‘I felt that way, my dear,’ Iris had said. ‘I felt it many times after I left Honoré and the other fellow was pummelling me fit to break my ribs. But then, I said to myself, what about the times when you don’t feel it? What’s true now isn’t always true tomorrow and tomorrow I might feel life is good and if I die now I’ll miss that feeling. You’re young, my dear. You shouldn’t say no to life if some of you thinks tomorrow you might say yes.’
Standing before the replica of the lost Virgin, Agnès thought, I can’t die yet. I have to find Gabriel.
But she must flee. All the former safety promised by the great cathedral had been destroyed, as if by one of the catastrophic fires that had wrecked the former buildings. Take flight as she might, and had done for the past twenty years, somewhere in her being she had known this day must arrive. The long index finger of Time had finally marked her out.
She walked on, round the long crypt, past the Well of the Strong, and down into the most ancient depth of the cathedral, the chapel of St Lubin, where she had gone with poor Father Bernard. She would wait there, gather strength and resolve, and then steal away in the hope they would not find her.
But they will find you, said the voice in her head. And then you will never find Gabriel.
• • •
The Abbé Paul and Alain were at that moment drinking wine in the Abbé’s warm study. They had been conversing most amicably but a lull had fallen on their conversation – a lull of the kind that usually implies a long and mutual ease.
Alain, trying to put himself into Agnès’ skin, broke the silence. ‘She’ll have wanted to run away.’
The thought so followed the Abbé Paul’s own that he blinked a little at his guest before answering. ‘It’s unlikely she’ll get far. The police –’
‘It will be better for her if she doesn’t try to leave. I wonder . . .’ Alain fell silent again, leaving his thoughts to divine, unshepherded, Agnès’ possible whereabouts.
Suddenly he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, I think I’m going to take a look round the cathedral. It’s large and she knows it so well.’
‘It’s where I’d go,’ agreed the Abbé Paul. He would have liked to suggest that he accompany his new friend but he had a feeling that the young man preferred to undertake this mission alone. ‘If you do find her, will you bring her here?’
‘Sure.’ The younger man, already impatient to be off to follow his hunch, had jumped up. ‘Could I borrow the keys to the crypt? I only have the ones for –’
‘But of course.’
A shrewd guess, thought the Abbé Paul as, alone once more, he returned to his fire-lit study and his wine. It was the holiest part of the cathedral. The place where for centuries men and women had brought their sorrows, their shames, their terrors, their harrowing memories, their own unique darkness, to the ancient comprehending darkness of the Virgin’s underworld domain.
• • •
The crypt smelled of darkness and damp. In the darkness, Agnès crouched remembering. What she remembered was the day she had run for her life back to the clinic and hidden in the old laundry, which was boarded up and out of bounds. The laundry was also dark and also smelled of damp. She had been there before, to hide things, and she knew it was alive with silverfish and riddled with mice droppings. Possibly there had been rats as well. There were sinister scuffling sounds behind the walls and a putrid smell.
She had crouched there, her heart pounding, waiting, waiting. Waiting as she waited now, for discovery and exposure, thinking of Mother Catherine’s saying ‘God takes His time.’
There was another memory too, one that she did not want to entertain. The hand on her bare thigh as she stood, balancing on the ladder in the apple orchard, the hand that had then wriggled its way into the serviceable knickers the convent had provided and poked about. She felt again that probing finger, the sharp nail which had scratched her inside. She no longer recalled the sharper pain which followed.
Hunkered down in the dark, she relived again the horror of the crushing weight, the wine and garlic breath in her nose, the rough beard grazing her averted cheek. And a hard-palmed, heavy hand, smelling also of garlic, and nicotine, and something worse, which had held her mouth and stopped her screams, while another hand scrabbled at her skirt and brutally yanked her knickers down.
She only felt him, never really saw more than a fat white hairy belly and a revolting black fuzz of wire wool hair out of which there stuck a disgusting red and purple-veined thing, and then she had shut her eyes tight against the horror and the pain.
She had crept back to her bedroom, quietly changed her underwear and gone in secret to wash her skirt. The knickers she wrapped in a newspaper and threw away in the convent dustbins.
And after that, the growing sickness in the mornings and the slow, at first imperceptible, swelling of her belly, until the day Sister Véronique had her in for questioning and yelled at her and banged the desk and shouted, with a red face and furious eyes, ‘You cunning little whore!’
Who he was she would never know. He had gone, she supposed, as unremarked as he had arrived. A passing farmer or workman, maybe.
God alone knew. Only God alone would ever know, that is if there was a God to know anything – if anything could ever really be known.
50
London
Dr Denis Deman had never forgotten his patient Agnès Morel. How much his conduct in her case had propelled his flight to England was something about which, over time, he had come to brood.
His initial treatment of her was, he could reassure himself, effective. The nourishing food and rest he had prescribed had, at least superficially, rescued her from the damage wrought at the hands of the nuns by the loss of her child. And, later, the fresh air and the walking regime had seemed to strengthen her.
