‘I will give you something when the room is made ready. You will have time to spare from your. . other duties?’
She nods, grins at him slyly, excitedly. All through their conversation the cat has kept its eyes fixed on the maid’s mouth.
At two o’clock, having told a series of lies to Lecoeur about having to draw funds at the goldsmith’s on the rue Saint-Honoré, Jean-Baptiste returns to the house. When he opens the door to Ziguette’s room, he looks with relief at the open and empty wardrobe, the dressing table where not a pin remains, the bare walls. Excellent Marie! He will see she has something handsome for this, enough for a new dress, a good one, something to show herself off in when she visits her home, if she has a home, somewhere one might recognise as a home.
Did she change the linen? He pulls back the bedcover, examines the bolster for blond hairs, then, on impulse, looks under the bed, finds there some small, fine thing, which he pulls out and turns in his hands. Purple satin. A thing of purple satin laced with a purple ribbon. A type of shoe, a soft sort of. . What does it matter what it’s called? There’s no time for that now. He folds it, puts it in a pocket, perches on a corner of the bed, then immediately gets up and goes to the window, leans out, scowls at the street, mutters to himself some weak witticism about women and punctuality, goes to the bed again, goes to the mirror, bares and examines his teeth, takes out his watch, sees there is another fifteen minutes before the hour, sits on the bed again, looks at the dirt on his shoes, cemetery dirt, the humus perhaps of dead men and dead women, then finds himself thinking of Guillotin’s Charlotte, the preserved girl with her long eyelashes sprouting from grey and sunken lids, lids like old coins. Why must he think of her now? Can he not be free of them, even for an hour or two? Other than for his father he used never to think of them at all. .
And who the devil is that old face looking at him from the window across the street? So you like to spy, eh? Very well. He stands and stares back, arms folded across his chest, staring, sneering, and is starting to suspect that it is not a face at all but something hanging, perhaps even the soft light of a small mirror, when he hears the sprightly trotting of horses, the rhythm of sprung wheels. Cabs have their own music and this is unmistakably a cab. He jumps to the window, looks down, sees it draw up outside the house, sees an old cabman slither off his box and come round to open the cab door. Sees, a moment later, the top of her head. The crown.
‘So this is it,’ he says, his voice in the room’s new hollowness like an actor’s, as false, as strange as an actor’s. He runs down the stairs, headlong, shoes clattering on the wood. Madame Monnard comes out of the drawing room, stands on the landing wringing her hands.
‘Is the house on fire?’ she cries as the engineer runs past her. ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’
10
Their first hours together are so painfully awkward that each is forced to the conclusion that a serious mistake has been made. He talks too much, then for almost half an hour says nothing at all. She sits on a chair by the dressing table, the light coming over her shoulders. He is tormented by the thought that she is suddenly, inexplicably, not as pretty as, on all their encounters in the street, she has seemed to be. She is wearing a white gown embroidered with red and pink flowers. Does it suit her? And high on her breastbone there is a mark, a little blemish, that she has tried to cover with powder. She is — in a way that suggests she pities him — talking about something or other. Polite enquiries about his work. His work! He is little better than a body-snatcher. And should he ask her about her work?
The light in the room fades to the colour of laundry water. He is suddenly very angry. He would like to make some sour, idiotic remark about women, about courtesans, prostitutes. Something unforgivable. Instead he says, ‘We should eat.’
‘Here?’
‘Where else?’
‘You eat with the Monnards?’
‘Of course.’
‘Perhaps tonight we might eat in the room?’
‘You must meet them sometime. It might as well be now.’
Downstairs in the drawing room, Madame Monnard is sitting alone beside the fire. In the weeks since Ziguette’s departure much of the life has gone out of her. There are little tearful episodes, snufflings into a balled handkerchief, sighs, damp looks into the distance, the occasional involuntary mewing sound. She receives no visible comfort from her husband, perhaps from no one at all. At times she gives the impression of being completely unaware of the world turning round her, but she is satisfyingly astonished to see Héloïse Godard walk into the room.
Marie could have warned her, of course; Marie chose not to. The visitor who knocked at the door in the afternoon was, as far as she knew, simply an acquaintance of Monsieur Baratte’s, someone from the cemetery, no doubt. Perhaps that rather frightening person, Monsieur Lafosse. And now this. This! The sudden, almost dreamlike appearance of a woman whose very name (supposing anybody knew it, her real name) cannot be uttered in polite company.
‘Madame Monnard, Mademoiselle Godard. Mademoiselle Godard will be staying in the house now,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘I hope, madame,’ says Héloïse, ‘that will not trouble you too greatly?’
‘I will settle with your husband,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘for the extra rent.’
Madame Monnard nods. She looks from one to the other, twists the ear of a little lavender-stuffed cushion on her lap.
‘What a nice room this is,’ says Héloïse. ‘Elegant and homely. Usually one finds it is one or the other.’
‘Oh?’ whispers Madame.
‘I am no expert,’ says Héloïse, spilling onto the older woman the light of a smile so generous, so of the heart, Jean-Baptiste has to look away for fear he will yelp with jealousy. He picks the decanter off the table, pours two glasses, gives one to Héloïse, who passes it to Madame Monnard, who takes it from her as if she had never held a glass before, never seen red wine.
‘You embroider, madame?’ asks Héloïse pointing to a sampler of indifferent workmanship hung on the wall beside the fireplace.
’embroider?’
‘The stitching, madame. I made one such as this as a girl, but it was not near as neat.’
‘My daughter did it. My daughter, Ziguette.’ It is the first time since the attack she has dared to mention her daughter’s name in the engineer’s hearing.
‘I can see she was well instructed,’ says Héloïse.
Madame smiles. Pure gratitude, pure relief. And something heroic gathers in her. Belly to heart to mouth. ‘Do you think, mademoiselle,’ she says, gripping the cushion more tightly, ‘do you think the air was a little warmer today? Warmer than yesterday?’
Héloïse nods. ‘I think, madame, perhaps it was.’
A half-hour later — a half-hour that flows past on a little stream of polite feminine chatter — they are joined in the room by Monsieur Monnard, who comes in, as he always does, smelling of some tart, acidic compound employed in the cutlery trade. It is his wife who, almost eagerly, introduces Héloïse — ‘A friend of Monsieur Baratte’s’ — but it is left to Jean-Baptiste to inform him that Mademoiselle Godard will be staying in the house. Living in it. With him.
‘Living, monsieur?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the house?’
‘Yes.’
It is the moment Monsieur Monnard might stage his revolt. The moment he might refuse point-blank and at the top of his lungs to have either of them in his house a minute longer, might, conceivably, unhinge himself and fly at the engineer, wrestle with him. . Then the moment is past, swallowed perhaps by the recollection of his daughter lying naked and lamb-innocent in her bed, a length of gored brass by her feet. He brushes something from his sleeve, looks to the window where the fires of les Innocents burn jaggedly in the spring night. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘Indeed.’