Andrew Miller - Pure

‘Or an elephant?’

‘An elephant?’

‘I have just thought of it. An elephant. I do not know why. Have we spoken of elephants before?’

‘I cannot. .’

‘It is not important.’

For almost an hour Jean-Baptiste commands the work from a quarterdeck of winter grass; then, his limbs beginning to finely tremble, he excuses himself and crosses towards the sexton’s house.

Jeanne is standing at the table slicing dried sausage, leaning her whole weight over the knife. Armand is in Manetti’s chair, a book of music on his lap, big creamy pages, black staves, thousands of dancing notes. He is frowning with concentration, his fingers playing the bones of his knees. He looks up at Jean-Baptiste, grins. ‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘You must sit,’ says Jeanne, putting down her knife and pulling a stool from under the table. Jean-Baptiste sits, heavily, shuts his eyes a moment, then slowly removes his hat.

‘You are very pale still,’ she says.

‘He was always pale,’ says Armand.

‘You should be at home,’ says Jeanne, going quickly to the hearth, where a coffee pot sits on a tile by the fire.

‘Home,’ says Armand, ‘is where they cracked his head open. No doubt he feels safer in a cemetery.’

The coffee is only lukewarm and without its aroma it has no taste, but Jean-Baptiste gulps it and holds out the bowl for more. ‘Your grandfather?’ he asks.

‘He is resting,’ says Jeanne, brown eyes flickering shyly over the engineer’s grey. He wonders what she is thinking. The last he can remember of her, of any of them, is going into the church for Armand to play the organ. Was that the night he was attacked? The night before? The week before?

‘All that work stewing our exhumed friends,’ says Armand, ‘has quite exhausted the old fellow. It exhausts me just thinking about it.’

‘Is this sausage edible?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. He takes a piece, puts it in his mouth. Pork and pork fat hard as money.

Armand shuts his book of music. He turns in the chair and watches the engineer, watches him chew and eventually swallow.

‘You find me so interesting?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Interesting? You know very well I have found you so from the moment you walked into my church. I confess I am intrigued to see what your surgeon has achieved.’

‘You mean Guillotin?’

‘I mean Ziguette Monnard. I fancy she has finished you off.’

Along the length of Jean-Baptiste’s wound the stitches briefly tighten. ‘It is what she intended,’ he says.

‘Ah, but you were in need of something, my friend. You were not quite hatched. . And is that not a new suit you have? Have you seen it, Jeanne? Black as midnight! Bravo! He has at last revealed himself as the good Calvinist I have always suspected him of being. You know his mother is of that persuasion?’

‘My mother . .’ begins Jean-Baptiste, speaking to the stone floor between his feet, ‘my mother. .’ He falls silent. He is in no mood for Armand’s games, in no condition to play them. He finishes the second bowl of coffee, rouses himself and goes upstairs to look in on Manetti, sits a while beside the sleeping man, then, coming down the stairs, suffers an instant of giddiness and only saves himself from tumbling by snatching at the rail.

‘You have done enough for now,’ says Armand, taking him firmly by the arm and walking him outside. ‘The cemetery is yours still. Poor Lecoeur was in a panic without you.’

‘I should speak to him. .’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Tomorrow will be soon enough.’

‘I shall come in the morning.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Armand.

‘And in my working suit, if I can find it.’

‘We shall be ready for you. I will even attempt not to tease you for a day or two.’ He smiles.

‘When it happened,’ says Jean-Baptiste, speaking quickly and quietly and looking over Armand’s shoulder at the arches of the south charnel, ‘when she struck me. . afterwards, I mean, there were some moments before I became insensible. Very few, I think, but enough. I wished to. . hold something. Some idea. I believed I was dying, you see. I wished for something to make the moment possible.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

On the rue aux Fers, grey light, grey stone; the black forms of birds on the steep roofs. To his left, the corner of the rue de la Lingerie, to his right, the rue Saint-Denis. By the fountain, a dog, skinny, pared down, is lapping at a puddle. Sensing itself observed, it looks up, water dripping from its muzzle, then turns, limps into the rue Saint-Denis, pauses a moment as if to see which half of the world beckoned it, and goes north towards the faubourg.

The engineer trails after it, enters the street’s stream, stands there clumsily, immediately in everybody’s way. He cannot see the animal any more but does not need to. He knows what he will do now, though for a man who has prided himself on possessing a trained and shadowless mind it feels uncomfortably like a descent into ritual magic. He will walk up the rue Saint-Denis. He will circle round to the church of Saint-Eustache. He will follow, as best he is able, the route he took the night he went painting with Armand and his fellow waifs, the night he found himself alone in the mist with Héloïse. He will follow the route and so discover her again and deliver his message — whatever the message is. He has not yet dressed it in words but surely, once she is standing in front of him, it will pour out of his mouth like the Holy Ghost.

He sets off through a cloud of seamstresses, noisy, red-cheeked girls heading towards the river after twelve hours on their benches squinting at needles. On the rue Saint-Denis, it is the fat hour when work is briefly suspended and there is a chance to look up and wring a little pleasure from a scrap of winter’s evening. Djeco’s wine shop is already full. A pair of porters lounge against the wall outside like Spanish gallants in the Age of Gold. Foundry men, flower-girls, shoe-blacks, stick-sellers, beggars, fiddlers, writers-for-hire — if any among them notice the engineer, the wounded white intensity of his face, and are, for a stride or two, amused or unsettled, they are soon swept past to new distractions. He, certainly, is mostly oblivious to them, would be entirely so were it not for the occasional shoulder-check from some man or woman hurrying in the counterflow. He is looking ahead, as far ahead as he can, looking and trying not to give in to the growing suspicion that all this — what he is doing here — is no more than one of those effects, unpredictable and of long duration, Dr Guillotin warned him of. And then, having walked no more than three hundred metres from the fountain, a movement of red — purple almost in this light — stops him dead, then starts him again at a quicker pace.

Unsettling to have found her so easily! To not have the time to walk off the last of his giddiness, to gather himself. Unsettling to think that magic might work. .

She is too far ahead to call to, and moving in the same northward direction as himself. For a whole minute he loses sight of her, his view obscured by a pair of ambling packhorses; then he spies her again, standing by the window of a shop, her face close to the glass. He knows the place, has passed it a score of times. They sell those things, those — love of Christ, he has one on his own head! — but the ones for women, for women and girls. Ribbons and so on, scoops, coloured feathers. .

‘Héloïse!’

He has called too soon; his voice does not quite carry, though the woman behind him, one of those prematurely aged market crones with a figure like a herring barrel, has heard him clearly enough and mimics him surprisingly well, the plaintive, husky tone: ‘Oh HELO-ISE!’