The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Semi-precious is real, dear. See, this one is garnet.’ Madame Picot’s plump white hand played with the dog’s collar.

  Madame Beck’s little eyes narrowed. ‘Of course they get them cheap over there.’

  There was a moment’s silence while each friend withdrew to examine her artillery.

  Madame Beck decided that the moment had come to apply their knives to weaker victims. ‘I saw Professor Jones with that Morel woman this morning. They were going off together, very chummy.’

  Madame Picot, less overtly adversarial than her friend, could none the less usually be relied on to rally to a joint attack. ‘I wonder what her game is?’

  Madame Beck sniffed. ‘Money! What else? The man is foolish with it. I see him giving it away to the beggars hanging about the close. They should put a stop to it.’ Without noticing what she was doing, she reached for a biscuit and then, collecting herself, snapped off a tiny portion. ‘I’ll just nibble at this corner, if you don’t mind.’

  Madame Picot smiled. ‘Of course, dear. Just as you please. How is the smell from the restaurant?’

  Madame Beck, who had been plagued with the output of the extractor fans, which she could not countermand since they were a requirement of EU health-and-safety regulations, gave a thin, pale-lipped smile. ‘I am having someone in to estimate for air conditioning. Of course it will be expensive but they say it will solve the problem completely.’

  • • •

  Professor Jones was showing Agnès the papers, or rather he was showing her a portion of the papers, since the bulk of them were stuffed away in cupboards or jammed into drawers where they could not present a face of perpetual reproach.

  ‘I need some help in sorting these.’

  He was aware of the debilitating cost of procrastination but lacked the will not to pay it. The papers, many still unattended to since his parents’ deaths, exacted from him an almost daily punishing emotional Dane Gold.

  Agnès assessed the stacked piles of folders, loose sheets and manila envelopes, which for her harboured no harrowing ghosts. Maybe the professor wanted her to dispose of them? But no, he was talking about which she should put where, so it seemed that reorganization was what was being asked for.

  ‘They’re mostly in French so you shouldn’t have any trouble.’

  Agnès nodded and smiled, and the professor, anxious to get off the topic as soon as possible, offered to make her a cup of tea.

  Professor Jones, having taken Agnès her tea and a stale Petit Beurre, left her to commence the Herculean task.

  ‘I’m just off to the shop to get in some soup. Anything I can get you?’

  Soup was a disturbing memory. ‘No, thank you, Professor.’

  It would never have crossed the professor’s mind that Agnès could not read. Quite possibly, even had he been aware of this fact, he would still have enlisted her help. That she was unable to fathom what was in the papers did not greatly bother Agnès either. She had not attended to the professor’s plans for organizing them into some rational scheme because she had intuited his fundamental terror of the whole enterprise. He was unlikely to be the best judge of how to deal with them.

  She began by taking anything which looked like a letter out of its envelope. The envelopes were grey with dust and were the first items to be disposed of. Agnès went to the kitchen and found a refuse sack.

  When the professor came back with his soup – one leek and potato, the other mixed vegetable – Agnès said, ‘We need some boxes.’

  ‘Boxes?’

  ‘It would help.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to buy.’

  ‘I’ll buy them,’ Agnès said. ‘It won’t cost much.’

  Pleased to have another opportunity to offload some money, Professor Jones handed her two fifty-euro notes.

  ‘That’s too much, Professor.’

  ‘No, no, take it. Boxes might be pricey.’

  • • •

  Madame Beck, on her way back from Madame Picot’s, passed the shop that specialized in fancy stationery and, catching sight of a figure in a blue dress inside, decided that she urgently needed envelopes.

  ‘Good morning. It’s Agnès, isn’t it?’

  Agnès, examining boxes for colour and size, turned and saw two little pale blue eyes that shifted rapidly from side to side as they took her in.

  ‘Good morning. Madame Beck?’

  ‘That’s right. I saw you with Professor Jones this morning.’

