Andrew Miller - Pure

‘What? Ziguette? You could sleep soundly with a murderer in the house?’

‘She is not a murderer, Jean. But no, I could not be in the house with her. We would need to find somewhere else. For example, Lisa says there is a nice apartment near to her own on the rue des Ecouffes. A notary and his wife have been renting it, but they are to move in September.’

‘That for example, eh?’

‘A place of our own,’ she says.

‘We would have Armand for a neighbour.’

‘We could survive that,’ she says. ‘Will you think on it, Jean?’

‘I will,’ he says.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

They separate, go on with their dressing. He buttons his waistcoat by the window, looks down on the swaying canvas roof of a cart going by, one he knows well enough, M. Hulot et Fils, Déménageurs à la Noblesse.

And what was it prompted his sudden talk of going away? Light on a chimneypot? Was that it? Half the time, it seems, one does not know what one is thinking, what one wants. Yet the idea is not so impossible. Sagnac would likely be agreeable, at a price. As for the miners, why should they object so long as they receive what is due to them? He tries to imagine it, he and Héloïse carefree in the verdant country, walking in the woods, pillowing their backs against hayricks, spotting trout in the stream, his mother’s blessing on their heads. . It is not as easy to imagine as he would wish. Easier to see himself fretting the whole while about the cemetery, then finding some excuse to hurry back.

‘I will buy oxtails today,’ she says. ‘Butcher Sanson has promised them to me. The men will like it. I will cook them with onions and garlic and tomatoes and thyme and a great deal of red wine, and perhaps some pig’s trotters. A trotter is an excellent thing in such a stew. The sauce is much the richer for it. Did your mother cook trotters for you, Jean? Is it not a common food in Normandy? Jean. . what are you doing?’

He has moved from the window to the dressing table, is sitting there gazing into the blue sheen of the mirror.

‘Are you getting one of your headaches?’ she asks, going to him and laying her hands gently either side of his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not at all.’

‘I should not have mentioned Ziguette.’

‘It does not matter.’

‘But you are frowning.’

‘I have just noticed,’ he says, ‘that I am starting to resemble old Dudo.’

‘Dudo? Who is Dudo?’

He finds her eyes in the mirror, grins at her. ‘One of our Baratte peasants,’ he says. ‘The purest.’

There is already a deal of heat in the sun. It pours down the rue aux Fers, pours into the bones of his head. At the far end of the street, he sees the dark forms of the laundry women beside the Italian fountain, the water flickering about them like bees. He opens the door of the cemetery: it is not locked and has not been so since the night with Lecoeur. A locked door did not serve him then, serve any of them. Certainly it did not serve Jeanne. As for those who might steal a little wood, let them have it. They are, anyway, he suspects, the type of people who disdain the use of doors.

On the roof of the church the masons and labour are already in place, though from the noise they are making it seems there is more banter than actual work going on up there. He scans the scaffolding, the parapets, but cannot see Sagnac. Perhaps he is not come yet and his apprentices are making the most of their freedom.

A dozen of the miners are seated in a circle on the ledge round the base of the preaching cross, boots in the long grass. Some are smoking their pipes, some chewing still on bread from their breakfasts. The engineer bids them a good morning, goes past them to the sexton’s house. The kitchen in the house is bare now, stripped of all but what is necessary for feeding the men. In Lecoeur’s old room, the cemetery’s mouldering records have been crated, though what should be done with them, where they should be sent, who would want them, is far from clear. The big bed upstairs will be dismantled tomorrow or the next day, its parts carried to the rue Aubri Boucher. All cooking will be done in a new shelter at the western end of the cemetery. It will be too dangerous soon for anyone to be in the house. A toppled stone from the church would pierce the roof like a cannonball.

At the far end of the kitchen table, a shadow moves, becomes substantial. The sexton is there, his silver hair brushed and neatly tied but no coat or waistcoat, just an old, greyish shirt of unbleached lined unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. He has a hen’s egg in his fingers and is carefully shelling it.

‘You are nearly done here,’ says the engineer.

Manetti nods, does not look up from his peeling.

‘I suppose you will miss it? Something of it?’

‘The garden,’ says the sexton. ‘We will not have a garden any more.’

‘A garden? No.’ From the kitchen window Jean-Baptiste can see the thin crescent of poppies down by the Flaselle tomb. And there are spikes of willow herb by the western charnel, and sorrel, whose leaves the men like to chew on. ‘Is it true,’ he asks, ‘they once cut the grass for hay here? That they grazed animals?’

‘It is true.’

‘Jeanne told me that. When I first came. She had learnt all your old stories, monsieur.’

‘There are some stories,’ says the sexton, fixing Jean-Baptiste with a steady and not entirely friendly regard, ‘you cannot tell to a child.’

The silence between them is broken by the doctor leaning in at the door. ‘Glorious morning,’ he says. ‘A very good day to you both.’ He beams at them. To Jean-Baptiste he says, ‘You are coming to the church? And where is that beautiful woman you have unaccountably persuaded to live with you?’

‘She will be here by and by,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

Outside, walking together, the doctor says quietly, ‘I fear that his mind is beginning to wander.’

‘Manetti? He seemed clear enough to me.’

‘Really?’

‘And what of Jeanne?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘My professional opinion?’

‘Yes.’

‘For her,’ says the doctor, ‘the only reality is the child. That above everything. When her time comes, I have offered myself as her accoucheur. No fee. I have designated myself a type of uncle.’

‘You have a niece in Lyon, do you not?’

‘My darling Charlotte. Yes.’

‘And the other?’

‘What?’

‘The other Charlotte. What did you do with her?’

‘Ah. She we had to burn, poor girl. She would not keep.’

They have walked round to the west door. It is not safe any more to enter into the south transept. Jean-Baptiste asks the doctor if there is something he wants from the church.

‘Now that you mention it,’ says Guillotin, ‘there are a pair of small paintings in one of the chapels. You know the sort of thing. Hazy landscapes with something inoffensively religious in the distance. Cleaned up, I think they would look well on the wall of my consulting room. You don’t object, do you?’

‘You are very welcome to them. They would only end up on a fire.’

‘A fire! My dear engineer, you have something of the Hun in you. Incinerating art indeed!’

Once inside the church, they go in single file. The sun has risen above the roof line and where the roof is gone, the light breaks in a shallow angle on the facing wall, picks out, with a kind of unnecessary perfection, the fluting of a pillar, the bevelled edge of an arch, a stone face staring goggle-eyed at some wonder in the middle air. Sagnac’s labourers and apprentices continue to twitter like birds. Something falls, flickers through light into shadow and hits the piled pews with a noise of thunder.

The north aisle is vaulted still, sheltered, dark as the edge of a wood. When they come close, they can see Armand is there, Armand and two of the miners, Slabbart and Block, all three bent beside the organ, working at it with tools. When Armand stands and looks at Jean-Baptiste, there are tears on his cheeks.