The Cleaner of Chartres (11 page)

Chartres

As it was Friday, the Abbé Paul found Agnès cleaning the labyrinth when he went in search of her at the cathedral. She was on her knees halfway round the left side.

‘You follow the path when you clean?’

Agnès stopped what she was doing and got up. ‘It feels right that way.’

The Abbé Paul nodded.

‘What was it for, Father?’

‘You know, I don’t know. No one does, I think. People have said the cathedral clerics once played some sort of sacred game here. Who can tell what my colleagues will get up to but I have always supposed it provided some sort of aid to meditation. Walking frees the mind. The pattern is calming, don’t you find?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you finding us, cleaning here?’

‘I like it, thank you, Father.’

‘No problems?’

She guessed he had come to talk to her about yesterday. ‘No.’

‘It must be tough work.’

‘I like it.’

‘Good. You know the paving here slopes. In the Middle Ages the pilgrims slept here overnight. They set the paving on a slope so it could be washed down more easily each day.’ He paused. ‘Father Bernard mentioned something about a fall.’

‘It was nothing, Father. An accident.’

‘We’re insured, of course. But we don’t want you at risk.’

‘Really, it was just a slip.’

‘Father Bernard tells me that Madame Beck was concerned for you. You clean for her?’

‘Yes, Father.’ Though perhaps not, she thought, for much longer.

The Abbé Paul hesitated. He was not an interfering sort, having a pronounced dislike of being interfered with himself. But he was also intuitive. Despite Bernard’s muddled report he sensed malice at work. ‘I could do with a cleaner. Bernadette used to do for me but she sacked me along with the cathedral. If you needed more work –’

‘Thank you, Father. I’d be glad to.’

‘Only if you want to, mind. I can muddle along.’ In fact, he had found that he enjoyed cleaning and was modestly proud to discover that he was rather better at it than Bernadette, who had once informed him that if the Good Lord intended us to see bacteria, He would have given us better eyes.

The Abbé Paul had gone when Alain climbed down the ladder. ‘Was he telling you off for yesterday?’

‘He wants me to clean for him.’

‘What’s with that old woman, then? You slipped out before I could get to you. She was looking at you like thunder.’

‘Madame Beck? I clean for her.’ For all their intimacy yesterday – or because of it – Agnès felt a return of reserve.

‘It seems to me you clean for the whole town.’

‘I don’t expect she’ll keep me on for long.’

‘It’s none of my business but if I were you I’d get out of there. I know that sort. Old woman alone gone sour – sexless and envious. Bad news.’

She shrugged. ‘You were going to tell me the story of this.’

‘The labyrinth? Oh, right. Yes. Yes, I was. I meant the original labyrinth. Built by Daedalus for Minos, King of Crete, to conceal the Minotaur. There was a bronze plaque at the centre of this here once – the Republicans took it to melt down for cannons along with the lead from the roof – but there was a drawing of it made before it was taken: the Minotaur with Theseus and Ariadne on either side. You know about the Minotaur?’

She shook her head. ‘I only know Bible stories.’

‘And why not? The Minotaur was the child of Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, the King of Crete. Poseidon sent a white bull from the sea to Crete and Minos refused to sacrifice it to the god.’

‘Why?’

‘Why the bull or why not sacrifice it?’

‘Both, I suppose.’

‘I don’t remember. Anyway, Poseidon, who was a bit of a bastard, took revenge by having Pasiphaë fall for the bull. She got Daedalus, who was the palace inventor, to construct a hide shaped like a cow and she hid in it while the bull had his way with her.’

‘Ugh!’

‘Don’t look like that. It’s many women’s sexual fantasy. Anyway, she gave birth to a monster, half man and half bull, called the Minotaur, though why he was named for the king who wasn’t his father I don’t know. Daedalus built a labyrinth to keep the creature in, and every year Athens was obliged to send a tribute of its prime youth to feed him – because of some peace treaty they’d agreed. Theseus persuaded his father, who was King of Athens, to let him sail to Crete among the tribute of youths and he found his way into the centre of the labyrinth and killed the Minotaur. Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, helped him by giving him a clue of thread to help him find his way out again. They escaped together but he dumped her on an island while she was asleep and sailed off home.’

