Pure (21 page)

‘Your mother,’ he says, turning back to Ziguette, ‘thought you would not object. I have just come from having supper with her. Your father too, of course.’ He gestures outwards and downwards towards the sitting room. ‘I am sorry to find you unwell. Sorry if I, in any way, unwittingly . . .’

She makes a frantic gesture. Marie drags a large pot from under the bed. Ziguette retches. She does not produce much – presumably her belly is near empty – but the noise, amplified by the pot, is impressive. Marie holds the girl’s head, red fingers sunk into the yellow hair, tugging it.

The engineer gets out onto the landing, eases the door shut and crosses quickly to his own room. He sits on the end of the bed, listening for more noises from the sickroom, receives a few faint reports; then the house is quiet, free for a moment even of its habitual small crackings and creakings.

Light a fire? Why bother.

He drags the banyan across his lap like a blanket, looks at the bottle of tincture on the cover of Buffon’s
Histoire Naturelle Volume II
, wonders if he should offer some of it, a generous brown spoonful, to Ziguette, then suddenly stands and goes to his coat, the riding coat he was wearing this morning, delves into a pocket, delves into the other pocket and pulls out the piece of bread Héloïse gave to him beside the cemetery wall. It has dried out, has almost the consistency of a biscuit, but he bites it, carefully, lets it soften on his tongue, and is smiling at the memory of that gesture of hers, so graceful, so spontaneous, so simple, when he hears from outside, from below, from – unmistakably – the cemetery, the thrill of a woman’s laughter. He unlatches his window, pushes it open, thrusts out his head. There is nothing to see, nothing obvious. Perhaps the fire by the preaching cross is burning more brilliantly than it should at such an hour, but otherwise . . . He leans out further, almost to his waist, focuses his stare. Across the fire’s red light shadows flit. Then it comes again, that wild laughter, rising above the walls, ringing clear as a pedlar’s bell in the cold, stinking silence of the night.

9

Seven in the morning. Frost on the charnel tiles, a white sun wedged between two houses on the rue Saint-Denis. ‘I heard women,’ he says to Lecoeur. ‘At least, I heard one.’

‘Mmm,’ says Lecoeur, who today has on the heavy, knitted waistcoat. ‘Yes. We must not forget our master has a clear view of us and can spy on us at his leisure.’

‘I was not spying,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I am not in the habit of spying.’

‘No? What would you prefer that we call it when you peer down at us from your eyrie?’

‘What I would prefer is not to find you drunk in the morning.’

‘Drunk? Oh good. Yes. Now you choose to defame me. And what if I was . . . if I was as you say? Would I not have justification? You escape here each night while I must remain surrounded by pits, bones. It is intolerable!’

‘You would prefer Valenciennes?’

‘I have burnt my ships there, monsieur. And all for your benefit. All so you can feed the swans at Versailles and keep the company of grandees!’

‘I feed no swans! Nor do I ever go to Versailles. I go to that house, there. There and no further. I keep the company of people I can make no sense of.’

Their voices have risen to something close to shouting. Each is dimly aware of being looked at, listened to.

‘But I am sorry,’ says Jean-Baptiste, alarmed to find himself suddenly on the brink of childish tears. ‘Sorry that you find it . . . intolerable. You have always been free to come and go. You know there are keys in the sexton’s house to all the doors. If it pleased you, you could go this morning. Walk about the city. I can manage well enough here. And . . . and you should come and have supper at the house. I had meant to invite you before. I am certain my landlord would be happy to make your acquaintance. You could come tonight if you wished it.’

‘Tonight?’ Lecoeur steps forward, muttering something about forgiveness, about the sweet balm of friendship. He tries to pull Jean-Baptiste into an embrace, but Jean-Baptiste, who has no wish to be folded in Lecoeur’s arms, steps back, and for a few moments, as the one advances and the other seeks to avoid him, they appear to be dancing.

‘You have not yet told me about the women,’ says Jean-Baptiste, bringing them both to a halt by the edge of the second pit.

‘The women? Half a dozen of the hardier local moppets. They climbed onto the wall with a ladder. Our men provided the means of their descent. I did not interfere. As a result you will find their morale much improved this morning. Cemeteries, of course, were once notorious for such women.’

