Pure (12 page)

He mutters his thanks, walks away from her. He finds the market easily enough. It is already a city within a city, bantering, spotted with lanterns and rush-lights, though it will be another two hours before any customers arrive. On the other side of it, the corner of the rue aux Fers, the black wall of the cemetery, the fog-damp cobbles of the rue de la Lingerie . . .

When he opens the door of the Monnards’ house, something darts in ahead of him. He fumbles with the matches on the hall table, eventually gets a candle to light. Ragoût is by the door to the cellar, his blunt face pressed to the crevice at the bottom of the door. He looks up at Jean-Baptiste as if in hope of some assistance. Jean-Baptiste reaches down, feels the air flowing through the crevice, cold air, cold like the breath of a man in the last stages of a fever. He sets his candle on the board next to the door. Immediately the flame sickens and, before he can raise it again, goes out.

12

In what is left of the night he lies awake, the inside of his head shiny with the clarity of sleeplessness and unlabelled liquor. Again and again he recalls his meeting with the woman, with Héloïse, until the whole scene becomes impenetrable and he enters some other state, vaguely hypnogogic, in which he is watching the cellar door swing slowly open and himself move, as if compelled, to the top of the cellar steps, steps he has never even seen . . .

He dresses in the first of the dawn. Twice he wipes the mirror with his hand before realising the black spots are on his face, not on the glass, his reward for holding Monsieur Renard’s paint pot. He has no washing water. He curses and creeps out of the house.

He is the last to board the coach on the rue aux Ours. He climbs up and sits opposite a silver-haired priest. Beside the priest (who, under his black cape, is gently palpating some discomfort in his belly) is a foreign couple, English it turns out, the woman neat, solidly dressed, comfortable as a hen; the man red-faced, big as an old prizefighter. The remaining passenger is a woman, one of those elegant, mysteriously sad women of a certain age, who travel unaccompanied on the public stages and who immediately become the focus of all manner of speculation for the other passengers. She gazes from the window as if in lingering hope of some figure, someone like Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson, riding out of the rags of last night’s mist to beg her to stay. No one comes.

In the doorway of the coaching office, the coachman is taking his morning dram. The English couple share a boiled egg. The priest reads a little book, the pages almost touching the end of his nose. The elegant woman sighs. Jean-Baptiste – who has eaten nothing since last night’s chicken – shuts his eyes and falls so profoundly asleep he is dead to everything until, abruptly waking three hours later, he sees, through mud-spattered windows, the winter countryside passing by, Paris already leagues behind them. The Englishwoman smiles at him, bobs her head. Her husband and the priest are side by side, snoring, each to his own rhythm.

They come to a hill. The horses struggle. The coachman, peering down through his hatch in the carriage roof, asks if the gentlemen would object to walking to the top. The gentlemen oblige, pick their way through the mud while making observations on the character of the mud-coloured country either side of them. They join the coach again at the crest, spread their mud over the floor, then cling to the straps as the horses make their long, slithering descent into the next village where, to everyone’s relief, they stop for lunch.

In the afternoon, all of them having drunk a good deal of white wine with the food, there is an hour of harmless conversation followed by an hour of napping, the coach rocking like a boat, the world outside the windows passing by, unconsidered and nameless.

They get to Amiens two hours after dark, riding in through one of the old city gates and craning their necks to get a glimpse of the shadow of the cathedral. There is a party of pilgrims staying at the inn. The newcomers must make the best of what space remains. Jean-Baptiste shares a bed in the attic with the priest and is invited, before the candle is put out, to join him in a prayer. He does not wish to pray, would prefer to announce that he is a philosopher, a rationalist, a freethinker, but he politely adds his amens to the priest’s and feels the old comfort of it. They shake hands and snuff the light. The priest’s guts rumble. He apologises. Jean-Baptiste assures him he is not troubled by it.

In the morning, he wakes with his head rolled against the priest’s shoulder. They sit up in the bed, shake hands again. This is life; this is travelling.

