The Cleaner of Chartres (14 page)

Chartres

When, twenty years later, Agnès looked back on this period of her life, it seemed to her that she had descended into an intractable hellish nightmare and then everything had resolved into an improbably happy dream.

She only very dimly recalled the time of the first troubles, the hours and hours during which people had questioned her about the attack and her abiding feeling that all she had to cling to was that the baby was – must be – she knew he was – her own little Gabriel. She was assured of this again from the pictures she was shown – the little curly-haired boy with the pointed features and pale brown skin. Of course he was her baby. All she had done was try to take him back.

But this later time was different. He was not her baby. She knew this now. And to find her real child she had to get away. Maddy was her friend. Maddy had told her how.

‘Stick to your guns, sweetie. Simple denial, repeated then repeated again, works wonders. My dad was accused of stealing once. He worked in a garage and some jerk was light-fingering the till. My dad said he just went on denying and denying and denying and they found who did it before he gave up. Tell them you made a mistake, you were upset, out of your mind, whatever helps. It’s true after all.’

This time there were interviews she remembered in detail. Always holding on to the idea that the one fact Maddy had taught her would get her through. ‘I know now he was not my baby. I made a mistake.’

‘But you insisted he was yours at the time.’

‘I imagined it.’

‘And you were never at this address?’

A piece of paper was held out to her. ‘I don’t recognize it.’

‘You never went there?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know where that is.’

But this was not enough to stop the questions. ‘You have no recollection, then, of going to this address and attacking Michelle Boyet with a knife?’

Be firm, Maddy had said. Don’t give up. Remember my dad. Stick to your guns.

‘No.’

‘No recollection at all?’

‘It was a mistake. I was upset. I said things. I see that now. I say things that aren’t true when I am upset.’

(‘Good girl,’ Maddy had said when they were practising that night. ‘Saying you were “upset” is just the ticket. They can’t argue with that.’)

Dr Nezat had of course become involved in the decision over the reconsideration of Agnès’ psychiatric status. She gave it, at some length, as her opinion that Agnès had been suffering a psychotic delusion as a consequence of the trauma of losing her own child. Nothing remotely aggressive had ever been observed in her behaviour at the psychiatric hospital. On the contrary, she was passive and biddable, maybe even too much so, at all times. The girl’s previous consultant, Dr Deman, had visited her, quite properly, as he was concerned that there had been a confusion in the diagnosis, and suggested they try this brief return to Agnès’ past environment in the hope that it might jolt her into a better sense of reality. Clearly the experiment had worked. She, Dr Nezat, would certainly recommend that the girl be sent back to the clinic under Dr Deman’s care for the rehabilitation, apparently so successfully started, to continue.

Maddy had been triumphant when, after many further discussions, it was agreed that the secure order be lifted and Agnès was, after some bureaucratic toing and froing, returned to St Francis’s. ‘Well done! See. It worked.’

‘I want to stay here,’ Agnès had said.

‘You can’t stay for ever. But the main thing is you’ve got that rubbish off your back. Real life’s horrible but it’s safer in the long run than make believe.’

But was it? Agnès wondered now, as she wiped over Philippe Nevers’ perspex coffee table with the ‘natural’ orange spray, moving the glass sculpture of the couple, engaged in what looked like an act of sodomy, with especial care. The episode with Madame Beck, so reprehensible to Robert Clément, so laughable to Alain, was to her a source of renewed dread. Twenty years had passed safely in Chartres with nothing more troubling than the elder Madame Badon’s lost spectacles to vex or perturb her. The scene over the missing doll brought back the fear she had lived with daily, hourly, through those dreadful years – the ‘special’ hospital in Le Mans, and before that the nursing home, and before all of that the day in the convent orchard.

She had told no one, not even herself, about that afternoon when, her duties all accomplished, she had climbed the slightly rickety wooden ladder she had found set against an apple tree. It must have been April, she supposed. The blossom was out, she remembered that, because that was why she had climbed up into the tree, to pick some sprays of bloom for the Mother’s room. Mother Catherine had liked apple blossom.

Why the ladder was there she no longer knew, if she had ever known. Maybe the trees were being sprayed?

Pointless, oh, pointless such rememberings, brought back now, and not a jot less painfully, by this fresh calamity with Madame Beck. And with it, like the long train of cosmic dirt of a slow, dangerously returning comet, the recollection of the other catastrophe.