‘Poor Ariadne.’

‘Theseus got his come-uppance. Everyone does in Greek myths. He’d told his father he would change the sails from black, which they’d sailed out with – because of the coming deaths – to white if he had been successful and in his hurry to get away from Ariadne he forgot to make the change. So his father, seeing the black sails, assumed that the Minotaur had had his son for lunch and committed suicide.’

‘Wasn’t that a bit –’

‘Rash? Yes. But that’s the way they are in myths. Impulsive.’

‘I suppose that –’

‘Stop interrupting – there’s a happy end. Dionysos, who’s one of the sexier Greek gods, saw Ariadne while he was sailing past Naxos, turned himself into a dolphin and carried her off. If I were a woman, I’d a hundred times rather be Dionysos’ lover than Theseus’. Theseus was a thug – strictly Alpha male.’

Agnès said, ‘Poor Minotaur. How horrible to be killed by his own sister.’

‘Half-sister. And she didn’t actually kill him. She just helped his killer. There’s not much sentiment in Greek myths.’

Agnès gazed down again at the labyrinth. ‘Do you think –’

‘I think it’s interesting that the rose here’ – he strode across the circling path to stand at the centre – ‘which is a very old symbol for spiritual perfection, should have had at its heart a picture of this rather gory story. And most definitely not a Christian one. It makes me laugh out loud when I see them walking around it so solemnly, praying and crying and carrying on like I don’t know what.’

‘Perhaps,’ Agnès said, looking at the iron bolts which once held the bronze plaque that had gone to make the new republic’s cannons, ‘everyone has a Minotaur hidden in their heart.’

Alain turned on her one of his long looks. ‘You’re a bit of a savant, aren’t you, in your quiet way?’

‘What’s that?’

‘A savant? A wise person. Someone with natural wisdom.’

‘I was in the retards’ class at school.’

‘You shouldn’t use that word.’

‘Why not? It’s what we were.’

‘It’s a horrible word. Don’t use it.’ Seeing she was blushing, he went on swiftly, ‘Anyway that proves you are a savant. Savants are so clever they seem like fools to the foolish.’

‘I must get on.’

‘Or your elderly admirer will be upon you, I know. He didn’t seem too bothered finding you yesterday in the arms of another. Very decent of him, I thought.’

‘Oh, get away,’ Agnès said. He had the strangest but most appealing gift of being able to make her laugh.

Le Mans

Dr Nezat, splendid in a figure-hugging dress, revealing an extensive cleavage, arrived at the hotel to collect Denis Deman. Her elegant calves were well set off by a pair of high-heeled, open-toed gold shoes. She seemed, Denis thought as she kissed him cordially on both cheeks, to have bathed rather liberally in what his sensitive nose suggested was Chanel 19.

He was to wonder in later life how Inès Nezat had coped with the smoking ban when, some years after their encounter, it was introduced into most of Europe. Perhaps by then she had given up cigarettes. But he always recalled her smoking like a navvy.

If his aim had been to charm his colleague, it appeared to have been achieved almost too easily. His only interest in her was Agnès, and the rescue plan he was devising. Not only Jean Dupère’s conviction of the girl’s innocence but the few conciliatory words of the unyielding Mother Catherine had restored his confidence that the girl would fare better under his care, even though that ‘care’ had been the unlucky cause of her incarceration. But as the evening went on he began to feel a touch of remorse that he had hooked this fish with so little bait beyond a clean white shirt from Monoprix and, he surmised, a thumping great bill to settle at the end of the evening.

He inquired about Dr Nezat’s life as if he were truly interested and she described how she’d taken psychiatry as a second option. ‘I really wanted to do surgery but I wasn’t good enough.’ (Ah, yes, thought Denis Deman. So you hack about in people’s minds instead.) He heard how she had married young, while still an unqualified medical student, and divorced her husband as soon as she got her first job. ‘He was a drunk and a gambler. I knew this before I married him but I didn’t realize the extent.’

