The Cleaner of Chartres (2 page)

Evreux

Agnès Morel was born neither Agnès nor Morel. So far as names go she was not born anything at all. She was found wrapped in a white tablecloth in a straw shopping basket on January 21st, St Agnès’ Day, with nothing to indicate her parentage except a single turquoise earring lying in the bottom of the basket, which might well have been dropped there by accident.

Agnès is the saint to whom young women pray for husbands, and, since Jean Dupère, who had found the baby, presumed the foundling’s mother had none, he named the anonymous woman’s daughter after the saint. In the way of those who unexpectedly find themselves doing a good turn, he felt a touch of pride in the poetry of his choice.

‘Morel’ was an afterthought – Jean’s small way of passing on something of his own. He had a taste for morel mushrooms, and the child was discovered, a frozen scrap of a thing, in the logging area of the wood where he was gathering fuel for his fire and where in spring he was in the habit of going in search of this culinary prize.

Jean was a bachelor. His romantic propensities, though stimulated by this unusual event, stopped short of envisaging raising a girl child on his own. But he was a farmer and fairly practised at rearing blighted orphaned creatures. He took the baby home and fed her in the old shepherds’ way, by dipping a knot of a boiled cloth in warm watered milk. When, the next day, he reported the find to the local police, they suggested that the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy at Evreux would no doubt care for the child while the necessary inquiries about her parentage were being made.

The inquiries came to nothing. No local midwife or hospital reported anything untoward. No lone young woman was believed to have lately been delivered of a child. Jean was no longer a practising Catholic but he had been brought up in the Church and nuns struck him as a better bet than a state orphanage.

A shared faith need not entail a uniform character. The Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy were, variously, strict, stupid, sadistic, well-meaning, intelligent and kindly – the three former traits slightly outweighing the latter qualities, as is generally the case in any human group. To be fair, as a community they were tolerant of illegitimacy. After all, the man whose life to which they had dedicated their own also came of ambiguous parentage.

As Agnès grew older, and teachable, Sister Laurence, who often regretted that she had not married her cousin and had a child herself (the parents were dead set against this for genetic reasons and in the end the young lovers lost heart and capitulated), enjoyed telling the young Agnès Bible stories. An alert listener might have noticed a slightly subversive note in Sister Laurence’s voice when it came to the story of Moses found in a basket, a tone which hinted that his discovery by Pharaoh’s daughter was not entirely an accident. But, for all Agnès’ appetite for stories, she appeared quite incapable of mastering the ability to read or write.

The nuns were, on the whole, as tolerant of this as they were of her illegitimacy. Sister Laurence put Agnès’ deficiency down to her unlucky start. It was Sister Véronique, who was writing a commentary on Dante, who tried her hardest to teach the girl, for, as she was fond of saying, ‘She is plainly bright’, adding somewhat tartly, ‘She laps up those tales.’ (Try as she might, Sister Véronique had never been able to rid herself of a certain scepticism over the factual accuracy of biblical stories.) But, as for helping Agnès to read the tales herself, it seemed to be a hopeless task.

It was not that she was stubborn. She was an unusually industrious child and apparently willing to learn where she could. Everyone agreed she was first-rate at washing, ironing, embroidery and darning. The Sisters gave her their black woollen socks and stockings to darn with some relief. Sister Céleste, who had been in charge of the mending before, merely cobbled over the holes in their hosiery in an ugly mess.

In time, Agnès began to work in the orchards and in the vegetable garden, where a local boy helped out. And that was when her troubles began again.

Chartres

On the first Friday Agnès was due to clean the cathedral, Philippe Nevers met her on his way to the station. Time had changed Philippe from the tubby boy in short trousers who had quarrelled with his sister to a lean and lanky young man who wore the most up-to-the-minute fashion and jewellery in the contemporary taste. But he had retained his boyhood manners.

‘Good morning, Agnès. That’s a very pretty skirt. You’re out early.’

‘I’m cleaning the cathedral now.’

‘So you’re wearing blue to match? Tough work, isn’t it, cleaning in this weather?’

Agnès smiled and agreed and continued up the hill.

