Pure (14 page)

An hour later, amid the banging of doors, the reckless jollity of dogs, his brother, Jean-Jacques, bursts in on them, as alike in his looks to their dead father as Jean-Baptiste is to their living mother. He leans his gun – father’s old Charleville musket – against a side of the dresser and greets his brother with an undisguised and manly affection that has the immediate effect of strengthening in Jean-Baptiste that sense of strangerhood that has been growing in him almost from the moment he sat down.

‘I hit a rabbit,’ says Jean-Jacques. ‘Just a small one, up by the hollow. Blew the poor thing to pieces. Let the dogs have it.’

‘To have hit anything . . .’ says Jean-Baptiste, nodding to the musket.

‘The secret is to aim half a metre to the left. You could calculate it for me, brother. A bit of your Euclid.’

‘It’d be easier to buy a new gun. Something with rifling.’

‘But I’d miss the old one,’ says Jean-Jacques, settling himself on the opposite side of the fire, stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘So what’s the news in Paris, eh?’

‘This and that.’

‘You’ve got skinny.’

‘And you’ve grown a belly. That waistcoat will need letting out.’

‘A belly suits him,’ says Henriette. ‘Don’t you think?’

It does. It suits him perfectly. How well he fits into this Norman world! Big shoulders from working the farm. A good high colour in his cheeks, his dark hair tied with a length of old blue ribbon. A country beau. A man adapted, a man in his rightful place. No wonder he has never shown much envy of his older brother’s success, his education, his being taken up by powerful men. His ambitions were always of a different order – less fancy, more easily grasped. And which of them now is the freer? Which has more pleasure in life? Which, to some clear-eyed judge of such things, would seem like the man arrived, the one whose wheel has risen?

That night the brothers share their old room, are carried into sleep by the calling of owls and wake together in the light of a late-setting moon. In the kitchen – that scrubbed and orderly world where even the light seems to lie like lengths of rinsed muslin – their mother is rousing the fire, dropping small wood onto small flames. She scalds cider. They drink it hot enough to make their teeth ache, put bread and apples in their pockets and set off with the mare to saw a fallen tree, an old elm uprooted in the autumn storms.

It is lovely work, sane work, though not easy for Jean-Baptiste to keep up with his brother. They sweat, laugh at nothing, compete with the saw, hint in their stories at sex, come home, the mare loaded with aromatic timber, their throats parched.

A week of this and he starts to forget about the Monnards, Lecoeur, les Innocents. He discovers in himself a great appetite for forgetting. He lets his accent thicken, rediscovers his country trudge, that considered slowness of movement and gesture that was the mark of the men he grew up among.

On Christmas Eve, they go to mass at Bellême. They put on their best things, compliment each other, though Jean-Baptiste is not wearing his pistachio suit, having, at the last moment in Paris, not quite had the nerve to face his family in Monsieur Charvet’s vision of the future. He had considered, briefly, going back to the place des Victoires and seeing if his old suit was still there (his mother has already asked after it), but let himself be unnerved by the anticipation of Charvet’s scorn, the unvoiced judgement that the young engineer was one of those timorous creatures who leap forward one day only to scurry back the next. Instead, he has on a suit borrowed from Monsieur Monnard, something pigeon-coloured and respectable, the sort of costume that might be worn to the annual Guild of Cutlers dinner. It fits him well; better perhaps than he would have wished it to.

In church, they sit in their usual pew, opposite the chapel of Sainte-Anne. Everyone, except the dying and those who have already drunk themselves into oblivion, is present. The priest, Père Bricard, is popular in the town for the shortness of his masses, his fathomless indifference as to how the members of his flock choose to damn themselves. When it’s done and neighbours have lingered in the cold by the church door and the children can find no more ice to crack with the heels of their boots and the town’s dogs have grown hoarse from barking, the Barattes go home across stream and fields. At the farm, the brothers look to the animals, peer into stable and byre with light held high, make out the shifting of cattle, the stillness of the horses, then come inside and sit and drink and join in the gossiping. (Who was that gentleman with the Vadier family? Did he not show a most particular attention to Camille Vadier? And what a curious little hat Lucile Robin was wearing! Surely she never meant it to look like that?)

At last the fire is smoored, the table cleared, and the house retires. In their room, the brothers lie speaking into the darkness above them, exchanging stories of their father. It is a ritual between them, a thing they must always do, the dead man’s life and character in a dozen worn anecdotes picked from a shared hoard, like that time in the middle of the market he told old Tissot what he thought of him, and the night he dragged the pedlar half drowned from the river and carried him home over his shoulder, and how, at his workbench, with his needles and grommets and waxed thread, he looked like a bull making a daisy chain . . .

Such tales comfort the brothers. Such stories make it possible not to tell other stories, like those in which their father is making free with his fists or his belt, his ashplant, his boots, with strips of hide or a pair of newly stitched gauntlets, thrashing the brothers or Henriette or his wife until he fell back, spent and shuddering. Nor do they speak of the last year of his life, though it is
this
Jean-Baptiste thinks of when they have fallen quiet and Jean-Jacques begins to snore. How their father became lost inside his own head, forgot the names of his tools, then forgot how to use them. How he took to addressing his wife as though speaking to his mother, called Henriette by the name of a long-dead sister. When the crisis was close, Jean-Baptiste was summoned home from the Ecole des Ponts and sat for hours on the stool by the sickbed talking of Maître Perronet, of roads and the grey wings of bridges, while his father lay with his head motionless on the bolster, eyes open, mouth slightly agape. The white lilac was in bloom. Bees and butterflies drifted through the narrow window and, having circled the room’s shade, found their way out again. Twice a week the doctor came from Eperrais, fussed uselessly over his patient. In the family they took turns attending to the glover’s needs, spooning soup into his mouth, propping him on the side of the bed to piss into the pot, wetting his lips, calming his fidgeting. All summer it went on – a whole summer viewed through the green diamonds of the sickroom window – until one afternoon, the air thickening for the last big storm of the season, the stricken man suddenly sat up in bed, grappled Jean-Baptiste’s hands into his own, stared into his face and with a voice hauled from the ice within him said, ‘I do love you.’

