Pure (35 page)

Guillotin says softly, ‘But this is philosophy.’

Jeanne begins to cry silently. She will not at first touch the light. Jean-Baptiste – it is the moment’s permission – takes her hand. She does not flinch. He lifts it, and when the light strikes it, her skin – the skin of both their hands – seems surrounded with a fragile blue fire.

Over the following days a score of holes are punched in a line along the south wall. The air thickens with dust, but at night the dust settles or escapes. Beams of light spread out until separate shafts become a jagged fringe moving slowly north towards the rue aux Fers. By the end of the month light laps at the edge of the nave, streaks the choir, pools by the foot of the altar. How filthy everything below now appears! How much the place depended on its darkness! The pews – most so beetle-ridden they would be dangerous to sit upon – are heaped together in a great pile under the crossing. Now that the light is here, it’s obvious that anything of value – monetary value – has been taken out already, officially or otherwise. With Armand, the engineer spends an hour searching for les Innocents’ most celebrated relic, the stylite’s toe bone in its box of iron, but there is no sign of it and something, some pantomime quality in his friend’s searching, prompts Jean-Baptiste to ask him if he has, in fact, stolen it.

Armand agrees that he has. ‘It was to raise funds for the hospital,’ he says.

‘Is that true?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

Armand shrugs.

A shout from above means something big is coming down – a sprocket, a wind-brace, an oaken hammer-beam spearing into the debris below. Or stone, something dislodged, then shattering on the flags like ordinance.

Half the miners work inside the church, wrecking. They have sledgehammers and picks and iron bars and bring, it seems, a certain sectarian relish to the business. The others work on the roof or man the hoists that lower parcels of salvaged tiles and folded lead. Jean-Baptiste starts to feel like an engineer again. Stone and dust and rotten wood are more than bearable after black earth and bones. And isn’t there something addictive about destruction? Does it not satisfy some shadowy appetite, some boyish urge to swing a blunt tool at what is silently, stupidly there?

He writes to his mother: ‘I am destroying a church!’ He encloses the usual money, suggests – only half playfully – she might want to use it to visit Paris to see him, her son, sleeves rolled, face caked with dust, bringing a stone elephant to its knees. And perhaps the pastor would care to accompany her?

He scores out that last thought. Scores it out carefully.

Working in one of the side chapels, one of those made plain and secular by lightfall, he finishes the bookshelf. A free-standing structure of five shelves built with wood from the church, the backs and seats of pews mostly (those few the beetles had not visited), though at the top he fits a carved panel cut from the reredos behind the altar, little figures, apostles perhaps, or just examples of those bystanders who must always be standing at the fringes of miraculous or terrible events. Guests at the wedding in Canna, villagers watching the arrival of Herod’s soldiers. Héloïse fills three of the shelves with books she already owns. An afternoon with Ysbeau down by the river – the pair of them genteel, forgetful – fills most of the fourth, the new books all good editions, not those for fifteen sous that fall apart in your hands.

About the city, these days of high summer, black paint and fresh graffiti.

Next to the church of Sainte-Marie on the rue Saint-Antoine: ‘beche will eat a bishop and spit out his bones. a cardinal for dessert.’

On the quai de l’Horloge, below the Conciergerie. Painted from a boat? ‘m. beche will drown the rich in the sweat of the poor!’

On a wall opposite the Company of the Indies: ‘beche has seen your crimes! the bill is on its way.’

On the parapet – left side going south – of the Pont au Change: ‘blood-sucking lords! m. beche will orphan your children!’

Spying graffiti, spying it before the authorities do, authorities now much keener to efface such sentiments, becomes a type of sport. People exchange new sightings with each other, casually, good-humouredly, though also with a certain questioning seriousness. For what if he exists, this Bêche? What if one day he does what is promised?

Jean-Baptiste, informed by Armand (who continues to deny all involvement), or Dr Guillotin, or Héloïse (who has not entirely given up her old free habit of threading the city’s thoroughfares), or on one occasion by Marie, of the existence of these scrawlings, nods and shrugs. What are they to him? And yet he cannot deny a creeping interest in this Bêche, even sometimes falls into the fantasy that there is indeed, in some fetid
bâtiment
in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, a man with thoughts like knife blades, a philosopher assassin, the people’s murderer. Would he oppose such a man? Betray him? Or would he follow him? Become, like him, implacable. Bloody and implacable . . . Then he wakes from the fantasy and turns back to his business. Stones and sweat and calling orders across the mazed air. What the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later. History must wait a little on les Innocents.

A vantage point, a good one, from which to view the progress at the church, is his old room at the back of the Monnards’ house. He goes in there most days when he can, stands between the bed and the table looking out of the window. The air in the room is stifling. Heaven knows what it is like in Marie’s room above. Across the bed, Ziguette’s dresses lie slack as weed raked out of a river. Little golden moths, the type that crushed between thumb and finger, leave a smudge of gold on the skin, skip and flutter among the fabrics. Ragoût, remembering perhaps their old intimacy in the room, those winter nights he lay by the man’s feet, sometimes joins the engineer, makes himself comfortable on the dresses, has the habit of climbing half inside them – a cat becoming a girl, a girl a cat.

One Sunday evening at the end of July, the two of them are there in the room, Ragoût nuzzling a muslin frill, Jean-Baptiste propped drowsily against the table, gazing out to the church. It has a pleasingly stricken look. A quarter of the roof is still to come down – they will need scaffolding on the rue aux Fers next week – and they have still not dug a trench deep enough to examine the foundations, but the progress is acceptable, more than acceptable, so much so that even Monsieur Lafosse on his last visit could not entirely conceal his approval, and stood a full minute at the drawing-room window before turning to say (a voice oiled with suspicion) that the minister would not be displeased to learn that his project at last went ahead as it should.

