The Cleaner of Chartres (15 page)

Chartres

Madame Picot had had no thought of consequences when she swept the broken parts of the china doll into her handbag. But she could never, she wordlessly complained to her reflection in the bathroom mirror, have expected the episode to be fanned into such a fuss. Her first instinct was to pretend that nothing had happened – to herself as much as with her furious friend. But in the corner of her heart there shone a glimmer of decency which made her want to repair the situation.

Chartres is one of the few towns in the world that still boasts a dolls’ hospital. It stands on a corner of the rue au Lait, opposite the rue aux Herbes and too dangerously close to Madame Beck’s watchtower for Madame Picot to want to venture in there. Madame Beck, however, had announced her intention to go to Paris. So on that same day Madame Picot, the doll and its severed head, guiltily swaddled in tissue, set off to see Albert, the doll doctor.

Albert if not quite a midget was not much bigger than one. He was perhaps no taller than a nine-year-old but with a face as pitted and weather-beaten as the hills and spectacles on the end of his nose, giving him the appearance of a cartoon character. When it came to human beings, Albert was bad-tempered almost to a pathological degree, though with his dolls he exercised a singular patience. Unlike the other local doctor, Albert Boulez, the
GP
, who had once misdiagnosed a broken arm as a boil and urged the sufferer, a steel worker, to get back to work, Albert the Doll Doctor hated his patients to leave his care. The little girls who sent their toys for repair had to beg and wheedle them out of him with sworn assurances of treating their charges better in the future.

Madame Picot knew Albert by sight, and a little by reputation. Her main anxiety was that any transaction be kept secret from Madame Beck, who had the knack of seeing round corners when it came to underhand dealings of any kind – far more so when anything shady touched her own person. Madame Picot therefore approached Albert with a bright smile and a carefully composed story.

‘My daughter’s old doll,’ she explained. It did not seem quite safe to invent a granddaughter – her daughter was
bona fide
at least. ‘She treasured it as a child and has asked me if anyone can repair it.’

Albert pushed his spectacles up his nose and examined the head. ‘Recent breakage?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Madame Picot. ‘In a move. My daughter lives in Japan and I suppose the movers were careless.’

‘She back here, then?’

An inquisition was not what Madame Picot wanted. ‘Just at present she’s in London. I’m visiting her there next week and hoped to take the mended doll with me. Might that be possible?’

While unable to blame Madame Picot directly for the accident, Albert was not visibly softened by this story but offered to do his best. He surveyed the doll’s head and then its neck and gently placed the two together and examined the join.

‘Can you mend it?’ asked Madame Picot anxiously.

Albert glanced over his spectacles. ‘Her.’

‘Pardon?’

‘
Her
. Not it
.
Her head will mend up well. Doubt you’ll see the join. I’ll paint over if anything shows.’

‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ said Madame Picot, quite wanting, in her relief, to kiss the ugly little man. ‘My daughter will be thrilled.’

She considered asking him to say nothing about the doll but thought better of it. He was unlikely to meet Madame Beck, and if he did he was even less likely to make any connection.

•   •   •

Madame Beck had gone to Paris partly with the intention of replacing the lost Lulu but also to try on a wig. The trichologist, on her last demoralizing visit, had hinted that in certain circumstances a well-fashioned wig might provide better results than further treatments. Madame Beck had rejected this suggestion as an impertinence, but repeated examinations of the parting at the top of her head had led her to reconsider the proposal.

She was annoyed when Philippe Nevers came bounding up the station stairs and tumbled into the same carriage as hers; more so when, on seeing her, he took a seat beside her. The nature of her trip made her irritably nervous of any local attention.

Philippe was chattily polite. ‘I usually get an earlier train but my sister’s arriving today and I had to leave a key with the shop downstairs and they don’t open till ten.’

‘Ah, yes. Your sister.’ Madame Beck recalled her. An obnoxious child with fat glossy brown ringlets. ‘Bernadette?’

‘Brigitte. She’s coming with her little baby.’

‘And her husband?’ asked Madame Beck, hoping for scandal. Scandal would be a pleasant distraction.

‘Just her. She needs a rest.’

‘How old is the baby?’

‘Only a couple of months.’

‘She won’t be getting much rest, then.’

‘I suppose not. Nor will I,’ Philippe said cheerfully. ‘You off to Paris?’

‘Yes.’

‘A shopping spree?’

‘I’m going to replace a doll. One of my antique dolls. It was taken by my cleaner.’

‘How horrid of her. Who is or was she?’

