The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  5

  Chartres

  As is the case with all French cathedrals, Notre-Dame is owned by the state, which is responsible for its repair and the extensive and costly programme of restoration. At the same time, its use is granted to the Roman Catholic Church, and it serves both as the local parish church and the seat of the very ancient Bishopric of Chartres. It is therefore subject to two ancient masters, God and Mammon, who reputedly have differing aims.

  The cathedral clergy could hardly resent the quantities of visitors possibly seeking spiritual enlightenment. Visitors brought money. As Friday was the day that, between March and October, the famous labyrinth was uncovered, it was also the day when the largest numbers arrived. The site was popularly supposed to have been a former haunt of druids, and inevitably this encouraged modern pagan worshippers and other believers in the strange or the bizarre. However much the clergy may have frowned privately on an interest that was not generated by a genuine Christian spirit, the modern pilgrims spent large sums at the gift shop, where mythic accounts of the labyrinth were on sale, along with its image on postcards, calendars, key-rings, paperweights, pendants, earrings, mugs and mouse mats. All this made a valuable contribution to the vast sums required to keep the cathedral going, never mind its perpetual need of repairs.

  Along with other Chartres locals, Agnès had occasionally dropped by on Fridays, to watch the sight of the pilgrims treading the labyrinth path. Some came in groups and walked the route to the centre according to a privately agreed pact; they handed flowers and little notes to each other as they passed; frequently they wept or stopped to hug or hold each other, often in a massed group embrace, when they finally reached the centre. Some moved according to what looked like a set of martial-arts rules, slowly and carefully, deliberating each footfall. Many walked with half-closed eyes. Some sank to their knees en route and visibly prayed – or uttered lines from poems or mantras, causing a human traffic jam to build up behind them. These pilgrims generally shed their shoes to tread the cold floors barefoot (the state of their soles was uppermost in Agnès’ mind when she came to clean). Others, less ethereally inclined, simply followed the path because it was there.

  Later in the day, when the more intense pilgrims had mostly departed, children often arrived and ran or skipped around the spiral. Jesus’ injunction to suffer little children to come unto him was evidently not uppermost in the early-morning labyrinthers’ minds. More than once Agnès had witnessed irritation, especially from foreign pilgrims, if one of the local children, brought by their mothers to shelter from the rain, for instance, created a noisy distraction.

  On that first Friday that she came to clean, Agnès had already finished washing the labyrinth when the Abbé Paul found her with a knife, picking off the candle grease on the altar that stood before the black pear-wood Virgin. ‘No need to do that, Agnès. That’s Victor’s job.’

  ‘Sorry, Father.’ She dropped the knife hastily into her apron pocket.

  ‘No need to be sorry. I’m here because I’m told we have a candle crisis. Can you credit it, the candle-makers are on strike?’

  It was well recognized that years of candle smoke were responsible for the blackened state of the stonework, and for this reason a bulk delivery of environmentally friendly candles arrived regularly on Fridays. Their purchase by the visitors also provided a useful addition to the cathedral funds.

  Disregarding his own words, the Abbé Paul scratched at a blob of intractable grease. Candle grease for some reason is irresistible. ‘We’re going to have to find another supplier in a hurry. God alone knows where.’

  He hurried away, raking with his fingers his still-black hair, while Agnès, in her overall, resumed her work.

  She began with the floor of the sanctuary of the pear-wood Virgin, who, imprisoned in her stiffly tinselled frock, looked mildly down as if to say she wished that she could enjoy again the simplicity of Agnès’ dress. From here, Agnès moved slowly round to the ambulatory. The colours of the stained-glass windows – blue, red, green and violet – danced before her on the yellowed limestone, which from years of wear bore the patina of old marble. She passed the Virgin’s celebrated veil (demoted from its former status as the Holy birthing gown but duly honoured in a ceremonial ark of gold) and stopped before a lancet window that, in its lower panes, depicted a man in green displaying what seemed to be a bale of cloth.

