Pure (23 page)

Among those gathered in the pews there is a moment of pure panic; then the women, young and old, form up and return fire, the priest’s basso damning of them met by a shrill taunting, a mockery, a contempt so well fuelled by historical indignation it is hard to believe the priest will not soon start to shit his own entrails. If they catch hold of him, if they can drag him down from his high place, the night will end with bloodshed. With murder, perhaps.

His arms spread, Jean-Baptiste attempts to herd the women out, but some are fixed like those stout posts sunk into the sides of busy streets for the protection of pedestrians. It is Jeanne who saves the priest’s skin. She takes the hand of the biggest whore, their general, and leads her gently away. The others follow her, their shouts unanswered now, or answered only by their own echoes. By the time they are stepping into the air of the cemetery, the mood has become one of general hilarity. The women press around Armand, petting him until Lisa Saget warns them off in terms they all understand.

The party revives: the teasing, the draped arms, the pairing off. The engineer watches for a while, then, trembling with a sudden fatigue (and wondering how many candles have been left burning inside the church, what alarms might be sounded in the middle of the night), he exchanges discreet nods with Lecoeur, peels himself away from the edge of the group and goes quietly towards the door to the rue aux Fers. He is alone – believes he is alone – but on reaching the door sees that Jeanne is walking with him. They stop. He speaks her name. She smiles. His heart sinks.

‘You will not be troubled by them?’ he asks, gesturing to where, by the fire, the company is growing raucous.

‘They would not hurt me,’ she says.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I cannot believe anyone would hurt you.’

‘I’m not a saint,’ she says.

‘A saint? Of course not.’

‘I wouldn’t even tell anyone if you kissed me,’ she says, and rests a hand very lightly on the sleeve of his coat. Light as a sparrow.

‘I am twice your age,’ he says. ‘Am I not?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘for you are twenty-eight and I am fourteen.’

‘Then I am twice your age exactly.’

‘Do you have a girl?’ she asks, removing her hand. ‘Are you sweet on Ziguette Monnard?’

‘Ziguette?’

‘She is very pretty.’

‘I am not . . . I have no interest in Ziguette Monnard.’

‘Good night,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ he says, and she waits as if to see if ‘yes’ is all there is, if ‘yes’ might still lead to something.

He looks across the top of her head. The night is colder than it was, clearer. The stars shine blue over blue roofs. In the cemetery, the walls of heaped bones glint like the armour of some old, defeated army.

‘Will you ask Lecoeur,’ he says, ‘to ensure the door is locked when the women leave? They should not stay much longer.’

She says nothing; she walks away from him. He nods at her back, unable at first to stir himself; then he gets the door open and goes onto the street, throws out his legs in long strides as if he hoped to outpace his own embarrassment. Sweet God, would it have killed him to have kissed her? To have dropped his head a little until their lips touched? Armand would have done it in an instant and she would have gone home happy instead of angry and hurt. And what was it stopped him? Some ludicrous attachment to a woman whose favours he could already have purchased for the price of a new hat? Can he not, once and for all, put his life on some proper, rational footing? Tomorrow – tomorrow without fail! – he must draw something up, a scheme, on paper, such as he has often done in the past. A plan of action to guide himself with, a rational scheme drawn out of the best part of himself, the highest. Do this, but not that. This will lead to success, this to the life of an idiot . . . Is he to be nothing but a
body
? A briefly animated example of what they dig up every day at les Innocents? Is that how Voltaire lived? How the great Perronet has spent his years, sitting among models and machines in his office at the Ecole des Ponts, a room – in memory at least – always packed with rich morning light?

By the time he opens the door to the Monnards’ house he is starting to feel calmer, more compact, more himself as he can bear himself. On the hall table he fumbles for candle and tinderbox, makes sparks, makes flame. The cat writhes past the kitchen door, follows him up the stairs, seems briefly tempted by Ziguette’s room, then follows the engineer into his own. He puts the candle on the table, takes off his coat and boots, wraps himself with the banyan. Is it midnight yet? Later? His watch is in one of his pockets, but he cannot quite be bothered to fish for it. He prepares his medicine – thirty drops or so in a mouthful of sour wine cold as the room – then undresses under the banyan and, when all is ready, blows out the candle, opens the window, peers down.