  ‘Yes?’ Agnès assessed a red box.

  ‘You clean for him?’

  ‘No, Madame.’

  Unused to dealing with reticence, Madame Beck paused. ‘Of course he would need help living alone. Such a shame about the wife. You know about her?’

  ‘No, Madame.’ Agnès picked up a yellow box.

  ‘She ran off and left him.’

  Agnès was appraising a bright pink box that she thought might do for photographs.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Madame Beck. ‘Ran off with a Chinky boy who played the fiddle. I saw it all.’

  Agnès addressed a passing saleswoman. ‘Excuse me. Do these come in any other sizes?’

  ‘You do clean?’ asked Madame Beck. It sounded like an accusation.

  ‘Yes, Madame,’ Agnès agreed.

  The saleswoman, who had gone off to inquire, came back to say that they also did a larger and a smaller version of the pink box.

  Madame Beck was suddenly taken with an idea. ‘Because I was looking for someone to help me out.’

  Agnès removed another box from the top of a pile. She now had too many to carry back to the professor’s in one go.

  ‘So,’ Madame Beck continued, the unusual resistance giving her an appetite for the chase. ‘May I ask you to come round to see me?’

  Agnès returned the pink box to the top of the pile and made towards the counter with Madame Beck almost running after her. ‘How about tomorrow? I live over “Beck’s”, our old restaurant, you know, mine and my late husband’s, by the cathedral steps.’

  ‘Tomorrow is Saturday, Madame,’ Agnès said, presenting the pile of boxes to the girl at the till.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Madame Beck was now seriously ruffled. ‘Monday, then. Shall we say ten?’

  • • •

  Agnès had one close friend in Chartres: Terry, the local dog-walker. Terry came from a sprawling Newcastle family, where she had been nurse to five younger male siblings, and the touch of genius which is in us all was in her case for handling dogs.

  She had come to France as an au pair to escape her family and had married a much older Frenchman, who, on their wedding night, had sat at the end of the double bed and wept.

  ‘He said, “Oh, Thérèse, chérie, I think we have made a terrible mistake,”’ Terry had confided in the early days of her friendship with Agnès. ‘He was, is, I should say, gay. I was only nineteen and pig ignorant. I was just grateful someone wanted me. I didn’t want to look beneath the surface.’

  Terry was small and stocky and took some obscure consolation in believing she was ugly.

  ‘But you have such pretty eyes,’ Agnès had said during the first days of their acquaintance.

  ‘Eyes only take you so far. I looked like a boy then, which is presumably why he thought he could make a go of it. Poor guy! He tried his best but the wedding night was the biggest flop, if you’ll pardon the pun. But we’re good friends now. He lives with his boyfriend, Raphael, in Toulouse. I visit them sometimes.’

  Ten years on, Terry and Agnès were having supper together at their favourite haunt, the jazz café.

  ‘Why does the old cow want you? That’s what I don’t get.’ Terry speared a plump spear of blanched asparagus.

  Agnès shrugged. ‘I guess she wants help cleaning.’

  ‘There’ll be nothing to do.’

  ‘
There’s always something to do,’ Agnès said. She described a little of her day at Professor Jones’s. Only a little, as she didn’t want to betray the professor, who, she had grasped, was growing less and less able to handle his own affairs. ‘He’s lonely.’

  Terry, however, didn’t want to be diverted. ‘He should get a dog. I reckon she wants to check you out. I know her. She’s often round assassinating people’s characters at Picot’s when I collect Piaf.’

  Agnès helped herself to a few slices of sausage and some gherkins. The idea of being ‘checked out’ made her uncomfortable.

  ‘Piaf doesn’t like Beck. They’re bright, Pekineses. Not my cup of tea, mind you, too yappy, but you have to hand it to them – they’re bright. That one is anyway. She’s nosy too,’ Terry, who, in the days when she had dogs herself, had always had terriers, continued. ‘Beck, I mean, not Piaf – though Piaf too come to that. When François and Raphael were staying with me old Beck met us one night when we’d all had a few. She couldn’t take her eyes off us after she saw us all holding hands. Raphael kept kissing me and then kissing François. She couldn’t work out who was sleeping with who. Mind you, neither could I.’

