Andrew Miller - Pure

He looks round at her, more confused than angry. Who is she? Does he know her?

‘Eh, Queenie!’ shouts another woman, sister-creature of the first. ‘Can’t you see the gentleman wants you?’

But still she has not heard them, still she stares in at the shop window, oblivious of the scene moving up the street towards her.

‘She don’t want to make her basket-weaver jealous,’ says a third. ‘Or the old bookseller. Or your old man!’

‘My old man so much as looked at her, I’d serve him his balls for dinner.’

Now she turns, watches them, holds her ground as they approach. Whatever she is feeling — anger, fear, astonishment — she is careful to keep all sign of it out of her face. The engineer stops a metre and a half, perhaps two metres from her.

‘He’s lost his tongue,’ says the first woman.

‘It’s not his tongue he’ll want,’ says the second, laughing at her own wit.

‘It’s him ,’ says a man’s voice, a shaggy head leaning from the window of an unlit room in the house next to the shop. ‘The one digging up les Innocents.’

‘You sure?’

‘ ’Course I’m bloody sure. Look at him.’

‘Expect he wants a bit of what his workers are getting,’ says another voice, female, younger than the others.

‘I was looking for you,’ says Jean-Baptiste to Héloïse. ‘I wished. . to speak with you.’ At the mention of speaking, the audience bursts into delighted laughter.

‘You got to show her the colour of your money, dear. Bless him. He must be new to it all.’

‘And what about the Monnard girl?’ asks the younger voice. ‘Gone off her, have you?’

Héloïse, who has not once allowed her gaze to be drawn towards anyone other than the engineer, grants him now four or five seconds in which to make everything right. He breathes; he frowns; he opens his mouth. ‘Hats,’ he says. ‘How could I have forgotten hats?’

She makes the slightest of nods; then, very calmly, as if none of it had anything to do with her, as if it was just some nonsense she had happened upon and which now she had lost all interest in, she turns away and continues her progress up the street.

The man in the window leans further out. ‘Hats!’ he screams. ‘Did you hear him? He said, “Hats”! Hats!’

It is only a step or two to the window from where Jean-Baptiste is standing. He goes to it, goes quickly before the man has any chance to react. He takes a fistful of the man’s hair, pulls his head down hard against the narrow sill. In his other hand he has the key to the cemetery. He presses the tip against the man’s throat, a soft place just below the jaw.

‘Who do I look like to you?’ he asks, his voice quiet, almost conversational. ‘Who do I look like to you ?’

In the time to come — when there will be cause to speak of such things — the man will say he saw bloody murder in those grey eyes, will insist on it and be listened to. Whatever he sees, it is enough to silence him. Even the women are discomfited. The show is over. They melt away, each to her own small circumstance. Within a minute the engineer stands quite by himself.

At his next meeting with Monsieur Lafosse — three days after the events on the rue Saint-Denis — Jean-Baptiste offers his resignation. He is quite clear about it. He no longer wishes to be the director of works at the cemetery of les Innocents. He wants nothing to do with les Innocents. He wishes to go somewhere else, do something different. He is, after all, an engineer: he knows that much. He should attempt to employ himself more appropriately.

Lafosse, who never sits during these encounters in the Monnards’ drawing room, waits for the younger man to finish what he has to say, then tells him that resigning is a recourse open to people of some importance in the world and that he, the engineer, is not such a person. He, the engineer, is in fact a type of servant and not even a particularly senior type of servant. A servant who was taken on at the minister’s pleasure. A servant who will be released when the minister has no further use for him. Those are the terms. To abuse them would be to destroy utterly any hope of future advancement. It is, perhaps, more pathetic than amusing that the engineer had not understood all this.

‘So I must remain here? I have no choice but to remain?’

‘Bravo, monsieur. You have grasped the essential fact. And now, if you would permit me to continue with what I have taken the trouble to come here and discuss with you?’

What Lafosse has come to discuss — though between them there is never anything that might be mistaken for a discussion — is the news that the quarry at the Porte d’Enfer is finally ready for its first consignment from the cemetery. His Grace the Bishop has scattered holy water in the vaults and passages where the bones will be stored. The carts will travel at night, accompanied by priests from the seminary at Saint-Louis. Throughout the journey the priests will pray aloud in strong voices. There will be incense, pitch torches, black velvet. Everything is to reflect the concern, the Catholic decency of the minister. .

‘And may I inform the minister,’ says Lafosse, ‘that your health is now quite recovered? That there will be no repetition of such adventures?’

He makes no comment on the engineer’s new black coat, a coat somehow a shade or two blacker than his own.

Dinner with the Monnards. A cabbage stuffed with capers. Veal kidneys cooked in wine. Pumpkin tart.

Monsieur and Madame eat in a state of exquisite discomfort. The engineer, for whom all food has now become simply a matter of volume, mass, elasticity, surface texture, degrees of aridity, just eats. Marie is blooming.

The night of 9 March, just after eleven by the engineer’s watch, a convoy of carts — solid, capacious vehicles built to haul stone — is ready to leave for the Pont Neuf and the quarry. It took more than three hours to load them, though in the cemetery the bone walls look much as they did before. As for the crypts and the attics of bones above the galleries, these they have not even touched.

The horses wait patiently in their traces. Now and then one scrapes a hoof over the cobbles. The priests are pale, rehearsed, young, competitively pious. They grip their flambeaux, glance at their neighbours, glance at the carts with their velvet-draped loads.

‘Let us hope these fellows have good boots,’ says Armand. ‘By the time this is over they will have walked to the moon and back.’

Twenty, thirty onlookers have gathered on the far side of the rue de la Ferronnerie. There has not been much, until now, for people to look at. The smoke of the fires, the weekly appearance of the miners, like sailors on furlough in a foreign port, eyes full of uneasy knowledge. But now there is this, a procession with carts and fire, and priests in their long, brass-buttoned coats. The first undeniable evidence of the end of les Innocents! The first removal. There is — there has been — no protest, no lament. Whatever loyalty people still feel for this patch of foul ground, no one, with the exception of Ziguette Monnard, has bothered to raise a hand to save it.

At the last moment, when everything is ready and the performance is about to commence, Père Colbert appears. He blunders through the cemetery door, shoves his bulk between Armand and Jean-Baptiste, glares at them from behind his tinted glasses, glares at the young priests. From the hands of one of them he snatches a torch, then stamps to the front of the procession and plants himself at its head.

The engineer gives the signal to the carter. The carter whistles to the horses. There is a jangling of tack, the crushing sound of iron rims turning on stone and, from the backs of the carts, a muffled tapping and grating as the bones settle beneath their covers.