Have the women gone? He cannot see or hear them. Gone to the tents perhaps to finish their business. At least the church is not ablaze, and the cemetery appears in good order, though a light still shows in the kitchen window of the sexton’s house. If he owned a sailor’s spyglass, he might be able to see a little way inside, see Jeanne at the table. See her tears? He closes the window, puts the shutters across, worms his way into the bed, feet tucked beside the warmth of the cat. Darkness, darkness and nothing to listen to but the roar of his blood. The drug is working fast. In a minute or two it will sketch the first of the night’s grotesques on the backs of his eyes, but before that, before he descends, before sleep and poppy juice atomise him entirely, he sends out his breath in a fading whisper.

‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. What do you believe in? What do you . . . What do . . . What . . . you . . . What . . . I . . . I . . . I . . .’

11

When the assault took place, when precisely, no one could ever say with any certainty. Somewhere between very late and very early, some deep, velvet-lined pocket of a winter’s night. He was dreaming, pressed under the weight of the drug, and then his eyes were open and there was light in the room, a wavering silver light. Behind the light, the figure of a woman standing by the little writing table, candle in one hand, something else in the other. She was perfectly naked, the light restless over her skin, glistening in her hair, glistening in the tight blond curls over her sex. She did not speak. His own voice was travelling towards him but much too slowly. She stepped to the side of the bed and looked down at him. Her face, tilted over the light of the candle, seemed calm and almost tender, a chiaroscuro angel bent over the bed of some ailing hermit. They may even, for an instant, have smiled at each other. Then her arm swung up, swung down and the whole world broke against his skull in a surge of exterminating pain. Briefly, he was aware of a noise, a sort of gasping, that might have been her or might have been him. Then, mercifully, nothing more.

12

But for Marie and her peeping, he would have bled to death. She had watched him blow out his candle, had got into her own bed, rattled off a Hail Mary, rubbed herself a little between her legs and dozed off for a minute, or for an hour or two, before opening her eyes and seeing a spot of light on the floor. Wide awake in an instant, she lowered herself to the boards, crawled over the cold floor and settled an eye over the hole. What was he doing lighting his candle again in the middle of the night? She was sure it had never happened before. And then – stranger still,
thrillingly
strange – she saw that he was asleep, quite obviously asleep, and the light came from a candle held by someone else, someone she could not yet see. For what felt like an age, though may in truth have been less than half a minute, nothing happened – nothing! – and she was almost beside herself with the frustration of it. What if whoever-it-was simply left and she never knew, never saw them at all? Never saw
her
, for she was convinced the secret watcher – the other secret watcher – was a woman. But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what could have prepared her for the shock of seeing Ziguette, dog-naked, step quietly into view! Had there been more than just a mouthful or two of stolen wine in her bladder, she might have puddled the floorboards. Ziguette, with her big, rosy bubs! The big, rosy curve of her arse! In one hand she held a candle, and with the other hand she took something off the lodger’s table, something that caught the light and made, knocking against something else on the table, a little chiming sound that he must have heard in his sleep for he started to stir. It was that thing of his, the metal thing for measuring. Was she going to measure him? Measure what? His neck, his feet, his cock-a-doodle-doo?

For the last scene, a very short one, he was, she would swear, awake and looking at Ziguette, though neither of them said even the smallest word. In her imagination, Marie seemed already to be watching what must follow – the covers thrown back, the lovers snugly wrapped in each other’s arms, the kissing and cuddling, the oohing and ahing, and she above it all, squirming on the boards. But it didn’t happen like that. The metal thing, the ruler, cut through the air and came down on his head and killed him. She must have made some noise herself, a little squeal, for Ziguette suddenly looked up, her face all dark, a dark mask, and at
that
, the sight of that, she had at last lost a few drops of Monnard’s wine.