‘You saw them?’

‘Their forms. At a distance.’

‘And none . . . none seemed remarkable in any way?’

‘I would say they were all of a type. Assiduous. Immemorial.’

‘Jeanne saw them?’

‘We saw them together. The spectacle seemed quite to animate her.’

‘Perhaps she knew them.’

‘By reputation you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘It cannot be a nightly occurrence,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘There must be some . . . regulation. They could come on a particular night. Saturday, for example. We would admit them by the door. They would have no need of ladders.’

‘But how are we to communicate this arrangement? By town crier?’

‘Monsieur Saint-Méard. He will know at least one of them. One will be enough.’

‘This will be a new part for us,’ says Lecoeur.

‘Part?’

‘There is a name for it, is there not? For those who arrange such matters?’

With a quick handshake they separate – Lecoeur towards the latrines, Jean-Baptiste to the sexton’s house, where Jeanne, Lisa Saget and the girl Natalie are about their business at the kitchen table. They will, from the window, have seen his awkward encounter with Lecoeur, but they say nothing. He is longing to ask Jeanne about the women, the moppets, their height, their hair, though he has already tested in his imagination a picture of Héloïse climbing a ladder propped against the cemetery wall, and dismissed it as being no more probable than her spreading her cloak and flying over the wall.

By the kitchen fire, there are now two chairs. The sexton’s is unoccupied; in the other is Jan Block, his shoulders hunched under a blanket, his eyes sunk and shadowed, yet he is clearly a man at the beginning of his convalescence. Jean-Baptiste congratulates him. Block nods, glances towards Jeanne, then back to the bobbling flames.

‘Good,’ says the engineer, talking to himself, to the air, to whoever cares to listen. ‘So now we go on.’

That evening – though in his heart it is the last thing he wishes – Jean-Baptiste returns to the rue de la Lingerie with Lecoeur and introduces him to the Monnards. Another place is set at the table. Lecoeur sits opposite Madame. Jean-Baptiste has warned him on their walk over not to speak of the work at the cemetery, that the Monnards were people peculiarly sensitive to change, commotion. Lecoeur promised he would not and remains true to his word, though he talks of everything else, fluently, restlessly, as if words had been massing inside him for weeks and needed only some genteel surroundings, the presence of a pianoforte, to start flying out of his throat.

Monsieur Monnard, however, seems genuinely interested in the mines at Valenciennes, the technicalities of pumps and gear, while Madame seems touched by Lecoeur’s description of his mother’s demise, extinct from the dropsy some years past and nursed in her last agony by Lecoeur and his sister, Violette.

‘Then you and Monsieur Baratte understand each other perfectly,’ says Madame. ‘For Monsieur Baratte was so unfortunate as to lose his father at an age when he might have hoped still to have one. And who is to say which loss is the greater, a father or a mother? And you are both very feeling young men, are you not?’

‘I believe we are, madame,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Ours is a friendship based on the twin pillars of sensibility and philosophy. We know each other’s thoughts, madame.’

‘I would say I am so with my daughter, monsieur. Just as you express it.’

‘You have a
daughter
, madame? I had assumed
you
were the daughter of the house.’ He makes a little flourish with his hand. The doubled cuff of his coat flicks the lip of his glass. Marie is called for. She kneels, collects the broken glass in her apron.

After supper, the friends climb to Jean-Baptiste’s room. Jean-Baptiste lights the fire. He offers Lecoeur the chair, sits on the bed. He is glad Lecoeur can see the simplicity of his circumstances, that his room, in size and furnishings, is not unlike the one Lecoeur sleeps in at the sexton’s house. He alludes to the fact. The allusion is missed.

‘I have not come empty-handed,’ says Lecoeur, reaching under his shirt and tugging out a crumpled package. He lays it on the table between them, smooths it. The package is tied with a red ribbon. He teases it apart, lifts away the plain top sheet of paper. Below is a picture of some sort, a complicated diagram drawn in faded ink and much annotated. He smiles at it and passes it across to Jean-Baptiste, who takes it, looks at it and nods. ‘Valenciana,’ he says.

‘Valenciana indeed,’ says Lecoeur.