  8

  Rouen

  Dr Deman was of the opinion that it was counterproductive to refer directly to any ‘episode’ a patient might have suffered. When Agnès entered his consulting room in the clinic, he gestured towards a comfortable chair.

  ‘Sit, please. You are enjoying our food?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Agnès looked around. The room was painted a pale lilac, a colour Dr Deman believed was calming to the nerves. On the wall hung soothing photographs of trees, birds, flowers, a mountain lake and behind his desk what looked like a map of a maze.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Dr Deman said, after a pause during which it became clear that Agnès was going to say nothing, ‘why you think you are here.’

  Agnès’ pale tawny eyes opened a little wider. ‘Because of the baby.’ She looked, he thought, like a starved young lioness.

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘My baby,’ Agnès said with some firmness. ‘Where is he? He must be hungry.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Deman, miserably aware that this was going to be nasty. ‘You have a baby?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Agnès said.

  ‘Does your baby have a name?’

  ‘But of course. He is called Gabriel.’

  Dr Deman wrote the name in the file on his desk and then appeared to make a further note. In fact what he made was the doodle of a pair of elliptically slanting eyes. It was an image he tended to draw when anxious or distressed.

  ‘Gabriel is the name of an archangel. Did you think an angel was the baby’s father, perhaps?’

  The tawny eyes fixed him with candid surprise. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So the baby came . . .’

  ‘He was found,’ Agnès explained. ‘I found him.’

  ‘You found him where?’

  ‘In a basket. In the orchard.’

  ‘Forgive me for asking all these questions, Agnès. But could you tell me when this was?’ He glanced at the notes. The child had been born on January 29th.

  Agnès’ smooth brow knitted. When was it? She couldn’t be sure. January the twenty-first, she decided. Yes, that was it. Her son was Aquarius. Born on the cusp.

  ‘Do you know what month it is now?’ Dr Deman asked.

  Agnès was very surprised to learn that it was late July. She was also alarmed. Gabriel must be very hungry indeed. She must go to find him at once. Efforts to distract or waylay her were wholly unsuccessful. Finally, despite Dr Deman’s philosophy, they had to sedate by injection.

  ‘I wonder,’ Dr Deman said on the phone to Mother Catherine, ‘if it might be possible to invite the man who found her to come to see me. It might help us to establish some reality for Agnès. You have his details?’

  Mother Catherine did have his details, though she was not keen to pass them on. Jean Dupère had been something of a nuisance, coming up and pestering them about the girl’s progress. More than once, she explained to the doctor, they had had to send him away with a flea in his ear.

  Jean Dupère, however, when Dr Deman phoned and explained who he was and what was wanted, said he was more than happy to drive over to St Francis’s. He arrived rather early, an elderly, scraggy man, with a moustache, red-veined farmer’s cheeks and a prominent Adam’s apple, who sat turning his felt hat on his knees as he waited for Dr Deman. But once inside the consulting room he became quite garrulous.

  He described the circumstances of his finding the baby and how she came by her name. ‘I was out getting in firewood from my neck of the woods and I found her where the morels grow in season. I like morels. Agnès was after the lady saint.’

  ‘How long would you say she had been there?’

  ‘Couldn’t be long, doctor, or she would have passed away in that perishing cold. Newborn that day, by my reckoning. I’m no expert, mind, with human births.’

  ‘And you took her to the Sisters when?’

  ‘Next day. I went to report it to the police and they said best to take her there while they made inquiries. They didn’t find anything so she stayed there. Seemed best.’

  ‘And you saw her there? You visited?’

  Jean Dupère frowned and resumed the turning of his hat. ‘I reckon they didn’t think I should. I wanted to but –’ He shrugged.

