The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  The old man must have heard the car for he was waiting at an open door.

  ‘Little Agnès.’ Not a hint of surprise or disappointment in his face. Only an expression of eager welcome. ‘Come in, come in.’

  Jean Dupère’s helpful neighbour had plainly been round, since lunch was on the kitchen table. He was anxious to tell them it was all home grown.

  ‘Radishes and lettuce from the garden. Tomatoes. Our own cured ham and the Camembert is from our neighbour. Take some milk.’

  Without waiting for Agnès to answer, he poured her a glass of milk from a pitcher from which he had removed a muslin cloth weighted with blue-glass beads.

  Agnès sat and drank the milk obediently.

  ‘Help yourself, sweetheart. Doctor?’

  Denis Deman took several slices of ham. He found he was suddenly terrifically hungry. Jean Dupère helped Agnès to a mountain of food but took nothing except bread and cheese for himself. Silently, they all began to eat.

  Suddenly Jean Dupère, wiping his moustache with a napkin, said, ‘See that basket hanging over there, left of the fire? That’s what I found you in.’

  Agnès stopped eating, fork poised in the air, and stared at the old straw basket.

  ‘Go on. Take it down.’

  She looked across at Denis Deman and he realized she was waiting for permission.

  ‘It’s OK, Agnès. You can get down from the table.’

  She moved across the kitchen, reached up and detached the basket from the black hook.

  ‘That’s what I found you in,’ the old man repeated. It was a moment he had envisaged often without ever quite believing in its realizable possibility. He was not, therefore, prepared for Agnès’ reaction, which was to stand in the middle of the kitchen floor holding in her two hands what had stood in for her crib and shed solemn tears.

  Jean Dupère was appalled.

  Denis Deman tried to reassure him. ‘Naturally, she is moved. It’s catharsis.’

  Which was Greek, of course, to the old man.

  ‘I meant it for a nice surprise.’ He had taken down the basket beforehand, in readiness for this moment, and shaken out the cobwebs, dead flies, moths and live earwigs, which had somehow negotiated a home there.

  ‘It will be.’ Denis Deman let Agnès cry. The old man’s dismay also prevented his making any attempt at consoling the girl. Tearless now, she stood in a pool of summer light, trembling. She seemed to Denis Deman’s imagination like the trapped leveret he had found as a boy in a meadow near his home.

  ‘Really, you have done nothing wrong,’ he assured the worried old man again much later, when Jean was conducting them round his farm and Agnès was picking field flowers. ‘It is roughly what I expected – hoped for.’

  ‘For her to take on so?’

  ‘For her to begin to feel what she must so long have been feeling.’

  ‘She will recover? She can come away from that – that place?’

  ‘We can only hope so. You’ve done a good deal already with the earring, and now this. If she can recover the memory of her own life maybe she’ll be able to give up the one she has created.’

  ‘But she will never have her baby?’

  The question, as they both knew, was rhetorical.

  ‘She will have to learn to bear it. It is a wrong she has been done but we must be prepared to believe that the Sisters supposed they were doing what was best for her and the child.’

  But if Denis Deman supposed he could get away with sanctimonious expressions, he was to be proved wrong.

  ‘They did it because they believe in “good and evil”,’ Jean Dupère, with surprising heat, declared. ‘I am to blame. I gave her to them. I did wrong but they, they have done her an evil in their wrong belief.’ He turned candidly angry eyes on Denis.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Denis Deman, impressed by this vehemence. ‘But the main thing is, what can we do now for her for the best?’

  He was considering this further when the three had said goodbye, with a promise to meet again the next day, and he was driving Agnès to the clinic, where she was to spend one night.

  Agnès was clutching the basket containing the already wilting poppies and cornflowers, some eggs, courtesy of Jean Dupère’s neighbour, and an embroidered prayer card to St Agnès, which Jean Dupère had found in the pages of his mother’s old receipt book. As they drove, she hummed a tune Denis Deman did not recognize.

