The Cleaner of Chartres (7 page)

Chartres

The bells that Agnès heard that summer evening from Professor Jones’s apartment were the same bells that she had heard when she arrived, twenty years earlier, and friendless, in Chartres. She had come, mostly on foot, sometimes accepting lifts from lorries, once from a couple who had seemed kindly enough, until at a petrol station the man had scuttled a hand up her skirt and she had had to make hurried excuses and leave. The lorry drivers were more decent. Generally, they offered her a piece of their cheese and baguette or a drink of their wine and told her how lucky she was that she was in their cab and not with some of the other fellows they could name.

The latest of these lifts dropped her one evening at the turn-off from the Le Mans road. At the first crossroads she heard the bells.

Like the pilgrims of former times, she walked the last part of the way, following, as they had done, the twin compass points of the spires. And if, thanks to the lorry drivers’ decency, she was not as weary and footsore as the pilgrims, she was perhaps more heart sore. She could not have put into words what she was searching for but a spy-hole into her heart would have revealed that it was a safe haven she craved.

Her first real sight of the cathedral came as she was walking up the rue de l’Horloge, where she was met by the face of the sixteenth-century clock whose forty-eight wavering gold rays in the figure of the sun mark the passage of each half-hour. To her left a rain-drenched statue of a tall woman with long hair gleamed in the rays of the clock’s real-life counterpart as it began its long summer descent below the horizon.

Agnès was used to the cathedrals at Evreux and Rouen. Sister Laurence had often contrived to take her to the cathedral at Evreux, and later she had occasionally gone to mass in Rouen with some of the more devout nurses at St Francis’s. The lofty grandeur of these edifices promised prospects less alarming than those offered by the majority of humankind. And the expression on the face of the long-haired statue was sympathetic. Agnès climbed the steps to the porch and entered through the double doors.

What met her eye was a sight she was later to say that she hoped she would see as she was dying. The dazzling darkness was transpierced by a panoply of jewelled light. Before and, turning around, behind her, in the dim, high amplitude she saw the rose windows of the South and North Transepts, where brilliants of ruby, sapphire, emerald and gold traced diamonds, circles, squares and ovals, enclosing the forms of marvellous beings: angels, prophets, kings and queens, the Mother of the Mother of God and the Mother of God herself, each bearing in her arms her holy child.

These astonishing wonders were outstripped in their beauty only by the extraordinary lapis-blue of the Western Rose, which, now illumined by the light of the setting sun, seemed to offer a foretaste of a heaven she knew she would never see.

The service of vespers was starting. The priest had invited God to come to his aid and the congregation had echoed him, ‘Lord, come quickly to help me.’

The sentiment exactly matched Agnès’ need. She had been adrift for four months. She was weary, very weary. She would cast her lot there in Chartres and live, if she could, with whatever returns that might bring her.

•   •   •

The immediate returns to Agnès of that first day in Chartres were unpromising. Apart from some bread and a morsel of pâté and half a tomato, courtesy of the last lorry driver, Agnès had not eaten for twenty-four hours. She had a little money left from her last job, as a dishwasher, enough for a bottle of water and a baguette. That was it. There was certainly not enough for a room for the night.

Agnès walked about Chartres waiting for people to retire to bed. She lingered too long near the tables of an outdoor restaurant, hoping to forage some uneaten food, so that the manager, observing her, told her to move on. She tried asking at other restaurants if they needed any help with washing up. But all the answers were negative save for that of one man, who invited her into the kitchen and then pushed her against a fridge door and shoved his tongue into her mouth. Finally, depressed and exhausted, she salvaged some rotting peppers and a half-eaten croissant from the floor of the covered market.

As night was falling, she made her way back up towards the cathedral, whose majestic shape in the departing light seemed to offer a harbour of consolation. On the North Porch, she discovered a niche between the central and right-hand doors, and there she covered herself with a heavy coat, which smelled of wood smoke, and curled up like a cat between the strong arms of the cathedral’s pillars. For the first time for many months, she slept a sleep free of marauding dreams.