Perhaps it had been drink, Denis Deman surmised, that had brought the Nezats together. Inès Nezat drank much as she smoked. An excellent claret disappeared before they had finished the first course and a second, slightly pricier – selected by her – vanished before he was halfway through his veal kidneys.

Denis Deman was fond of wine himself but he was not as a rule an immoderate drinker. Towards the end of his second course, he began to wonder if the usual amatory practices were being turned on their heads and that it was his guest who was attempting to get him drunk.

Happily, he had inherited his father’s head for alcohol rather than that of his mother (who became more than usually embarrassing after one glass of cheap champagne). If that was Inès Nezat’s game, he would sit her out. He was particularly anxious that there be no question arising of her sharing the expensive bed she had directed him towards, with, he now uncomfortably suspected, exactly that end in view. For one thing, it would be fatal to his plan to embarrass her by a refusal. For another he had not the slightest sexual interest in her.

It was tact as much as outright deceit that made him, not for the first time, produce what the English might refer to as his Bunbury, a fiancée whose existence he had called upon sufficiently often for her to have developed by now a distinctive, if necessarily ghostly, existence. A slender girl with pale, rather highly strung features and shoulder-length dark hair. Perhaps because of his mental connection with the famous alibi in the equally famous English play, this fiancée was English and based in London, which gave credence to his doing so much socially alone. For no reason he could explain – it merely came to him one day and he didn’t especially care for it – her name was Anne, spelt in the French way with an
e
.

Anne’s profession had careered somewhat wildly over the years of their long engagement. Having started life as another doctor (a cardiologist), Denis dropped that idea after one of the women he was trying to brush off suggested she get in touch with Anne when she was over doing a stint at Bart’s (where he had currently located his imaginary fiancée). For some time now Anne had settled into being a vet. It seemed unlikely that anyone would wish to contact a foreign vet.

Inès Nezat, he suspected, would make short work of an absent fiancée, but she would be obliged to respect his principles. Principles had the merit of being admirable while at the same time acting as a useful deterrent.

He introduced Anne over the dessert via a discussion of the lowering standards required by medical schools.

‘It always slightly surprises me,’ Denis said, taking a cautious sip of the pricey Sauternes that his guest had ordered for them, ‘that the requirements for a veterinary degree are so high. My fiancée studied at Cambridge and it was easily the hardest subject to get into.’

Inès Nezat raised two scimitar eyebrows. ‘She’s a vet?’

‘Agricultural,’ Denis said on a whim, mentally shifting the pliant Anne from a flat in Kensington to a draughty cottage in Norfolk. ‘Very successful. Eventually she’ll move here, of course; but there’s plenty of farming work around Rouen.’

‘How inconvenient to be apart.’ Dr Nezat finished her wine and began to cast her eye about for the wine waiter. ‘Shall we have another?’

‘Let’s,’ said Denis, adding gallantly, ‘it’s really excellent.’ The least he could do was to indulge her other tastes with a consolation prize.

After a lull in the conversation, Inès Nezat said she was going to powder her nose and returned with her war paint freshly applied. ‘So how long have you two been engaged?’

Denis elected to say that he and ‘his fiancée’ had been together for some while but had only got engaged at Christmas. Happily for him, Inès did not pursue him for wedding details.

When the second glass of Sauternes arrived, he said, ‘I was wondering if you felt it would help if I were to visit Agnès from time to time. I have a feeling that between us you and I could –’

‘A kind of mother/father thing?’ asked Inès Nezat, quite helpfully. Again, he found himself liking her.

‘Exactly. I’m more and more convinced she didn’t make that assault and if we can persuade her to recognize that –’

‘Probably a displaced fantasy about murdering those nuns,’ said Dr Nezat cheerfully. Her slight but noticeable aggression over the phantom Anne seemed to have been quickly dispelled.

She’s not a bad sort, Denis reflected as he paid the monstrous bill. And would make quite a jolly friend.