  ‘Did you enjoy the visit, Agnès?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You would like to go again tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, please. I would like to.’

  Well, that was a start.

  She seemed pleased too when they arrived at the clinic and climbed eagerly out of the car, with the basket in hand.

  ‘We’ve given you a room here. Come.’ He led her to the private wing, where the rooms were single.

  ‘I’m not sharing?’

  ‘No. Unless you’d rather.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Would you rather, Agnès?’

  ‘Yes, please, Doctor.’

  This posed a problem. He could not in all conscience put her in with one of the fee-paying patients. It would have to be one of the others, who might disconcert her, and the visit must be as calm as possible if it were to be a success. Maybe, he thought, one of the nurses might be induced to spend the night with her.

  Denis Deman had remained mildly attracted to the tall Australian nurse who had, quite unwittingly, set him off on his wild-goose hunt for Agnès’ child. Inquiry revealed that she was about to come off her shift and he found her and explained the situation. ‘Might you be willing to spend the night here with her?’

  ‘Is she violent?’

  ‘There’s no evidence of it. She’s only ever harmed herself. We, that is her current consultant and I, think now that this fixation she had on the other child is pure delusion.’

  ‘Poor mite. Funny I should have known the family.’

  To cover his embarrassment Denis Deman said, ‘You might be able to help there. Talk to her about it. About him.’

  ‘You mean the other boy?’

  ‘Yes. What was his name?’

  ‘Caspar.’

  He remembered now the child’s grotesque conjunction of names. ‘The thing is, I feel if she can surrender this delusion that the boy is hers we can reasonably appeal to have her de-sectioned. She’s no business in a secure hospital. She’s quite harmless.’

  ‘OK. But if I’m found knifed in the back it’s on your head, mind. I want this in writing.’

  Dr Deman spoke with some stiffness. ‘Naturally, there will be someone on duty. I’m only asking you to sit with her and keep her company.’

  ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot, Doctor. Of course I’ll help out. What’s she come here for, anyway?’

  Denis explained. ‘Ah, poor thing. It’s like a story – a baby in a basket. So the old man wants to see her?’

  ‘I wanted him to, in fact. I thought it might help establish her own history for her.’

  ‘It would help. My dad never knew his dad. My grandma’s indigenous – “abo” to you.’ Denis Deman attempted to protest but she laughed and said, ‘It’s OK. We’re used to it. No, as I was saying, my dad’s dad was some white guy who had his way with my grandma and then relieved himself of any responsibility. Dad spent half his life trying to find him. Good riddance, Mum and I say, but blood’s thicker than water, I guess.’

  ‘But Jean Dupère isn’t Agnès’ “blood”.’

  ‘He might be the nearest thing. Of course I’ll watch her. Nice little thing, she was.’

  ‘She’s rather a big thing now.’

  ‘Rotten diet in those places. I wouldn’t work in one myself.’

  ‘Maddy, I forget, why did you leave?’

  ‘It wasn’t the boy. He
was a pet. It was the father – couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I can manage that but she, Miss Moonshine, or whatever she called herself, guessed and there was an atmosphere. I hate atmospheres.’

  Denis Deman took Maddy to introduce her to Agnès. ‘So, then, Agnès, I’ll leave you with Nurse Fisher –’

  ‘Maddy, please.’

  ‘Maddy will look after you this evening and I’ll see you in my room tomorrow morning.’

  When he had gone, Maddy said, ‘Come to pay us a little visit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it like in Le Mans?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Nicer here, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to keep you company tonight. Anything you’d like to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK. We’ll just stay cool, then.’

  Asked if she might like to walk in the garden, Agnès agreed that she might. They strolled for a while but she seemed ill at ease outside and said what she would really like was to watch the pop programme on TV.

  ‘Sure. There’s a TV in the common room. Supper now or after?’