‘Our old plans. You have kept them all.’

‘Did you imagine I would throw them on the fire? Now that we are older, better versed in the ways of the world, we should review them.
Distil
them.’

‘We should?’

‘Behold!’ says Lecoeur, taking the brass ruler off the desk, holding it horizontally and raising it over his head in the manner of a priest celebrating the Eucharist. ‘Valenciana rises from the ashes!’

For an hour and a half – until the candle, burning low, threatens to leave them sitting together in the dark – they pass between them sheets and scraps of paper on which the very handwriting, sometimes Jean-Baptiste’s, sometimes Lecoeur’s, evokes the excitement of those winter evenings at the mines six years before. There are headings such as
‘
On the Education of Women
’, ‘
Plans for a Modern Sewerage System
’, ‘
Sparta and Valenciana’, ‘On Combustion’
, ‘
The Ideal Wife’, ‘An Investigation into Rational Religion
’, ‘
Some Costumes for Women
’, ‘
The Purity of Forms
’, ‘
A Conveyance for Women
’, ‘
Plans for a Bridge
’.

‘And look,’ says Lecoeur, ‘we even had a little paper on the disposal of bodies.’

‘I had forgotten it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I had forgotten much of it.’

‘The very reason I brought it with me,’ says Lecoeur. ‘First ambitions are best. We are less brave later. Don’t you think?’

‘Or we simply change?’

‘Grow older, you mean?’

‘Older. Other.’

‘But tonight, everything is as it was. Mind speaking to mind, heart speaking to heart. The fountain of youth in our breasts . . . bubbling! You know what it is distinguishes one man from the next? His willingness to remain unspotted while the other, out of a kind of idleness, lets his mouth fill up with soil. Grave-dirt.’

Jean-Baptiste nods to the candle. ‘I will walk you down,’ he says.

‘Or I could stay here?’ says Lecoeur.

‘I think,’ says Jean-Baptiste, getting to his feet, ‘we would not be comfortable.’

They part at the front door. There is a clasping of hands. Lecoeur, standing in the street like the shade of himself, a spirit required by the hour to return to the Underworld, lingers and sighs and at last turns away with a reluctance painful to see.

Jean-Baptiste shuts the door, locks it, then stands in the hall awhile, in the dark between the street door and the kitchen door. He has done his duty, has he not? He has offered the hand of companionship, has revisited a past, an enthusiasm that seemed even more remote than he might have anticipated. What more could be expected of him? And yet, as he feels his way to the bottom of the stairs, what sits in his chest is unmistakably a sense of betrayal. He does not investigate it. He gives himself up to the darkness around him, cautiously ascends.

By lunchtime the following day the second pit, emptied and filled, can be crossed from the list, and though it is no easy matter to measure morale in a place like les Innocents, it does seem to Jean-Baptiste that the men have recovered something, have, in the company of the laughing women, been transfused with new vigour. The third pit is marked out to the west of the second, and at one in the afternoon, in steady drizzle that soon turns to steady rain, the men (some of whom have the knack of smoking their pipes with the bowls turned downwards) break open the ground.

The doctors are present again. They raise stout umbrellas against the rain. They are quite comfortable, like a pair of gentlemen anglers at a pond hoping to lift a pike for their dinner, though in truth there has been little at the cemetery to excite their professional interest. They have picked among the bones, have spent the occasional hour with the sexton and his boiling vessel, have sketched and measured and peered cautiously into the charnels, but they might have done as much in any ancient cemetery – Saint-Séverin or Saint-Gervais for example. Then, shortly after three o’clock, two coffins are raised and laid side by side on the wet grass. To look at, there is nothing obvious to set them apart from the forty others they have raised since lunch. The wood, perhaps, is a little less rotten, but there is really no time to waste on close inspection. Two of the miners apply their spades to the lids. Nearly all the men are proficient at this now, prying coffins open like oysters. Then they stagger back. One drops his spade, which falls, soundlessly, onto the damp ground. Inside the coffins are young women. Skin, hair, lips, fingernails,
eyelashes
. All of it, even the woollen shrouds they are wrapped in, looking only in need of some washing, some buffing, a little thread to restore them.