The Tenth Man Page 7
"You're one of the unlucky ones who believe," he said gloomily.
She got up from the bed. "What's the good of talking? I'd like him here in front of me and me with a gun."
"Have you got a gun?"
"Yes."
"And afterwards I suppose you'd go to confession and be happy again."
"Perhaps: I don't know. I can't think so far."
He said, "You good ones are so horrifying. You get rid of your hate like a man gets rid of his lust."
"I wish I could. I'd sleep better. I wouldn't be so tired and old." She added in a serious voice, "People would like me. I wouldn't be afraid of them any more."
He felt he was in front of a ruin: not an old ruin which has gained the patina and grace of age, but a new ruin where the wallpaper crudely hangs and the wound lies rawly open to show a fireplace and a chair. He thought to himself, It isn't fair. This isn't my fault. I didn't ask for two lives—only Janvier's.
"You can have those collars," she said, "if they are any good to you. Only don't let Mother know. Do they fit you?"
He replied. with habitual caution, "Near enough."
"I'll get you a glass of water."
"Why should you get me the water? I'm the servant here."
"The Mangeots," she said, "don't run to servants. Anyway I want to walk about a bit. I can't sleep."
She went away and came back holding the glass. As she stood there in the rough dressing-gown holding the glass out to him he instinctively recognized the meaning of her action. She had told him all about her hate and now she wanted to indicate by a small gesture of service that she had other capacities. She could be a friend, she seemed to indicate, and she could be gentle.
That night, lying in bed, he felt a different quality in his despair. He no longer despaired of a livelihood: he despaired of life.
11
WHEN HE WOKE THE DETAILS OF THE SCENE, EVEN THE DETAILS of his emotions, had blurred. Everything for a while might have been the same as before, but when he put his hand on the knob of the kitchen door and heard her stirring within, his troubled heart beat out an unmistakable message under his ribs. He walked straight out of the house to try to clear his thoughts, and over the small patch of cultivated garden he spoke aloud the fact, "I love her," across the cabbages as if it were the first statement of a complicated case. But this was a case of which he couldn't see the end.
He thought, Where do we go from here? And his lawyer's mind began to unpick the threads of the case, and to feel some encouragement. In all his legal experience there had never been a case which didn't contain an element of hope. After all, he argued, only Janvier is responsible for Janvier's death: no guilt attaches to me whatever I may feel—one mustn't go by feeling or many an innocent man would be guillotined. There was no reason in law, he told himself, why he should not love her, no reason except her hate why she should not love him. If he could substitute love for hate, he told himself with exquisite casuistry, he would be doing her a service which would compensate for anything. In her naive belief, after all, he would be giving her back the possibility of salvation. He picked up a pebble and aimed it at a distant cabbage; it swerved unerringly to its mark, and he gave a little satisfied sigh. Already the charge against himself had been reduced to a civil case in which he could argue the terms of compensation. He wondered why last night he had despaired—this was no occasion for despair, he told himself, but for hope. He had something to live for, but somewhere at the back of his mind the shadow remained, like a piece of evidence he had deliberately not confided to the court.
With their coffee and bread, which they took early because it was market day at Brinac, Madame Mangeot was more difficult than usual: she had now accepted his presence in the house, but she had begun to treat him as she imagined a great lady would treat a servant and she resented his presence at their meals. She had got it firmly into her head that he had been a manservant to Michel, and that one day her son would return and be ashamed of her for failing to adapt herself to riches. Charlot didn't care: he and Therese Mangeot shared a secret. When he caught her eye he believed that they were recalling to each other a secret intimacy.
But when they were alone he only said, "Can I find you anything at the market? For yourself, I mean?"
"No," she said. "There's nothing I want. Anyway, what would there be at Brinac?"
"Why don't you come yourself?" he said. "The walk would do you good... a bit of air? You never get out."
"Somebody might come when I was away."
"Tell your mother not to open the door. Nobody's going to break in."
"He might come."
"Listen," Charlot earnestly implored her, "you're driving yourself crazy. You're imagining things. Why, in heaven's name, should he come 'here' to be tormented by the sight of everything he's signed away? You're making yourself ill with a dream."
Reluctantly she lifted up one corner of her fear like a child exposing the broken crinkled edge of a transfer. "They don't like me in the village," she said. "They like him."
"We aren't going to the village."
She took him by surprise at the suddenness and completeness of her capitulation. "Oh," she said, "all right. Have it your own way. I'll come."