Dawn breaking through her closed eyelids brought awareness of the stiffness of a night spent sleeping on stone and the sharp returning pangs of the cruel hounds of anxiety. But, on sitting up and putting her hands for warmth into the capacious pockets of the coat (for the mornings that summer were chilly), Agnès found to her surprise a ten-franc note. Unaware that the young Abbé Paul had tucked it there as she slept, she felt that it was some sort of sign left to her by the coat’s ghostly owner.

The thought gave a fillip to her spirits. She had passed a small, unassuming café near the market the previous evening. She would go there, buy a coffee and use the
toilette
to wash herself and comb her hair.

The café still served coffee in the old way, in bowls, and the warmth of the china under her cupped fingers was a further source of comfort. With a fresh face, clean hands, tidy hair and the good-tasting caffeine inside her, Agnès felt she could take on the day.

A courageous outlook will often attract its own rewards. The café proprietor had been taken to hospital for an emergency hysterectomy, the young woman who served Agnès her coffee confided. She couldn’t, the young woman admitted, complain. It was an emergency, after all, not Madame’s fault, she wasn’t blaming her, the bleeding had been terrible – but it meant she herself was not going to be able to take her holiday with her boyfriend, which was pissing him off no end. But what could she do? There was no chance of getting anyone else to run the place at such short notice.

Within half an hour Agnès was behind the counter being shown, by Christelle, the confiding waitress, how the till worked, told where the bread and pastries came from and whom to ring if they were late. She was introduced to Aziz the cook and Nini, who did the dishes and cleaned.

‘The only thing,’ Agnès said, ‘is my clothes are being sent on so I’ve nothing to wear. And with my place falling through’ – she had invented a domestic situation which had turned out badly – ‘I’ve nowhere to sleep.’

Christelle said that was all right, Agnès could sleep at her place while she was away. She wasn’t as skinny as Agnès, worse luck, but she could let her have some clothes as long as Agnès didn’t mind them hanging off her a bit.

Agnès didn’t mind. She spent the next night on Christelle’s sofa after a meal cooked by Christelle’s boyfriend, who was full of gratitude that thanks to Agnès his holiday dreams had not been dashed.

When Christelle returned from her holiday, very brown and her low-cut t-shirt even tighter across her magnificent breasts, she announced that Madame had asked to see Agnès.

‘What does she want?’ The hounds of anxiety, temporarily in abeyance, came snuffing round again.

‘Oh, just to thank you, I think. You’ve run the place beautifully. Loads of regulars said.’

Madame was as good as Christelle’s word. ‘I can’t keep you on in Christelle’s position, obviously, but I have to take it easy for some weeks so if you wouldn’t mind helping us out?’

Among the regulars enthusiastic about Agnès was Robert Clément. In fact, it was chiefly his words of praise for Agnès’ competence which had secured her the further employment. Madame had a soft spot for Robert, who had charmed her into letting him use the café to hang his paintings with a commission of a mere five per cent.

‘You ever modelled?’ he asked one morning as Agnès served his bowl of coffee. ‘For an artist, I mean, not magazines.’

‘No.’

‘Like to try? I’ll pay double what you get here.’

Agnès smiled and shook her head but on his third time of asking she said, ‘What would I have to do?’

‘Nothing. Just sit. You can keep your clothes on if you prefer.’

But Agnès was willing to sit without as well as with clothes. The café work became permanent; various other odd jobs began to come her way. After some months, she found she had developed a life, of sorts, in Chartres.

Rouen

The news of the attack reached Dr Deman through the most mundane and yet also in a sense the most unlikely of sources, the local regional paper. Dr Deman read
Le Monde
. He was by no means a regular reader of the local rag. He happened on it by chance, left in his outpatient waiting room, and only as he was about to chuck it in the waste bin did he notice the headline.

NANNY IN CHARGE OF POP STAR’S BABY STABBED!

The angry black letters sounded a warning note in his memory, which was only strengthened when he examined the photo of the victim, a young, long-haired blonde.