Madame Beck pursed her lips. She did not welcome this interrogation. If there was interrogating to be done she liked to be the one to do it. ‘Her name is Morel.’

‘Not Agnès?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there’s a mistake. Agnès would never take anything.’

‘I’m afraid she did,’ said Madame Beck. ‘I am not in the habit of telling lies.’

‘No but –’

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Madame Beck said, getting out her magazine, ‘I’d like to read.’

As they disembarked at the Gare Montparnasse, Philippe, coming up beside her, said quietly, ‘Agnès cleans for me and for Father Paul. I feel sure you’ve made a mistake, Madame.’

Madame Beck’s trip to Paris went badly. The shop which specialized in antique dolls had a notice on the door saying it was temporarily closed, the card machine at the salon which specialized in wigs was out of order, and when she tried to get cash from the machine her credit card was refused twice and she dared not try it again. She returned to Chartres doll-less and wig-less and in a black mood.

Chartres

If there had been a time in her life of unalloyed happiness, Agnès thought, as she walked by the river from Robert Clément’s studio, where she had been sitting for him, it was the two years she had spent living with Jean Dupère. In her memory, the days and nights were hallowed by an aura of deepest peace.

The farmhouse possessed only one bedroom so she slept in the kitchen, in the box bed where Denis Deman on his first visit had found Jean Dupère. She rose early, often before dawn, and lit the fire during the cold months, prepared breakfast, woke the old man, bathed and shaved him and then, increasingly, as the months passed and his strength declined, helped him to dress.

Their days were spent in domestic routine, she performing household tasks, sweeping, dusting, washing, as he sat, less and less mobile in his rocking chair, chatting with her sometimes, sometimes simply co-existing in companionable silence. She was never bored. Boredom is a luxury of a life lived without fear.

Although the milking was now done by machine, Agnès, under the instruction of Yvette, Jean Dupère’s helpful neighbour, learned how to milk by hand. ‘If you’ve the hands for it, it’s very agreeable,’ Yvette told her. ‘They catch your mood – mind you, the times I’ve been in a temper and they wouldn’t yield. But you catch their mood too, which is mostly good. We couldn’t manage without machines now but I still like to keep my hand in with a few of the old girls.’

Sitting with her cheek against Maribelle’s or Josette’s warm flank, the regular sound of the milk squirting into the pail as the cow’s hooves shifted with a peaceable restlessness on the concrete floor, was indeed, Agnès found, soothing.

Yvette also taught her how to make quince preserve and to bottle fruit in
eau-de-vie
; she especially loved to see the results of the latter in the larder, the coloured fruits gleaming in their glass jars, plums, cherries, greengages, all from the Dupères’ old orchards.

Dr Deman came to visit them, bringing, on one occasion, an excitable Sister Laurence. Maddy, Dr Deman told Agnès, was now in Vienna. She didn’t like the Austrians much, she had written, but the pastries were fabulous. She had apparently gained four kilos and was learning ballroom dancing.

For two years and a month Agnès had lived a life in rhythm with the seasons, with the time of day, or night, with the weather – a lull, in her so-far stormy life, of kindly, uneventful calm. Without either of them discussing it, she took to calling Jean ‘Papa’ – he was, after all, her foster father, for without him – though this they never discussed either – she might not have been alive.

And then one morning, a couple of weeks after she turned nineteen (an event they celebrated, quite contentedly, alone, just the two of them), she found him in his bed distraught.

‘There’s pipi on the sheets, and worse. I’m sorry, sweetheart.’

Agnès, recalling this, stopped by the banks of the Eure to look at a green canoe on which a mallard duck had alighted. Horrible and humiliating for her ‘father’, but she was grateful for it now. It had given her a chance to demonstrate the depth of her love for him. (And what could be worse – she half thought – than to have loved and been given no chance to make it known?) Tenderly, she had washed her father’s withered bottom and balls and sponged his veined old penis and powdered him with baby talc and put him to sit, in clean vest and warm pyjamas, by the fire before stripping the mattress of its soiled sheets and sprinkling it with Yvette’s remedy for bad smells, bicarbonate of soda and dried lavender.

That night, after a glass of warm milk followed by his customary Calva in the little green shot glass, she had put him to sleep in her bed, the box bed in the kitchen, while she sat watch by the fire.

It was a night of freezing February fog. Even with the fire stoked up the room had grown chilly. Checking him around midnight, she felt his feet were far too cold, and to warm him got into bed beside him. She fell asleep with one arm across his thin shoulders.

In the morning, she had climbed from the bed into the chill darkness and made up the fire to a blaze to warm the room. Even the inner windowpanes were bleared with frost.

