The Cleaner of Chartres (22 page)

Chartres

Three other people in Chartres were perturbed about Agnès that day. Robert Clément, who had gone to seek advice about the steps required for his proposed change of life, heard the news late, in fact from the restaurant by the Eure where he had seen Agnès with Alain. Like the Abbé Paul and Alain, he first rang Agnès and, getting no answer, went round to her house. Failing to raise her there, he used a resource unavailable to the two other men: he called Madame Badon.

Madame Badon said she had not seen Agnès since the last weekend she had spent in Chartres but she was in fact proposing to visit Chartres again that coming weekend. In her way, she too was fond of Agnès, who had served her elderly mother faithfully and been of great assistance in the management of Madame Badon’s affair.

And now the unreliable lover had developed Parkinson’s and Madame Badon was considering moving them both back to Chartres. She did not confide this to Robert but it crossed her mind that it may be no bad plan to revive their old tenderness. She suggested she could come from Paris a day earlier in case by chance Agnès was ill in bed and in need of care.

The following day Robert met Cécile Badon at the station. She was looking rather well, he thought: slimmer than formerly and more chic in her dress. Her hair, now a fashionable silver bob, suited her better than when it was long and she had used to colour it.

The old lovers walked the few metres from the station to Madame Badon’s apartment, where she suggested, in the light of his concern over Agnès, that he come inside.

The apartment was, as always, orderly. Everything was in its proper place and there was no sign of missing human life other than the slight wilt on a vaseful of golden lilies. Agnès’ bed appeared quite unslept in, but then, as Cécile Badon remarked, on the few occasions that she’d been in the room it always looked that way.

A red nightdress was folded under the pillow. A pair of crimson, gold-worked slippers sat neatly on the rag rug by the bed. The wardrobe was full of Agnès’ colourful clothes but if anything had been removed there was no way of telling. Her toothbrush was still in the bathroom but it was impossible to say if she had taken a spongebag – none was visible but, then, what did that amount to?

Passing her own bedroom door, Madame Badon touched her old lover’s arm. ‘Shall we?’

(In years to come, Robert Clément was to recall this moment as his farewell to an old life.)

•   •   •

Philippe Nevers was also worrying. The force of his sister’s reaction, one of hysterical anger and violent accusation, had initially steamrollered him into supposing Agnès was implicated in the injury to Max. Brigitte had shouted and raved on the discovery of the fracture, so much so that the hospital had had to offer her a sedative. She was now, thank God, in a bed beside Max, who was still under observation for a possible head injury.

Withdrawn from his sister’s destabilizing orbit, however, Philippe began to ponder the logic of the event. That Agnès would attack a baby, never mind one for whom she had shown such loving care, seemed to him less and less likely. Bit by bit, he became convinced that there was something amiss and the feeling was strengthened by a conversation with the doctor in charge of Max’s case.

Philippe had gone to the hospital to see how Max was doing and to take Brigitte some of the things she was fretting about: her cosmetic bag, for example, about which she seemed absurdly possessed. She was asleep when he came by and on leaving the room he encountered Dr Moreau.

Dr Moreau stopped to talk to Philippe and, with a casualness which he later questioned, asked him about the events of the evening before Max’s injuries were discovered.

It transpired that Agnès and Brigitte had given slightly different accounts. Agnès had spoken of a problem with the train that had led to Brigitte getting back later than expected, at nine, while Brigitte had claimed she was home that evening by seven. Perhaps, Dr Moreau carefully suggested, his sister had, in her anxiety, misremembered the time? Might he perhaps be able to clarify?

Philippe explained that he had not, unfortunately, been present that evening but, although he kept this to himself, Agnès’ version of the evening, as reported by the doctor, sounded to him the more plausible one. In his experience, Brigitte was careless, even wantonly irresponsible, where Max was concerned. And she had, after all, been engaged in the business of ‘reconnecting’ with a potential new boyfriend. Nor could he see any sound reason for Agnès to lie about the time of his sister’s return: it could hardly further her innocence to have been longer with the baby than Brigitte’s account suggested. He had not forgotten the look of concern on Agnès’ face when he told her that Max had been admitted to the hospital. There was, when he considered it, no trace of guilt, or guile.

Like the Abbé Paul, the professor, Alain and Robert Clément, Philippe rang Agnès’ number, and like them he got no reply.

