The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  In any case, she loved the cathedral in its state of desertion, the only movement within its great space her own, or the shadowy flight of the odd sparrow. The tremendous height of the ceilings, the noble lofty columns – like lichen-covered trees – the succession of soaring arches, affected her profoundly and the jewelled brilliance of the stained glass, re-created in the ephemeral butterflies of light which played over the grey stone, lifted and brightened her darker thoughts.

  Because of the restoration programme, the whole of the choir was closed off and half of the ambulatory behind. A complex of scaffolding had been assembled for the work on the ceiling plaster. The day after she had completed the filing of the professor’s letters, Agnès entered the cathedral to find she was not alone. A man was there. A man with an open knife in his hand, sitting bold as brass on the marble dais by the silver altar, right beside the sign that forbade people to mount it.

  She stopped dead and a bolt of fear flashed down her sternum. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The man put down the knife and looked at her for some seconds before replying.

  ‘You’re the cleaner. I’ve seen you.’

  ‘Where?’ The alarm flashed down her sternum again.

  For answer, the man jerked his chin towards the scaffolding. ‘Up there you can see most things.’

  ‘You’re one of the workmen?’

  ‘I’m part of the team.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You always get here early?’

  Habit made her cautious. ‘Now and then.’

  ‘We’re behind. Restoration works are always behind so I’m going to be in early from now on. Get the benefit of the morning light before autumn.’

  ‘I see,’ Agnès said again. As if that was sufficient excuse to allow him to penetrate her sanctuary at this hour.

  The man smiled. He had a long lean face, of a slightly mournful cast until he smiled. ‘I’m Alain.’

  ‘I’m Agnès.’

  ‘That’s a pretty name.’

  Agnès, embarrassed, nodded.

  ‘Would you like some sausage? I was having a spot of breakfast.’

  ‘I’ve eaten.’

  The man smiled again. ‘I don’t plan to get in your hair.’

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘You needn’t fret. I’m not chatty myself.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Agnès said, further embarrassed at being read.

  ‘I can see that. I’m on your patch. But don’t worry, there’s space enough for the two of us.’

  Agnès went to find her cleaning materials. When she came back there was no one on the dais, but she could hear whistling from above.

  When the Abbé Bernard arrived, Agnès was about to leave.

  ‘Off already, Agnès?’

  ‘I’ve finished the work for today, Father.’

  The Abbé Bernard scrabbled at her forearm. ‘I dreamed last night that my mother was drowning in a duck pond. Mud, thick mud. Maybe worse. Maybe . . . and I stood there watching. I did nothing to save her.’

  ‘It’s a dream, Father. It happens when people die.’

  The Abbé Bernard looked at her with scared exhausted eyes. ‘Should I be feeling guilty?’

  Agnès gently detached his hand from her sleeve. ‘That happens too, Father, when people die. You will get used to it.’

  12

  Chartres

  Professor Jones had been utterly absorbed since he opened the yellow box on which Agnès had stuck a label bearing the dates 1935–1955. There, before his eyes, lay the first twenty years of his life, neatly assembled in transparent folders. He took out the top letter, which was written in blue ink on blue-lined paper.

  ‘My dear Bronwen,’ the professor read. ‘The news of little Owen’s timely arrival last evening brought us the greatest joy.’

  The professor turned the page to see who had written to his mother to celebrate his birth. He read the signature in the clear cursive hand: ‘Mother’.

  Nana. His Nana with whom he had gone to stay as a little boy. ‘Da and I are so thrilled,’ he read on. ‘We shall be making the journey, God willing, to see you all as soon as you tell us to come. Meantime I am knitting away in the blue wool. Annie has taken back the pink I got in, in case, though we all said it would be a boy and praise the Lord he is.’

  The professor’s eyes began to prick. Days of heavy scones, thick with cream and running with blackcurrant jam, a pony which bit him with big yellow teeth when he tried to feed it a carrot, rain on warm grass wetting his socks, a cut foot from a broken bottle in a rock pool, sardine sandwiches, sand in his socks, roly-poly down a hillside – the revenant years began to fill out as he read.

  Agnès had not been able to follow a strict system. She had put together all the letters which looked as if they came from the same hand in the order of their date. On the few occasions when there was no date (luckily the professor’s correspondents tended not to depart from the correct etiquette of letter-writing), she appended them, clipped together, to the back.

  Nana Williams had always followed the proper forms so every letter written, either to her daughter or, later, to her grandson, was there filed in chronological order.

  ‘My dear Owen,’ he read. ‘Here is a ten-shilling postal order for your birthday. Grandda and I hope you will buy something for the train set. Grandda suggests maybe a turntable or some signals. We hope you will soon be coming on the big train to Aberystwyth to see us. Phoebe’ – their black-and-white cat, Owen Jones, alone on his single divan in the faraway town of Chartres, remembered – ‘is looking forward to seeing you.’

  • • •

  ‘She’s a cow,’ Terry said categorically. ‘I can’t think what possessed you to take her on. You should get out while you can.’

  She and Agnès had been for their weekly swim. Agnès, naked, was rubbing herself down with a towel. ‘It’s work.’

  ‘Do you need it? You never spend a sou as far as I can see. What are you saving for?’

  But if Agnès was saving for anything she didn’t say.