Outside, in the occluding fog, the blurred shapes of trees and bushes loomed thick with rime. She had gone out to hang ham fat from the apple trees and scatter cake crumbs for the birds; and also, she recalled now – how odd the small things that lie waiting to be uncovered in memory – to put out a saucepan of warm water, because birds die as much from lack of water as from cold when the frost is severe.

Crossing the bridge over the Eure to take her up the hill towards the cathedral, Agnès remembered how glad she had been that morning that her ‘father’ was sleeping later than usual, and how when she checked him she had found him cold, colder than any fire could ever warm.

Chartres

Madame Picot had put off the usual meeting with her friend Madame Beck. She was preparing for her London trip, she explained over the phone, and up to her eyes with things to do.

‘Whatever are you taking with you?’ asked Madame Beck. ‘I thought you were only gone a week.’ Although Madame Picot was irksome, Madame Beck did not care to feel abandoned.

‘It’s not that, dear. It’s Piaf. Terry has agreed she can stay with her and I want to get her used to the idea. She’s never spent a night away before.’

‘How will staying in help her get used to your absence?’

‘I can’t explain, dear.’ Madame Picot became flustered. ‘You’re not a dog person. I can’t explain.’

Madame Beck rang off with none of her customary expressions of affection.

The day before her departure, Madame Picot nervously pressed the bell of the doll clinic and slid furtively through the door. The ugly little man disappeared into his workroom and returned, doll in hand.

‘Can you see the join?’

The doll looked as good as new. Or as good as new as a nineteenth-century china doll could look. ‘My goodness. That’s a miracle. Albert, you are a genius.’

This was not news to Albert, who gave an imperious nod and asked for thirty euros.

Madame Picot, who would gladly have given twice the amount, retrieved her wallet from her capacious bag, in which she then stowed the recovered doll.

‘Careful with her now. She’s rare enough, that one. There’s not so many from that period that’s dark.’

‘Oh, I know. Thank you. My daughter will be thrilled.’ She was anxious to be off before there was any chance of being spotted from the Beck watchtower.

Madame Picot sidled out of the shop, walked slowly up the rue aux Herbes and up the stairs to her friend’s apartment, trying to master her breath.

Madame Beck took a little longer than usual to open the door. ‘You’re all packed, then?’

Madame Picot peered. Louise had had something radical done to her hair. ‘All packed, yes. I’m taking Piaf round to Terry’s this evening. And her tins of chicken and her chews and her sleep cushion, of course.’

‘How long are you gone for?’

‘Just over a week, dear, as I told you.’ Surely it was a wig. ‘Julie is coming back to Paris with me. We’re spending a night there before I return home.’

‘So Julie doesn’t care to visit her old home town?’ It was Madame Beck’s decided belief that Jeanette had spoiled that girl.

‘It’s not that, dear.’ It must be a wig. My goodness. Whatever next? ‘Her husband is very busy, you know he’s moved to a very big job in a top finance company, and they can’t spare the time. Besides, you know, it’s nice for me to get away.’

While Madame Beck was in the kitchen making an angry clatter with the kettle, Madame Picot was calculating. Where might she conceal the doll so that a discovery would seem credible?

‘Just popping to the little girls’ room, dear.’

The door to Madame Beck’s bedroom was ajar. Madame Picot stealthily opened it, moved, quick as a cat, to the bed and slid the doll deftly down in the narrow gap between the mattress and the bed’s foot. She returned to the salon to find Madame Beck standing there impassively, tea tray in hand.

‘Just powdering my nose, dear.’ Good God, but her heart was pounding.

Madame Beck’s pale face beneath the hennaed wig looked to her friend more forbidding than usual. Should she mention the change to her hair, Madame Picot wondered. Tentatively, she volunteered, ‘You’re looking very well, dear.’

Madame Beck sat down and poured a cup of tea. ‘I hear the Abbé Paul has taken on the Morel girl as a cleaner.’

‘Really, dear?’

‘It is my duty to warn him of her character.’

But Madame Picot’s flabby conscience was pricked at last. ‘Louise, I do think before you blacken the girl’s name you should be quite sure of your facts. Have you made a really thorough search of the apartment?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Madame Beck’s face looked thunder and lightning.

‘She has a good reputation in the town and I hardly think that the Abbé Paul would –’

‘Do you suppose, Jeanette, I have lost my mind?’

‘Well, dear. We all grow forgetful with age.’ What a tyrant Louise had become. She was glad to be getting away.

‘There is nothing wrong with my mental processes, thank you.’

