Andrew Miller - Pure

A vantage point, a good one, from which to view the progress at the church, is his old room at the back of the Monnards’ house. He goes in there most days when he can, stands between the bed and the table looking out of the window. The air in the room is stifling. Heaven knows what it is like in Marie’s room above. Across the bed, Ziguette’s dresses lie slack as weed raked out of a river. Little golden moths, the type that crushed between thumb and finger, leave a smudge of gold on the skin, skip and flutter among the fabrics. Ragoût, remembering perhaps their old intimacy in the room, those winter nights he lay by the man’s feet, sometimes joins the engineer, makes himself comfortable on the dresses, has the habit of climbing half inside them — a cat becoming a girl, a girl a cat.

One Sunday evening at the end of July, the two of them are there in the room, Ragoût nuzzling a muslin frill, Jean-Baptiste propped drowsily against the table, gazing out to the church. It has a pleasingly stricken look. A quarter of the roof is still to come down — they will need scaffolding on the rue aux Fers next week — and they have still not dug a trench deep enough to examine the foundations, but the progress is acceptable, more than acceptable, so much so that even Monsieur Lafosse on his last visit could not entirely conceal his approval, and stood a full minute at the drawing-room window before turning to say (a voice oiled with suspicion) that the minister would not be displeased to learn that his project at last went ahead as it should.

If the miners can be kept at it just a little longer! The miners, Sagnac. And himself, of course, himself particularly. He has at least managed to find somewhere for Jeanne and her grandfather. Four decent, well-lit rooms on the ground floor of a house on the rue Aubri Boucher, opposite the church of Saint-Josse, a few minutes’ walk from the market. Convenient for a mother-to-be — convenient for a mother — for there is no longer any question but that Jeanne is with child. She has visibly thickened about the waist; her breasts are swelling. She looks younger. Young, shy, dreamy. Not unhappy. She smiles at them, speaks little, looks both ruined and saved, as perhaps Christ’s mother once did. And always nearby, always contriving somehow to stand at the end of her shadow, that booted, bearded, carved peg of a man, Jan Block. .

His face breaks in a yawn. He rubs the heels of his palms over his eyes, feels the body’s steady, monotonous instruction, his heartbeat’s heartbeat: this, this, this, this. . When he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking not at the church but at the picture on the wall, the etching of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, its single high arch high enough to let shipping through whatever the tide, its twenty-four narrow houses with their lead roofs. The picture dangles from its nail just as it has since the night he first came to this house, but it is months since he last considered it, months since he considered those old ambitions it once stood as emblem for. Bridges and roads? Yes. Bridges and roads crossing France, leaping her rivers, stringing towns and villages like pearls along a thread, and then the whole enterprise, dependable, sweetly cambered, laid like a gift at the walls of some shining city. Himself on a horse, gangs of men behind. Men, horses, carts, stone. Clouds of dust. And he could do it now. It is perfectly credible. He does not doubt himself, does not feel any more he must, through some anxious exercise of the will, hold all the pieces of himself together or cease to exist. But are his ambitions what they were? Are they, for example, less ambitious? And if so, what has replaced them? Nothing heroic, it seems. Nothing to brag of. A desire to start again, more honestly. To test each idea in the light of experience. To stand as firmly as he can in the world’s fabulous dirt; live among uncertainty, mess, beauty. Live bravely if possible. Bravery will be necessary, he has no doubt of that. The courage to act. The courage to refuse.

On the bed, the cat is watching him, placidly, out of the depths of its own mystery. He grins at it. ‘You think, old friend, they’d have me back on the farm?’ And then his gaze is drawn to the window again, to the church, where a black smoke is spiralling up through the broken roof. It rises, dips, swirls round the scaffolding, dips as low as the cemetery walls, then climbs again, circles in the clear air, circles, circles, circles, then swoops away towards the east. He shouts for Héloïse. She runs across the landing.

‘They’re going!’ he cries. ‘The flying. . Damn! Like flying mice.’

‘What? Bats?’

‘Yes, yes. Hundreds of them! Thousands!’

She looks to where he is pointing, squints, but there is nothing now above the church but night itself.

Mid-August; sunrise is twenty past six. Already the days are noticeably shorter. He folds back the shutters, studies the shadowed houses opposite, wonders if he is looked back at, cannot tell. In the bed behind him, Héloïse stirs. He asks if she wants a candle, if he should light one. There is no need, she says. She can see enough. Is there some water? He finds some for her, puts the glass into her hands, listens to her drink.

He is dressed only in the shirt he has slept in. He pulls on his breeches, tucks the shirt around his thighs, finds his stockings, sits on the end of the bed to draw them on. Héloïse is fetching down her peignoir from where it hangs overnight from an edge of the screen.

‘A clear sky,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘No rain for weeks.’

‘No.’

‘I should welcome a storm,’ she says. ‘Something to wash the streets.’

Their speaking is barely above a whisper. He is buttoning his breeches; she is about her business behind the screen. Across the street, the tops of the chimneypots show a thin, gold line of sunlight. Pink gold, orange gold.

‘What if we went away?’ he says.

‘Away?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘You could do that?’

‘I could ask Sagnac to take care of things here. The work is mostly his anyway.’

‘And where would we go?’

‘To Normandy. Bellême. It will be fresher there. Much fresher. And is it not time you met my mother?’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what if something happened here?’ asks Héloïse, coming out from behind the screen, dabbing her face with the orange water. ‘What if your men would not work for Sagnac?’

‘Why would they not work for him?’

‘Perhaps they do not like him.’

‘They do not need to like him. I do not know if they like me. And it would only be for a fortnight. Less, if you wished. Do you not want to meet my mother?’

‘I do,’ says Héloïse. ‘But it scares me a little, that is all. We live. . irregularly.’

He goes closer to her. He loves to see her face in the morning. ‘She is kind,’ he says, taking hold of her water-cold fingers.

‘Kind?’

‘Yes.’

She starts to laugh. He joins her, a soft, hissing sort of laughter stopped short by an improbably loud sneeze from the room below, the first eruption followed by a rapid series of others.

‘Monsieur Monnard,’ says Héloïse, ‘has caught Marie’s cold.’

‘I had wondered,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘if Monnard. . If he and Marie. . Is that possible?’

‘Last Saturday afternoon,’ says Héloïse, ‘I swear I heard the oddest noises coming from the attic.’

‘Noises?’

‘Like someone birching a child.’

‘And now they have caught colds together,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Poor Madame,’ says Héloïse.

‘She should go to Dauphiné,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not know why she does not.’

‘Or she could come back here.’