Love?
Nothing of the kind had ever been said between them before. None of the children would have expected to hear such words from their father. So who, in that little resurrection, did he imagine he was speaking to? Did he know it was his eldest son? Did he think it was Jean-Jacques? Or perhaps his own brother, Simon, with whose absence he had several times held long, muttered conversations? There was no sequel, nothing that might have made anything clearer. Two days later the glover was gathered into an immense and private silence. Two weeks after that, he was dead, a man who, to all appearances, no longer knew his own name.

On Christmas morning – and early even for the country – Jean-Baptiste goes with his mother to the house-on-the-hill, the Protestant house, where she and a clutch of others will pray in the way they prefer. The few who see them on the road pretend not to know where they are headed. Madame Baratte is a decent woman, and there are plenty in Normandy for whom the gospel of Jesus Christ means nothing at all. Let her have her little heresies.

They pass through a well-swept yard, are admitted to the house the moment their faces are seen. To the left of the door is a broad flight of stairs, the stones so well trodden they are like the cast of an ancient riverbed. At the stair’s turning is a pillar, a plain cross scored into the stone, and here there is space enough for six or eight to gather together. A small window gives a view of the road – a view that must once have been more necessary. The pastor is a Dutchman. He speaks French with an accent Jean-Baptiste has always found faintly comical. He is smooth-shaven, has eyes like a child’s. He opens his Bible. The pages are worn to a grey nothing, but he does not need to read from them. He recites.

‘ “Beware the Lord will empty the earth and turn it upside down and scatter its inhabitants . . .” ’

No infants? No stables? No shepherds or journeying kings?

‘ “The earth dries up and withers, the whole world withers and grows sick, the earth’s high places sicken, and the earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it . . .” ’

Ezekiel? Isaiah? The others will know.

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

He does not spare them. He would not consider it kind to spare them. At length – great length – he shuts the book and the little congregation is left to pick through their consciences in silence, while Jean-Baptiste, hat in hand but head unbowed, looks out at the sky and is lost for a time in the beauty and mystery of what is most ordinary. When it is over, the company embrace one another, stiffly, solemnly, then quit the house in pairs, melt into the brightening day.

At the farm, the kitchen is already strewn with relatives. Children – a boy and girl Jean-Baptiste only vaguely recognises – clamber onto his back the moment he sits down. Cousin André is there, of course, looking prosperous, masonic, entertaining the women with tales of small-town scandal. And there too the poorest of the relatives, old Dudo and his wife – pure Baratte peasantry – their eyes untellable from those of the beasts they husband on their scrap of Norman mud. They speak only old Norman, understand no French, and sit at the end of the table smuggling slices of white sausage under their smocks. A plate of it is always left near them for this purpose. Even the children know better than to notice what they do.

In the midst of this, this amiable hubbub, Jean-Baptiste works at his cider. The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes? Having longed to escape Paris, he is anxious now to return. Whatever his life will be, whatever fate it is he is pressed against, it will be lived out somewhere else, not here among the still-loved fields and woods of his boyhood. He drains his mug, chews at something in the bottom of it, and stretches for the jug. His sister settles on the bench beside him. When they were younger they used to fight, and she had seemed to him spiteful, proud, yet now – plain and twenty-three – she is all kindness, and with a wisdom she has pulled down from who knows where, an enviable wisdom. She asks him more questions about Paris, about the fashions, about those Monnards he lives with. He knows she knows he has not told her the half of it. She asks more particularly if he has been in good health. A little fatigued, he says, shrugging. He has not been sleeping as he used to. And then it occurs to him what she might be referring to.

‘You mean I do not smell as sweet as I did?’

‘We wondered if it was the air in Paris, Jean. That it is not as good as here.’

‘It is not,’ he says. ‘Not at all.’

‘Then when you return here, you will recover,’ she says. ‘Already I think it is somewhat improved.’

He thanks her, drolly.

‘When do you go back?’ she asks.

2

Armand and his mistress must have been busy, Jeanne too perhaps. When Jean-Baptiste returns to Paris he is pointed out in the street, or simply stared at as if he might reveal a fringe of angel wing above the collar of his coat, or a nub of horn on his brow. In the marketplace, the morning before the Feast of Epiphany, an old man, one of the ragged, grimacing sort who haunt any public space, waves a withered arm at him and warns him to leave alone ‘the field of our fathers lest the wrath of the Almighty . . .’ Two days later, a stall-holder on the rue de la Fromagerie makes him a gift of honeycomb, wishes him luck. He starts to hear a new word at his back. ‘Engineer.’ He wonders how many of them have any clear notion of what an engineer is.

But of all the reactions he encounters in the first cold days of the New Year, none is more perplexing than that of the Monnards. Coming back to the house, he had felt almost pleased to see them, had been most particular in his thanks to Monsieur Monnard for the loan of his suit, assiduous in his enquiries as to how Madame and Mademoiselle Monnard had enjoyed the festivities, but by dinner on the second evening, it was clear that all was not well with them. It was Madame Monnard (having first ejected a piece of gristle from her mouth to the top of her fist) who raised the matter that was evidently the source of their disquiet.

‘Monsieur,’ she began, ‘is it the case what we hear about the cemetery?’

‘Madame?’

‘That it is . . . to go?’

He set down his knife and fork. ‘In a manner of speaking, madame, yes. It is to be removed, the land made clean. The church too, in time, will be removed.’