Madame Picot left as soon as she judged it safe to do so without arousing comment, with the excuse that she had ‘a few last things’ to buy for her daughter.

‘What can she want that she can’t buy in London?’ asked Madame Beck suspiciously.

‘Nougat,’ said Madame Picot, with happy inspiration. ‘She can’t get the good soft nougat we have here.’ She made a mental note to buy some to add verity to the story.

Hurrying out of the sweet shop on the rue des Changes, with a bag containing four bars of nougat, it was a shock to almost run into Agnès carrying a sponge mop.

‘Good morning – Agnès, isn’t it?’

Agnès stopped. Madame Picot, she knew from Terry, was a crony of Madame Beck’s. ‘Yes, Madame.’

‘The sunny weather is holding up well,’ Madame Picot said, smiling at Agnès. ‘That’s a pretty dress. I can’t wear red myself, strawberry-blondes can’t, but it’s a lovely colour on you.’

‘Thank you, Madame,’ Agnès said. She shifted the mop into her other hand.

Madame Picot nodded civilly at the mop as if it too were an old friend. ‘I hear you are cleaning for our dear Father Paul? He must be a pleasure to clean for. Such a saintly man.’

‘Yes, Madame.’

‘Well, I mustn’t stand here all day chatting. I’m off to see my daughter in London tomorrow and I still have so much to do.’ She smiled again, effusively. ‘Goodbye, my dear.’

Hurrying along the rue Saint-Pierre, congratulating herself on her democratic civility to her friend’s former cleaner, Madame Picot suddenly realized who it was that Agnès reminded her of. The picture of a young woman asleep, painted by – oh, what was the artist’s name? – on a postcard that her husband had brought back from the Courtauld Gallery on his London trip – the same trip, she smiled to herself, when he had sent her the postcard of the woman at her dressing-table, the woman he had so sweetly likened to herself.

•   •   •

Agnès was on her way to the Abbé Paul’s house when she encountered Madame Picot. She had found it poorly equipped with proper cleaning materials and had already renewed the dusters and replaced his cheap all-purpose spray with a decent wax polish.

The Deanery was old and bare, the dark oak furniture simple and sparse but to her eyes beautiful. It was the furniture of the Dupère farm. The china, likewise, was an old-fashioned country make. Washing it, Agnès was reminded again of Jean Dupère. It was the very same china as his, down to the white coffee bowls with the three thin dark red stripes around the rim.

She had prepared just such a bowl for his coffee on the morning she put her hand to his cheek and found it so cold. Not knowing what to do, she had run up the track to find Yvette, who had called the doctor and after him the undertaker. But it was she and Yvette who had laid her ‘father’ out. Yvette had done this more than once before, she said.

Together they had washed him, cleaned away the faeces and urine which, Yvette explained, was always the death’s first legacy, and put him into a clean white shirt, which she’d ironed again specially, and his dark blue serge trousers. As an afterthought, she put woollen socks on the corpse, because the sight of the swollen cracked feet and yellowed toenails was more than she could bear. No matter that there was no longer any way for them to feel the cold.

The niece came grudgingly from Dreux, with her even more grudging husband, and made a business of organizing a chilly little funeral service at which she countermanded any flowers. Her uncle, whom she had visited maybe once a year, she declared would ‘not have wanted them’. (After the funeral, Agnès put on the raw-earth grave a jam jar of wild snowdrops, white with delicate green tracings, from the wood where her ‘father’ had discovered her.)

No will was ever found. Perhaps the old man had not made one? Or perhaps it was a part of the large bonfire that the niece had her husband make the morning after the funeral? After the fire, and before Agnès left the house for the last time, the niece said, ‘Do take something that you might like to remember Uncle by. Something small, naturally.’

Agnès had taken the basket she had been found in and Jean Dupère’s old army coat, which still smelled of wood smoke, rescued from the pile the niece had set aside for ‘the poor’. It was only when Agnès got to Evreux late that same evening that she realized with dismay that she had left Dr Deman’s maze tacked on the head of the bed on which her ‘father’ had died. When she rang the following day to ask about it, the niece’s husband said, ‘I’m afraid we burned it today with the rest of the junk. Sorry. We didn’t know it was yours.’

‘Wasn’t she the girl involved in that stabbing incident?’ he asked his wife when he put down the phone. ‘Amazing that your uncle risked having her here, with her reputation.’

His wife was engaged in looking under a loose floorboard in the hope of hidden valuables. ‘I think he was a little touched in the head, to be honest,’ she said, dusting down her dress. ‘That creature couldn’t even keep the place clean. This floor is quite disgusting.’