The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  Mother Catherine felt it her place to become trenchant. ‘It was all carried out under the strictest protocol. Naturally, we were not informed. I would have thought you would know this, Doctor.’

  Dr Deman did know it of course.

  9

  Chartres

  ‘And then there is the china,’ Madame Beck said, indicating a mass of ornaments crowding the mantelshelf in the salon. ‘It must be dusted each week and once a month washed. Perhaps you would like me to write this down?’

  Agnès said she would remember it. She had appeared on Monday at 10.15 a.m. at Madame Beck’s after she had finished at the cathedral.

  Madame Beck was waiting for her. ‘We said ten, I believe.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Madame. I got delayed.’

  Madame Beck had observed Agnès coming out of the South Porch. Her lips pursed, as a fisherman’s might when he feels he is about to land a big catch.

  ‘Next time I would be obliged if you would ring me. I might have gone out.’

  ‘I don’t have a mobile phone, Madame,’ Agnès replied. ‘Where would you like me to clean?’

  Madame Beck’s apartment was carpeted throughout, which could be easily dealt with by vacuuming, but there were a large number of ‘knick-knacks’, some quite cumbersome. A Breton spinning wheel, for example, and various copper kettles, pots and long-handled warming pans. These, in the days when the restaurant below was still under the Becks’ management, had hung on the walls and in the many niches of the restaurant dining room.

  The spinning wheel, Agnès was warned, was ‘extremely fragile’. She must take great care while dusting it. The copper pans required a special polish. And then there was her collection of antique china dolls.

  ‘These are extremely valuable. I would ask you to take most especial care with them. So you’ll come tomorrow?’ Madame Beck’s eyes darted like little wintry blue fish.

  Agnès promised that she would come when she had finished her other job. She was careful not to say what that might be.

  • • •

  Agnès had been cleaning the cathedral for about a week when she began to feel that she might have to do something about the Abbé Bernard. In recent months, the Abbé had fallen into the habit of sitting each morning before the figure of the black pear-wood Virgin, with whom he conversed, sometimes loudly, startling the early-morning visitors who had come to the venerated statue expecting to pray in peace and quiet.

  Bernard, who had taken his name from the saint of Clairvaux, had entered the priesthood at eighteen. He had worked diligently at school, but for all his application his marks never placed him higher than halfway in the class. Still, everyone agreed he was industrious, honest and, for a boy, very devout.

  His father had died when he was just fourteen, and his mother, a woman famed in the community for her piety, was thrilled when he announced his intention to enter the priesthood and began at once to advertise the news at their church.

  Bernard’s ruling aim in life was to try to make things better for his mother, whose loss of her husband came as a particular blow, since she had also lost Bernard’s twin sister at birth. His mother and father had been sweethearts from the ages of thirteen and fourteen respectively. Bernard sometimes wished she would marry again – she was a handsome, big-boned, blonde woman and he had observed men casting approving glances at her. But his mother was determined to remain loyal to her dead husband and sought Bernard’s approval for her saintly resolution. ‘You would not want me forgetting Papa’s memory. Such a good father as he was.’

  What could an only son, and surviving child, do but agree? The priesthood was Bernard’s compensating gift to her for all that she had lost and undergone. He left the matter of his faith in God’s hands.

  And until lately God had played fair by not raising any troubling questions about His existence. Then, at 103, the apparently indomitable mother died.

  Circumstances had brought Bernard and his mother more than usually close. He had formed his ambitions to fit his mother’s for him. It was for her that he had never married (for he would never want her to be bothered by another woman coming first in his affections); he had entered the Church for her, because he wanted her not only to feel proud of him but to be able to boast about him to her friends; he had kept his own friends to a minimum so she should never be neglected on his few holidays.

  His mother had been a monumental presence. Now she was gone, and into the great void made by her departure there rode, like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, anger, terror, confusion and, most deadly, a harrowing despair. Anger that she had abandoned him; terror that without her he would not be able to survive; confusion about the emotions her departure stirred in him; and despair that not only his mother but his God seemed to have deserted him.