But the matter of the alleged attack over the little boy, and his part in her apparent involvement and subsequent treatment, remained an acutely sore spot in his memory. To be sure, from what had seemed a disastrous error on his part some good had come. He had managed to free her from the hospital in Le Mans and the attentions of Inès Nezat (for whom, however, he retained an amused partiality), and his patient’s years spent on the farm with Jean Dupère had been, he was sure of this, happy ones. But then she had been ousted from that oasis of security and to his shame he had lost touch with her.
His flight to England had hardly been a success. The relationship with Pauline, the girl he had impulsively married on the strength of her resemblance to his fictive fiancée, had not fulfilled his fantasies. The initial attraction, brought on by the chance to be of use, however slightly, had not been sustained. He had wanted, he recognized now, to be of use to someone.
Pauline was not a bad woman. But she lacked the kind of strength his own character needed. It was, he had concluded, a combination of the flight from his handling of Agnès and his disappointment in his marriage that had led to a growing tepidness in his medical practice.
His belief in the therapeutic virtues of trust and respect, his faith in nature and the remedial power of hope, had never entirely vanished, but they had, he was bound to acknowledge, been set aside. He had found his English colleagues more hidebound than his French ones. With the memory of his terrible error still fresh in his mind, some part of him had given up, had not wanted really to try. He had bowed to the unspoken distrust of his methods – indeed to his own mistrust in them – and resorted to drugs, in which he did not believe, and even to ECT, which he had always abhorred. The truth was, he acknowledged that morning, sinking into an armchair to read his post, he had lost heart.
But, on opening the letter which had been forwarded from the hospital from which he had lately retired, the lost heart palpably stirred.
Mother Véronique was writing, she confided in her elaborately florid hand, to give him the news that in a recent visit to Chartres she had come across Agnès. ‘Sh
e looks well,’ the letter went. ‘And she appears to be doing well too. She was quite overjoyed to see us (Sister Laurence accompanied me).’ The letter, in purple ink, ran on for a page and a half, outlining various improvements that the Mother was planning for the convent. It concluded with an invitation to visit them any time he should find himself near Evreux.
Denis Deman gazed round the drawing room, tastefully furnished and decorated but in a style and colours that he thoroughly disliked. He had always been so particular about colour, but he had allowed Pauline her taste, perhaps because it was something he could fairly give her when it appeared – for, to their joint regret, they had remained childless – that he could give her little else. She was away now seeing her mother. Pauline saw quite a bit of her mother these days, and it had crossed his mind that she returned home with a degree of reluctance which suggested that perhaps it was not only her mother she was seeing. It would not, he suspected, pain her were he to suggest that they part.
He reread Mother Véronique’s letter, walking now into his study.
Back in the Rouen days, he had had a sense of what mattered, of what a life – his life anyway – might amount to. He had loved his work and if he had not always been wholly successful with his patients, he had, by and large – with the exception of Agnès – felt he had done his best for them. Could he put his hand on his heart and declare that the same was true of his career since?
Looking at the curtains of his study, a heavy maroon weave, chosen for him by Pauline, he reflected how he would like to find Agnès, if only to satisfy himself that he had done her no lasting harm.
Time had softened certain things in Denis Deman but not his tendency to be impulsive. He went to his desk and fumbled in it till he found his fountain pen.
‘Dear Mother Véronique,’ he wrote, hung fire for a moment, crushed the paper to a ball, tossed it in the bin and began again.
‘Dear Sister Laurence . . .’
51
Chartres
Turning the key in the stiff lock of the door to the crypt, Alain felt a cat shoot past his legs. He had searched the upper cathedral first. But his stronger instinct had been to come here. A scared animal, he knew, will seek the shelter of a cave. The beam of the torch moved before him as he walked down into the darkness.
• • •
‘Agnès. Wake up.’
She was hiding now with Max. She was to meet someone. Someone, not a friend, maybe even an enemy, but he would take them into hiding.
‘It’s me, Alain. Wake up.’
But she had forgotten something. Something vital to Max. Some medicine he had to take. Without it he would die.
‘Agnès.’
But Max was dead already. She had forgotten. He was dead and she was responsible.
‘Agnès, listen to me.’
No point in running away. She had done this thing. They would get her now.
‘Agnès, Agnès.’
They had found her. She knew they would. She always knew they must.
‘Agnès, for God’s sake, wake up!’
• • •
‘Agnès, for God’s sake, wake up!’
What was Alain doing here?
‘Why?’
‘Because you must.’
‘What?’
‘Wake up.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You must.’
She felt him grab her shoulders and drag her to a sitting position. ‘Listen to me, Agnès. Have you taken anything?’
‘Let me sleep.’
Now he shook her. ‘Answer me. Have you taken anything?’
‘Only . . .’
