The Cleaner of Chartres (20 page)

Chartres

Agnès had returned baby Max on the Sunday evening. Brigitte, who was due back by the six o’clock train, had not arrived.

Philippe, who had had a wildly erotic weekend with his friend Tan and was feeling on top of the world, said, ‘Stay for supper, do, you’re most welcome.’ But Agnès did not like to think of parting with Max in front of his mother.

She made her way home via the close and encountered the cat René sitting on the north steps beneath the long statue of St Modeste.

A cat is not a baby with soft black hair but in its way it can be soothing. Agnès, approaching quietly, scooped a reluctant René up in her arms. After a while he submitted to her attentions and began to purr. When she put him down, he made towards the railing by the crypt door.

She had tried before to see where René got in and out of the crypt. But this time she was able to follow him with her eye as he vanished. Peering round, she saw a very small gap, invisible to a superficial glance, by the lower lintel of the door.

So that was his route. Clever creature. She was about to move on when something stayed her.

A distant wailing. Another cat? She listened again. No, that was a human note. Someone was in the crypt and it sounded as if they were in some distress. The cathedral keys were on her key-ring in her handbag. She unlocked the door and switched on the lights.

‘Excuse me. Is anyone there?’

The faint sound stopped. She walked downwards, towards the chapel where the venerated figure of the Virgin had once presided before it was burned in the zealous revolutionaries’ fire.

On one of the benches the Abbé Bernard was slumped, his head held in his crumpled hands. ‘Father?’

‘Lost, lost. All lost.’

‘What is “lost”, Father?’

‘Are you lost too, child?’

‘What is it, Father?’

‘It is the Satan come for me.’

‘Where, Father?’

He turned a stricken tear-wet face to her and she was shocked at how old and mad his features had become. ‘You want to see him?’

‘If you’d like to show me, Father.’

The Abbé Bernard struggled to stand, swayed slightly and clutched for support at Agnès’ shoulder. ‘He hides in the pagan well.’

The Well of the Strong, into which the Vikings allegedly once tossed their victims, was widely – if wildly – reputed to have been originally of druid making. The Abbé Bernard, shuffling and swaying erratically, and Agnès, supporting him, made their way through the chapel towards it.

‘There. There. I cannot look. His face, oh, his face is terrible.’

Agnès peered down through the grille, which for reasons of health and safety had long been lodged beneath the mouth of the well to prevent any Viking-like activity. Impossible to see anything in there; it was far too deep.

‘I think maybe he has gone, Father.’

‘He never goes, child.’

‘Well, for the time being I think he may have done. Shall we go now?’

It was easier to continue round the long path of the crypt and out by the South Door. Passing the entrance to the ninth-century St Lubin Chapel, which leads to the very lowest and oldest part of the crypt, the Abbé Bernard halted. ‘Hear. Hear. He has retreated there.’

Agnès, about to reassure him, also heard something.

‘He has assumed the likeness of a dog. The head of a dog is one of his guises.’

‘No, Father. I think that really
is
a dog.’

It was maybe not the best plan to have the Abbé Bernard follow her. But he was unwilling to let go of her hand. He rattled off a string of incoherent forebodings as they descended into the most ill-lit and ill-smelling part of the cathedral.

Coming to the remains of the bases of some Roman columns, Agnès stopped and called out, ‘Piaf. Good girl. Piaf.’

‘Not Piaf, child. No. She is a singer, I believe. Beelzebub, Beelzebub.’

‘No, Father. Listen for a minute. I think a dog has got trapped here. A lost Pekinese.’

She held his hand while he muttered phrases, some of which she recognized as coming from the books of Jonah and Job. There issued from the enigmatic ancient Gallic darkness another disembodied yap.

‘Father, please, wait here. I am going to try to get along that passage.’

‘The Lord of Darkness will consume me for I have sinned.’

In the diminished light she felt rather than saw the anguish in his face.