  ‘I bet the pay’s really mean,’ Terry, slightly sulky, said. Like many apparently well-intentioned people, she was prone to take offence when her advice went unheeded. Looking at Agnès’ naked body, she relented. ‘Why don’t you pose some more for old Robert? He pays well, doesn’t he?’

  Agnès shrugged. ‘I do but –’

  ‘Is he a lecher?’

  ‘Not really. It’s more . . .’ But she didn’t complete the sentence because Terry would not understand. Sitting so still for hours, with or without her clothes, brought on dark thoughts.

  ‘How many jobs have you got now, anyway?’

  Agnès collected her thoughts. ‘My old regulars, the Duchamps, the Poitiers and there’s still Madame Badon. Then there’s the cathedral and now Madame Beck.’

  ‘And the professor.’

  ‘He’s not “cleaning”.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’d call it, then,’ said Terry, who had seen the plastic bags stuffed with the contents of the professor’s wardrobe. ‘How much do you charge these days?’

  ‘Twelve to fifteen euros. Depends when I took them on.’ The truth was Agnès operated a sliding scale. The Poitiers, with five kids, could not afford more than ten euros an hour and even then she sometimes waited a week or so before being paid.

  ‘I hope you’ve made old Beck pay top rate.’

  Agnès, who had already agreed, without demur, to Madame Beck’s proposed rate of ten euros an hour, said that she had.

  ‘How much you charging the professor?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Agnès admitted. ‘We haven’t discussed it yet.’

  • • •

  When Agnès got to the professor’s apartment, she found the yellow boxes on the floor where she had left them.

 
‘I’ve been reading through,’ the professor confessed. ‘Things I’d quite forgotten. People too. It’s amazing what one forgets.’

  Agnès, who felt it might be a relief to forget, nodded. ‘We’ll leave them there for the moment, then. Should I get on?’

  ‘Do. Do.’ The professor went back to perusing two letters, each with a Scottie dog embellishing a corner, that he had received from Lorraine Partridge, a girl he had met at university. She’d had thick brown wavy hair, he recalled. And a light blue bra. He’d once got to the bra, after some effort and a lot of courage, but had not managed to unhook it, though with hindsight perhaps she was less unwilling that he should undo it than he had understood at the time. The professor sighed. So many wasted opportunities.

  Agnès had determined that today was the day to begin to tackle the photographs. These she had amassed from a variety of hiding-places – envelopes, notebooks, old albums with black-and-white childhood snaps (taken, in fact, by the professor himself with a Brownie camera given to him by Nana and Grandda) – and arranged in piles in the study. It would be easier for her to order these than the letters since it involved no reading. Some, obligingly, had dates on the back in faded ink or pencil. But many Agnès could group by studying the characters.

  There was the white-haired old couple who appeared first with a well-cocooned baby on the woman’s lap, a baby that over a period of time translated itself into a youthful professor, first in long shorts and round spectacles, later into a youth in long trousers and a bad case of acne. From a picture taken at a beach – of the white-haired woman, a younger woman who looked like a daughter and the unmistakable young professor with plump bare legs and a shrimping net – Agnès deduced that a number of tiny black-and-white photos with crimped edges were of the same beach and thus belonged in the section for the old people.

  As she was arranging these on the professor’s desk, the professor himself came in.

  ‘My God. St Govan’s Beach. Now that truly takes me back.’ He began to shuffle through the pile and picked out one of the photos of the white-haired woman. ‘That’s my grandmother, Nana, we called her. My mother’s mother. She was, oh, would you know what I mean by archetypal, Agnès? She was like a grandmother in a story-book – always baking something, always kind.’ She had smelled of Coty’s talcum powder. Talcum in a dark pink canister with gold writing on it. Once, before they had had to leave, he had sneaked into her bedroom and found the tin and had sprinkled it on his stomach to remember her by. His parents had complained of the smell in the car all the way home. ‘Do you use talcum powder, Agnès?’

  Agnès shook her head.

  ‘I expect your mum did, though. Look, that’s my mother. My God, but she looks young.’ He held out a photo of a serious-looking young woman with long, dark, waved hair wearing a waisted suit and a jaunty little hat set slantwise. ‘She looks like the heroine of a war movie. She might have been too. My father had just missed being done in at Dunkirk.’

  Agnès said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t file these away. Maybe we could make something with them.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘On the wall,’ Agnès said, looking at the dingy paper which contributed to the general pervading gloom of the professor’s study. ‘We could put your family pictures up there.’

  Agnès returned to the stationers, where she bought three rolls of paper on which pictures and photographs could be tastefully stuck to form a collage. They spent the afternoon together making up a sheet celebrating Nana and Grandda.

  ‘That’s Grandda.’ A man in a beret wheeling a wheelbarrow. ‘That’s me in the wheelbarrow. He loved sweet peas, Grandda. I used to give him the seeds for his birthday.’ In a large packet, with pictures of the flowers they would become. Pink, mauve, blue and dark crimson flowers, which bloomed to give the sweetest scent. The professor, who could no longer smell any living flower, smelled again the heavenly scents of childhood.

  The bells of the cathedral chimed for vespers. ‘I’ll have to leave soon, Professor,’ Agnès said.

  13

  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.