The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  Agnès said suddenly, ‘I used to try to get to the middle with my eyes but I never could.’

  ‘No, it would be difficult. I think you have to walk it.’

  ‘How long do I have to stay here?’

  ‘In this room?’

  ‘No. In this place.’

  ‘You don’t like it here?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘If you, we, can persuade people that you won’t do yourself or anyone else harm, we might be able to move you.’

  ‘Will I be allowed to have my baby back?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I want my baby.’

  ‘Agnès, I am so sorry.’

  He sat there while she wept, and then, when he thought she must have wept her all, wept more, her eyes and nose running with the unchecked grief of the irreparable loss for which there was no comfort.

  ‘Why didn’t they let me keep him?’

  ‘I suppose they thought you were too young.’

  ‘I am not too young.’ She turned her face shining with tears to him in an appeal he was powerless to grant.

  ‘It’s very terrible, I know.’ There was no cure for the dreadful thing that had been done to this young life. And perhaps to her child’s life. All he could do was to try to help her not fall further into the consequences. ‘Agnès, I need your help.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s like this. I think I may have misunderstood you. I thought perhaps you had tried to get your baby back and’ – he didn’t want to speak words she might then put into her own mouth – ‘and did not quite know what you were doing. A young woman, the nanny of a child, who wasn’t yours –’

  ‘He was mine.’

  ‘No, Agnès. That child was not yours.’

  ‘But I saw him,’ Agnès said.

  Denis Deman, who wanted to put his head in his hands and howl, instead said, ‘Tell me what happened when you saw him.’

  Agnès thought. ‘He was in a pushchair. He had dark hair.’

  ‘Was there anyone with him?’

  She thought again. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘So he was on his own, the child?’

  ‘I saw him,’ she said again, staring defiantly. ‘Can I go now?’

  24

  Chartres

  By the time Agnès’ day of the week to clean came round again, Madame Beck’s emotions had reached a pitch of excitement which she had seldom enjoyed since she uncovered Claude’s first affair in Evreux. When the doorbell chimed, she opened the door to Agnès so swiftly that she gave her own ankle a nasty blow.

  ‘Come into the salon, please.’

  Agnès, who assumed there was to be some interrogation over the episode with Alain, wordlessly obeyed.

  Madame Beck, limping slightly in her pale pink mules, pointed at the scallop-edged table. ‘The doll.’

  Agnès scanned the table, which was crowded with dolls in various states of fancy dress.

  ‘Lulu, the little coloured doll’ – Madame Beck paused for emphasis – ‘is missing.’

  For a moment, Agnès hadn’t a clue what she was talking about and then she remembered. ‘It was here last Tuesday.’

  ‘You admit it?’ Madame Beck was almost regretful to get such an easy admission.

  ‘It was the day I washed the china. I noticed it was new.’

  ‘And you notice it is not here now,’ said Madame Beck grimly.

  ‘If you say not, Madame.’

  ‘I do,’ said Madame Beck. Her ankle was beginning to throb. ‘And you can either pay for it now or work the next three weeks for nothing.’

  ‘I didn’t take it,’ said Agnès quite calmly, though she felt far from calm.

  ‘I dare say you didn’t. What I do say is that if you didn’t take it, you broke it, and if you broke it, you concealed the damage from me. Had you come at once and owned up, I might have taken a different line,’ said Madame Beck, quite untruthfully. ‘But dishonesty is another matter.’ She folded her arms over her high, well-bolstered bosom, the same bosom that long ago, when her world was young, her husband had liked to caress.

  ‘I didn’t take it or break it,’ Agnès said. She had no expectation of being believed.

  ‘No one but you has been here. No one else could have done it. Either you took it or you broke it. Or do you imagine that I broke it myself and it slipped my memory?’ asked Madame Beck, smiling with a terrifying attempt at irony. Her teeth behind the thin lips were tombstones, large with gaps.

  Agnès began, ‘I do assure you, Madame –’ but was interrupted.

  ‘And I assure you, Mademoiselle, that I am neither forgetful nor demented.’

  The scene brought to Agnès’ mind another scene, when it also seemed she had done something she had no recollection of.

  ‘If I’d broken it –’ she began but once more was savagely interrupted.

  ‘There is no “if”. Either you broke it or you stole it. If the latter, then return it at once or I’ll inform the police. If you own up to breaking it, I will allow you to pay for the breakage without informing the authorities.’

  • • •

  ‘I said I would pay for it.’

  Robert Clément, trying once again to catch the faint shadow under Agnès’ cheekbones that gave her face that hint of contemplative melancholy, dropped his pencil. ‘Shit, the lead’s broken. You can’t do that. It’s an admission of guilt.’

  ‘I’d rather,’ Agnès said. ‘I’d rather pay her and leave.’

  ‘Leave by all means. Leave you must. But neither must you pay for something you didn’t do.’

  ‘I’d rather,’ Agnès said again. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘My dear girl, you are making trouble for yourself. How much is she rooking you for?’

  ‘Sixty euros.’

  ‘You’re joking. A little china doll didn’t cost sixty euros.’

  ‘It was an antique.’