He escorted her to her car, which, alarmingly, she revealed she proposed to drive home. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to get you a taxi?’

‘Not in the least. I’m fine.’

He watched her skilfully manoeuvre the car out of its tight space and drive smartly off. She was the sort of woman his father should have married, he decided. Exuberant and probably good fun in bed, if ‘fun’ is what you wanted and she was the type you fancied.

•   •   •

Denis Deman called at the hospital the following morning. Inès Nezat had said she would not come in herself; as it was a Saturday, she was ‘prescribing’ herself ‘a decent lie-in’. But when he arrived at Reception she had been as good as her word and had rung to say he had her permission to stay as long as he cared to with Agnès. Dr Nezat, he was informed, had also said he could use her office.

After about ten minutes, during which he examined Dr Nezat’s sparsely filled bookshelf and leafed through an old copy of
Paris Match
, Agnès was ushered in by a nurse who said, ‘Now be a good girl, Annie. Behave nicely with the doctor.’

Agnès stood looking blankly just behind his head until he said, ‘Do sit down, please,’ and then, ‘What’s with this “Annie”?’

‘It’s what they call me here.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘“All right” doesn’t sound too all right to me. Would you like some coffee?’

‘Don’t mind.’

‘Well, I’m having some.’ He filled Dr Nezat’s kettle at the small sink. It was, he observed, in need of a good clean.

‘Sugar?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘How many lumps?’

‘Two, please.’

Well, that was a start. He dropped two lumps of sugar from Dr Nezat’s sugar bowl, which had Botticelli’s naked Aphrodite printed on its side. ‘Agnès, I wondered, I’ve been wondering what you remember . . .’ Deliberately he let the sentence trail off.

‘About what?’

‘Anything. Anything at all.’

She thought. ‘I remember your room. There was a map.’

‘A map?’

‘It looked like a map of something.’ She made a spiral gesture with her forefinger.

‘You mean the maze?’

Again she spiralled her finger and then, laying her other forefinger over it, made a cross.

‘It’s in a cathedral.’

‘I liked the pattern.’

‘Yes, I like it too. It’s in the cathedral at Chartres.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s not far from here.’

She said nothing and he thought of how he had gone with his father to visit the cathedral just before his father died. He had been glad his mother had not accompanied them. She would have tarnished the whole experience.

Agnès said suddenly, ‘I used to try to get to the middle with my eyes but I never could.’

‘No, it would be difficult. I think you have to walk it.’

‘How long do I have to stay here?’

‘In this room?’

‘No. In this place.’

‘You don’t like it here?’

She shrugged.

‘If you, we, can persuade people that you won’t do yourself or anyone else harm, we might be able to move you.’

‘Will I be allowed to have my baby back?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘I want my baby.’

‘Agnès, I am so sorry.’

He sat there while she wept, and then, when he thought she must have wept her all, wept more, her eyes and nose running with the unchecked grief of the irreparable loss for which there was no comfort.

‘Why didn’t they let me keep him?’

‘I suppose they thought you were too young.’

‘I am not too young.’ She turned her face shining with tears to him in an appeal he was powerless to grant.

‘It’s very terrible, I know.’ There was no cure for the dreadful thing that had been done to this young life. And perhaps to her child’s life. All he could do was to try to help her not fall further into the consequences. ‘Agnès, I need your help.’

‘What?’

‘It’s like this. I think I may have misunderstood you. I thought perhaps you had tried to get your baby back and’ – he didn’t want to speak words she might then put into her own mouth – ‘and did not quite know what you were doing. A young woman, the nanny of a child, who wasn’t yours –’

‘He was mine.’

‘No, Agnès. That child was not yours.’

‘But I saw him,’ Agnès said.

Denis Deman, who wanted to put his head in his hands and howl, instead said, ‘Tell me what happened when you saw him.’

Agnès thought. ‘He was in a pushchair. He had dark hair.’

‘Was there anyone with him?’

She thought again. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘So he was on his own, the child?’

‘I saw him,’ she said again, staring defiantly. ‘Can I go now?’