The clinic and Le Mans. And kind Dr Deman, who had told her about the labyrinth. She had sat in his room so often while he had gently questioned her and she – she had to laugh a little at this now, polishing Philippe’s bedside cabinet with the beeswax polish she had found in his neat cupboard – she had told him next to nothing, only answering as politely as he had questioned her, always staring up at the strange beguiling pattern he had behind him on the wall.

Chartres

‘She would never have paid up so promptly if she hadn’t broken it,’ Madame Beck declared to Madame Picot at their next meeting.

Madame Beck’s expression of satisfaction at Agnès’ paying in full for the missing doll did not quite accurately reflect the true state of her feelings. Privately she was annoyed. She had been anticipating a longer period of resistance and the girl had seemingly got away from her. ‘Add to that, there’s the fact that she left without a word.’

Madame Picot, who felt uncomfortable at hearing of the incriminating envelope containing the sixty euros, hastened to voice strong agreement. ‘It hardly suggests innocence.’

But her friend’s reply was not what she might have expected. ‘It’s a nuisance. She wasn’t a bad cleaner.’

‘But, dear, you told me she was slow.’

‘Slow but thorough,’ said Madame Beck, adding, for the benefit of Jeanette’s education, ‘the two are not incompatible.’

‘I know that, my dear, but you seemed so set against the girl.’

Many years ago Louise Beck had had an unhappy experience with an Algerian waitress whom she and her husband had employed at their restaurant in Evreux. She had caught Claude with the girl when he had assumed that his wife was occupied with their vintner ordering in the new stocks of wine. She had gone to the kitchen to check with Claude whether he wanted her to get in the ’61 or the ’66 Bordeaux – both good years – and had found him with their waitress in an amorous embrace. It was shortly after this that she had first found him out in another love affair.

With the discovery of the affair she had sacked the waitress to ensure nothing similar would happen under her own roof and had felt fully justified in doing so when she discovered that some of the restaurant’s linen had gone missing. She was not aware that Agnès’ colouring and demeanour had stirred a painful recollection and that she was once again paying one woman back for another woman’s treachery.

If her husband’s infidelity, the background to this episode, had conveniently perished in Madame Beck’s pliant memory, the sense of a long-held grudge had not. She would have liked more time to effect a more substantial revenge on Agnès.

•   •   •

Agnès had not confided to Terry the reasons for her having left Madame Beck’s, mainly because she did not want to hear Terry say she had told her so. When they met next for dinner at the jazz café, she simply said she had decided to leave.

‘I told you so,’ were Terry’s first words. ‘She drive you away? Bet she did. Foul old cow. She was round at Picot’s when I picked up Piaf this morning. Yap, yap, yap, and I’m not talking about the doggie. Old Picot’s hairstyle is looking more and more like Piaf’s. It’s true what they say about owners getting to look like their pets. But at least she has a head of hair even if it’s a mess. Old Beck’s going bald.’

‘Poor thing,’ Agnès couldn’t help saying.

‘“Poor thing” my arse. Just because she’s going bald doesn’t mean you have to feel sorry for her.’

Terry went on to say that Madame Picot had asked her to mind Piaf while she visited her daughter. ‘It’s the one she likes to say has “done well for herself and married a banker”. She lives in Japan but her husband’s coming to London on a business trip and they’ve asked old Picot to join them – worse luck.’

‘It’ll be good money, though,’ Agnès suggested.

‘To be fair, old Picot isn’t mean. Beck strikes me as stingy as hell. Christ knows why Picot’s so matey with her.’

‘Maybe she’s scared of her,’ suggested Agnès.

‘Well, I’m not scared of her,’ Terry announced.

But Terry hadn’t her reasons to be scared, Agnès reflected as she walked back down the hill to her room at Madame Badon’s.

The elder Madame Badon had finally died and gone to pester her Maker over the whereabouts of her spectacles, if spectacles were required in the afterlife, which, Agnès supposed – quite enjoying her own small joke (though she had been fond of the elder Madame Badon) – was unlikely. The young Madame Badon had, since the loss of her mother, more or less decamped to Paris to oversee her unreliable man. But she was a generous woman, grateful to Agnès and had been happy to leave her as caretaker of the apartment. More than ever, therefore, Agnès had the place to herself, with the only expense being the greater amount of food she had to buy since the elder Madame Badon’s rations were no longer available to her.