‘Only what? Only what, Agnès?’ He shook her again. ‘Speak to me.’
‘Only one.’
‘One what?’ Only one what, Agnès?’
‘Sleeping pill.’
‘Only one sleeping pill?’
‘Yes. Please let me –’
‘Are you sure?’
In spite of the dazzle of his torch, and the longing to return to sleep, she made out the concern in his eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘Sure? Just the one?’
‘Yes. Two maybe.’
‘OK. We’re going to the Abbé Paul’s.’
‘No, please.’
‘He told me to bring you there.’
‘No, I don’t want to.’
‘Yes.’
‘No, no, please.’
‘I’m sorry. But you’re coming with me, Agnès.’
52
Chartres
When Agnès woke, she was in a strange bed. The room was warm and peacefully dark, but she could make out from the familiar tatty tapestry of a heraldic shield hanging on the wall that she was in the Abbé Paul’s spare bedroom.
There was a man’s dressing gown at the foot of the bed and she put it on over her underwear. She had no recollection of having got undressed or of getting into the bed.
The Abbé Paul was washing up in the kitchen when she entered. He turned round briefly to ask, ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee with milk, please.’
Wordlessly he made coffee, heated some milk in a small pan and brought it to the table, on which bread, butter and jam were already laid. ‘Will that be enough?’
‘Plenty, thank you, Father.’
‘The jam is damson. I’m rather proud of it but watch out for the stones.’
When she had finished, he took away the plate and cutlery, washed and dried them, and offered her more coffee.
‘I’m having some. We can take it through to my study.’
They walked through to the study, where the Abbé Paul was in the habit of sitting with none but his few intimates.
‘What day is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s Saturday. My day off.’
‘Mine too.’
‘Excellent. We can take our day of rest together.’
Agnès looked out of the window towards his garden at the last frail white blossoms on a windblown rose. ‘There’s no rest for the wicked, isn’t that what they say, Father?’
‘Are you wicked, Agnès?’
‘Yes.’
The Abbé Paul, reaching out, refilled her cup with coffee and milk. ‘I’m assuming you wanted more.’
They sat without further words. The Abbé Paul allowed his mind to fill with the nothingness that long practice had taught him. After many mute minutes Agnès said, ‘A long time ago I did something.’
‘Ah.’
‘I had a baby when I was very young. Just fifteen. The nuns who brought me up made me give him away.’
‘Did your baby have a name?’
‘He was called Gabriel.’
‘A good name.’
‘I never wanted to give him away. He was taken from me and adopted. I had I suppose what you call a breakdown. I was sent to a clinic. St Francis. A nice place, for what it was.’
‘I’m glad of that for you at least.’
‘I was glad to get away from the nuns. And there was a doctor there. I suppose I must have been in love with him.’
‘Not unusual in those circumstances, I’m told.’
‘He was very kind and quite handsome. He had a photo of the labyrinth – our one – on his wall. It’s because of that I came here.’
‘A man of taste.’
‘He had all these ideas about how to treat people who were sick like me – we had special food and he liked us to sleep in airy rooms but he also liked us to go walking in the countryside. He thought that nature and exercise were good for us.’
‘He sounds splendid.’
‘He was. He was bit absent-minded – actually very, though I don’t think he knew that about himself. I knew it. I knew quit
e a lot about him.’
The Abbé Paul nodded. He was all too aware that even those who see clearly into the souls of others rarely see themselves quite as they are.
‘One day he had my file on his desk and when he got up to get something in another room I took it and hid it under my skirt. It was a long skirt so it wasn’t hard. I couldn’t read but I had this idea that it would say where my baby had gone.’
‘Not a bad supposition.’
‘Yes. And it did. Or I thought it did. I showed the file to another girl there and she read it for me. She said the only thing that might be a clue was this address that was written there. She told me where it was and I found out that it was not that far from the clinic. I was used to finding my way about the countryside and Dr Deman, that was his name, had told me to walk. I put the file back on his desk – he never locked his door and his desk was always untidy so that was easy – and walked there.’
‘To the address on the file?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you found it?’
‘It was a big house, old, and I could tell the people who owned it were rich. I kept thinking just because they’ve got money they’ve got my little boy and he was taken from me because I’m poor and can’t give him anything. That wasn’t the reason, of course, I know that now. Anyway, I hung around, in these trees by the road near the drive of the house, just watching and then I saw this young woman pushing a buggy with a baby in it up the drive. He was a sweet little baby boy with black hair, just the age my Gabriel would have been and she was blonde so I knew she wasn’t his real mother.’
‘That must have been a shocking moment for you,’ said the Abbé Paul, feeling some shock himself.
‘It was. Anyway, I walked back to the clinic and two days later I went back there with a knife. I had this thing about knives. I used to cut myself at the convent and although I mostly stopped doing it at the clinic I was always after knives. I had places I hid them. They never seemed to notice.’
The Cleaner of Chartres Page 24
