Pure (36 page)

‘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.

‘This wretched provincial,’ he says to the doctor, jabbing a finger a coin’s breadth from Jean-Baptiste’s waistcoat, ‘is making me butcher my own instrument.’

‘Oh, monsieur,’ says Guillotin sweetly, ‘monsieur, monsieur! I have already accused him of being a Hun. And I am sure he will find some nice thing for you. Some recompense.’

‘What are you doing to it?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Getting the keyboards out. If I have the keyboards, I can still practise.’

‘You want the stops too?’

‘You can get them?’

‘Of course,’ says Jean-Baptiste, reaching to touch the shaped end of the closest. He has learnt their names now, some of them. Cromorne, trompette, voix céleste, voix humaine. ‘I would have kept it all if I could.’

‘And done what with it?’ asks Armand, whose fit of grief seems already to be passing. ‘The thing has had its day. Had thousands of them. It dies with the church.’

‘Then come and play at the house tonight,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Bring Lisa. And we may persuade Jeanne and her grandfather to come. You are welcome too, Doctor.’

‘A little concert?’ asks Armand.

‘If we like. I am sure the Monnards will have no objection.’

‘The Monnards?’ says Armand, giving the engineer his chisel. ‘No. I am sure they will not. The Monnards will never object, eh? By the way, isn’t it time you considered leaving them alone? They’ve had their punishment. Listen to Héloïse.’

For half an hour in the dusty cool of the north aisle, Jean-Baptiste works with Slabbart, loosening the keyboards, then starting on the panelling around the stops. The miner has a neat way with the tools and it’s pleasant to work with him, but once it is clear Slabbart can finish the job perfectly well on his own, Jean-Baptiste skirts the walls to the west door and steps outside again. Ahead of him, above the charnels, the sun is full on the backs of the houses of the rue de la Lingerie, every window blind with light. Was it really about
punishing
the Monnards? Punishing them for having a mad daughter? He had not, knowingly, thought of it like that. On the contrary, his behaviour towards them – treating them with the barest possible civility, keeping Ziguette in her exile, doing exactly as he wished in their house, living there with Héloïse – all this had seemed entirely reasonable. Just and reasonable. Now it strikes him he has behaved towards them much as Lafosse has behaved towards him, much, perhaps, as the minister behaves towards Lafosse. He has set them at nought. He has humiliated them.

From the roof, more whoops and skirls. He steps away from the church’s shadow, squints up at the scaffolding, decides he must go up there soon, talk to Sagnac. First, though, he will set the men to work shifting the bones for tonight’s convoy. After that, they can begin the business of forcing out the iron grilles from the fronts of the bone attics. He has already examined most of them, seen (perched on a ladder) how weathered the stone is about the bars, how rusted the bars themselves are. Remove the grilles and they can simply rake the bones from the attics, a task immeasurably less arduous than carrying them, armful by armful, down the narrow, black stairways to the charnel archways. Rake them onto big tarpaulins, bundle them up, drag them to the door. An ass might be useful. A pair of them even more so. Would Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson deal in such humble creatures? Hard to believe he would not.

He gathers the men to him. They come at their own steady pace, shirtsleeves rolled, collars open. Brown necks, brown arms. Looking more like farmers now than miners. He starts – in his usual gnarled mix of French and Flemish – to give them their orders, starts to explain his thinking about the attics and the grilles. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Héloïse arriving from the market, two big straw bags in her hands. One of the men, Elay Wyntère, hurries to help her.

‘Our dinner,’ says the engineer. He smiles at them, then looks round at the church. A flurry of shouting has been followed by a strange silence. No one is hammering or sawing now. The labourers on the roof, those who can be seen from the ground, seem simply to be standing there, staring down into the church. The day ticks. Light falls, admirably and unchangingly. It is the miners who understand it first. What have the works at Valenciennes failed to teach them of such things? Disaster felt as a gentle vibration through the boots, the hush that follows. They run past the engineer, brush past him, run towards the church. After a moment of confusion, he runs behind them.

‘What is it?’ calls Héloïse. Then, ‘Don’t go in, Jean!’

He shouts back to her, ‘Wait!’

‘Jean-Baptiste!’

‘
Wait!
’

Inside the church, the miners are already circling a spot midway between two pillars, south side of the nave. Jean-Baptiste has to pull hard at the arm of one, push the shoulder of another, raise his voice, bully his way through. And there on the ground in the midst of them is a sprawled man, a length of sawn beam on the stones nearby. Already there is a jagged halo of blood around his head, though the wound is not immediately obvious. Is it coming from his mouth? Is the wound on his face? One of the miners is crouching beside the stricken man. Jean-Baptiste kneels on the other side.

‘Slabbart,’ says the miner.

‘Find Guillotin,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Fetch him here.’ The miner stands; the others open a passage for him. There is an urgency to their movements still, though it is nothing but the moment’s vile excitement. Slabbart is quite obviously dead, must have died instantly, died mid-stride, perhaps starting to look up in answer to a warning, the wood striking him, spinning him.

‘Who is it?’ asks Armand, shoving through.

‘Slabbart,’ says Jean-Baptiste, then looks to the roof and the faces staring down from its edges. He gets to his feet. The cloth at the knees of his breeches, black with blood, sticks to his skin. He goes outside. He has gone slightly deaf. He sees Héloïse, but he does not clearly hear what she says to him. He starts to climb the scaffolding, uses ladders where he sees them, clambers the structure itself when he can find nothing else. Ascending, climbing with reckless haste, he receives oddly gimballed views of the streets beyond the cemetery walls – a big dray turning into the rue Troufoevache, a young woman in a straw hat strolling with an older woman, an open doorway on the rue des Lombards . . . When he reaches the upper walkway, the sky rears. It is as if he had climbed out of les Innocents’ deepest pit, climbed panting to its surface. Ahead of him, shocked, scared-looking faces. Bodies braced. And over there, on the cat ladder above the nave, two faces stiff with the horror of what has happened, stiff with fear, stiff – to the engineer’s mind – with guilt. He pulls himself onto the parapet and runs for them. They have perhaps never seen a man run like that on the top of a narrow wall fifty metres above the ground. His deafness has passed now. He can hear them all shouting. A clamour, like seabirds. The two on the roof begin to look demented. They slither along the tiles, closer and closer to the edge, the drop. Then Sagnac’s voice rises above the others. ‘Baratte! Baratte! You’ll kill them! You’ll fucking kill them!’