Andrew Miller - Pure

Coming in, he is momentarily disappointed to find her looking less unhappy than he had imagined she would. In fact, she does not really look unhappy at all. She smiles at him, calmly, holds out her book above the head of Ragoût, who has curled his bulk tidily on her lap. She points to a word halfway down the page.

‘I cannot see it,’ he says.

‘You are not looking at it,’ she says.

‘You cannot read it?’ he asks.

‘ “Refraction”,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ he says, laughing. ‘Yes. I know it. Refraction. To use a lens to change the angle of the light.’

He carries the cat onto the passage (set down, it shivers with disgust), then comes back into the room, takes off his boots, coat, waistcoat. They sit side by side on the bed. She wets two fingertips, puts out the candle. There is light enough from the fire. They lie down. They kiss. Their mouths at first feel cool to each other, then warm. She is, unsurprisingly, good at buttons. He struggles out of his breeches, presses his face into her breasts, clings to her. Gently, she disentangles herself, works her shift up until it is rucked about her hips. When he dares to look, he sees flame-light on the skin of her thighs. Under his shirt, he’s hard as a bottle, too hard. Almost as soon as she touches him, he convulses, lets out the sort of strangled half-shout he might have made the night Ziguette Monnard brought the ruler down on his head.

It is another week before, in an unexpected mid-afternoon encounter, neither of them much undressed, he finally enters her. Once he is inside her, he lowers his brow, lets their skulls press lightly against each other. With her thumb she traces the line of his scar, the ridge of nerveless skin. From that moment on, in his own heart, he considers her to be his wife.

At les Innocents, there is a sharp increase in the number of rats. Rats visible. Guillotin is of the opinion they are leaving. The men acquire cats. Each tent has at least one, though not even Lecoeur seems to know where they have got them from. From their Saturday-night women perhaps, their moppets. Sometimes the engineer thinks he sees Ragoût among them, patrolling in the dusk, but at a distance one cat can seem much like another. At night, they fight epic battles. A cat is killed, but so too many of the rats, their bodies, whole or sundered, found in the lengthening grass or left as trophies on the steps of the charnels.

A new pit — pit fourteen — is opened in the vicinity of the south charnel. In addition to this, the engineer decides to broach the first of the private crypts. He gathers a small team — Slabbart, Biloo, Block, Everbout — and walks them to the west charnel under the windows of the rue de la Lingerie. They will start with the Flaselle family, the tomb sealed in 1610. With chisel and mallet they break the mortar, loosen the top-stone, then drive in their long, wedge-tipped steel bar and haul down until the stone shifts. They lower a ladder; it only just reaches. The crypt, it seems, has aristocratic dimensions. Jan Biloo is the first man down. As he descends, his light begins to flicker. Somewhere near the bottom of the ladder, it goes out. They call; he does not answer. Jean-Baptiste and Jan Block go down to get him. They hold their breath like scallop divers. They find him with their groping hands, drag his dead weight up the ladder until Everbout and Slabbart can take hold of him. He comes to almost immediately, but he and the engineer and Jan Block are some minutes together crouched on the grass outside the charnel, spitting, sucking in air.

Later, in the sexton’s kitchen, Jean-Baptiste sketches designs for breathing equipment, masks with filters of treated lamb’s wool or powdered charcoal. Or something more complete, a closed hood with an air-pipe and some manner of clapper valve to allow exhaled air to be expelled. He tries to interest Lecoeur in his ideas, but Lecoeur’s mind is elsewhere.

‘Monsieur Lecoeur is exhausted,’ says Jeanne, perhaps more sharply than she intended. ‘Everyone is exhausted.’

He nods. She knows about Héloïse Godard, of course; the whole quarter knows, though only Armand will speak to him about it. He folds the sketch, pockets it.

Lecoeur smiles at them both, dreamily. ‘We Lecoeurs,’ he begins, ‘we Lecoeurs. .’ Then he shrugs and turns away and gazes out of the window again.

Each morning, in the liquid half-light of spring dawns, he wakes from blank sleep beside Héloïse. Some mornings he wakes to find her watching him, wakes into her smile. And some mornings he is the first and lies very still, studying the lovely imperfections of her face, the privacy and mystery of her shut eyes. Then, when she opens them, her gaze, its roots deep in sleep and dreams, often has some taint of sadness to it, though it is a sadness she denies if he ever asks her about it. With dry mouths they lie a while talking of intimate, unimportant things. With dry lips they kiss a little. And this is medicine to him, this gift of mornings, the doggish warmth under the covers, the birdsong on the neighbours’ roofs, the new heartbeat in the bolster. He hardly notices how much he has ceased to notice, how much of the world beyond this room he has ceased to properly attend to.

When Marie remembers to bring them anything, they breakfast together in the room. On the mornings she forgets, Héloïse stays in bed and he eats at the cemetery with Jeanne and Manetti and Lecoeur. As to how she spends her days when he is gone, it is a source of continual fascination to him. No detail is too trivial. It is not enough that she informs him Madame Monnard cheats at backgammon; he wants to know exactly how she does it. The dice? The counters? And when the two women spend an afternoon sitting by the window embroidering, he wants to be told what, and what patterns they stitched. Rosebuds? Zigzags? Peacock tails?

‘What do you talk about?’

‘You, of course.’

‘Me?’

‘No. Never you.’

‘Ziguette?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And Monsieur Monnard?’

‘Sometimes of him too. And the price of bread, the probability of rain, whether senna or buckthorn is best for a constipation.’

‘You have made her happy again.’

‘No, Jean. I have not. You know I have not.’

A month after Héloïse arrived at the house on the rue de la Lingerie, she sits up in the bed drinking a little dish of coffee from a bowl painted with roses, and says that she wishes to visit the theatre. Did he not promise her? He nods. He goes to see Armand. Armand will know about theatres.

‘The Odéon,’ says Armand, as they stand together in a green lozenge of sunlight beside the preaching cross. ‘They are performing a play by Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais is of the party.’

‘The party of the future?’

‘Of course. And I shall come with you. Lisa too. You will not know how to behave otherwise.’

‘I don’t object to your company.’

‘Mademoiselle Godard is not well enough acquainted with you. She has not studied you as I have.’

‘Tell me this, Armand. You think Héloïse belongs to the party of the future?’

‘Héloïse? She and Lisa will be among its queens.’

‘And my own membership?’

‘Ah, you will be informed, dear savage.’

‘Informed? By whom?’

‘By circumstances. By what you will and will not do. We shall all be found out in time.’

‘When you speak like this you remind me of the pastor. My mother’s pastor.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘Desolation alone is left in the city and the gate is broken into pieces. If a man runs from the rattle of the snake he will fall into the pit. If he climbs out of the pit he will be caught in the trap. .’