A new coach, a new coachman, fresh horses. They reach Douai by early afternoon. Here, the company divides. The old priest is met by young priests from the seminary, the English couple cross the yard to the waiting Calais coach, the sad and elegant woman makes hushed enquiries about the next conveyance to Brussels. Jean-Baptiste, clutching a small valise, is hurried into a crowded box aimed at Valenciennes. Two hours later, he climbs down, stiff with cold, onto the rue de Paris. There is always traffic between the town and the mines. For ten sous, he buys a ride on a cart delivering barrels of high-smelling butter, and they come to the edge of the miners’ colony just as the daylight gutters behind them.

Even in the gloom, it is evident that Lecoeur was right and that nothing important has changed since Jean-Baptiste was last here. The same thick rind of shacks and hovels, like the encampment of a besieging army, one that clings on grimly without the slightest faith in victory. Scores of small fires burn, each attended by its gang of silhouetted men and women. On the verges of the road, children play laboriously, some pausing to look up, wan and incurious, at the passing wagon. The roads were built by the company. The first were given names such as avenue de Charbon, avenue de l’Avenir, even avenue de Richesse. Later roads were simply given numbers: rue 1, rue 2. In the centre of it all, discernible as a darker, denser zone of smoke and muffled din, are the works themselves.

The managers have a compound of their own a little to the east of the works. The prevailing wind brings a steady drift of soot and rock dust. The style of the compound is that of a provincial barracks, each block divided into six, each sixth the home of a manager, most of them single men. It is not a place to bring a wife; it is certainly not a place you might hope to find one. The senior managers live in Valenciennes. The owners and shareholders are in Paris, where the mines might feature in their thoughts as marvellous holes in the ground from which one can simply scoop money.

Snow has been threatening for hours. Now, just as the engineer enters the compound, it begins to fall. He remembers Lecoeur’s place; his own was next to it for nigh on a year, the second and third divisions respectively of the second block. Outside his front window, Lecoeur used to have a small garden, a patch of worked ground in which, in summer, he grew onions and lettuces, some marigolds. There is no trace of it now.

He raps at the door, waits, knocks again. Snow is settling on his shoulders, the brim of his hat. He is about to knock for a third time when the door is dragged open and there is Lecoeur, candle in hand, the flame streaming, flickering.

‘Comrade!’ he cries. ‘Oh, dear comrade! I am almost deranged with waiting!’

The candle blows out. They go down the little passage in the dark. They come to the parlour. The candle, after some searching for the necessary materials, is lit again. Lecoeur stands in the middle of the room, triumphant, fumy, a little unsteady.

‘You remember it?’ he asks. ‘Mmm? Can you not see your old self in that very armchair?’

‘I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He takes in the room – the chair with its blooms of human grease, the mean little fire, the silhouette portraits of mother and sister . . . A constancy, a changelessness that, like that of the miners’ colony, is not of a good type.

On the table, a meal has been set out. Some slices of a soused calf’s head, potatoes undressed, bread spread thinly with a previous consignment of the high-smelling butter. At the centre of the table is a bottle containing some clear liquid that Lecoeur now pours into two glasses, draining his own immediately, then passing the other to Jean-Baptiste. They sit opposite each other. Jean-Baptiste saws at the slice of head on his plate (it tastes, poor thing, as though pickled in its own tears). He sips at the stuff from the bottle, sees black flakes of snow collide soundlessly with the window glass.

Three years since they last met – a hurried embrace in the drizzle by the coach-stop in Valenciennes. What rigours have those years imposed that this man should be so hollowed out? He is no more than thirty-five, possibly younger, yet looks fifty and ill. Most of his teeth have gone. His nose is swollen, pitted, strung with swollen vessels. He is pitifully thin and nervous. Once he has started talking, he cannot stop, and what began breezily enough becomes, by degrees, a lament, then a bitter complaint, that has at its heart the mine, that leviathan, that grinder of men’s bones.

