Pure (30 page)

‘You are not looking at it,’ she says.

‘You cannot read it?’ he asks.

‘ “Refraction”,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ he says, laughing. ‘Yes. I know it. Refraction. To use a lens to change the angle of the light.’

He carries the cat onto the passage (set down, it shivers with disgust), then comes back into the room, takes off his boots, coat, waistcoat. They sit side by side on the bed. She wets two fingertips, puts out the candle. There is light enough from the fire. They lie down. They kiss. Their mouths at first feel cool to each other, then warm. She is, unsurprisingly, good at buttons. He struggles out of his breeches, presses his face into her breasts, clings to her. Gently, she disentangles herself, works her shift up until it is rucked about her hips. When he dares to look, he sees flame-light on the skin of her thighs. Under his shirt, he’s hard as a bottle, too hard. Almost as soon as she touches him, he convulses, lets out the sort of strangled half-shout he might have made the night Ziguette Monnard brought the ruler down on his head.

It is another week before, in an unexpected mid-afternoon encounter, neither of them much undressed, he finally enters her. Once he is inside her, he lowers his brow, lets their skulls press lightly against each other. With her thumb she traces the line of his scar, the ridge of nerveless skin. From that moment on, in his own heart, he considers her to be his wife.

11

At les Innocents, there is a sharp increase in the number of rats. Rats visible. Guillotin is of the opinion they are leaving. The men acquire cats. Each tent has at least one, though not even Lecoeur seems to know where they have got them from. From their Saturday-night women perhaps, their moppets. Sometimes the engineer thinks he sees Ragoût among them, patrolling in the dusk, but at a distance one cat can seem much like another. At night, they fight epic battles. A cat is killed, but so too many of the rats, their bodies, whole or sundered, found in the lengthening grass or left as trophies on the steps of the charnels.

A new pit – pit fourteen – is opened in the vicinity of the south charnel. In addition to this, the engineer decides to broach the first of the private crypts. He gathers a small team – Slabbart, Biloo, Block, Everbout – and walks them to the west charnel under the windows of the rue de la Lingerie. They will start with the Flaselle family, the tomb sealed in 1610. With chisel and mallet they break the mortar, loosen the top-stone, then drive in their long, wedge-tipped steel bar and haul down until the stone shifts. They lower a ladder; it only just reaches. The crypt, it seems, has aristocratic dimensions. Jan Biloo is the first man down. As he descends, his light begins to flicker. Somewhere near the bottom of the ladder, it goes out. They call; he does not answer. Jean-Baptiste and Jan Block go down to get him. They hold their breath like scallop divers. They find him with their groping hands, drag his dead weight up the ladder until Everbout and Slabbart can take hold of him. He comes to almost immediately, but he and the engineer and Jan Block are some minutes together crouched on the grass outside the charnel, spitting, sucking in air.

Later, in the sexton’s kitchen, Jean-Baptiste sketches designs for breathing equipment, masks with filters of treated lamb’s wool or powdered charcoal. Or something more complete, a closed hood with an air-pipe and some manner of clapper valve to allow exhaled air to be expelled. He tries to interest Lecoeur in his ideas, but Lecoeur’s mind is elsewhere.

‘Monsieur Lecoeur is exhausted,’ says Jeanne, perhaps more sharply than she intended. ‘Everyone is exhausted.’

He nods. She knows about Héloïse Godard, of course; the whole quarter knows, though only Armand will speak to him about it. He folds the sketch, pockets it.

Lecoeur smiles at them both, dreamily. ‘We Lecoeurs,’ he begins, ‘we Lecoeurs . . .’ Then he shrugs and turns away and gazes out of the window again.