  They ate supper watching the pop programme. After about twenty minutes Maddy observed Agnès had kicked off her shoes. Later, as Agnès was getting ready for bed, Maddy said, ‘You like it here, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what, you might be able to come back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well . . .’ The doctor had told her to have a try at talking to her so why not have a go? Maddy sat down on the bed. ‘The little boy you say was yours. He’s not. I was his nanny so I know.’

  Agnès stared at her.

  ‘The thing is, the nanny with him was attacked, quite seriously, I hear, though she’s OK now. Thank my lucky stars I was out of it or it might have been me. But they can’t risk your maybe having done that. That’s why they sent you off to Le Mans. If you can say he isn’t yours, and you know that now and you didn’t do anything and it’s all been a terrible mistake, they’ll maybe stop worrying about you going after someone with a knife. See?’

  ‘Would it mean I could leave there?’

  ‘Well, don’t quote me but it’s a possibility. They might send you back here for a while and then, you know, you could do what you wanted.’

  ‘What would I have to say?’

  ‘OK,’ Maddy said. ‘So this is how it goes. They’d have to believe you. So it has to sound like you mean it. Not like I’ve told you. Or anyone else told you. OK?’

  She accompanied Agnès to Denis Deman’s room the following morning.

  ‘Everything go all right last night with you two?’

  Denis Deman had passed a restless night. Much as he wanted to believe in Agnès’ innocence, Maddy’s quip about the knife in the back had unsettled him. Agnès was a dark horse. No one, he felt, least of all himself, had ever fully fathomed her. Perhaps after all his first impressions were correct and she had been the author of this violent deed.

  ‘We had a great time, didn’t we, Agnès?’

  Agnès beamed. ‘Yes, we did, Maddy.’

  The reassurance from the strong Australian girl revived Denis Deman’s spirits. ‘Very good. Thank you, Maddy.’

  ‘Not at all. We enjoyed ourselves, didn’t we, Agnès? Remember what I told you, now?’

  Agnès favoured her with a radiant smile.

  • • •

  ‘What was it that Nurse Fisher told you?’ Denis Deman asked a little later. They were in his room. Above his desk, she saw again the maze on the wall. If she tried really hard she was sure she could follow the path with her eyes to the centre.

  ‘Agnès?’

  Oh, but she never could get past that first loop round to the right. ‘She told me that she looked after the baby I said was mine and she told me he wasn’t mine.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do you think of that?’

  ‘I think I made a mistake.’

  ‘And you were never there?’ It was a leading question but to hell with that.

  ‘It was a mistake. I didn’t do anything. Can I come back here now?’

  28

  Chartres

  When, twenty years later, Agnès looked back on this period of her life, it seemed to her that she had descended into an intractable hellish nightmare and then everything had resolved into an improbably happy dream.

  She only very dimly recalled the time of the first troubles, the hours and hours during which people had questioned her about the attack and her abiding feeling that all she had to cling to was that the baby was – must be – she knew he was – her own little Gabriel. She was assured of this again from the pictures she was shown – the little curly-haired boy with the pointed features and pale brown skin. Of course he was her baby. All she had done was try to take him back.

  But this later time was different. He was not her baby. She knew this now. And to find her real child she had to get away. Maddy was her friend. Maddy had told her how.

  ‘Stick to your guns, sweetie. Simple denial, repeated then repeated again, works wonders. My dad was accused of stealing once. He worked in a garage and some jerk was light-fingering the till. My dad said he just went on denying and denying and denying and they found who did it before he gave up. Tell them you made a mistake, you were upset, out of your mind, whatever helps. It’s true after all.’

  This time there were interviews she remembered in detail. Always holding on to the idea that the one fact Maddy had taught her would get her through. ‘I know now he was not my baby. I made a mistake.’

  ‘But you insisted he was yours at the time.’

  ‘I imagined it.’

  ‘And you were never at this address?’

  A piece of paper was held out to her. ‘I don’t recognize it.’