‘Listen. Hold this, Father. It will save you from him. It is’ – she had taken off her silver chain – ‘a charm.’

‘A charm?’ She felt him shudder.

‘A relic, then. A very powerful relic. I’m putting it in your hand now, Father. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Agnès, inching her way along the abandoned Carolingian passageway, called, ‘Piaf, Piaf.’

She heard another ‘yap’. Around a corner, there was a ledge and reaching out, trying to banish any thought of rats, she felt a bundle of damp fur.

•   •   •

‘God, what a relief.’

Terry was bathing Piaf, who, after a tin of chicken and much water, seemed remarkably chirpy.

Agnès, experiencing the strange affection of a saviour for the saved, said, ‘I wonder how the poor scrap survived?’

‘She’s a tough cookie, this one. Mice, maybe. Or rats? I wouldn’t put it past her to have a go at a rat.’

‘And there’s enough water down there anyway. I was dripping when I got out.’

‘The main thing is she’s here. I’ll ring old Picot and take her round and eat truck-loads of humble pie. Then we can go out and celebrate. On me this time.’

‘I’m going to talk to Father Paul about Father Bernard first.’

‘What now?’

‘He’s dementing. I’m afraid he will harm himself. I don’t even know where he has gone tonight.’

‘You and your old guys!’

•   •   •

The Abbé Paul’s feelings, when he answered the door to Agnès, were less straightforward than usual. As always, he was glad to see her but the interview with Madame Beck was sticking in his craw.

Madame Beck had gone into Agnès’ ‘history’, as she seemed to wish to call it, with a monstrous superfluity of detail – detail that made him flinch even at his studied non-recollection of it. At every turn, to the Abbé Paul’s mind, his unwelcome caller appeared to put the worst possible complexion on matters: the unknown circumstances of Agnès’ birth, the underage pregnancy, the subsequent adoption, the attack on the Mother Superior, naked and armed with a knife, the psychiatric clinic and last but not least the murderous assault on the nanny and the subsequent sectioning of Agnès in the secure hospital in Le Mans. About this assault, he had pressed Madame Beck, sensing some haziness in her account, which in all other details had the triumphalist ring of truth. Madame Beck had responded with a vehement vow to pass on to the Abbé Paul the newspaper cuttings that Mother Véronique had promised to send. Mother Véronique had, he was told, been careful to keep the file on Agnès that she had found in the former Mother’s bureau.

The Abbé Paul cared not so much for what this distasteful account revealed about Agnès, for an aspect of his peculiarity was an insistence on judging everyone solely from his own experience and never by repute. But he felt distress that Agnès had been stripped before him by Madame Beck’s gleeful cataloguing of her past.

And now he was in a quandary. He did not care to have knowledge (if that is what it was) of another without their also being aware of it. On the other hand, he would find it impossible to raise with Agnès any hint of her most painful-sounding history.

His dilemma was deferred, however, as Agnès was too anxious to convey her concern about the Abbé Bernard to speak of anything else.

‘How long has he been like this in your view, Agnès?’

‘For some time, Father. Since his mother died, I would say. But lately it has got worse. He’s terrified that Satan has come for him.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the Abbé Paul, who believed that the only true Satan was the idea of Satan. ‘I’m afraid Bernard was always overly religious.’

‘I think maybe he should see someone.’

It crossed the Abbé Paul’s discreet mind that if any part of Madame Beck’s account were true, Agnès would be a judge of dangerous mental states. ‘I am grateful for this advice, Agnès. I shall look into it tomorrow, first thing.’

‘I think it might be best, Father.’

‘Thank you again, Agnès. Good night.’

Chartres

Robert Clément’s studio on the rue du Frou backed on to the River Eure. He was in the habit each morning of viewing the river from his landing stage, where the shifting early-morning light and the enigmatic movements of the mallard ducks held for him the promise of artistic inspiration.