  Bernard, of course, had a spiritual adviser, Father Dominique, a Benedictine monk of famed theological sophistication. ‘Remember our Saviour’s words on the cross,’ Father Dominique offered when Bernard confided his low spiritual state. ‘“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”’

  The words did nothing to strengthen Bernard’s flagging spirits. Rather, they had a newly hollow ring to his inner ear. He had accepted them obediently all his adult life as a necessary part of the story of the passion of Christ but he now felt that the so-called Son of God may have been right to ask this question and that it was a question that had not been adequately answered. If He had a father in heaven, then what kind of a father was this to subject a son to a horrible torturous death? Slowly but surely, the thread of belief which Bernard had spun around him all his adult life began to unwind.

  Bereft of immediate support, and unwilling to approach the Abbé Paul – whom he had counselled when the dean was still a young man – or the bishop – an upright but emotionally aloof man with an instinctive aversion to anything that smacked of the psychological – Bernard had taken to asking the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was, after all, a woman and a mother. A mother, it seemed to the Abbé Bernard, was more likely to understand his condition than any man.

  When Agnès first began to clean, Bernard had been disconcerted by the change in the regime but gradually her studied quiet began to soothe his nerves. He found in Agnès an apparently more willing listener than the Virgin, whose presence had also become a matter of encroaching doubt. As a result, he had taken to buttonholing Agnès and following her about as she mopped, dusted and polished her way round the cathedral.

  His anguish went to Agnès’ heart, for she knew something of what he was going through. One morning, unable to bear her own reticence a minute longer, she straightened her back from bending to polish the rail before the pear-wood Virgin, and said, ‘If God is so good, then why have all these people remembered in this cathedral died for Him? Why would any good person want their loved ones to die?’

  Bernard in mid ramble stopped, stared at Agnès and then, to her dismay, began to weep. His mother, his father, Annette, his little twin sister, whom he had never even seen, all gone into the dark and maybe for nothing or to no one. The bleakness of this prospect seemed to him unbearable.

  Agnès let him cry for a while and then went over and put a hand on his shoulder. He was considerably shorter than Agnès, which made him seem to her more than ever like a hurt child. ‘It is only what I sometimes think. Often I think maybe it is because death is good that God allows it.’

  The Abbé Bernard turned upon her beseeching red-rimmed eyes, eyes that, had she been conscious and in Dr Deman’s consulting room at the time, might have reminded Agnès of Jean Dupère’s. ‘You think so?’ he asked eagerly.

  • • •

  It was almost a relief to get to Madame Beck’s, although Madame Beck did not ask Agnès if she would like a cup of coffee, as her other clients did, or even tell her to take water from the fridge should she need it. Instead, she presented Agnès with a pair of polythene shoe covers.

/>   Agnès knew these from the nearby swimming bath where she went with Terry, and wondered if Madame Beck had gone there especially in order to appropriate them for this purpose. ‘No need for those, Madame. I take off my shoes when I clean.’

  Madame Beck looked down at Agnès’ long brown feet in her red sandals. ‘Nevertheless, I would prefer you to use them.’

  She showed Agnès into her bedroom, the walls of which were closely hung with pictures of holy saints and photographs of Madame Beck and her departed husband in various attitudes of beaming uxorious delight. A number of antique dolls, with china faces and limbs, lay at the foot of the bed, which was vast and heavily counterpaned. Above the bed there was a Dutch landscape with a windmill worked in coloured wools, which Madame Beck had made while waiting for her husband to propose.

  ‘I would like you to strip the bed, vacuum the mattress and then turn it before putting on the clean linen.’

  The linen was pure, Madame Beck explained. The following week she would require Agnès to wash and iron it. She listed a number of other tasks that Agnès was to perform. Agnès listened without comment before setting to work. At the end of the two hours they had agreed on, she found Madame Beck in the kitchen, drinking coffee and listening to her favourite radio programme.

