Andrew Miller - Pure

Four days later, Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse dress for an evening at the theatre. He has nothing brighter than black. She teases him. Where is that coat of his the colour of pea soup? Pistachio, he says, peeled pistachio. And back where it came from. Good, she says. Green was not your colour.

They cross the river in a cab. Armand and Lisa have their backs to the horses; Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse are facing. The two women, having met for the first time in the hall of the Monnards’ house, having observed each other carefully among the woody shadows of that place, have, apparently, decided to like each other, a great relief to Jean-Baptiste, who has developed a powerful faith in the rightness of Lisa Saget’s judgements.

The cab’s two windows are hard down. The evening sun is on the river. On the Pont Neuf, the crowd flows through itself, slowly. Each time the cab is forced to stop, strangers peer in for a moment. A girl in a straw hat climbs onto the cab step and reaches in with posies. Armand insists Jean-Baptiste purchase the two largest, the two prettiest. The cemetery is a thousand miles away, its pits, its walls of bone, like things imagined, some old trouble they are finally getting free of. And could they not keep going like this? A bare week and they would be in Provence letting the sun’s heat scour them. Or cross the Alps to Venice! The four of them in a gondolier sliding under the Rialto Bridge. .

The cab sways to a halt by the theatre steps. The two couples join the throng filtering between the white pillars. Jean-Baptiste has never been to the Odéon (it has only been completed four years). Nor has he been to the Comédie-Française or any other grand theatre. The last time he saw a play it was one of those rough affairs put on twice a year in Bellême by companies of travelling actors who arrive noisily (bellowing, blowing hunting horns) and leave quietly (with stolen chickens, scrumped apples, the honour of certain local girls).

This, well, it is more like Versailles, though of course less theatrical. They are shown to their box by a flunky in a tight lavender coat who, though graceless and offensively casual, will not leave without his tip. Their box is cramped and does not have a good view of the stage. The chamberpot at the back of the box has not been emptied. The candle wicks are untrimmed and one of the chairs looks as if, during a recent performance, it was briefly on fire. None of it matters; their mood is impregnable. The flunky is made happy with the size of his tip, then sent to fetch wine and. .

‘What do you have?’ asks Armand.

‘What do you wish for? Oranges? Roast chicken? Oysters?’

‘Yes,’ says Armand, ‘we’ll have those.’

The place is filling up. It starts to roar. People call across to each other, signal with their hats and fans. Some of the women shriek like peacocks. A scuffle breaks out by the spikes at the front of the stage. ‘Author’s friends,’ says Armand, knowledgeably. ‘Author’s enemies.’

The lavender coats move in. A man is carried out, arms and legs waving like a beetle on its back.

‘The minister is here,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly. ‘Box opposite the stage.’

‘The one with a face like an axe?’ asks Armand.

‘That’s him,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘But do not stare. I do not wish to be sent for.’

‘You’ve as much right to be here as he does,’ says Héloïse.

‘Even so,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not want him in my head tonight.’

They sit back in their seats. Behind the curtain, the musicians are tuning their instruments. The engineer does not mention the other man in the minister’s box, the young man in the shimmering coat. The name of Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson would mean nothing to them.

First, there is a short, frantic mime, then a lengthy interval, then, finally, the play. The audience sits in the light of five hundred candles, charmed, restless, a little bored. The engineer, Armand, Héloïse and Lisa Saget suck oranges, chew on the bones of high-flavoured chicken, drop the bones under their seats. Jean-Baptiste finds the play elusive, sometimes baffling. Who exactly is Marceline? Why can Suzanne not marry Figaro? And who is hiding in that closet? Héloïse, her lips beside his ear, patiently explains. He nods. He watches the audience, watches them watching. Dead, stripped of their feathers and fans, their swords, canes, ribbons, jewels, stripped bare and piled like bacon, could he not fit them all into a single pit? He has the thought; feels the disturbance of it; lets it go.