12

Each morning, in the liquid half-light of spring dawns, he wakes from blank sleep beside Héloïse. Some mornings he wakes to find her watching him, wakes into her smile. And some mornings
he
is the first and lies very still, studying the lovely imperfections of her face, the privacy and mystery of her shut eyes. Then, when she opens them, her gaze, its roots deep in sleep and dreams, often has some taint of sadness to it, though it is a sadness she denies if he ever asks her about it. With dry mouths they lie a while talking of intimate, unimportant things. With dry lips they kiss a little. And this is medicine to him, this gift of mornings, the doggish warmth under the covers, the birdsong on the neighbours’ roofs, the new heartbeat in the bolster. He hardly notices how much he has ceased to notice, how much of the world beyond this room he has ceased to properly attend to.

When Marie remembers to bring them anything, they breakfast together in the room. On the mornings she forgets, Héloïse stays in bed and he eats at the cemetery with Jeanne and Manetti and Lecoeur. As to how she spends her days when he is gone, it is a source of continual fascination to him. No detail is too trivial. It is not enough that she informs him Madame Monnard cheats at backgammon; he wants to know exactly how she does it. The dice? The counters? And when the two women spend an afternoon sitting by the window embroidering, he wants to be told what, and what patterns they stitched. Rosebuds? Zigzags? Peacock tails?

‘What do you talk about?’

‘You, of course.’

‘Me?’

‘No. Never you.’

‘Ziguette?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And Monsieur Monnard?’

‘Sometimes of him too. And the price of bread, the probability of rain, whether senna or buckthorn is best for a constipation.’

‘You have made her happy again.’

‘No, Jean. I have not. You know I have not.’

A month after Héloïse arrived at the house on the rue de la Lingerie, she sits up in the bed drinking a little dish of coffee from a bowl painted with roses, and says that she wishes to visit the theatre. Did he not promise her? He nods. He goes to see Armand. Armand will know about theatres.

‘The Odéon,’ says Armand, as they stand together in a green lozenge of sunlight beside the preaching cross. ‘They are performing a play by Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais is of the party.’

‘The party of the future?’

‘Of course. And I shall come with you. Lisa too. You will not know how to behave otherwise.’

‘I don’t object to your company.’

‘Mademoiselle Godard is not well enough acquainted with you. She has not studied you as I have.’

‘Tell me this, Armand. You think Héloïse belongs to the party of the future?’

‘Héloïse? She and Lisa will be among its queens.’

‘And my own membership?’

‘Ah, you will be informed, dear savage.’

‘Informed? By whom?’

‘By circumstances. By what you will and will not do. We shall all be found out in time.’

‘When you speak like this you remind me of the pastor. My mother’s pastor.’

‘And what does he say?’

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

Four days later, Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse dress for an evening at the theatre. He has nothing brighter than black. She teases him. Where is that coat of his the colour of pea soup? Pistachio, he says, peeled pistachio. And back where it came from. Good, she says. Green was not your colour.

They cross the river in a cab. Armand and Lisa have their backs to the horses; Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse are facing. The two women, having met for the first time in the hall of the Monnards’ house, having observed each other carefully among the woody shadows of that place, have, apparently, decided to like each other, a great relief to Jean-Baptiste, who has developed a powerful faith in the rightness of Lisa Saget’s judgements.

The cab’s two windows are hard down. The evening sun is on the river. On the Pont Neuf, the crowd flows through itself, slowly. Each time the cab is forced to stop, strangers peer in for a moment. A girl in a straw hat climbs onto the cab step and reaches in with posies. Armand insists Jean-Baptiste purchase the two largest, the two prettiest. The cemetery is a thousand miles away, its pits, its walls of bone, like things imagined, some old trouble they are finally getting free of. And could they not keep going like this? A bare week and they would be in Provence letting the sun’s heat scour them. Or cross the Alps to Venice! The four of them in a gondolier sliding under the Rialto Bridge . . .