  ‘He’s showing a customer a fur.’

  Startled out of her reverie, Agnès dropped the mop, which clattered to the floor, splashing the trousers of Robert Clément, who had come up behind her. Not that the wet marks were likely to cause any fuss. Robert’s trousers were habitually as daubed as his palette.

  ‘What are you doing here, my pretty?’ he demanded.

  Robert’s family was obscurely connected to the painter Renoir’s. Unkind people suggested that this legacy had encouraged a degree of arrogance in Robert that his painting did not warrant. But this was unfair. Robert dined out on the connection but essentially he was a realist and never made the error of confounding the famous artist’s talent with his own.

  Many years ago he had discovered that money was to be made by reproducing scenes from the cathedral stained-glass windows to sell to the many tourists who visited the town. He was therefore a regular in the cathedral, which he unconsciously regarded as a kind of ready annexe to his studio.

  Agnès said nothing. She liked to look at the windows but she liked it best when, her eyes unfocused, the cathedral appeared to her a haze of jewelled light. But Robert liked the sound of his own voice, and regarded himself as something of an authority on the windows. Undeterred by her silence, he began to expound.

  ‘This window is dedicated to St James the Great. The story is he was the brother of Jesus –’

  Rather to his surprise, Agnès interrupted him. ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s fanciful nonsense but then all this is, in its splendid way.’

  ‘Why is the fur there?’

  ‘The furriers and drapers of the town paid for this window.’ Robert was delighted that he was in a position to instruct. ‘If you look, you can see their signatures in the bottom panels.’

  Agnès gazed at the window. At the top, the putative brother of Jesus was about to be beheaded. It looked more as if he were about to be knifed in the back.

  Quite unaware that he had failed to get her attention, Robert continued. ‘Most of the windows were endowed by the local merchants. There are some quite bizarre matches. The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin was given by the butchers. There’s a bloody great hunk of meat ready to be butchered alongside all her miraculous deeds. It was a kind of advert. Trapped audience. Something to rest your eyes on when the preacher was rambling on.’

  Agnès smiled as if interested. When Robert had gone, she would come back and look at the window undisturbed. She bent down and began to try to scrape away a piece of chewing gum which had been trampled into one of the interstices of the stone.

  ‘Here, use my knife. Gum is the very devil to get off. I’d guillotine anyone found dumping it.’

  ‘Father Paul said it was one of the reasons Bernadette left.’

  ‘I wondered what had happened to old Bernadette?’

  ‘I think it was her knees.’

  ‘You look after yours, then. They’re very pretty. I hope they’re paying you decently, Agnès.’

  Agnès smiled but said nothing.

  ‘Mean as hell, the Church. Remember, I always need you as a model. Indecent payment guaranteed.’

  Agnès smiled again and Robert, finally capitulating to her silence, plonked himself down on one of the wooden benches and began to draw.

  Mopping as she went, as if in a dance with a singularly thin and passive partner, Agnès made her way round to the wine growers’ Zodiac window, which needed no interpretation.

  There was January with three faces, looking three ways �
� past, present and what was to come. Beside him Aquarius, the water-carrier, seemed to be pouring out the water from his pot. And there was Capricorn, as a strange goat-fish, beside the man feasting on Christmas fare. Was she a goat-fish or a water-carrier? According to Sister Laurence, she could be either.

  • • •

  Outside the cathedral, Professor Jones was engaged in the strangest endeavour. Money had come to him through his father, who had manufactured a variety of novelty biscuits in the shape of a bear, known as ‘Bicky Bears’, which at a time when children were barely catered for had proved immensely popular. As a result, Ewan Jones had been able to send his son to a minor public school, from where, much to his parents’ pride, for they had come from very humble origins, the boy had gone on to read art history at Swansea University.

  The two senior Joneses were killed in a car crash, while test-driving a Jaguar (the latest result of their newfound prosperity). Their untimely death left their son, an only child, richer, thanks to Bicky Bears, by several millions. His first wife requisitioned half the legacy when she filed for divorce. This, plus the fact that he had come to the conclusion she had only married him for money in the first place, left a sour taste in the future professor’s mouth.

