Andrew Miller - Pure

‘We could go inside,’ he says. ‘Talk inside.’

‘In the Monnards’ house?’

‘They would not object. They are in no position to object to my wishes.’

‘On account of the daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of what she did?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was your friend?’

‘Not as you mean it.’

‘And how do I mean it?’

‘You know how you mean it.’

‘It would not have mattered.’

‘No?’

‘Why should it have mattered?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t know.’

They pause, as though the mind of each was briefly dazzled by the sheer strangeness of such a conversation, of it happening at all. It is Héloïse who recovers first. ‘And that is what you wished to say? That you have thought of me?’

‘It is not everything.’

‘And the rest?’

‘I wondered if you might. . come here.’

‘Visit you?’

‘If you might stay here. Might care to.’

‘In the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let us be clear,’ she says.

‘I thought I was,’ he says.

‘You wish to take me as your mistress?’

‘I want you to stay with me.’

‘What is this stay ? You mean to live with you?’

‘Yes.’

Now, he thinks, now she will throw back her head and laugh. She will accuse him, in a voice full of scorn, of not knowing what he is saying. And it is true. He does not. Was this his message? Live with me? Or has he simply said the most extravagant thing he can think of? He readies himself to say some harsh, dismissive thing to her, something to cover his humiliation, but when she speaks again, her voice is quiet, serious. Not unfriendly.

‘You have lived with a woman before?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. Then, ‘Is your question practical? Are you afraid I will not know how to behave?’

‘We do not know each other,’ she says.

‘We do not know each other well,’ he says.

‘On better acquaintance, you might find me disagreeable. I might find you so.’

‘You do not wish to live with me?’

‘I have not said that. Only I do not believe you have thought of. . all that you need to. Not properly.’

‘You are wrong,’ he says.

‘Or you are wrong.’

‘I am not wrong.’

‘Ha! You do not care to be contradicted.’

She makes a shape with her mouth, forms her lips as she might in the market when dealing with some canny, persistent stall-holder. Then she looks down and slowly grinds the toe of one of her shoes on the cobbles.

‘You like me,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘ Why? ’

‘You must know,’ she says.

‘Of course,’ he says, though in fact it has never occurred to him that he needed a reason for liking her. ‘You looked at me,’ he says.

‘I noticed you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is true,’ she says. ‘I did notice you.’

‘You were buying cheese,’ he says.

She nods. ‘You looked lost.’

‘You also.’

‘Lost?’

‘Out of place.’

‘Were I to agree to this,’ she says, after another of those pauses in which she seemed carefully to weigh each of his words, ‘I must be free to come and go as I choose. I am too old to take orders from you or anyone else.’

‘You would be free.’

‘And if you ever struck me. .’

‘I would not.’

‘I heard you held a knife to a man’s throat. That night on Saint-Denis.’

‘It was a key, not a knife.’

‘A key?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he insulted me?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will not be the last.’

‘Then I will fight them.’

‘With a key?’

‘You could come soon,’ he says. ‘Do you have many things?’

‘Some clothes,’ she says. ‘Some books.’

‘Books?’

‘You imagined I could not read?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I did not think that.’

‘I would like more books. The good editions. Not those for fifteen sous that come apart in your hands when you open them.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not those.’

‘And the theatre,’ she says. ‘It is a long while since I have been there.’

‘The theatre,’ he says. ‘I would like that too.’

For a while they are quiet together, peaceable. Even the street has entered one of its periods of occasional hush, barely a soul abroad. It is likely, thinks Jean-Baptiste, that from one of these windows they are being watched by someone who knows who they both are. He could not care less.

‘Is that you?’ she asks, turning to look diagonally across the street to where, on the shutters of the haberdasher’s, black paint proclaims another of Monsieur Bêche’s threats to the mighty. This one concerns the fate awaiting the governor of the Bastille. It went up a week ago and has still not been painted out.

‘You know my name,’ he says.

‘I know them both,’ she says, smiling at him openly for the first time.

She will not give him any assurance. She will consider the matter. It is a large matter. She will consider it and send word to him. He, she suggests, would do well in the meantime to consider it too. To wonder if in fact he meant to say what he said. Truly meant to.

For nearly a week he is left in a state of exquisite uncertainty. By the fifth day — the fifth night — he is suddenly sure it will not happen. That is his instinct, his flash of insight. It will not, cannot happen. Most probably she has each week half-a-dozen men asking her to live with them, men who confuse their lust with something more tender, something that has no part to play in the trade she practises. She is hard, she must be: reason insists on such a conclusion. She is hard and hollowed out. Or else she is kind, endlessly kind, and will not come to him for his own good. A man like him, an educated man, a professional man who must naturally seek to rise in the world — for such to ally himself to a woman like her would be to condemn himself to public ridicule, to ignominy. An aristocrat like the Comte de S— might do it, or else someone of small importance, someone who has risen as far as he ever will and can lose very little with the loss of his name. But for him — who is neither grand nor little — it is an impossibility. And she has seen that, has, at the expense of her own comfort, chosen to protect him from his folly.

He longs to speak to someone. He has never felt such a stranger to himself, as if his life was a room in which every familiar object had been replaced with something that merely imitated it. Speak to Armand? But Armand will be too vehement, too furiously for it or against it, too amused. Guillotin? Guillotin would listen, would, with the experience of his years, take a large view of the matter. A medical view? It is not unlikely. It may be the correct view. He is unwell! Unwell and not himself, not as he should be.

He discovers the doctor in the middle of a warm morning seated on a stool in the doctors’ workshop, polishing one of the orphans’ skulls. At the sight of it, that poor, brightening object on the doctor’s palm, all thought of confession instantly departs. Instead, they talk about the bones of the head. Frontal, parietal, occipital. How in infants and young children the various bones are not yet fused and how this is necessary at their birth when the skull is subject to immense pressure on its passage through the birth canal.

‘They are perfectly done,’ says the doctor, passing the skull to Jean-Baptiste. ‘They do not split like melons. They do not shatter like balls of glass.’

He stands to examine Jean-Baptiste’s wound, carefully parts the newly grown hair, pronounces himself quite satisfied with the appearance of the scar.

‘You still suffer no symptoms,’ he asks, ‘other than the headaches?’