The cab sways to a halt by the theatre steps. The two couples join the throng filtering between the white pillars. Jean-Baptiste has never been to the Odéon (it has only been completed four years). Nor has he been to the Comédie-Française or any other grand theatre. The last time he saw a play it was one of those rough affairs put on twice a year in Bellême by companies of travelling actors who arrive noisily (bellowing, blowing hunting horns) and leave quietly (with stolen chickens, scrumped apples, the honour of certain local girls).

This, well, it is more like Versailles, though of course less theatrical. They are shown to their box by a flunky in a tight lavender coat who, though graceless and offensively casual, will not leave without his tip. Their box is cramped and does not have a good view of the stage. The chamberpot at the back of the box has not been emptied. The candle wicks are untrimmed and one of the chairs looks as if, during a recent performance, it was briefly on fire. None of it matters; their mood is impregnable. The flunky is made happy with the size of his tip, then sent to fetch wine and . . .

‘What do you have?’ asks Armand.

‘What do you wish for? Oranges? Roast chicken? Oysters?’

‘Yes,’ says Armand, ‘we’ll have those.’

The place is filling up. It starts to roar. People call across to each other, signal with their hats and fans. Some of the women shriek like peacocks. A scuffle breaks out by the spikes at the front of the stage. ‘Author’s friends,’ says Armand, knowledgeably. ‘Author’s enemies.’

The lavender coats move in. A man is carried out, arms and legs waving like a beetle on its back.

‘The minister is here,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly. ‘Box opposite the stage.’

‘The one with a face like an axe?’ asks Armand.

‘That’s him,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘But do not stare. I do not wish to be sent for.’

‘You’ve as much right to be here as he does,’ says Héloïse.

‘Even so,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not want him in my head tonight.’

They sit back in their seats. Behind the curtain, the musicians are tuning their instruments. The engineer does not mention the other man in the minister’s box, the young man in the shimmering coat. The name of Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson would mean nothing to them.

First, there is a short, frantic mime, then a lengthy interval, then, finally, the play. The audience sits in the light of five hundred candles, charmed, restless, a little bored. The engineer, Armand, Héloïse and Lisa Saget suck oranges, chew on the bones of high-flavoured chicken, drop the bones under their seats. Jean-Baptiste finds the play elusive, sometimes baffling. Who exactly is Marceline? Why can Suzanne
not
marry Figaro? And who is hiding in that closet? Héloïse, her lips beside his ear, patiently explains. He nods. He watches the audience, watches them watching. Dead, stripped of their feathers and fans, their swords, canes, ribbons, jewels, stripped bare and piled like bacon, could he not fit them all into a single pit? He has the thought; feels the disturbance of it; lets it go.

Another chicken is delivered, and more wine, and almonds tasting like scented sawdust. The engineer is tipsy. He kneels to piss in the pot at the back of the box, pisses into another’s cold piss and returns to his chair to discover that Suzanne will, after all, marry Figaro.

‘So they will have what they wished for?’ he asks, though his question is lost in the noise of applause and renewed skirmishing. Cautiously, he leans forward to see how the minister has liked the play. The minister is standing. Next to him, Boyer-Duboisson is whispering in his ear. The minister laughs. Boyer-Duboisson steps away from him, also laughing. Below them, the theatre-goers are fighting their way through the doors like scummed water draining out of a sink. The minister, still laughing, rests a hand on his chest as if to settle himself, and glances over, casually, to the box where Jean-Baptiste is watching. Does he see the engineer? His engineer? Would he even remember his face? And still he cannot stop laughing. It is as if nothing short of death could bring such a flow of amusement to an end.

Impossible once they get outside to find a cab. They trail through the little streets, almost careless of where they are headed, find themselves (just as the women’s shoes are starting to pain them) on the Ile de la Cité, eat bowls of tripe from a night-stall beneath the walls of the Conciergerie, then hire a skiff and are rowed along the black scarf of the river to the steps under the Pont Neuf.

They stumble up the treacherous steps, and on the rue Saint-Honoré, with embraces and promises of doing it all again – soon! soon! – they finally part.