  Earlier in his life, Professor Jones had been persuaded to consult a gypsy fortune-teller, who opined that he and money would ‘never get on well’. The loss of his second wife caused him to brood. The gypsy’s vaguely phrased warnings began to play on his mind. He became convinced that the only path to happiness was to give away his money; but to good causes. The problem was in settling on which.

  One cause readily to hand was that of the teams of beggars who hung about the cathedral hoping to benefit from its heightening effects on the visitors’ sense of charity. That these local mendicants were generally ignored might have troubled the cathedral clergy since the promotion of Christian charity was supposedly their task. In fact, they rather deplored the professor’s efforts since it encouraged the vagrants. But what could they do? Also, as the bishop hinted, it wouldn’t do to reprove a potential benefactor who might be persuaded to help out with the repair fund.

  When Agnès finished for the morning, she left by the South Door and at the bottom of the broad steps met Professor Jones, who had completed his morning round of superstitious disbursements. The professor was glad of the chance encounter. Agnès had a pleasing smile and was not likely to tattle about him, as he feared many of the women of Chartres were prone to do. Madame Beck for example. Professor Jones, had he been able to summon up the knowledge, was frightened by the flashes of malice that he unconsciously detected in that person’s little blue eyes.

  ‘Hi there, Agnès.’ Professor Jones tried his hardest to adopt the language of youth, unaware that, like too much make-up on an older face, it was merely ageing.

  ‘Hi,’ Agnès returned. The warmth he felt for her was reciprocated: each intuitively knew that, from the other, there was no question of any attack.

  ‘I was wondering,’ the professor went on, racking his brains for something he could reasonably ask, ‘if you would come and help sort out my papers.’ Ah, that was the thing! She might help with the paperwork which hung about his untidy apartment in menacing heaps and piles.

  Agnès was glad to be offered employment. It was not so much that she needed the money; it was that for her own reasons she was in need of occupation.

  • • •

  Madame Beck, stationed at her lace-curtained watchtower, observed the shambling figure with the once-red-now-silver-and-auburn hair and the woman in the cornflower-blue dress as they walked together down the rue aux Herbes towards the professor’s apartment in la place de la Poissonnerie. When they had vanished from sight, she picked up the phone and dialled the number of her friend, Madame Picot.

  6

  Rouen

  The local doctor, who was summoned by the Mother Catherine to give his opinion on Agnès’ state, diagnosed a case of catatonia.

  ‘What is that?’ Sister Laurence asked. She, in particular, was anxious over their charge.

  ‘Dementia praecox,’ said Sister Véronique shortly. ‘Otherwise known as schizophrenia. But I doubt it myself. It’s post-partum depression or I’ll eat my St Augustine.’

  Happily for her, Sister Véronique was not required to consume The City of God. The Mother Superior went with Agnès in the ambulance, which took her to the St Francis Psychiatric Clinic at Rouen, and after some protracted negotiations managed to recover the pruning knife. Mother Catherine was strong, and had once in a mood of frivolity challenged Sister Véronique to an arm-wrestling match. But Agnès held the knife in a grip so tight that even the Mother’s famed force could not prise her fingers from it.

  ‘Why the pruning knife?’ the Mother asked once she had safely recovered the implement. Agnès made no answer. She simply lay there impassive, with an unnerving sightless golden gaze.

  Told of her history, Dr Deman agreed with Sister Véronique. ‘The loss of the child, coupled with her own history of motherlessness, this alone is enough to account for such a reaction.’

  Mother Catherine chose to take offence. ‘We have been nothing but a community of mothers to her.’

  Dr Deman was tactful but adamant. ‘Nevertheless, the effect of the dereliction of the biological mother cannot be underestimated. Nor can the loss of a child.’