Another chicken is delivered, and more wine, and almonds tasting like scented sawdust. The engineer is tipsy. He kneels to piss in the pot at the back of the box, pisses into another’s cold piss and returns to his chair to discover that Suzanne will, after all, marry Figaro.

‘So they will have what they wished for?’ he asks, though his question is lost in the noise of applause and renewed skirmishing. Cautiously, he leans forward to see how the minister has liked the play. The minister is standing. Next to him, Boyer-Duboisson is whispering in his ear. The minister laughs. Boyer-Duboisson steps away from him, also laughing. Below them, the theatre-goers are fighting their way through the doors like scummed water draining out of a sink. The minister, still laughing, rests a hand on his chest as if to settle himself, and glances over, casually, to the box where Jean-Baptiste is watching. Does he see the engineer? His engineer? Would he even remember his face? And still he cannot stop laughing. It is as if nothing short of death could bring such a flow of amusement to an end.

Impossible once they get outside to find a cab. They trail through the little streets, almost careless of where they are headed, find themselves (just as the women’s shoes are starting to pain them) on the Ile de la Cité, eat bowls of tripe from a night-stall beneath the walls of the Conciergerie, then hire a skiff and are rowed along the black scarf of the river to the steps under the Pont Neuf.

They stumble up the treacherous steps, and on the rue Saint-Honoré, with embraces and promises of doing it all again — soon! soon! — they finally part.

At the house, Jean-Baptiste lights a candle, and with Héloïse behind him, both of them yawning extravagantly, they start up the stairs to bed. As they pass the drawing room the door swings open. Marie comes out. ‘A girl called for you,’ she says.

‘A girl?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘What girl?’

‘Well, it wasn’t Ziguette,’ says Marie. She lets out a squeak of laughter. In the candle-shadow her face looks like a mask she has put on in a hurry.

‘It might be best,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘not to let Monsieur Monnard know you’ve been at his wine. Though God knows how you managed to get drunk on it.’

‘You’re a fine one,’ she says. She turns to Héloïse. ‘Before you came, he used to talk to himself all night. Mutter, mutter, mutter. Drove poor Ziguette right out her brains.’ She sniffs.

Héloïse steps closer and takes one of the maid’s hands.

‘But who was the girl?’ she asks. ‘The one who called here?’

‘Oh, I sent her away,’ says Marie. ‘He’s got you now, hasn’t he.’

‘Yes,’ says Héloïse softly. ‘Yes.’

He had intended — had planned as much as they skimmed over the river — to spend the night, or a good part of it, diligently plundering his Héloïse, but within a few minutes of climbing into bed (he is lying on his side watching her disrobe and listening to her speculate about the identity of his mysterious caller) he has fallen asleep, and for the first time since the attack he starts to dream.

He is back in the theatre, walking on the frayed red carpeting in the corridor behind the boxes. He is looking for the minister’s box. He has a message for him, an important message, one that he must deliver in person, but the little polished doors to the boxes have no numbers on them and there is no one to ask. And then, in the sudden way of dreams, there is someone, a lanky figure lounging against the wall under a branch of candles. . Renard? Renard the foundling? There is no mistaking him. Scrawny neck wrapped in a collar of greasy fur, a tight little grin on his face. He bows to Jean-Baptiste, points to the door opposite him, turns and hurries away down the empty corridor. Quietly — no knocking or scratching — Jean-Baptiste opens the door and slips inside. The only light is a dull, red pulsing, as if from some conflagration in the stalls below, but it is enough to show him the minister and Boyer-Duboisson, their chairs side by side at the front of the box. Have they really not heard him? Are they so engrossed? From his pocket he takes out the message. A message with weight, a point, an edge. He steps behind the minister’s chair, puts a hand gently but firmly across the minister’s eyes, feels the fluttering of his eyelids. No nerves now. No more uneasiness. He is a boy from the country; he has seen this sort of thing often enough; has sat with his brother watching the pigman come over the winter fields with his ropes, his canvas roll of blades. As he sets to work, the minister’s feet kick like an excited child’s. .