An autumn mist moved slowly upward from the river. The slats of the bridge were damp beneath their feet, and brown leaves lay in drifts across the road. Shapes faded out a hundred yards ahead. For all the two of them knew they were one part of a long scattered procession on the way to Brinac market, but they were as alone on this strip of road between the two mists as in a room. For a long while they didn't speak: only their feet moving in and out of step indulged in a kind of broken colloquy. His feet moved steadily toward their end like a lawyer's argument hers were uneven like a succession of interjections. It occurred to him how closely life was imitating the kind of future he had once the right to expect, and yet how distantly. If he had married and brought his wife to St. Jean, they too might in just this way have been walking silently together into the market on a fine autumn day. The road rose a few feet and carried them momentarily out of the mist. A long gray field stretched on either side of them, flints gleaming like particles of ice, and a bird rose and flapped away; then again they moved downhill between their damp insubstantial walls, and his footsteps continued the steady unanswerable argument.
"Tired?" he asked.
"No."
"It's still strange for me to be walking on and on in a straight line, instead of up and down."
She made no reply and her silence pleased him: nothing was more intimate than silence, and he had the feeling that if they remained quiet long enough everything would be settled between them.
They didn't speak again until they were nearly in Brinac. "Let's rest a little," he said, "before we go in." Leaning against a gate they took the weight off their legs and heard the clip-clop of a cart coming down the road from the direction of St. Jean.
It was Roche. He checked his pony and the cart drew slowly up beside them.
"Want a lift?" he asked. He had developed a habit of keeping himself in profile, so as to hide his right side, and it gave him an air of arrogance, a "take it or leave it" manner. Therese Mangeot shook her head.
"You're Mademoiselle Mangeot, aren't you?" he asked. "You don't need to walk into Brinac."
"I wanted to walk."
"Who's this?" Roche said. "Your man-of-all-work? We've heard about him in St. Jean."
"He's a friend of mine."
"You Parisians ought to be careful," Roche said. "You don't know the country. There are a lot of beggars about now who are better left begging."
"How you gossip in the country," Therese Mangeot said sullenly.
"And you," Roche addressed Charlot, "you are very quiet. Haven't you anything to say for yourself? Are you a Parisian too?"
"One would think," Therese Mangeot said, "that you were a policeman."
"I'm of the Resistance," Roche replied. "It's my business to keep an eye on things."
"Don't you believe it. It's just beginning down here. You'd better show me your papers," he said to Charlot.
"And if I don't?"
"Some of us will call on you at the house."
"Show them to him," Therese Mangeot said.
Roche had to drop the reins to take them and the pony, released, moved a little way down the road. Suddenly he looked odd and powerless like a boy who has been left in charge of a horse he can't control. "Here," he said, "take them back," and snatched the reins.
"I'll hold the pony for you if you like," Charlot offered with studied insulting kindness.
"You'd better get proper papers. These aren't legal." He turned his face to Therese Mangeot. "You want to be careful. There are a lot of queer fish about these days, hiding, most of them. I've seen this fellow somewhere before, I'll swear to that."
"He markets every week. You've probably seen him there."
"I don't know."
Therese Mangeot said, "You don't want to raise trouble. The man's all right. I know he's been in a German prison. He knew Michel."
"Then he knew Chavel too?"
"Yes."
Roche peered at him again. "It's odd," he said. "That's why I thought I knew him. He's a bit like Chavel himself. It's the voice: the face of course is quite different."
Charlot said slowly, wondering which syllable betrayed him: "You wouldn't think my voice was like his if you could hear him now. He's like an old man. He took prison hard."
"He would. He'd lived soft."
"I suppose you were his friend," Therese Mangeot said. "They all are in St. Jean."
"You suppose wrong. You couldn't know him well and be his friend. Even when he was a boy he was a mean little squit. No courage. Afraid of the girls," He laughed. "He used to confide in me. He thought I was his friend until I had this accident. He couldn't stand me after that because I'd grown as wise as he thought he was. If you are in bed for months you grow wise or die. But the things he used to tell me. I can remember some of them now. There was a girl at Brinac mill he was sweet on..."
It was extraordinary what things one could forget. Was that the face, he wondered, that he had drawn so inexpertly on the wallpaper? He could remember nothing, and yet once—"Oh, she was everything to him," Roche said, "but he never dared speak to her. He was fourteen or fifteen then. A coward if ever there was one."
"Why do they like him there in the village?"
"0h, they don't like him," Roche said. "It's just they didn't believe your story. They couldn't believe anyone would die for money like your brother did. They thought the Germans must be mixed up in it somehow." His dark fanatic eyes brooded on her. "I believe it all right. It was you he was thinking about."
"I wish you'd convince them."
"Have they troubled you?" Roche asked.
"I don't suppose it's a case of what you call trouble. I tried to be friendly, but I didn't like being shouted at. They were afraid to do it themselves, but they taught their children..."
"People are suspicious around here."
"Just because one comes from Paris one isn't a... collaborator."
"You ought to have come to me," Roche said.
She turned to Charlot and said, "We didn't know the great man existed, did we?"
Roche laid his whip to the pony's flank and the cart moved away: as it receded the looped arm came into view—the sleeve sewn up above the elbow, the stump like a bludgeon of wood.