On that particular morning, Robert spotted something untoward bobbing against the bridges of the old watermill of the Abbaye Saint-Père just up river from his landing stage. Hastily he summoned both ambulance and the police, and was present when the latter hauled a sodden form out of the water and laid it on the cobbled ramp which led down to the water beside Robert’s house.

The barely recognizable water-swollen face, on which strands of straggling waterweed had pathetically stuck, upset Robert more than he could have predicted. And not simply because the sight was a horrible one. It seemed like some ghastly presage not so much of his own death – still, in theory at least, many years off – but of the encroaching despair that he knew, if not in his conscious mind, that old age often brings on.

Robert was not a sentimental man. He was aware, a little better than most maybe, that humankind is mortal, that he was a man and that being so he must, in time, die. He was aware too that the Abbé Bernard had been in decline for some while. Agnès had spoken of it, lightly, as was her way, but enough for him to have taken note that she was concerned about the old man, and he had even felt, God help him, some jealousy at her concern.

Robert was not unacquainted with despair but mostly he kept the acquaintance at bay by the usual methods: drink, daydreaming and outright fantasy. But that quiet morning he saw in the face of the drowned priest a reflection of his own condition. He was a failure, a failure as a lover but more crucially as an artist. He would never paint his Madonna, or not one he could ever rightly worship.

Robert Clément’s life at that moment took a strange turn. Atheist as he was, and remained till the end of his life, he determined there and then to enter the Church, not as a priest but as a monk. In some quiet abbey, out of the world, he might lose his false hopes and find another source of meaning.

But his present action was to go to find Agnès.

•   •   •

He found her, as he had expected to, in the cathedral. Or more properly coming out of it.

The Abbé Bernard had not made his usual appearance that morning and Agnès was already worried. When they had emerged, with the draggled Piaf, from the cathedral, he had not wanted to surrender the silver chain and, with some reluctance, she had allowed him to keep it. That the chain had not done the work she had attributed to it, by protecting the benighted man from his diabolical fears, she now learned from Robert Clément.

‘I thought there was some danger. I lent him my chain. I hoped . . .’

‘I’m sorry, Agnès. It looks like suicide. I know you were fond of him.’

‘I don’t know that I was fond of him,’ said Agnès, who had a peculiarity almost as odd as that of the Abbé Paul’s: she tried always to tell the truth, if not to others then to herself. ‘But I worried about him. Poor soul.’

‘You need worry no more. He’s gone wherever believers go.’

‘He wasn’t a believer. That was the trouble.’

(And indeed a perfectly rational-seeming note was later found affirming that the Abbé Bernard had left his estate to an association for the promotion of humanism.)

Agnès repeated the essence of her comment when she went to tell the Abbé Paul.

‘I wonder. It seems to me he believed too much. Wasn’t it Satan he was afraid of? The Church has much to answer for, Agnès. Not least in the fright it can implant in a child’s mind.’

‘Yes,’ said Agnès, who knew all about this phenomenon. ‘Maybe he’s better off dead.’

‘We are all better off dead, in a way, I suppose,’ said the Abbé Paul. ‘But I do believe that we have a duty to try to keep on living.’

That evening he conducted a solitary conversation with his old teacher and colleague over a bottle of Chinon. ‘You see, Bernard. The devil does exist but only in people’s minds. That is his power.’

•   •   •

The Abbé Paul was less sure of his ground when three days later he again opened the door to a triumphant-looking Madame Beck. She is the devil incarnate, he thought grimly to himself, and his voice and tone were uncharacteristically abrupt.

‘Yes, Madame?’

For answer, Madame Beck thrust a manila envelope into his unwilling hand and pushed roughly past him into the hall.

‘Do come in, please,’ said the Abbé Paul, who was a natural ironist but only rarely indulged himself with a parishioner.

‘The Mother has sent me all the evidence.’

‘Evidence? We are not in a court of law, surely, Madame?’

‘That girl should have been by all accounts if she hadn’t persuaded them she was soft in the head. Got a psychiatrist to back her.’