  ‘She’s mad. If you pay her I shan’t let you work for me again.’

  Agnès had never intended to sleep with Robert Clément. She did it for the simple and not uncommon reason that it seemed rude not to. He had, after all, set her up in Chartres, both helping to ensure that she stayed on at the café and giving her work as a model. But also it was through him that when she first arrived in Chartres she found her room with the Badons.

  The Badons’ large apartment was on the boulevard Charles Péguy close to the station, where the elderly Madame Badon lived more or less bedridden and from where her daughter, who worked in Paris, spent an unpredictable number of nights of each month away. Madame Badon the younger was looking for a reliable girl to help the elder Madame Badon to the commode and see to it that she took her sleeping pills or her laxative and didn’t fall out of bed at night, or at least if she did to see to it that she was rescued from the floor. Also, someone to find her spectacles. Astonishing that in such a small space with such restricted movement she could lose them so often.

  The room on offer was not large but it was the first real room Agnès had ever had to herself (you couldn’t count the cell-like space at the convent). Once Agnès had established her credentials as reliable and clean, yet not averse to wiping her mother’s bottom – a task that the younger Madame Badon found quite beyond her – the relief to the younger Madame Badon was such that she began to allow herself more and more latitude in time spent away. She had a lover in Paris on whom she found it necessary to keep an eye, so increasingly Agnès found she had only the elder Madame Badon to contend with.

  The apartment had two bathrooms, but, as the elder Madame Badon never used hers, Agnès had a bathroom to herself. Apart from having no rent to pay, she saved money on food too, since the elder Madame still believed she had the appetite of her youth and had Agnès cook twice as much as – or more than – she could ever eat.<
br />
  Agnès owed this stroke of good fortune to the fact that the younger Madame Badon had once been Robert Clément’s mistress and indeed, though this was not widely known – or in fact known to anyone save Robert Clément and Madame Badon herself – she too had modelled for him in the days when her figure was firmer and both of them enjoyed seeing it naked. The affair had been one of mutual affection rather than passion, and, in the way of such arrangements, had drifted on until one or the other found a more desirable companion, or anyway one they were willing to own up to.

  Madame Badon had met and fallen in love with her Parisian lover and had served notice on Robert but not without asking his aid in her search for someone to help with her mother. At the time, Robert had only recently met Agnès and she had agreed to model for him. He knew she was sleeping on Christelle’s sofa and in need of more settled accommodation.

  The introduction worked to everyone’s advantage. It assured the younger Madame Badon that she and Robert would remain on good terms, it relieved Robert of Madame Badon (who was beginning to bore him), and it gave Agnès her first taste of secure freedom. So when, after a session sitting for Robert, he pressed her more ardently than usual and eased her, quite gently, down on to his studio couch it seemed only polite to let him proceed.

  That this was a mistake she was to realize later. It gave Robert an appetite which she had no wish to continue to feed. She had endured a couple of sexual liaisons, both brief, unsatisfactory and, for various reasons, painful, arising more from a general difficulty in refusal and perhaps a faint hope of comfort than from any true desire. She didn’t mind the modelling, though she preferred more active employment, but negotiating Robert’s embraces was embarrassing. In the end, by way of explanation, she called upon the religion she had been brought up with. ‘I’m Catholic.’

  ‘It didn’t stop you before.’

  ‘I know but I can’t again.’

  ‘You can go to confession afterwards.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  Robert had been a handsome man in his youth and, having failed to take a realistic account of the inevitable erosions of time, he was still a little vain. He was disappointed that the lovely young creature whom he had felt sure he had satisfied had turned suddenly prudish on him. It was not the first time he’d met this feminine line of resistance but it never occurred to him that the reasons for these refusals might be more to do with the measure of his desirability than with piety or the exercise of moral scruples. In this case, however, it was more important to him that Agnès model for him.

  Robert’s was not at all a religious disposition except in one – for him – important matter: he had nursed for years an ambition to paint a nativity. Perhaps this was some sort of rebellion against his famous ancestor, whose paintings in the Impressionist style were secular in subject and mood. Whatever the reason for his passionate ambition, Robert felt that in Agnès he had found the perfect model for his Mary.

  Because his bread-and-butter work was the production of versions of the stained-glass stories – sometimes simply a figure in one of the panels, sometimes the whole drama – the time he had for his own artistic interest was limited. But he was as dedicated as any religious devotee to his aim of accomplishing a representation of his ideal Madonna.

  After twenty years, and many failed attempts, he was still struggling to pull off his dream. And Agnès, with her unusual capacity for stillness and her striking bone-structure, continued no less inspiring in his eyes.

  Agnès for her part felt safe with him. She was fond of him, and in his debt. He was getting old, his peacock feathers were visibly moulting, and because she had a certain fellow feeling for all creatures on the run, or in decline, she allowed him, from time to time, to fondle her so as not to dent what she understood was a self-preserving vanity.

  But, for all that, she was not about to follow his advice over how best to deal with Madame Beck.

  25

  Rouen

  Almost the very moment that Denis Deman returned from Le Mans he rang Jean Dupère.

  ‘Jean? Denis Deman here. I thought you might like to know I’ve seen Agnès again.’