  ‘You didn’t see her at all as she grew up.’

  ‘Seemed best not to.’

  ‘But you tried.’

  ‘The Mother asked me not to come. Seemed best to do as they said.’

  ‘Did Agnès know that you’d tried to see her?’

  ‘I left it to the Mother. She seemed all right. But –’ He hesitated.

  From behind his desk, Dr Deman, sensing a revelation, leaned forward encouragingly.

  ‘I found this,’ his visitor continued. He produced a matchbox from the pocket of his jacket and handed it across the desk. ‘It was in the basket when I found her.’

  Dr Deman opened the matchbox and took out a single earring.

  ‘I was going to give it her for a present when she turned sixteen.’

  Jean Dupère was not an avaricious man. He came from old farming stock and was cautious and slow. He had not passed on the earring when he took the baby to the Sisters because he had not known what was finally to become of her. If he had not handed it over when it was agreed that the child should remain under their care, it might have been because a small part of him wanted to retain a share in the child’s future himself.

  The plan to surprise her with the little turquoise drop had evolved in his slow but not unimaginative mind as he sat long evenings in his kitchen alone. He had been abashed – even a little hurt, had he allowed himself to recognize the feeling – by the Sisters’ reluctance to allow him to keep in touch with his foundling and was looking forward to a small moment of drama when he turned up with this gift from her past on her sixteenth birthday.

  But he was a decent man and not inclined to self-dramatization.

  ‘Maybe best she has it now.’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘Can I see her?’ The memory of his finding the little girl had, with time, become one of those episodes to which his mind returned with more rather than less wonder. Increasingly, it held for him a mysterious enchantment.

  The note of suppressed longing was unmistakable and Dr Deman had his own views about the nature of the Sisters’ care.

  ‘Of course. But I plan to say nothing for the time being about who you are. She’s, let us say, she’s not been well. We’re taking things slowly.’

  ‘Surely.’ Jean Dupère’s red face had lit up with shy delight. His little Agnès. He was going to see her again at last.

  • • •

  ‘Little
Agnès’ was lying on her bed in her white cotton St Francis nightgown. As usual, she was staring into midair, apparently at nothing. She was heavily sedated, as this, to Dr Deman’s continuing regret, was the only way they had found to control her efforts to do herself harm.

  Jean Dupère looked down at the placid oval face, dressed by a fan of long black hair. She looked like the Sleeping Beauty in the story told him long ago by his grandmother in the red-tiled kitchen which was now his.

  ‘She always like this, Doctor?’

  Dr Deman cleared his throat. ‘It will – I should say, we hope – it will pass.’

  Agnès’ rescuer stood there, turning his felt hat in his hand. There had been mental illness, his mother had confided, on his father’s side. ‘Reckon I’ll be off, Doctor.’

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Dr Deman said. He felt depressed by this encounter. Hoping to salvage something from it for them both, he added, ‘Why not give her the earring while you’re here?’

  Dr Deman handed the matchbox to the man beside him, who stood with it unopened in his big red hand and then handed it back again.

  ‘Not much point is there, her being the way she is now. You give it to her, Doctor, when she’s ready.’ He turned, making to leave the room.

  Partly to delay him, Dr Deman said, ‘I don’t suppose you know what happened to the basket?’

  But it was too late. Unwilling that anyone should witness his brimming eyes, Jean Dupère, hastening to the door, failed to hear him.

  • • •

  ‘The basket?’ Mother Catherine asked sharply, when Dr Deman rang her. ‘I’ve really no idea. I imagine we put it with the others in the pantry. I’m sure it’s long gone.’

  ‘I just feel anything we can bring to bear on Agnès’ history . . .’ Dr Deman began to counter and let the sentence trail away, for he found the whole case, and his failure to make any headway with it, dismaying. History appeared to be repeating itself in this poor girl with a peculiar vengeance.

  Damn the woman! Damn religion! He tried another tack. ‘Do we know who adopted the baby?’