Behind a wreathing veil of summer mist, incalculably different from the autumnal mists, the tops of the two cathedral spires were aiming at a heaven the whole edifice beneath them was there to invoke. She paused to catch her breath before the three grand bays of the Royal Portal.

The solemn elongated figures of the bearded prophets and patriarchs, the dead kings and braided queens who give the name of Royal to the doors, stared inscrutably down from their perilous pedestals, their hands – such as had been spared from the depredations of time and the ferocity of revolution – raised as if in formal greeting. Above them on the tympanum, Christ, in his aureole, awaiting the glory of his second coming – but now so imprisoned behind scaffolding as to give an impression of some detained felon or caged wild animal – also raised an elegant right hand.

Agnès raised her hand of flesh and blood in an answering gesture. ‘I hope, Lord, you have a better time this time around.’

She turned to walk along the north side of the building, to the porch where twenty years ago she had come to rest. Above her – now as then – Job lay on his comfortless bed of ashes, plagued by a grotesquely grimacing Satan.

Inside the cathedral, the musty air seemed to be perfused with a faint odour of onions. What caused that? Something to do with years of human sweat, she supposed. An alert sparrow took the opportunity to nip through the open door into the cathedral. It struck out across the empty nave chittering triumphantly as Agnès went round to the vestry, where the cleaning equipment was stored. She put on an orange overall and filled the bucket with hot water. Today was the labyrinth day.

Victor, the janitor, had already been in to see to the chairs that on most days obscured the famous labyrinth, which was set into the floor of the nave just inside the West Doors. Agnès stood looking at the pattern made by the path which, moving regularly forward and back on itself, traced eleven circles to frame an open corolla of petals at its centre. A cross was adumbrated by the bands of black marble that marked the turns in the path. It was clever, she reflected, the cross, being composed not of the stones that made the path but of those that marked its absence. Around the large circle of the whole, a pattern of cogs gave the impression of some mysterious clock.

The cathedral lay as if asleep, utterly quiet save for the sporadic pinking of the sparrow, which appeared to have found a convivial mate. Agnès took off her shoes. Moving to the entrance of the labyrinth, she began to tread the spiralling path.

•   •   •

Walking up the rue aux Herbes, Professor Jones witnessed the face of the upper part of the cathedral’s South Transept lighting up to a pale honey. The sun, in a brave sortie, had made a bright gash in the clouds. The lower part of the transept, waiting its turn in the long programme of cleaning, was still grimy. Impervious to the dashing sunlight, the smoke-darkened stones made, with the paler ones above, for a strange piebald effect.

Really, the professor thought, taking a seat under the awning of his regular café, the weather this summer was almost as bad as that of his native Wales.

Without needing to be summoned, a waiter appeared with a small tray of café crème, a basket of fresh baguette, a slab of pale butter and a dish of apricot jam.
This
was not Pembrokeshire, the professor reflected. He had never got over his acute pleasure at taking his breakfast in France.

Opposite him, secure on a row of high niches well above the pedestrian world, weather-beaten bishops brandishing crosiers peered beakily down. Professor Jones stirred the coffee – to which, unmindful of his diabetes, he had added three lumps of sugar – and looked back up indifferently. He no longer cared a damn who they were. He had long ago lost interest in the majority of the four thousand, five hundred (if that was the true number) statues it had once been his ruling ambition to identify. Nowadays he cared for only a few familiar ones – the long elegant angel on the south-west corner, for example. It was a replica, of course. The original had grown too fragile to withstand the effects of the weather – a condition with which the professor, had he thought about it, might have sympathized.

When he had finished his breakfast, the professor left some euros on the table and moved across to one of the benches with the remains of the baguette. A former professional colleague from University College had recently visited and told him that the sparrow population in London was in decline. Something to do with the noise of the metropolis’s traffic drowning the mating call of the male birds, his colleague surmised. What a very good reason not to live there, the professor had retorted. With the loss of all human company, save the very rare visitor, he had become greatly attached to the friendly little birds.

The neat grey-headed chocolate-backed male sparrows and their modest brown-flecked mates bobbed about consuming crumbs at the professor’s large sandalled feet as he studied the angel bearing a sundial. It seemed a prosaic gesture for a heavenly body and yet somehow, he reflected, maybe it was fitting that a messenger from God should act as an agent of time.