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ the newspaper report excitedly ran, ‘23-year-old Michelle Boyet was out with her charge, nine-month-old Caspar Louis Bonaparte Howell, son of the singer Kelly Moonshine and her fiancé, the property developer Jeff Howell. An unknown assailant surprised Mademoiselle Boyet from behind and stabbed her repeatedly in the back. An attempt by the assailant to remove the child was thwarted by François Chicot, the driver of a passing van, who reported that the attacker’s face and neck were swathed in “a black scarf” but claimed that it “looked like a young woman”. Mademoiselle Moonshine and Mr Howell hurried from Paris, where the singer was recording. Baby Caspar escaped unharmed. Mademoiselle Boyet is in hospital, where her condition is said to be “critical”.’

A white fear prickled across Dr Deman’s stomach. From his locked cabinet he picked out Agnès’ file and read the last entry. ‘Still refusing to believe that her baby has gone. Seems calmer, however. Have recommended continuing with the walking.’

Beneath this entry, he saw the address he had so thoughtlessly written in the file.

It was about eight, maybe ten kilometres away, an easy enough walk from the clinic by someone sufficiently determined. But how could Agnès possibly have read her file? The cabinet was kept locked and the key was on the ring in his own pocket. No, this was sheer paranoia. Agnès was too passive, too docile, to have done this thing. There was no way she could possibly have found the address. Also, thank God, he suddenly remembered, she couldn’t read.

But, nevertheless, a few days later he summoned Agnès to his office. She sat there, as usual, her face impassive, waiting for his questions.

‘How are you today, Agnès?’

‘Very well, thank you, Doctor.’

‘Still sleeping better?’

‘Yes, thank you, Doctor.’

‘And how are the walks going?’

‘Very nice, thank you, Doctor.’

‘You walk far, do you, Agnès?’

But to this Agnès made no answer. She just gave one of her habitual smiles.

Perhaps because of the suspicion he was trying to suppress the smile looked to Dr Deman today slightly sinister. Without quite meaning to, or rather without consciously forming the intent, he said, ‘Agnès, a young woman was attacked last week with a knife. I don’t suppose you know anything about it?’

Agnès sat there, the smile still on her face. Dr Deman produced the paper and held it out quite pointlessly, since Agnès could not read. ‘Here. The woman was out with a baby. Her charge. She’s a nanny. Not the mother of the child.’

To his dismay two great tears began to roll down Agnès’ thin cheeks. ‘He is my baby.’

‘Agnès, did you attack this young woman? Please consider your answer carefully because if you tell me that you did I am bound to report it.’

There was no time for him to pray that she would keep silent. ‘He is my baby,’ Agnès repeated. ‘She had my baby.’

Nothing so dreadful had ever before happened to Denis Deman.

‘He is not your baby, Agnès,’ he pursued weakly. ‘That baby is called Louis, I mean Caspar.’ It crossed his mind that Caspar Louis Bonaparte was a terrible conjunction of names.

Agnès stared at him in wonderment. ‘He is Gabriel.’

‘No, Agnès,’ Dr Deman was almost crying himself, so furious was he with himself for allowing this catastrophe to have occurred. ‘Not Gabriel. Caspar, Caspar, Caspar. He is not your son.’

He was by no means a bad man. Indeed, he was, by and large, a good man and a conscientious doctor. But a part of him was now concerned that his carefully prepared paper on the re-visioning of psychotic care through diet, air, rest and gentle exercise would be laughed to scorn once word about the consequences of his treatment got out.

‘He is my son,’ Agnès said simply. ‘He was waiting for me.’

•   •   •

The report of the psychiatrist appointed by the court, after extensive police questioning, confirmed that Agnès was of unsound mind. She could not be safely permitted to continue at the clinic under Dr Deman’s care. Although nothing concrete had been found to connect her to the assault, patently she was a danger. A danger to herself and, quite possibly, to others.

Dr Deman saw her once before she was taken to the psychiatric hospital where she was to be detained. He had set himself two tasks and the first was to apologize. ‘Agnès, forgive me. If I had been more watchful this would never have happened.’