  ‘How does the little one do?’

  ‘I wonder, if it’s not inconvenient, may I visit you again?’

  Spring had made bold strides since Denis had last driven out to the Dupère farm. The cows stood in solid white shapes beneath the dark green shadows of craggy apple trees, already crowned with flourishes of pink and white. The river flowed quicksilver in the clear evening light. There was no barn owl encounter; only a voluble gang of rooks, which rose in rowdy unison into the sheer sky as Denis Deman’s old Renault rattled down the farm track, still deeply pitted with mud but thankfully now dry.

  Jean Dupère was out of bed and sitting in the rocking chair by the fire. He did not get up but extended a veined brown hand.

  ‘Good evening, Doctor. You’ll take some Calva?’

  The apple liquor burned Denis’s throat and then spread agreeably across the lining of his stomach.

  ‘That’s quite something!’

  ‘The apples are from my own orchards. We’ve had a still here since my grandmother’s time, though the neighbour sees to it now. Sit, Doctor, please.’

  Denis sat and for a few minutes simply sipped the heavenly scented Calvados from the stout green glass. Finally he said, ‘I gave Agnès your earring.’

  ‘Not mine.’

  ‘The one you wanted me to give her. I never found the right moment before.’

  The old man made a gesture with his two hands as if to say whatever the doctor did it would be right. The gesture irked Denis Deman, who knew that very little he had done for Agnès to date had been ‘right’.

  ‘I forgot about it,’ he said coldly, and then felt remorse because the old man looked at him with bewilderment in his faded eyes. ‘I didn’t find a moment and then, you know, the fracas, and so, well, I took it to her in Le Mans last weekend. I told her you had planned to give it to her on her birthday. She was very pleased.’

  ‘She is sixteen now?’

  ‘Just gone.’

  ‘January twenty-first. St Agnès’ Day. I remember it like yesterday.’

  He relived that moment often: the basket, the small baby wrapped in a white tablecloth; the little earring trapped in an unravelling weave of the basket. The basket which still hung on his wall.

  ‘She seemed pleased,’ Denis said again. He was feeling foolish. The conversations with Agnès had got nowhere.

  ‘She is wearing it?’

  ‘I don’t know. She asked if she could have her ears pierced.’

  ‘Please, Doctor, would you go to the dresser over there?’

  Jean Dupère pointed at a dark oak dresser on which plates, cups and bowls of red-and-white china were ranged. ‘The drawer on the left. There is a box.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘Yes. Bring it here if you would be so kind.’

  Denis took the little green box to his host, who opened it and brought out a silver chain. ‘I would like her to have this. The earring could be made to hang on it, I think.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s possible.’

  ‘You will please give it to her as a birthday gift from me? It was my mother’s. She had a crucifix on it but we buried that with her. Mother did not care for my niece. I have been puzzling whom I should leave it to.’

  ‘Why didn’t she like your niece?’ Denis Deman ran the fine chain through his fingers.

  ‘She felt she was greedy. My mother had good judgement. But she is all I have, my niece. Except the little Agnès.’

  ‘I’ll get a jeweller to fix the earring on this if you like.’ It seemed all he was going to be able to do for his former charge.

  But even in this he was foiled. ‘I would like to pay for it. My wallet is also in the drawer, if you wouldn’t mind.’

&n
bsp; Denis found it and the old man took out a ten-franc note. ‘This will be enough?’

  ‘More than enough, I should imagine.’

  ‘Buy her a little something with anything over. Some sweets. Or a little pastry. She is so thin.’ He could cry aloud thinking of the child lying so still and gaunt in her white nightdress in her bed at the clinic.

  ‘She’s less so now,’ said Denis. The physical change in Agnès was for him still very shocking, for one of his unfashionable beliefs was that appearances were an accurate reflection of the psyche.

  ‘I would love to see her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Denis agreed, meaning that that was quite impossible.

  But driving back up the track he thought, But why not? I could bring her here. She would be in my care. It might involve another sticky dinner with Inès Nezat but Paris was worth a mass.

  • • •

  Inès Nezat appeared to have digested the existence of the fictive Anne and elected to ignore her. Or that, anyway, was Denis Deman’s conclusion when she arrived, splendidly attired, at the more modest hotel he had chosen for his next visit. ‘Attired’ seemed to him the correct term, as the excessive sheen on her satin suit and high-heeled silver shoes suggested some sort of fashionable armour. If previously she had bathed in scent, this time she might have washed her hair in it.

  Denis Deman was prone to allergies, which were also affected by his emotional state. Assaulted by the emanations of his guest’s pungent scent, his eyes began to run and he sneezed.

  ‘You have a cold?’

  ‘How are you, Inès? You look well.’

  Inès Nezat took this compliment as if it were only to be expected. ‘I am, thank you. You look tired.’

  Denis, who had been feeling rather better, recognized that this was an opening gambit in a not-too-subtle game of power. Nevertheless, he felt dashed. ‘I’ve been working hard.’

  ‘All work and no play . . .’ Inès wagged a playful forefinger at him, the nail expertly varnished a dark cerise.