What did it say in the Book of Revelation? Professor Jones had abandoned his Christian faith with his short trousers but he had not forgotten the teaching of his chapel upbringing. ‘There shall be time no longer,’ the angel of Revelation said. Time no longer. Is that not what death is, thought Professor Jones. For since the world is known to us only through our experience of it, does its existence not, in some crucial way, come to an end when we do? And is not heaven, then, merely the fact of non-existence? The loss of the fear of loss, which haunts and casts its shadow over so much of human life.

•   •   •

Inside the cathedral, Agnès, now on her knees and assiduously cleaning the path of the labyrinth, heard the Abbé Bernard, one of the elderly canons, opening the great West Door. For some months now, he had elected to take on the task of personally opening the cathedral to the public. There was no call for this for a man in his position but he had been an integral part of the life of the cathedral for so long that no one liked to gainsay him. He marched in, gown flapping, and seeing Agnès stopped short, his old freckled hand reaching nervously for the rosary at his waist.

‘Bernadette?’

‘She’s left, Father. Father Paul asked . . .’

‘Yes, yes, I remember, of course.’ The Abbé Bernard was growing more and more afraid that he might be losing his mind. ‘So today is Friday?’

‘Yes.’

‘I know that. I speak rhetorically.’

Taking advantage of the open door, a swallow made a dramatic entry, skimming the ear of the Abbé, who cursed heartily and hurried to shut the door. ‘God damn it, we are not an aviary.’

A hopeless war was constantly being waged by the cathedral staff against the regular influx of birds. In former times, families of swallows had been annually raised in a nest built beneath the lancet window of King David and the suicide of Saul. Finally, the bird droppings became so great a nuisance that the bishop ordered that the nest be destroyed.

Agnès, on hands and knees with a scrubbing brush, ignorant of all this, her cotton frock making a cornflower pool around her, watched the swallow cutting an oblique curve through to the choir. Birds, she had heard on the radio, were older than humankind, the oldest of any species – perhaps the only surviving version of the dinosaur.

•   •   •

Outside the sun was winning. The high banks of coiled cloud were attenuating to let in stretches of purest blue. Professor Jones had dropped into a morning doze. He was five years old again, sitting beneath the keys of an upright piano at his mother’s feet, as she sang in the Welsh tongue that had long since left his waking mind. If he sat there long enough she would scoop him up in her soft white arms and carry him to bed. Nestling against his mother’s warm bosom – made slightly uncomfortable by the spikes of Sunday brooches of jet, bought during her parents’ honeymoon at Whitby – Professor Jones on his bench sighed in a peaceful contentment that he was unlikely ever to know so completely again.

Evreux

‘Agnès is looking very healthy these days,’ Sister Laurence declared. ‘It’s nice to see her filling out. The garden work must be doing her good.’

Sister Véronique, who had merely glanced at Agnès to see what Laurence was on about, looked again more searchingly. Before taking the veil, she had been a headmistress of a girls’ school and was accustomed to assessing the girls’ weight, whether for signs of anorexia or more troublesome conditions. She collared Agnès at the first opportunity and demanded to know when she had had her last period. The reply did nothing to calm her fears.

‘I don’t know, Sister. Some time ago.’

When Sister Véronique reported her suspicions to the Mother Superior, the Sisters were collectively appalled.

‘She is so young, couldn’t we, in the circumstances . . .’ Sister Laurence, who was only ten years older than Agnès, falteringly suggested but was reproved sharply by the Mother Superior.

‘You cannot have forgotten, surely, Sister, that to interfere with nature is a mortal sin?’

Agnès was not yet fifteen. As far as they knew, she never went out. The number of men visiting the convent premises was necessarily limited. How could this violation possibly have occurred?

Agnès herself was vexingly unclear. Asked about possible boyfriends, she only shook her head and insisted she hadn’t any. In the end, Sister Véronique, irritated by this impasse, summoned Frédéric, the boy who helped with the garden. Meeting with his persistent denials of any wrongdoing, she became assertive. ‘Don’t try to deny it. Only you could have done this shocking thing to our little Agnès.’

Frédéric’s posture of denial became more intransigent. He fixed Sister Véronique with a cool grey Norman eye and asserted that he wouldn’t touch a bastard retard if you paid him.