Quiet as a cat, she stole away from the hole, crouched by her bed listening for feet on the stairs. Then, when none came, when there was no creak of the door, no naked mistress with a length of bloody metal in her hand, she wanted to crawl into bed and sleep, thinking that if she did so, she would wake in the morning and none of it would have happened. And this she might have done had she not heard him, his noise, a kind of snoring, a terrible sound, like someone in a nightmare they cannot wake from. She listened and listened. Her fear grew less. If silly Ziguette came in she would just crack her over the head with one of her sabots. That would settle her. Girls from the warrens of Saint-Antoine had no cause to tremble at lily-skinned girls from les Halles.

She pulled on her clothes. Everything was dark but she was perfectly used to dressing in the dark. She felt her way in stockinged feet down the narrow stairs and onto the landing. Under Ziguette’s door a light but no sound of her moving or weeping or whatever a girl does after trying to split a man’s head in two. On closer inspection she could see the door was not quite shut and needed only a very gentle push to open it wide enough for her to put her head round. There was her mistress, all tucked up in bed, innocent as a lamb, the ruler on the end of the bed, the candle on the bedside cabinet. She leant in, lifted the candle and crossed to the lodger’s room. When she opened the door, Ragoût bolted past her feet and plunged headlong down the stairs. The candle shook in her hand but she did not drop it, not quite. She found her breath again, went on, went in, went right up to the bed and stood over him, as Ziguette had done. And what a mess he was! It reminded her of something seen in childhood, an uncle of hers, a sort of uncle, who had put a lead ball through his temple one boiling Sunday afternoon. Blood, blood, blood. Puddles of it. The lodger, however, unlike her uncle, was still breathing, and not as he had before, noisily, but in shallow gasps, little dips of air like a child after a long cry. To stop a wound from bleeding, bind it with cobwebs. She had picked that up from somewhere. But where would she find cobwebs? Had she herself – good maid that she was – not swept them all away? She went to his trunk, opened it. At the top was the suit of green silk that when she first saw it seemed so funny and so beautiful. She reached below it, dragged out a handful of linen and went back to the bed. She held the candle over his head, touched the gash, its pulpy lips. He moaned, shuddered as if he might be starting a fit. ‘I only touched it,’ she whispered, then quickly, neatly, pressed a square of folded linen over the wound (some rag for drying himself after washing) and bound it in place with a neckcloth. Then, to be sure of it, she took off one of her own blood-warm stockings, wound it under his chin and knotted it over the already darkening pad of linen. She sat on the bed and looked at him. Now and then his eyes would flicker, but they did not open. She patted his hand, unwilling to give up ownership of this marvellous disaster, but then the thought of announcing to the half-asleep Monnards what their daughter had just done was too tempting, and taking the candle, she went down to their room (one leg bare, one dressed) and told them everything in the plainest speech imaginable, adding at the end – she really could not stop herself – ‘Why, madame, I suppose they might even hang her.’

13

In the cemetery of les Innocents, in the pearly light of eight in the morning, the miners have congregated near the door onto the rue aux Fers. Most, perhaps encouraged by their whores, have made some effort to smarten themselves, to look more like regular subjects of Louis XVI and less like men who pull bones, coffins, miraculously preserved girls out of the ground. Jackets have been brushed down, mud kicked off boots. There has even been some washing, some untangling of beards. Three of the younger men – they stand together nearest to the door – have plaited grasses into crowns to wear round the brims of their hats. Others, looked at closely, can be seen to wear items once used to decorate the dead, trinkets picked out of the sticky earth or traded for at night in the privacy of the tents. One fellow, clear-eyed, calm-eyed, his back straighter than the others, sports a pair of memorial rings,
Respice finem
on one hand,
Mens videt astra
on the other, its greenish metal wrapping the hilt of a finger lost at the middle joint.