She made herself supper now, a fricassee of veal with beans and artichoke hearts, and ate it still immersed in thoughts of the past.

The unusually cold summer had given way to an unusually warm October and the whole of Europe was enjoying a fiery Indian summer. Groups of young people lounged on the south steps of the cathedral, drinking cans of lager, smoking, laughing, flirting, generally enjoying the good gifts of the weather and giving Madame Beck plenty to deplore.

Agnès, too hot to consider sleep, and disturbed by her recollections, felt the urge to walk. As she made her way back up the cobbled streets towards the lighted cathedral, she heard music. Eugène the organist was practising, as he liked to do of an evening in a cathedral free of visitors.

Reaching the cathedral close, Agnès stood in her sleeveless dress enjoying the mighty chords as they issued from the mighty edifice before her and enjoying, in a different way, the gentle currents of air on her bare arms. A skinny black-and-white cat, the crypt cat, René, slipped down the steps of the North Porch and slid under the railings. He had been named René because, as a kitten, he was found in the crypt among a stray’s litter and, due to be put down with his siblings, had disappeared, only to reappear just as mysteriously two weeks later. Since then the reborn cat had been deemed to be under the special protection of Our Lady. Maybe it was through her influence that he had a secret inroad into the crypt that no one had ever found.

Agnès strolled round towards the flower-beds before the Royal Portal. In the warm night air, they were still exuding a heady summer scent.

‘Good evening, Agnès.’ It was the Abbé Paul, also out taking a stroll.

The two of them stood side by side listening to the music.

‘Bach,’ said the Abbé Paul after a particularly dramatic chord. ‘Do you like Bach, Agnès?’

‘I don’t know. I like this.’

‘Then you like Bach.’ The grave sounds died away to be replaced by a less measured, more frantic sound. ‘Ah, this now is Poulenc. By no means the genius that Bach was, but not a bad composer. Not bad at all. He was another who liked the organ.’

Agnès, feeling she should offer some response, said, ‘I don’t know much about music, I’m afraid.’

‘You don’t need to “know” anything. Listening is all that’s required. Hear this bit . . .’

They stood, as the flowers cajoled by the warmth released their scent, the Abbé Paul with his hand behind his ear, for he feared he was growing a shade deaf and had recently purchased a hearing aid which he had not found the courage to try out. Feeling awkward at the priest’s unusual proximity, Agnès said, ‘I meant to say, if you still wanted someone to clean?’

The Abbé Paul, absorbed in the music, took a moment to grasp what she was talking about. ‘By all means, if you were willing . . .’

‘I’ve finished at Madame Beck’s.’ She wondered if Madame Beck had spoken about her to the Abbé. ‘She believes I broke or took something.’

‘So she dismissed you?’

‘No, I left. I didn’t take or break anything but she asked me to pay for it.’

‘And you paid?’

‘Yes.’

In the orange light, refracting from the beams trained on the famous Western Front, she saw his expression change. ‘I understand. There is nothing to break at mine, or, I should say, nothing worth breaking and anyway I would never –’

But, from this mild man, who had not even inquired after the object of the supposed breakage, she could not take too much kindness.

‘Thank you, Father. When would you like me to start?’

Evreux

It was Maddy’s idea that Agnès should go to live with Jean Dupère. The return to the clinic had been beneficial: Agnès had lost all the weight she had gained and acquired a skill with make-up and, with it, a new confidence. Maddy had taken her in hand and was encouraging but brisk. While ignorant of the philosophy of Cognitive Therapy, Maddy was a natural exponent.

‘No point in moaning on about the past. We have to look ahead,’ was her maxim and constant refrain. But, in harmony with her philosophy, Maddy herself had decided to move on. She wanted to ‘do’ Europe, she said, before she grew elderly and staid.

‘I can’t see you ever “staid”, Maddy,’ said Denis Deman, who found himself a little in love with the tall, boldly spoken nurse. And then out of cowardice, because he did not want to let on that he would, just a little, miss her himself, he inquired how she felt Agnès would react to her departure.

‘I would say she’s well enough now to go back into the world.’

‘But where?’ Denis Deman twirled his pen between his long fingers. He was surprisingly aroused by the sight of Maddy’s hands and strong forearms with her sleeves rolled back and found himself involuntarily envisaging them caressing his naked body.