•   •   •

The third person to be in a state of worry about Agnès that evening was her friend Terry.

Terry had not owned up to Madame Picot that it was Agnès who had found Piaf. The omission was not entirely intentional, or maybe even conscious. If asked, Terry would have said that she was planning to give her friend the credit once Madame Picot’s ire had died down. But the moment for that admission had not arrived and hearing Madame Picot’s excited account of her friend’s supposed crime produced in Terry a severe pang of remorse.

Hastening to repair her lapse of loyalty, she said, ‘Oh, but Madame, I should have told you, it was Agnès who found Piaf. She adores babies and animals. I know her very well. She just couldn’t have done such a terrible thing.’

While a part of Madame Picot did not like to hear this, for it threatened to take the edge off a gripping drama – one in which, through her friend Madame Beck, she had if not a part at least a ringside seat – another part of her was obscurely relieved. Her sojourn with her daughter had reminded her of merrier forms of relationship. She had her own guilt over Agnès. And she had begun to find her friend’s febrile jubilation over her former cleaner’s past disquieting.

‘You said you found Piaf in the cathedral crypt.’

‘I know, Madame. But it was actually Agnès who found her. She was taking care of that poor old nutter, you know, the one who topped himself.’

Madame Picot clicked her tongue. ‘I wish you had told me, Thérèse. I should have liked to thank her. And maybe give her a little reward.’

‘I’m sorry, Madame, but you were so angry and I . . .’

It has been said that the leopard cannot change its spots, but human beings, just occasionally, can make a shift, if not in their habitual actions then in their perceptions. The loss and recovery of Piaf, following the episode with the broken china doll, had stirred something in Madame Picot’s gluey soul.

She waved Terry’s apology aside in an almost regal manner. ‘It’s all right, my dear. I can fly off the handle. Julie ticks me off about it. I’m sorry your friend is in trouble.’

Fear is not always bad, though no one welcomes it. From it, a frail frond of fellow feeling for Agnès had sprung up in Madame Picot. In addition, she felt a need to punish her old friend.

Chartres

It was very dark in the crypt but that was what Agnès wanted. Not the dazzling darkness of the upper cathedral but the older, deeper darkness of its ancient antecedent. It was cold too. But she had on her father’s heavy coat, and carried in the basket, her one-time crib, a bottle of water. Also a torch, which she would switch on only if she had to. For now, she wanted total darkness, utter obliteration.

Agnès had no clear idea why she had fled to the crypt, but for her, unlike Father Bernard, it was the very opposite of the haunt of the diabolical. On the contrary, it had always seemed to her a hallowed place. Old and still and unjudging. Unjudging was what she most craved. She opened the door on the north side of the cathedral and walked, like the old pilgrims, for about seventy metres until she came to the replica of the statue of Our Lady Under the Earth.

Her first thought had been that she would go there to die. It was where the pilgrims had assembled in the past looking for help, hoping to be healed. In the pocket of her father’s coat she had old Madame Badon’s sleeping pills, prescribed at a time when barbiturates were still readily available (the more so to troublesome old people who fretted if they couldn’t sleep), which she had taken from the bathroom cabinet which had never been cleared. There were enough tablets there, with the help of some codeine, to ‘heal’ her, to put her to sleep for all time.

But, reaching the seated replica of the Virgin, something dented her resolve.

During the few months before she came to Chartres, Agnès had spent some weeks in a doss house on the shabby outskirts of Evreux. There she had met an old woman – maybe not so old, she calculated now, but the woman had had the face of an eighty-year-old and trembled like an aspen leaf when Agnès helped her to the bathroom. Her doss-house companion, whose name was Iris, had told Agnès a little of her life. She had once had money through a wealthy husband, but had left the husband for a sax player who had regularly attacked her until she had finally found the strength to leave. Iris told Agnès this story one night when Agnès had confided that she felt there was nothing left for her to do but die.

‘I felt that way, my dear,’ Iris had said. ‘I felt it many times after I left Honoré and the other fellow was pummelling me fit to break my ribs. But then, I said to myself, what about the times when you don’t feel it? What’s true now isn’t always true tomorrow and tomorrow I might feel life is good and if I die now I’ll miss that feeling. You’re young, my dear. You shouldn’t say no to life if some of you thinks tomorrow you might say yes.’