Charlot rebuked her gently: "Now you've made another enemy."
"He's not so bad," she said, looking after the cart for so long a time that Charlot felt the first septic prick of jealousy.
"You'd better be careful of him."
"You say that just as if you knew him. You don't know him, do you? He seemed to think he'd seen you..."
He interrupted her: "I know his type, that's all."
12
THAT NIGHT, AFTER THEY HAD RETURNED FROM BRINAC, Therese Mangeot behaved in an unaccustomed way—she insisted that they should eat in future in the dining room instead of in the kitchen where previously they had taken all their meals, hurriedly as if they were prepared at any moment for the real owner of the house to appear and claim his rights again. What made the change Charlot had no means of knowing, but his thoughts connected the change with the meeting on the Brinac road. Perhaps the farmer's attack on Chavel had given her confidence, the idea that one man at any rate in St. Jean was prepared to play her friend against him.
Charlot said, "It'll need sweeping out," and took a broom. He was making for the stairs when the girl stopped him.
She said, "We've never used the room before."
"No?"
"I've kept it locked. It's the kind of room he'd have swaggered in. It's smart. Can't you imagine him drinking his wine and ringing for his servants?"
"You sound like a romantic novel," he said and moved to the foot of the stairs.
"Where are you going?"
"To give the room the once-over of course."
"But how do you know where it is?" It was like putting his foot on a step that didn't exist: he felt his heart lurching with the shock; for days he had been so careful, pretending ignorance of every detail, the position of every room or cupboard.
"What am I thinking of?" he said. "Of course. I was listening to you."
But she wasn't satisfied. She watched him closely. She said, "I sometimes think you know this house far better than I do."
"I've been in this sort of house before. They follow a pattern."
"Do you know what I've been thinking? That perhaps Chavel used to boast about his house in prison, draw pictures of it even, until you got to know..."
"He talked a lot," he said.
She opened the door of the dining room and they went in together. The room was shuttered and in darkness, but he knew where to turn on the light. He was cautious now and shuffled a long time before he found the switch. It was the biggest room in the house with a long table under a dust sheet standing like a catafalque in the center, and portraits of dead Chavels hanging a little askew. The Chavels had been lawyers since the seventeenth century with the exception of a few younger sons in the church; a bishop with a long twisted nose hung between the windows, and the long nose followed them round from wall to wall, portrait to portrait.
"What a set," she commented. "Maybe he hardly had a chance to turn out differently."
He turned his own long nose up to the face of his grandfather and the man in robes stared down at the man in the green baize apron. He looked away from the supercilious accusing eyes.
"What a set," the girl commented again. "And yet they married and had children. Can you imagine them in love?"
"That happens to anyone."
She laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh. He watched her avidly, just as a murderer might wait with desperate hope for a sign of life to return and prove him not after all guilty.
She asked, "How do you think they'd show a thing like that? Would they blow those long noses? Do you think they could weep out of those lawyers' eyes?"
He put out a hand and touched her arm. He said, "I expect they'd show it in this way..." and at that moment the front doorbell began to clatter and clang on its long metal stalk.
"Roche?" he wondered.
"What would he want?"
"It's too late for beggars, surely?"
"Perhaps," she said breathlessly, "it's him at last."
Again they could hear the long steel tendril quiver before the bell shook "Open it," she said, "or my mother will come." He was gripped by the apprehension anyone feels at anytime hearing a bell ring at night. He moved uneasily down the stairs with his eyes on the door. So much experience and so much history had contributed to that ancestral fear: murders a hundred years old, stories of revolution and war... Again the bell rang as if the man outside were desperately anxious to enter, or else had a right to demand admittance. The fugitive
and the pursuer give the same ring.
Charlot put up the chain and opened the door a few inches only. He could see nothing in the dark outside except the faint glimmer of a collarband. A foot stirred on the gravel and he felt the door strain under a steady pressure against the chain. He asked, "Who's that?" and the stranger replied in accents inexplicably familiar, "Jean-Louis Chavel."
PART THREE
13
"WHO?"
"Chavel." The voice gained confidence and command. "Would you mind opening the door, my good fellow, and letting me in?"
"Who is it?" the girl said: she had paused halfway down the stairs.
A wild hope beat in Charlot's breast, and he called to her in fearful hilarity and relief, "Chavel. He says he's Chavel." Now, he thought, at last I am really Charlot. Somebody else can bear all the hate...
"Let him in," she said, and he unchained the door.
The man who came in was as familiar as the voice, but Charlot couldn't place him. He was tall and well made with an odd effect of vulgarity that came from a certain flashiness, something almost jaunty in his walk... His skin was very white and looked powdered, and when he spoke his voice was like that of a singer: he seemed too aware of its intonations. You felt he could play any tune on it he pleased.