‘Not back to those terrible nuns, for sure. How about the old man?’

‘Jean?’

‘Why not? By all accounts he needs help and she’s ace at housework. You have to hand it to the nuns: at least they gave her that. And from what you say he dotes on her.’

It was not at all a bad plan, Denis Deman reflected, as he drove the Renault once again down the rutted track towards the Dupère farm.

•   •   •

Jean Dupère, though decidedly frail, was proving resilient. His constitution, hardened through years of working outside at all hours and in all weathers, with only a couple of hands to help, seemed for the time being to be keeping death waiting.

Denis Deman had several times taken Agnès to see him since her return to the clinic in Rouen. The affection the old man felt for the girl was patent. And, as Maddy implied, she in turn seemed to take real pleasure in washing up for him and preparing tasty meals to tempt his flagging appetite. But whether he would want the responsibility of taking on a girl whose mental health was potentially as fragile as his physical health was another matter.

Denis Deman put the idea to the old man as they were enjoying their customary shot of Calva.

‘Have Agnès here?’ Jean looked perplexed.

‘To stay. To help you out. She’s so much better and really there is nowhere for her to go except the nuns.’

Denis Deman had in fact inquired about that possibility and the response had not been promising. Mother Catherine, he was brusquely informed, had left the convent. (Months later, during a conversation with Sister Laurence, he learned more: during Holy Week in Rome the Mother had re-encountered Father Ignatius, with whom a
tendresse
had sprung up when they had met, also in Rome, many years earlier at a summer school on Johannine theology. Their greater maturity, or maybe the well-documented inflammatory effects of the Eternal City, had reignited a passion which, they revealed to each other, neither had fully forsworn. A few glasses of Valpolicella, followed by a stroll on the Palatine, and the pair had forsaken their vows with the zeal of an elderly Romeo and Juliet. The sheer pleasure of that experience encouraged them to give in to the doubts that each had secretly harboured about their vocations. Within a fortnight, they had declared their intention of leaving the Church and marrying.)

The convent had taken the news of Mother Catherine’s dereliction badly. A new Mother had to be appointed, and fast. For reasons of seniority, the choice had fallen on Sister Véronique, never too popular on account of her sharp intellect and still sharper tongue. Under Sister Véronique’s inexpert management, the Sisters of Mercy had become more than usually subject to a seething discontent. Communal maladjustment, kept firmly in check by Mother Catherine’s authoritative hand, had set in.

When Denis Deman rang, asking for the Mother, he had been startled to hear, rather than clipped civil-service tones, the tense, high-pitched voice of Sister Véronique. Her reply, when he tentatively raised the possibility of Agnès’ return, was shrill. They really could not take on serious mental cases, she had enough on her plate already, God knew they had tried their best for the girl, but it was clear she was unstable if not, Mother Véronique dared to hope, actually the host of evil.

So he was grateful that when he broached the subject to Jean Dupère the robust retort was, ‘Send her back to those damned nuns? Over my dead body.’

Agnès, with her few modest belongings, including a new make-up bag, a gift from Maddy, moved into the Dupère farm on January 20th, the eve of her seventeenth birthday. Denis Deman and Maddy came for supper the following day. Agnès cooked a chicken, really more of a fowl, she explained, as it was an old bird, but with carrots, swede, turnip and potatoes, simmered in Jean Dupère’s brother’s wine, it made for their modest needs a feast. For pudding she made a
tarte aux pommes
from the apples in the Dupère store-room, followed by the Dupère Calva.

Agnès wore the little turquoise earring, now hanging securely on the silver chain. Maddy gave her some blusher and eyeshadow in several shades of mauve and Dr Deman gave her a photograph.

‘What’s that?’ Maddy asked.

Agnès looking at it said, ‘It’s in a church. A cathedral, I mean, isn’t it, Doctor?’

‘That’s right. Chartres. I remembered you liked it.’

Maddy said, ‘It looks more like something my grandma’s people might draw back home. Nice, though.’

Denis Deman drove Maddy to the clinic, where, with a hand made unsteady from overindulgence with the Calva, he helped her from the Renault – quite needlessly, as she was a good deal steadier than he was – and, with a head giddy not merely with alcohol but also with relief at the success of their joint enterprise, asked her to marry him.

Maddy, however, refused him. She was determined not to make that mistake again, she explained. But she said she was very flattered and thanked him for the offer.