  But at this Mother Catherine put her well-laced foot down. ‘There could not have been any question of her keeping the child. She is not yet sixteen. Barely fifteen, in fact.’

  Dr Deman brought the conversation to a close saying that in any case they would keep Agnès in for a while, and Mother Catherine left with the pruning knife and an admonition to him to keep a careful eye on the girl.

  When her tight-sleeved dress was, with difficulty, removed, marks of severe cutting were exposed on Agnès’ forearms, breasts and thighs. Many were recent. But some were scars of long standing. Dr Deman followed the gentler and unfashionable methods of early psychiatry (in which he was not well supported by medical colleagues, who considered them reactionary) that held that rest, good food and good air were the best nurses for states of mental disquiet. He placed Agnès in a ward with three other patients, all cases of what he surmised to be temporary catatonia.

  His instructions were that the upper windows were to be left open to ensure a constant influx of air (the upper windows being too small to allow anyone to climb out), and the patients were prescribed first milk, if necessary in feeding bottles, and then nourishing soups, which were to be spooned into their mouths only if they made no protest. Otherwise they were to be left in peace. It was his contention that catatonia was a method of escaping the unendurable harassments of life and that the royal road to its cure was to let the patient be.

  Whatever the truth of the theories, they seemed to work with Agnès. After a fortnight of this treatment, she rose from her bed in the pure cotton nightwear with which all Dr Deman’s patients were issued and asked for bread and cheese.

  Dr Deman was delighted. He ordered that she be served exactly what she had asked for, together with some of the local gherkins, because in addition to the good effects of cotton next to the skin he placed some faith in the healing properties of vinegar.

  The gherkins were a lucky inspiration. Agnès had formerly shown a great partiality to them, and their arrival on a plate of fresh baguette and ripe Brie gave her the first taste of pleasure she had had since her enforced spell at the nursing home. She wolfed down the bread and cheese and asked for more gherkins. Dr Deman saw her in his consulting room that same afternoon.

  7

  Chartres

  Madame Picot, like Madame Beck, lived in the old town, that part of Chartres that lies within the city walls. Both women had been left comfortably off by husbands who had also left them comfortable apartments.

  Madame Beck and her husband had owned the restaurant beneath the
ir apartment in a picturesque house which stood on the south side of the cathedral close. After her husband’s death, Madame Beck had leased out the restaurant. Her continued residence above it made it easy for her to monitor the lessees and ensure that the leasehold conditions were properly met. Much of the rest of her time was spent discussing, in detail, with Madame Picot the domestic affairs of Chartres.

  Madame Picot’s husband had been a tax consultant. She was richer than Madame Beck but lived in the lower part of town, a less historic, and thus less desirable, area than that of her friend.

  ‘I hear the price of the house in the rue du Lait has doubled again. Such a pity Auguste didn’t buy it for you when he could,’ was Madame Beck’s opening shot when she came to take afternoon tea with her friend that Friday.

  ‘He was concerned about the woodworm, dear. Very practical, was my Auguste. He didn’t want me having to worry about repairs when he was gone.’ (It was one of Madame Picot’s fanciful assertions that her hard-headed late husband was ‘psychic’ and had successfully predicted the year of his own death.)

  Madame Beck’s apartment was in the upper storey of one of Chartres’ ancient fifteenth-century timbered houses. A popular subject of tourists’ photos but known to be the very devil to insure and maintain.

  ‘But a great investment, my dear. Auguste would surely have wanted you to have that. Claude always said, with our house in that position we’d never want for cash. Not that I need it. The interest from the restaurant lease does me very nicely.’

  ‘A biscuit, dear?’

  ‘Thank you, my dear, no. As you know I try to watch my weight.’

  Madame Picot, who was inclined to run to fat, bent to caress her elderly Pekinese. ‘Who’s a sweet girl, then? Show Aunty Louise your new collar. My daughter sent it from Japan. The jewels are real.’

  Madame Beck looked down at the little dog with disapproval. ‘They look to me semi-precious.’ She did not care for dogs and she had no living children.