Standing before the replica of the lost Virgin, Agnès thought, I can’t die yet. I have to find Gabriel.

But she must flee. All the former safety promised by the great cathedral had been destroyed, as if by one of the catastrophic fires that had wrecked the former buildings. Take flight as she might, and had done for the past twenty years, somewhere in her being she had known this day must arrive. The long index finger of Time had finally marked her out.

She walked on, round the long crypt, past the Well of the Strong, and down into the most ancient depth of the cathedral, the chapel of St Lubin, where she had gone with poor Father Bernard. She would wait there, gather strength and resolve, and then steal away in the hope they would not find her.

But they will find you, said the voice in her head. And then you will never find Gabriel.

•   •   •

The Abbé Paul and Alain were at that moment drinking wine in the Abbé’s warm study. They had been conversing most amicably but a lull had fallen on their conversation – a lull of the kind that usually implies a long and mutual ease.

Alain, trying to put himself into Agnès’ skin, broke the silence. ‘She’ll have wanted to run away.’

The thought so followed the Abbé Paul’s own that he blinked a little at his guest before answering. ‘It’s unlikely she’ll get far. The police –’

‘It will be better for her if she doesn’t try to leave. I wonder . . .’ Alain fell silent again, leaving his thoughts to divine, unshepherded, Agnès’ possible whereabouts.

Suddenly he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, I think I’m going to take a look round the cathedral. It’s large and she knows it so well.’

‘It’s where I’d go,’ agreed the Abbé Paul. He would have liked to suggest that he accompany his new friend but he had a feeling that the young man preferred to undertake this mission alone. ‘If you do find her, will you bring her here?’

‘Sure.’ The younger man, already impatient to be off to follow his hunch, had jumped up. ‘Could I borrow the keys to the crypt? I only have the ones for –’

‘But of course.’

A shrewd guess, thought the Abbé Paul as, alone once more, he returned to his fire-lit study and his wine. It was the holiest part of the cathedral. The place where for centuries men and women had brought their sorrows, their shames, their terrors, their harrowing memories, their own unique darkness, to the ancient comprehending darkness of the Virgin’s underworld domain.

•   •   •

The crypt smelled of darkness and damp. In the darkness, Agnès crouched remembering. What she remembered was the day she had run for her life back to the clinic and hidden in the old laundry, which was boarded up and out of bounds. The laundry was also dark and also smelled of damp. She had been there before, to hide things, and she knew it was alive with silverfish and riddled with mice droppings. Possibly there had been rats as well. There were sinister scuffling sounds behind the walls and a putrid smell.

She had crouched there, her heart pounding, waiting, waiting. Waiting as she waited now, for discovery and exposure, thinking of Mother Catherine’s saying ‘God takes His time.’

There was another memory too, one that she did not want to entertain. The hand on her bare thigh as she stood, balancing on the ladder in the apple orchard, the hand that had then wriggled its way into the serviceable knickers the convent had provided and poked about. She felt again that probing finger, the sharp nail which had scratched her inside. She no longer recalled the sharper pain which followed.

Hunkered down in the dark, she relived again the horror of the crushing weight, the wine and garlic breath in her nose, the rough beard grazing her averted cheek. And a hard-palmed, heavy hand, smelling also of garlic, and nicotine, and something worse, which had held her mouth and stopped her screams, while another hand scrabbled at her skirt and brutally yanked her knickers down.

She only felt him, never really saw more than a fat white hairy belly and a revolting black fuzz of wire wool hair out of which there stuck a disgusting red and purple-veined thing, and then she had shut her eyes tight against the horror and the pain.

She had crept back to her bedroom, quietly changed her underwear and gone in secret to wash her skirt. The knickers she wrapped in a newspaper and threw away in the convent dustbins.

And after that, the growing sickness in the mornings and the slow, at first imperceptible, swelling of her belly, until the day Sister Véronique had her in for questioning and yelled at her and banged the desk and shouted, with a red face and furious eyes, ‘You cunning little whore!’

Who he was she would never know. He had gone, she supposed, as unremarked as he had arrived. A passing farmer or workman, maybe.

God alone knew. Only God alone would ever know, that is if there was a God to know anything – if anything could ever really be known.