  ‘I can work an extra hour, Madame, or do the rest next time I come.’

  ‘How much have you left to do?’

  ‘The salon is all done. And the bedroom.’ The mattress, horsehair, had all but defeated her.

  ‘But the bathroom?’ Madame Beck had asked her to clean the grouting in the tiles, for which task an old toothbrush had been provided.

  ‘I’ve cleaned it, Madame, but for the tiles I’m afraid there was not enough time.’

  When she had gone Madame Beck rang Madame Picot. ‘She’s slow,’ she said. ‘Didn’t do half what I asked her to.’

  ‘Lazy?’ Madame Picot was inclined to laziness herself.

  ‘Time will tell,’ said Madame Beck with a certain satisfaction. ‘For the moment I’ll keep her on.’

  10

  Rouen

  Had Dr Deman been married and with a family to go home to, he might have been less preoccupied with his work. As it was, he tended to hang around after his formal working hours, making a nuisance of himself with the cleaners, who had their work cut out already negotiating the piles of papers on all the surfaces of his office, without having to negotiate the office incumbent too. Like many easily abstracted men, Dr Deman entertained the delusion that he was unusually organized.

  Occasionally, to get out of the cleaners’ hair, and to avoid the trouble of shopping, he took his dinner at the staff canteen. He was enjoying a glass of wine with a good helping of their porc aux pruneaux when a couple of nurses sat down at the table next to him. One, whose face was familiar, smiled.

  ‘Good evening, Dr Deman.’

  ‘Good evening, Sara. Late shift?’

  ‘No, we’ve just come off. And you?’

  ‘I’ve finished too.’

  ‘Sorry. How rude of me. You know Maddy Fisher? Maddy, Dr Deman.’

  Dr Deman was mildly pleased to be introduced to her companion. He had noticed her about – a tall, dark Australian girl, with good bones, who, he surmised, had only lately come to work at the clinic. The two nurses were discussing the Australian girl’s recent employment.

  ‘Maddy was working as a nanny before she came here,’ Sara explained.

  Maddy went on to describe how she had filled in as a nanny after leaving her husband, who, in a fit of romantic optimism, she had married following a brief affair. ‘It was a mistake – we both agreed. He’s a nice guy but I wasn’t ready for it. Still, it means I can work here.’

  ‘Before she came here she was the nanny to Kelly Moonshine,’ Sara confided.

  Dr Deman, who did not follow popular music trends, hadn’t the faintest idea of the significance of this name but he nodded knowingly. He was enjoying the company of Sara’s friend.

  ‘The boy was adopted,’ Maddy continued. ‘She’s quite a bit older than him so they couldn’t have kids themselves. Shall we get some more wine?’

  Dr Deman, who was about to fetch a plate of cheese, suggested that he get a bottle for the three of them.

  ‘How old was the child?’ he asked, when he returned with a bottle of the best Bordeaux the canteen rose to.

  ‘Nearly eight months when I left. Handsome kid. She’s Colombian and if looks were all he could have been her own flesh and blood.’

  Dr Deman had studied Agnès’ face and features, and it seemed to him that she surely had some Algerian or gypsy blood in her. ‘Really? You don’t know where they, er, got the child?’

  ‘I gather they used a backhander to get him from somewhere local. We weren’t supposed to know all that but, you know, people talk.’

  Sara said, ‘That’s awful.’ Dr Deman poured Maddy more wine.

  ‘Well, money no object, you know how it is with the rich. They were OK. It wasn’t a bad job. Sweet little boy and it’s a lovely house. A small château it was once. But, you know, I’m a nurse, not a nanny.’

  Dr Deman cut himself a considered slice of Reblochon. ‘Where is the house exactly?’ he asked.

  • • •

  The six-month lapse of time when a child could be legally returned to the birth mother had long passed. But Dr Deman nevertheless drove the short distance to a large, isolated house in the countryside, easily found from Maddy’s description, and spent some time patrolling its surrounds.