Agnès, now heavily sedated again, merely looked at him with dulled leonine eyes.

But there was a further torture Dr Deman had prescribed himself. ‘Agnès, can you tell me. Where did you get the address?’

Silence.

‘Agnès, was it from me? Was it from your file you got it?’

But for all his stricken pleas he could get nothing out of her and he left, more sick at heart than he could remember, before Agnès was taken off to a secure hospital in Le Mans.

Chartres

Agnès had come to expect to find Alain somewhere in the cathedral when she arrived there to clean. At whatever hour she came through the North Door he seemed to be before her, his presence signalled by cheerful whistling or humming. She tried a couple of times to beat him there, but even at 5 a.m. as she entered she heard the now-familiar sound of his whistle. He appeared to have taken to heart his pledge to keep out of her hair. A couple of times she saw his shadow reflected in the arches above the ambulatory, alongside the white overalls of his later-arriving mates. But she didn’t for some while re-encounter his solid person.

The effect of this was to make her curious. She almost regretted his reticence now it was so readily granted. So it was not entirely an unwelcome surprise to find him once again sitting on the dais of the silver altar when she arrived one Friday at her usual hour of 6 a.m.

‘You’ve caught me at breakfast again. Want some sausage?’

Agnès shook her head.

‘Well, it’s here if you change your mind.’

‘You get here early,’ Agnès suggested. For her the remark was a bold one and she blushed.

‘I sleep here.’

‘In the cathedral?’

‘I have a sleeping bag up there.’ His expression reflected her solemn one for a moment and then broke into a grin. His slightly pointed eye-teeth gave him the look of some feral animal. ‘I’m teasing. I’ve a little room at the Hôtellerie Saint-Yves. I’m a lark like you, and like you I like the cathedral to myself.’

‘I’m sorry if I interrupt your peace,’ Agnès said.

Alain stopped smiling and looked at her. ‘Have some sausage. It’s excellent. I get it from the stall in the market. And there’s wine. Or coffee. I bring a thermos. It saves going up and down.’

‘
OK
. Thank you.’ She accepted a couple of slices of sausage cut expertly with his penknife. ‘What do you do up there?’

‘We’re cleaning back to the original thirteenth-century surface, where it still holds. A surprising amount does, maybe eighty per cent in the ambulatory. Where there are gaps we restore.’

‘How is it done?’

‘The restoration or the cleaning?’

‘I suppose I meant the cleaning.’

‘You really want to know? Or are you being polite?’

‘No.’

‘With patience, mainly. First of all we vacuum off the accumulated grime. Most of that comes from centuries of candle smoke. Then we apply chemical compresses to lift off the more engrained dirt and the grease. There’s a lot of that. Then there’s a further cleaning process at the micro level, a sort of gentle abrasive technique, not unlike what fashionable women have done to their skin, I hear. Probably not unlike what you do for floors. Just a bit more refined.’

‘I don’t “do” anything.’

‘You clean.’

‘That’s not important.’

‘Cleaning is important.’

‘Not the kind I do.’

He looked at her again. ‘Everything that is done well is important. That’s the basis of all this here. All this’ – he waved his arms like a conductor energetically leading an orchestra to a final crescendo – ‘was built by people who believed that they worked for the glory not of themselves but of God. Or the Mother of God, I should say.’

‘I like cleaning it,’ Agnès allowed.

‘So do I. So, we’re colleagues. Both cleaners if not for the Mother of God at least for her finest establishment on this earth.’

‘Today’s the day I clean the labyrinth,’ Agnès said, emboldened.

He jumped up. ‘I know. Victor came in last night to clear the chairs. He’s taking his mother to Paris this morning to the heart clinic.’

They walked down the nave and then stood, side by side, looking down at the strange old design.

Alain said, ‘Odd thing, isn’t it, to find in a church?’

‘I like the pattern.’

