Andrew Miller - Pure

‘So this is it,’ he says, his voice in the room’s new hollowness like an actor’s, as false, as strange as an actor’s. He runs down the stairs, headlong, shoes clattering on the wood. Madame Monnard comes out of the drawing room, stands on the landing wringing her hands.

‘Is the house on fire?’ she cries as the engineer runs past her. ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’

Their first hours together are so painfully awkward that each is forced to the conclusion that a serious mistake has been made. He talks too much, then for almost half an hour says nothing at all. She sits on a chair by the dressing table, the light coming over her shoulders. He is tormented by the thought that she is suddenly, inexplicably, not as pretty as, on all their encounters in the street, she has seemed to be. She is wearing a white gown embroidered with red and pink flowers. Does it suit her? And high on her breastbone there is a mark, a little blemish, that she has tried to cover with powder. She is — in a way that suggests she pities him — talking about something or other. Polite enquiries about his work. His work! He is little better than a body-snatcher. And should he ask her about her work?

The light in the room fades to the colour of laundry water. He is suddenly very angry. He would like to make some sour, idiotic remark about women, about courtesans, prostitutes. Something unforgivable. Instead he says, ‘We should eat.’

‘Here?’

‘Where else?’

‘You eat with the Monnards?’

‘Of course.’

‘Perhaps tonight we might eat in the room?’

‘You must meet them sometime. It might as well be now.’

Downstairs in the drawing room, Madame Monnard is sitting alone beside the fire. In the weeks since Ziguette’s departure much of the life has gone out of her. There are little tearful episodes, snufflings into a balled handkerchief, sighs, damp looks into the distance, the occasional involuntary mewing sound. She receives no visible comfort from her husband, perhaps from no one at all. At times she gives the impression of being completely unaware of the world turning round her, but she is satisfyingly astonished to see Héloïse Godard walk into the room.

Marie could have warned her, of course; Marie chose not to. The visitor who knocked at the door in the afternoon was, as far as she knew, simply an acquaintance of Monsieur Baratte’s, someone from the cemetery, no doubt. Perhaps that rather frightening person, Monsieur Lafosse. And now this. This! The sudden, almost dreamlike appearance of a woman whose very name (supposing anybody knew it, her real name) cannot be uttered in polite company.

‘Madame Monnard, Mademoiselle Godard. Mademoiselle Godard will be staying in the house now,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘I hope, madame,’ says Héloïse, ‘that will not trouble you too greatly?’

‘I will settle with your husband,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘for the extra rent.’

Madame Monnard nods. She looks from one to the other, twists the ear of a little lavender-stuffed cushion on her lap.

‘What a nice room this is,’ says Héloïse. ‘Elegant and homely. Usually one finds it is one or the other.’

‘Oh?’ whispers Madame.

‘I am no expert,’ says Héloïse, spilling onto the older woman the light of a smile so generous, so of the heart, Jean-Baptiste has to look away for fear he will yelp with jealousy. He picks the decanter off the table, pours two glasses, gives one to Héloïse, who passes it to Madame Monnard, who takes it from her as if she had never held a glass before, never seen red wine.

‘You embroider, madame?’ asks Héloïse pointing to a sampler of indifferent workmanship hung on the wall beside the fireplace.

’embroider?’

‘The stitching, madame. I made one such as this as a girl, but it was not near as neat.’

‘My daughter did it. My daughter, Ziguette.’ It is the first time since the attack she has dared to mention her daughter’s name in the engineer’s hearing.

‘I can see she was well instructed,’ says Héloïse.

Madame smiles. Pure gratitude, pure relief. And something heroic gathers in her. Belly to heart to mouth. ‘Do you think, mademoiselle,’ she says, gripping the cushion more tightly, ‘do you think the air was a little warmer today? Warmer than yesterday?’

Héloïse nods. ‘I think, madame, perhaps it was.’

A half-hour later — a half-hour that flows past on a little stream of polite feminine chatter — they are joined in the room by Monsieur Monnard, who comes in, as he always does, smelling of some tart, acidic compound employed in the cutlery trade. It is his wife who, almost eagerly, introduces Héloïse — ‘A friend of Monsieur Baratte’s’ — but it is left to Jean-Baptiste to inform him that Mademoiselle Godard will be staying in the house. Living in it. With him.

‘Living, monsieur?’

‘Yes.’

‘ Here? ’

‘Yes.’

‘In the house?’

‘Yes.’

It is the moment Monsieur Monnard might stage his revolt. The moment he might refuse point-blank and at the top of his lungs to have either of them in his house a minute longer, might, conceivably, unhinge himself and fly at the engineer, wrestle with him. . Then the moment is past, swallowed perhaps by the recollection of his daughter lying naked and lamb-innocent in her bed, a length of gored brass by her feet. He brushes something from his sleeve, looks to the window where the fires of les Innocents burn jaggedly in the spring night. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘Indeed.’

They sit at table. Marie, coming in with the tray, serves Héloïse first, already looks to have some crush on her. They start with a radish soup. For the main course, along with some boiled greens and boiled onions, there are tubular sections of a grey meat in a sauce of the same colour.

‘Is this eel, madame?’ asks Héloïse, and when Madame Monnard confirms that it is, Héloïse manages to say half-a-dozen clever, pertinent things about eels. ‘And they are mysterious, madame. I am told no one knows where they raise their young.’

‘When I was a child,’ says Madame, ‘I liked to look at them in their buckets at the market. I used to wonder what would happen if I put my hand in the water. Whether they would eat it.’

‘Damn them,’ growls Monsieur Monnard.

‘Monsieur?’ asks Héloïse.

‘I do not think I said anything, mademoiselle.’

‘My husband,’ begins Madame Monnard, ‘has a large establishment on the rue Trois Mores. Blades from plain to fancy. Père Poupart of Saint-Eustache cuts his meat with one of my husband’s knives.’

‘I have seen it, madame. The establishment. Everyone speaks of its excellence.’

‘You know Père Poupart?’ asks Madame, who seems to have performed in her head the trick of entirely forgetting who she is talking to.

‘We have passed in the street, madame.’

‘He has a lovely speaking voice. My daughter, I think, delighted in it.’

‘One needs a strong voice in so large a church.’

‘Oh, one does, mademoiselle. Yes, I think that is very true.’

‘ Rogue !’ shouts Monsieur Monnard, springing from his seat. Ragoût, infected by the room’s atmosphere of feebly suppressed anarchy, has leapt onto the table and seized a gob of Monsieur Monnard’s eel. He escapes with it beneath the pianoforte. Monsieur Monnard, released at last to express himself, hurls his plate at the cat, but too wildly. The plate hits the side of the instrument and disintegrates in a rain of porcelain and grey sauce. In the silence that follows, Jean-Baptiste gets to his feet. A moment later, Héloïse stands too.

‘You must be fatigued after your journey, mademoiselle,’ says Madame Monnard, airily.