  On one such patrol, he met a young blonde woman with a small child in a pushchair. Dr Deman smiled at the baby, who, with a child’s quick instinct, sensed an ally and returned a radiant toothless beam.

  ‘What a charming little boy.’

  The young woman stopped and eyed him. Dr Deman was an attractive man and when he cared to he could rise to being quite charming himself. ‘He’s not mine. I’m the nanny.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Eight months, coming up to nine.’

  ‘The parents must be proud. He’s a lovely child.’

  The nanny sized up her interlocutor. ‘They don’t see much of him, to tell you the truth. Don’t know why they bothered to adopt.’

  ‘He’s adopted?’

  ‘She’s too old for kids. They wanted one that was, you know, kind of coffee-coloured, the kind they’d make if they could make their own.’

  Dr Deman tried to repress any sign of his instinctive repugnance at her tone. ‘Not so easy to find a child that fills that bill.’

  The nanny became confiding. ‘Rumour is they slipped money to some local nursing home.’

  Dr Deman was not quick enough to wholly master his response, and the woman, aware of something amiss, became alarmed. ‘You a reporter? Because if so I said nothing.’

  ‘Not at all. I was merely interested.’ He made a polite farewell.

  Later he could not have said what brought him to do this but perhaps for lack of any alternative way of handling this potentially disturbing information he wrote the address down in Agnès’ file.

  11

  Chartres

  Although Agnès could neither read nor write, she had a marked numerical ability. In the class for backward children at the local school near the convent, as with all the other slow learners, she was largely given up on, until an enterprising student teacher noticed her. She had observed the small girl concentratedly counting out tiddly-winks and placing the different colours in a series of complex designs. The student, who was to become the kind of teacher with ambitions for her pupils, took to the pretty girl with the appealing eyes and made the child her special project.

  As a result Agnès could read ten- or even twelve-figure numbers, including those with decimal points, and could add, subtract and multiply very efficiently in her head. She could also do long division and p
lot a graph. Perhaps she could also do algebra, though the student teacher had left before her young student’s talent could be further tried.

  Agnès began her assault on the professor’s papers by sorting the letters according to date. When the professor put his head round the door a little later she inquired, ‘Have you any other letters?’ She had divined the contents of the drawers.

  By the end of two weeks, seventy-five years’ worth of letters had been neatly clipped together according to the year, filed in transparent folders and placed in three yellow boxes, each of which was labelled with the dates of the correspondence. The boxes, she decided, would fit on the shelf at the top of the wardrobe.

  ‘I think you could store them in there, Professor. I’ve cleaned it out.’ Agnès indicated a number of plastic bags filled with clothes. ‘I don’t think we should bother with the charity shops.’

  ‘How about the beggars by the cathedral?’

  Agnès, who knew several of the beggars by name and was aware that even they might turn up their noses at the professor’s matted jerseys, said she could try but she thought that maybe the clothes were best thrown out.

  Before she left, the professor insisted on giving her a glass of white wine.

  ‘I’m sorry it isn’t cold – seems to be something wrong with the fridge. God knows where my wine glasses have gone. Frankly, I’m incredulous, Agnès. However did you manage all this?’

  Agnès accepted the tumbler of wine and some stale salted biscuits from a chipped plate with ‘Welcome to Aberystwyth’ still just discernible to those who could read. ‘It’s easier when it’s not your own stuff.’ She tried to resist her urge to wipe over the glass, which was bleared with grease. Failing, she gave the lip a surreptitious scrub with her overall.

  ‘But still, you’re a genius. When can you start on the rest?’

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow morning if you like when I’ve finished at the cathedral.’

  • • •

  The Abbé Bernard was not merely losing his faith; he appeared to be losing his wits as well, and there was only so much that she could take, Agnès decided, of his mounting distress. She was an early riser, so in order to limit the time she would be exposed to his misery she must get there well before he was likely to arrive.