  ‘You never went there?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know where that is.’

  But this was not enough to stop the questions. ‘You have no recollection, then, of going to this address and attacking Michelle Boyet with a knife?’

  Be firm, Maddy had said. Don’t give up. Remember my dad. Stick to your guns.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No recollection at all?’

  ‘It was a mistake. I was upset. I said things. I see that now. I say things that aren’t true when I am upset.’

  (‘Good girl,’ Maddy had said when they were practising that night. ‘Saying you were “upset” is just the ticket. They can’t argue with that.’)

  Dr Nezat had of course become involved in the decision over the reconsideration of Agnès’ psychiatric status. She gave it, at some length, as her opinion that Agnès had been suffering a psychotic delusion as a consequence of the trauma of losing her own child. Nothing remotely aggressive had ever been observed in her behaviour at the psychiatric hospital. On the contrary, she was passive and biddable, maybe even too much so, at all times. The girl’s previous consultant, Dr Deman, had visited her, quite properly, as he was concerned that there had been a confusion in the diagnosis, and suggested they try this brief return to Agnès’ past environment in the hope that it might jolt her into a better sense of reality. Clearly the experiment had worked. She, Dr Nezat, would certainly recommend that the girl be sent back to the clinic under Dr Deman’s care for the rehabilitation, apparently so successfully started, to continue.

  Maddy had been triumphant when, after many further discussions, it was agreed that the secure order be lifted and Agnès was, after some bureaucratic toing and froing, returned to St Francis’s. ‘Well done! See. It worked.’

  ‘I want to stay here,’ Agnès had said.

  ‘You can’t stay for ever. But the main thing is you’ve got that rubbish off your back. Real life’s horrible but it’s safer in the long r
un than make believe.’

  But was it? Agnès wondered now, as she wiped over Philippe Nevers’ perspex coffee table with the ‘natural’ orange spray, moving the glass sculpture of the couple, engaged in what looked like an act of sodomy, with especial care. The episode with Madame Beck, so reprehensible to Robert Clément, so laughable to Alain, was to her a source of renewed dread. Twenty years had passed safely in Chartres with nothing more troubling than the elder Madame Badon’s lost spectacles to vex or perturb her. The scene over the missing doll brought back the fear she had lived with daily, hourly, through those dreadful years – the ‘special’ hospital in Le Mans, and before that the nursing home, and before all of that the day in the convent orchard.

  She had told no one, not even herself, about that afternoon when, her duties all accomplished, she had climbed the slightly rickety wooden ladder she had found set against an apple tree. It must have been April, she supposed. The blossom was out, she remembered that, because that was why she had climbed up into the tree, to pick some sprays of bloom for the Mother’s room. Mother Catherine had liked apple blossom.

  Why the ladder was there she no longer knew, if she had ever known. Maybe the trees were being sprayed?

  Pointless, oh, pointless such rememberings, brought back now, and not a jot less painfully, by this fresh calamity with Madame Beck. And with it, like the long train of cosmic dirt of a slow, dangerously returning comet, the recollection of the other catastrophe.

  The clinic and Le Mans. And kind Dr Deman, who had told her about the labyrinth. She had sat in his room so often while he had gently questioned her and she – she had to laugh a little at this now, polishing Philippe’s bedside cabinet with the beeswax polish she had found in his neat cupboard – she had told him next to nothing, only answering as politely as he had questioned her, always staring up at the strange beguiling pattern he had behind him on the wall.

  29

  Chartres

  ‘She would never have paid up so promptly if she hadn’t broken it,’ Madame Beck declared to Madame Picot at their next meeting.

  Madame Beck’s expression of satisfaction at Agnès’ paying in full for the missing doll did not quite accurately reflect the true state of her feelings. Privately she was annoyed. She had been anticipating a longer period of resistance and the girl had seemingly got away from her. ‘Add to that, there’s the fact that she left without a word.’