‘I don’t know that –’

‘She should
not
be cleaning Our Lady’s cathedral with a past like that. Never mind minding little children.’

‘Madame Beck,’ said Abbé Paul. ‘Have you perhaps forgotten what Jesus’ mission on earth was? Was it not the forgiveness of sins?’

He had never actually seen anyone sniff with disapproval but that was precisely what Madame Beck did in answer. ‘He also said “Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s.” The cathedral belongs to the state.’

‘Madame Beck, Agnès also cleans for me. For what it’s worth I would trust my life to her.’

But if he hoped to impress his guest with emotional appeals he was to be disappointed. She sat on the chaise-longue as if she were a queen on her rightful throne about to command a beheading.

‘As to that, Father, all I can say is I hope you have better luck with your “life” than that poor young woman in the newspaper report. From what I’ve read there she nearly lost it. I’ve warned you. I shall take my own action.’

‘Perhaps, then, you would be so kind as to take this with you as well.’

But even here he was foiled. She merely looked at him and made a mysterious and sinister movement with her chin. ‘I’ve made copies. You can keep them. I’ll see myself out.’

Pouring himself a glass of remedial wine, the Abbé Paul addressed his old friend. ‘You may have been right after all, Bernard. He taken human form these days. But I suppose he always did.’

•   •   •

While Brigitte was in Auxerre collecting her things, she had met an ‘old boyfriend’ who had apparently invited her back to stay with him.

Philippe was all for it. ‘Of course you must go. A new start.’ As he confided to Tan, he couldn’t wait to be rid of her.

‘Agnès can mind Max for me.’

‘You’re not taking little Maxling with you?’

‘You’re joking. Take a baby with me on a first date? He’d be yelling just at the moment –’

‘I thought he was an old boyfriend,’ said Philippe, who had no wish to have his imagination invaded by images of his sister’s sex life.

‘That was ages ago. We need to reconnect.’

‘I don’t think you should leave a two-month-old baby again so soon, Brigitte. Max needs to “connect” with you too.’

‘Three months, nearly. Anyway, she likes having him.’

•   •   •

The avenue of stately limes that graces the grounds beside the Musée des Beaux-Arts at the east end of the cathedral is a common parade ground for the babies of Chartres. Agnès was walking Max there and had nodded and smiled to many parents out showing off their offspring in the sunshine.

At the end of the avenue, she came face to face with Alain.

‘So who’s this?’

Max had woken without protest, opened a pair of deep blue eyes and, with the steady, unwavering gaze of the still truly innocent, was taking in the stranger.

‘This is Max.’

‘Hi, Max. May I join you?’

‘If you like. We’re just walking.’

‘“Just walking” is exactly what I was planning on doing.’

They walked down the rue des Acacias to the gates of the hôtellerie. Alain said, ‘Would you mind if I nipped up to my room? I shan’t be a moment.’

He was back in less than five minutes, with his wallet in his back pocket. ‘I forgot to tell you. The snorer. It was your old nun. Talk about a farmer taking his pigs to market.’

‘Not Sister Laurence?’

‘No, no. The bulky one, the know-all with whiskers. I’ll tell you another thing. She had the
TV
on first thing really loud. And Paulette, the nice maid, told me she had a bottle of whisky in the room. Not that I begrudge the old girl her tipple. Except it probably increased the volume of the snoring.’

‘I was terrified of her when I was a girl.’

‘You didn’t look too jolly when I saw you with her in the cathedral.’

Agnès laughed. ‘She was livid when you put her right about the paintwork. Sister Laurence was thrilled. But Sister Laurence is
OK
.’

‘Sister Laurence is quite attractive. If my heart weren’t committed elsewhere I’d have seduced her.’

They had reached the bottom of the hill which led down to the river and Agnès was turning the buggy to walk alongside it, so he couldn’t see the expression on her face. She began to walk a little faster so that Alain had to quicken his pace to catch up with her.

‘How about lunch?’