If the miners can be kept at it just a little longer! The miners, Sagnac. And himself, of course, himself particularly. He has at least managed to find somewhere for Jeanne and her grandfather. Four decent, well-lit rooms on the ground floor of a house on the rue Aubri Boucher, opposite the church of Saint-Josse, a few minutes’ walk from the market. Convenient for a mother-to-be – convenient for a mother – for there is no longer any question but that Jeanne is with child. She has visibly thickened about the waist; her breasts are swelling. She looks younger. Young, shy, dreamy. Not unhappy. She smiles at them, speaks little, looks both ruined and saved, as perhaps Christ’s mother once did. And always nearby, always contriving somehow to stand at the end of her shadow, that booted, bearded, carved peg of a man, Jan Block . . .

His face breaks in a yawn. He rubs the heels of his palms over his eyes, feels the body’s steady, monotonous instruction, his heartbeat’s heartbeat: this, this, this, this . . . When he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking not at the church but at the picture on the wall, the etching of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, its single high arch high enough to let shipping through whatever the tide, its twenty-four narrow houses with their lead roofs. The picture dangles from its nail just as it has since the night he first came to this house, but it is months since he last considered it, months since he considered those old ambitions it once stood as emblem for. Bridges and roads? Yes. Bridges and roads crossing France, leaping her rivers, stringing towns and villages like pearls along a thread, and then the whole enterprise, dependable, sweetly cambered, laid like a gift at the walls of some shining city. Himself on a horse, gangs of men behind. Men, horses, carts, stone. Clouds of dust. And he could do it now. It is perfectly credible. He does not doubt himself, does not feel any more he must, through some anxious exercise of the will, hold all the pieces of himself together or cease to exist. But are his ambitions what they were? Are they, for example, less ambitious? And if so, what has replaced them? Nothing heroic, it seems. Nothing to brag of. A desire to start again, more honestly. To test each idea in the light of experience. To stand as firmly as he can in the world’s fabulous dirt; live among uncertainty, mess, beauty. Live bravely if possible. Bravery will be necessary, he has no doubt of that. The courage to act. The courage to refuse.

On the bed, the cat is watching him, placidly, out of the depths of its own mystery. He grins at it. ‘You think, old friend, they’d have me back on the farm?’ And then his gaze is drawn to the window again, to the church, where a black smoke is spiralling up through the broken roof. It rises, dips, swirls round the scaffolding, dips as low as the cemetery walls, then climbs again, circles in the clear air, circles, circles, circles, then swoops away towards the east. He shouts for Héloïse. She runs across the landing.

‘They’re going!’ he cries. ‘The flying . . . . Damn! Like flying mice.’

‘What? Bats?’

‘Yes, yes. Hundreds of them! Thousands!’

She looks to where he is pointing, squints, but there is nothing now above the church but night itself.

2

Mid-August; sunrise is twenty past six. Already the days are noticeably shorter. He folds back the shutters, studies the shadowed houses opposite, wonders if he is looked back at, cannot tell. In the bed behind him, Héloïse stirs. He asks if she wants a candle, if he should light one. There is no need, she says. She can see enough. Is there some water? He finds some for her, puts the glass into her hands, listens to her drink.

He is dressed only in the shirt he has slept in. He pulls on his breeches, tucks the shirt around his thighs, finds his stockings, sits on the end of the bed to draw them on. Héloïse is fetching down her peignoir from where it hangs overnight from an edge of the screen.

‘A clear sky,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘No rain for weeks.’

‘No.’

‘I should welcome a storm,’ she says. ‘Something to wash the streets.’

Their speaking is barely above a whisper. He is buttoning his breeches; she is about her business behind the screen. Across the street, the tops of the chimneypots show a thin, gold line of sunlight. Pink gold, orange gold.

‘What if we went away?’ he says.

‘Away?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘You could do that?’

‘I could ask Sagnac to take care of things here. The work is mostly his anyway.’

‘And where would we go?’

‘To Normandy. Bellême. It will be fresher there. Much fresher. And is it not time you met my mother?’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what if something happened here?’ asks Héloïse, coming out from behind the screen, dabbing her face with the orange water. ‘What if your men would not work for Sagnac?’

‘Why would they not work for him?’

‘Perhaps they do not like him.’

‘They do not need to like him. I do not know if they like me. And it would only be for a fortnight. Less, if you wished. Do you not want to meet my mother?’

‘I do,’ says Héloïse. ‘But it scares me a little, that is all. We live . . . irregularly.’

He goes closer to her. He loves to see her face in the morning. ‘She is kind,’ he says, taking hold of her water-cold fingers.

‘Kind?’

‘Yes.’

She starts to laugh. He joins her, a soft, hissing sort of laughter stopped short by an improbably loud sneeze from the room below, the first eruption followed by a rapid series of others.

‘Monsieur Monnard,’ says Héloïse, ‘has caught Marie’s cold.’

‘I had wondered,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘if Monnard . . . If he and Marie . . . Is that possible?’

‘Last Saturday afternoon,’ says Héloïse, ‘I swear I heard the oddest noises coming from the attic.’

‘Noises?’

‘Like someone birching a child.’

‘And now they have caught colds together,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Poor Madame,’ says Héloïse.

‘She should go to Dauphiné,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not know why she does not.’

‘Or
she
could come back here.’

‘What? Ziguette? You could sleep soundly with a murderer in the house?’

‘She is not a murderer, Jean. But no, I could not be in the house with her. We would need to find somewhere else. For example, Lisa says there is a nice apartment near to her own on the rue des Ecouffes. A notary and his wife have been renting it, but they are to move in September.’

‘That for example, eh?’