhaps. Just the smoke.

The men working the surface gawp. One speaks a word, drops it like a pebble to his fellows below. The engineer greets them. He has no trouble bringing their names to mind. Agast, Everbout, Cloët, Pondt, Jan Biloo, Jacques Hooft, Louis Cent, Elay Wyntère. . He is glad of them, surprised at how unaffectedly glad he is to see them again. He asks them to go on with their work. They go on.

‘We have not,’ says Lecoeur, confidentially, ‘made all the progress I would have wished for. We finished two this last week —’ he gestures to where they have dug — ‘and would have finished this had one of the sides not collapsed. It was fortunate the men were on their break. I even feared for the cemetery wall.’

‘You were using the. . the wooden. . the shapes. . the shapes that hold the sides?’

‘The box-crib? I had hoped it would not be necessary. The weather has been tolerably dry. It was an error, of course. I am sorry for it.’

‘It is no great matter. We can shore the wall with the earth. A ramp of earth. Then put the crib in place.’

‘Yes,’ says Lecoeur. ‘That will be best.’

‘The men have eaten their midday meal?’

‘Some hours ago. It is, I think, past three o’clock.’

‘I had not realised.’

‘ Tempus fugit ,’ says Lecoeur, gleefully. There are little white crusts at the corners of his mouth. His lips, chapped by the wind, look sore. ‘You are perfectly recovered?’ he asks.

‘I am told I have a thick skull,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And you?’

‘Recovered?’

‘You are well?’

‘Oh, have no unease on my account. We Lecoeurs are a leathery breed.’ He laughs. ‘I dare say I could wrestle a bear. Were there some need to.’