Is this how he passes his nights? Alone with a bottle, indicting the air? He has on a waistcoat of clotted brown wool, a garment knitted perhaps by a circle of unmarried female relatives for whom the young Lecoeur, the Lecoeur with teeth, once represented the family’s last great hope. By the time he falls silent and reaches, with a lover’s sigh, for the bottle again, Jean-Baptiste has already decided he must take him to Paris if he can. Here he will not last another winter. And can he
really
have lost all his former ability? All that good activity of mind he once possessed? With the minister’s money, the minister’s authority, it should not be impossible to extricate him. There is a risk, of course. How far gone is he? But in good conscience, he cannot be left in Valenciennes.

He is thinking it through, trying to construct in his imagination a credible picture of the first day of excavations at les Innocents – himself on some kind of dais or scaffolding, the men below in neat rows with their tools – when Lecoeur suddenly asks, ‘Have you married?’

‘No,’ says Jean-Baptiste, into whose mind – absurdly! – comes the shadow of Héloïse, the whore Héloïse.

‘I thought not,’ says Lecoeur. ‘A married man does not wear a suit such as that.’

‘And you?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘There is some . . . involvement?’

Lecoeur smiles, shakes his head, glances into the fire. ‘I have had nothing to do with women for a long time now.’

In the morning, the tocsin rings at three thirty. First shift, first descent, is at four. Jean-Baptiste wakes in the upstairs room. He is looking towards the window, but there is no hint of any light. He swings his legs from the bed. The room is laughably cold. He remembers it all, perfectly.

In the parlour, he finds Lecoeur fully dressed, his face a mask of concentration as he uses both hands to pour himself a glass from the now almost empty bottle. He sets the bottle down, then leans his mouth to the rim of the glass and sucks in the first mouthful while the glass is still on the table.

‘Shall I pour one for you?’ he asks.

‘Later, perhaps,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

They have, the previous evening, talked a little about the scheme for les Innocents, about the men who will be needed. Lecoeur was reassuringly businesslike. He had prepared a list of names and, going down the list (Everbout, Slabbart, Block, Rape, Cent, Wyntère . . .), gave Jean-Baptiste a quick assessment of each of them, the approximate age, length of service, moral character so far as it was known, could be known. Nothing was said about adding his own name to the list, but now, in the snow-cold parlour, Jean-Baptiste asks if he might consider it.

‘
Consider it!
’

In his rush to clutch his friend’s hands, Lecoeur strikes the corner of the table with his thigh, almost upsetting the precious bottle.

‘They will name squares after us!’ he cries. ‘The men who purified Paris!’

He breaks into a jig; he cannot help himself. Jean-Baptiste laughs, claps time. He has saved a life today and has not even had his breakfast.

For almost an hour, having rediscovered their old intensity of speaking, the thrust and parry of the Valenciana days, the two of them discuss the preparations they must make. The transportation of the men, their lodging in Paris. Hygiene, discipline, pay. All imaginable difficulties, from inclement weather to a terror of ghosts.

‘And this place,’ asks Lecoeur, ‘where the remains will be taken . . . ?’

‘An old quarry.’

‘The arrangements are complete?’

‘They will be soon enough.’

‘And it is dry? We have been using a new pump here after the English model. Much faster than anything we have used before.’

‘My responsibility is the cemetery. Once the carts have left les Innocents . . .’

‘How deep must we go?’

‘They say some of the common graves are thirty metres.’

‘So deep?’

‘Most, hopefully, are less so, but for the men, it will not be very pretty work.’

‘It cannot,’ says Lecoeur, ‘be any worse than slithering into the earth with a pick and not knowing when you might crawl into choke-damp or when the tunnel behind you will fall. We lost three this last week. Buried alive. They will not shore up the tunnels properly, for they know they will not be paid for it. Only for coal.’

Beyond the window, the day does not seem to be getting any lighter. Thin gusts of snow are striking the glass again. Jean-Baptiste bestirs himself. He does not intend to be trapped here.