‘Thank you but I –’

‘My treat. I deliberately put myself on short rations during the week so I can feast at weekends. And I’ve no one to share my extravagances with. Come on. Max would like it, wouldn’t you, Max?’

And Max, with the divine timing of a baby, turned his grave blue gaze on Alain and broke into a wide and gummy smile.

They ate in a restaurant on the rue du Frou, where according to Alain the roast partridge was excellent. Agnès chose cassoulet and Max, contented on her lap, ate a jar of banana cereal.

‘Isn’t he a bit young for solids?’

‘She thinks it will help him sleep. But they start them early nowadays.’

‘But you don’t approve? Don’t answer. I see you don’t. My big sister breastfed her brood till they were eighteen months at least. Two in one case.’

‘You have a sister?’

‘Three. I’m the baby of my family. And my dad died when I was a tiddler so I was brought up entirely by women. I was like Stendhal. I used to lie on the floor and look up their skirts.’

‘Stendhal did that?’

‘One of his earliest memories was lying on his back looking up his mother’s skirt. In those days they didn’t wear drawers.’

She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Max, cover your ears.’

‘Max looks to me as if he’ll enjoy looking up a woman’s skirt when the time comes.’

A slight awkwardness arose when Robert Clément, whose local restaurant it was, came over to their table.

‘Agnès. How are you?’

‘Fine, thank you, Robert. This is Alain. He works on the restoration.’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

Alain smiled, apparently to himself, and Robert, almost turning his back on him, said to Agnès, ‘I hope they find your chain.’

‘What are you smiling for?’ Agnès asked when Robert had made his way back to his own table.

‘Oh, just life. Can I have a turn with that baby?’

After lunch, they walked, Alain still carrying Max, over to the old watermill where the body of the Abbé Bernard had been found.

‘My guess is,’ Alain said, tipping Max over his shoulder, ‘there you go, Max, that’s a good burp – my guess is the old boy threw himself in for unrequited love of you.’

‘That’s not nice.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it nastily. But don’t you think all suicide in the end is a love matter? A failure of love somewhere?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Poor old chap. He can’t have felt loved. Certainly not by his God.’

‘He’d stopped believing in God. And he’d lost his mother, who was very important to him.’

‘Mothers are. I’d be nowhere without mine.’

‘Yes?’

‘Christ. I’m sorry. I’m putting my big feet into it fair and square today, aren’t I? You never had any clue about yours?’

Involuntarily she touched the nook between her collarbones where the turquoise earring on its silver chain usually lay.

‘The man who found me, whom I called my “father”, also found a turquoise earring. I’ve always worn it, on a silver chain, which my “father” gave me. I gave them to the Abbé Bernard the evening before he died.’

‘Why?’

‘He was scared. He thought Satan was after him. And I told him that the chain would protect him.’

‘He didn’t believe in God but he still believed in Satan. That says plenty about the Catholic faith.’

‘It’s not important now.’

‘He didn’t return it?’

‘I forgot to ask him.’ This was not the case. She had wanted him to have its protection a little longer: a ‘protection’ her relic could not, after all, provide.

‘Agnès, this is serious. You must ask the police. He may have had it on him.’

‘I did ask. I asked the Abbé Paul to ask and he asked the police and then he went to look himself in Father Bernard’s house and neither he nor his housekeeper found anything. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter. It matters most extremely.’

‘Oh well.’ She shrugged.

‘Agnès, that shrug of yours is a bad sign.’

‘It’s only a –’

‘Stop it. Listen to me.’

Max, still in Alain’s arms, disturbed by the deep raised voice, began to whimper and she took the baby back, putting him into the buggy and rocking it on the cobbles. ‘It’s gone. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Agnès, if your mother’s earring wasn’t found in the Abbé’s house or on his body, then it’s probably in the river. And that can be searched.’

In answer, she looked down to the river, purling grey below them. ‘How?’

‘Listen. This isn’t a promise because I may not be able to keep it, but if it’s in the river I will find it for you.’