Sister Véronique lost her temper (a sin she had frequently been advised to overcome), made as if to whop the impertinent boy round the head and, according to Frédéric’s mother, would have done so had he not had the presence of mind to duck. Sister Véronique, the indignant parent continued, had pushed her son out of the room ‘swearing like a trooper’.

The mother had gone up to the convent to threaten the Sisters over their ‘foul language and disgusting accusations’, about which, she informed them, she was planning to write to ‘the authorities’. Fierce words were exchanged. Frédéric was dismissed from his garden duties, and it was later found that he had expressed his resentment by stealing a pruning knife.

None of this did anything to help Agnès. In due course, she was packed off to a local nursing home, known to be discreet in such matters, where she gave birth to an underweight boy child who was mercifully removed from her before she could feed him or apparently had a chance to bestow on him a name.

Agnès returned to the convent from her sojourn at the nursing home quieter and more biddable than ever. The nuns congratulated themselves on their tactful handling of the sad affair. Sister Véronique tried again to interest her protégée in reading. (She herself in her secular days had embarked on her study of Dante as a means of recovering from an unhappy love affair with the History mistress.) Agnès meekly accepted the large-print book describing the life of St Thérèse of Lisieux. But later, burnt fragments were found in the dustbin by the girl who had been recruited to help with the heavy work while Agnès was recuperating.

About three months after Agnès’ return from the nursing home, a piercing caterwaul issued from the kitchen garden. Several of the Sisters hurried outside to find Agnès screaming and wildly tearing at the bodice of her dress as if it concealed some venomous snake or other deadly creature.

Nothing was seen or found either on or under her clothing; nor could anyone get the girl to make any kind of sense. She was finally persuaded to come inside and take a calming tisane of lime flowers. The Sisters conferred anxiously but agreed that this was an inevitable nervous reaction to the unfortunate birth.

Some weeks later, Sister Camille noticed drops of what looked like blood on the floor of the bathroom. It was not the time of the month when those of the Sisters who were still fertile underwent their communal period. Nor had any Sister complained of a wound. Various sharp instruments began to go missing. Several Sisters complained that they couldn’t find their nail scissors. Sister Laurence did not report the loss of her razor, since it was a secret with which she dealt with an embarrassing vestigial moustache. But Sister Camille was open, even cantankerous, about the disappearance of her pinking shears and the cook reported the loss of a new carving knife.

Agnès continued reticent and hard-working. If anything, she seemed to want to do more for the Sisters than before, even offering to goffer the wimples they wore on certain feast days, a task so skilled that it had hitherto been reserved for the local laundress, who had been trained to the task through an ancient laundering connection to the convent. The girl was often seen in those days walking in the orchard gathering the many windfalls from the apple trees. But this gave no cause for alarm. It merely showed a love of nature, coupled with a proper sense of housewifely thrift. A series of delicious
tartes aux pommes
confirmed this diagnosis. Since her return, Agnès had made friends with the cook, who was giving her culinary instruction.

There were, however, certain disturbing events. The door to the hutch, where rabbits were kept to supplement the convent’s diet, was found open, not once but twice, after the first lot of escapees had been replaced. More sinisterly (if less widely deplored), Sister Véronique’s current work on the symbolism of the rose in Dante’s
Purgatorio
, which she had left unguarded on a library table, was defaced. Examination indicated that excrement had been smeared over it. Tempers ran very high indeed when Sister Véronique, understandably outraged, began to accuse the community of neurotic envy of her scholarship.

All speculation was brought to an end when one night the Mother Superior, feeling a more than usual draught in her room, rose from her bed and put on the light to find Agnès standing there, stark naked and carrying a knife. Mother Catherine had once held a senior position in the Diplomatic Corps. She was a cool-headed woman and asked Agnès, quite briskly, to hand the knife over immediately. Mother Catherine told the doctor afterwards that the girl had stared at her, then, naked as she was, had made ‘a quite extraordinary curtsy’, after which she collapsed senseless before the Mother’s bare feet, still clutching the knife.

It was not the missing kitchen knife (which in fact the cook had purloined) but the pruning knife from the garden shed.