‘Maybe the neural pattern of the brain.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s as good a guess as any. It’s the pattern that makes it fit in here. If you look about it’s all circles and squares, octagons and pentagons, diamonds and triangles. And crosses of course. But crosses are not just crucifixes. They’re axes.’ He crossed his forefingers and she noticed again his hands. Workman’s hands.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The windows too.’

‘Well, see,’ Alain said, ‘look around you. It’s all shapes. Look at those columns – they alternate, see, some octagonal, the others round. All the proportions here are based on geometric principles but it’s just that bit enough off centre to be natural – which is why the whole effect feels so immediately satisfying. Our faculties sense it subliminally before we consciously register it. The master builders who were in charge would have been skilled geometers as well as architects.’

Agnès looked down the empty nave at the grey-green columns rising like a regulated avenue of sturdy ancient trees to a heaven of cross-ribbed vaults above. And then down at the oddly compelling pattern on the floor.

‘With so much to look up at, it’s funny that for this you have to look down.’

Again he looked at her, but this time with a face that spoke admiration. ‘That’s a very shrewd observation. I’d not thought of it. And believe me I’ve thought a good deal about this labyrinth.’

‘I was told it was a maze.’

‘No. A maze has deliberate tricks in it. False trails. Dead ends. This is a labyrinth because there is only one path. A long and complicated one but only one.’

‘Why is it here?’

‘Maybe because of what you say. To make sure among all this exalted stuff we also keep our feet on the ground. Who knows? No one does, really. Of course there are theories, most of them guesswork. Half of them crazy. You know the story?’

The door through from the West Portal creaked, heralding the arrival of the Abbé Bernard.

Alain winked at Agnès. ‘Better get back to work. See you around.’

The Abbé Bernard had been increasingly plagued by bad dreams which woke him early each morning. Sometimes he awoke in tears. In all cases, he knew the dreams had been about his mother. Once she came as a great tabby cat with cruel claws and draggled, matted, wet fur. Once as he had known her when he was a boy, in a hat dressed with blue flowers, a hat which had quite left his conscious memory. More than once he had learned to his horror that she was not dead at all, and had never been, but was trapped in her coffin underground. His nights were made hellish by her sepulchral calls.

He was very glad to see Agnès in her yellow turban headscarf and leaf-green skirt.

‘Early bird, eh, Agnès?’ The Abbé Bernard gave what he imagined to be a jaunty laugh.

Agnès smiled acknowledgement. She did not want to admit that she was in fact later than usual lest he come in earlier to find her.

‘I wonder,’ said the Abbé Bernard, ‘if I might confide to you a dream I had last night. I was in a train . . .’

•   •   •

Madame Beck watched Agnès leave the cathedral by the South Porch with the Abbé Bernard. The silly old fool was clutching her arm, almost as if they were familiar friends. When Madame Picot called round for tea, this being Madame Beck’s week to host this ritual, Madame Beck said, ‘Is it right, that girl cleaning the cathedral? She never goes to mass. Bernadette was a regular attender.’

Madame Picot, who was not much of an attender herself, sighed and remarked that this was the way the world was going. Young people, she attempted to expound . . . But she was not allowed to complete her wisdoms on the mores of the young.

‘All the more reason for the Church to set a good example. There are plenty of good Christian women who would be glad to do that job. I wouldn’t mind betting that missy there is a Muslim. She has the look.’

‘But what can you do about it, dear?’ Madame Picot picked out the least stale-looking biscuit from the plate which her hostess had provided. She much preferred it when Louise came over to hers. Her tea was better than Louise’s – her daughter sent her English leaf tea from her London visits – and she didn’t have to leave Piaf, who sometimes expressed her displeasure by dragging her nails on the Persian carpet. ‘I mean, you weren’t thinking of managing the cleaning yourself, were you, dear?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Jeanette. Of course, I don’t mean myself. I might have a word with Father Paul, or the Bishop. Father Bernard is going soft in the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t set her cap at him along with Professor Jones. Men are idiots at that age. A nod and a wink from anything in a skirt and they lose their heads.’

Naturally, she was not thinking of her own late husband.