The Tenth Man (11 page)

He began formally again, ‘Thérèse.’ He paused, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Only my mother,’ she said, ‘who else could it be?’

‘Thérèse,’ a voice called from the stairs. ‘Thérèse.’

‘You’ll have to finish washing-up without me,’ Thérèse said. ‘I know that voice. It’s her praying voice. She won’t sleep now till we’ve done a rosary at least.
Goodnight
, Monsieur Charlot.’ That was what she always formally called him at the day’s end to heal any wound to his pride the day might have brought. The moment had gone, and he knew it might be weeks before it returned. Tonight he had felt certain she was in the giving mood. Tomorrow …

When he opened the door of his room Carosse was stretched on the bed with his coat draped over him for warmth: his mouth was open a crack and he snored irregularly. The click of the latch woke him: he didn’t move, he simply opened his eyes and watched Charlot with a faint and patronizing smile. ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘have you all talked me over?’

‘For an experienced actor you certainly chose the wrong part this time.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Carosse said. He sat up in bed and stroked his broad plump actor’s chin. ‘You know, I think I was too hasty. I shouldn’t have gone away like that. After all, you can’t deny that I had aroused interest. That’s half the battle, my dear fellow.’

‘She hates Chavel.’

‘But then I’m not the real Chavel. You must remember that. I am the idealized Chavel—a Chavel recreated by art. Don’t you see what I gain by being untrammelled by the dull and undoubtedly sordid truth? Give me time, my dear chap, and I’d make her love Chavel. You never by any chance saw my Pierre Louchard?’

‘No.’

‘A grand part. I was a drunken worthless
roué
—a seducer of the worst type. But how the women loved me. I had more invitations from that part alone …’

‘She spat in your face.’

‘My dear fellow, don’t I know it? It was superb. It was one of the grandest moments I have ever experienced. You can never get quite that realism on the stage. And I think I did pretty well too. The sleeve: what dignity! I bet you she’s thinking in her bed tonight of that gesture.’

‘Certainly,’ Charlot said, ‘Chavel can’t compete with you.’

‘I’m always forgetting you knew the man. Can you give me any wrinkle for the part?’

‘There’s no point in that. You’re going before it’s light. The curtain’s down. May I have my bed, please?’

‘There’s room enough for two,’ the actor said shifting a few inches towards the wall. In tribulation he seemed to be reverting, with hilarity and relief, to the squalor, the vulgarity of his youth. He was no longer the great and middle-aged Carosse. You could almost see youth creep into the veins under the layers of fat. He hitched himself up on an elbow and said slyly, ‘You mustn’t mind what I say.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why, my dear fellow, I can see with half an eye that you are in the throes of the tender passion.’ He belched slightly, grinning across the bed.

‘You are talking nonsense,’ Charlot said.

‘It’s only reasonable. Here you are, a man at the sexual age when the emotions are most easily stirred by the sight of youth, living alone in the house with a quite attractive young girl—though perhaps a little coarse. Add to that you have been a long time in prison—and knew her brother. It’s just a chemical formula, my dear fellow.’ He belched again. ‘Food always does this to me,’ he explained, ‘when I eat late. I have to be careful about supper if I am entertaining a little friend. Thank God, that sort of romance dies in a few years, and with older women one can be oneself.’

‘You’d better go to sleep. I’m waking you early tomorrow.’

‘I suppose you’re planning to marry her?’

Charlot, leaning against the washstand, watched Carosse with dull distaste—watched not only Carosse: a mirror on the wardrobe door reflected both of their images: two middle-aged ruined men discussing a young girl. Never before had he been so aware of his age.

‘Do you know,’ Carosse said, ‘I’m half regretting that I’m leaving here. I believe I could compete with you—even as Jean-Louis Chavel. You haven’t any dash, my dear fellow. You ought to have gone in and won tonight when emotion was in the air—thanks to me.’

‘I wouldn’t want to owe you thanks.’

‘Why ever not? You’ve nothing against me. You’re forgetting I’m not Chavel.’ He yawned and stretched.
‘Oh
well, never mind.’ He settled himself comfortably against the wall. ‘Turn out the light, there’s a good fellow,’ he said and almost immediately he was asleep.

Charlot sat down on the hard kitchen chair, the only other perch. Wherever he looked there were signs of how completely at home the pseudo-Chavel had made himself. His overcoat hung on the door, and a little pool had collected on the linoleum beneath it; on the chair he had hung his jacket. When Charlot shifted he could feel the sagging weight of the other’s pocket against his thigh. The bed creaked as the actor rolled comfortably towards the centre. Charlot turned off the light and again felt the heavily weighted pocket beat against his leg. The rain washed against the window regularly like surf. The exhilaration and the hope died out of the day, he saw his own desires sprawl upon the bed, ugly and middle-aged. We had better both move on, he thought.

He shifted and felt the heavy pocket beside him. The actor rolled onto his back and began to snore softly and persistently. Charlot could just make out his shape like a couple of meal sacks flung down at random. He put his hand into Carosse’s pocket and touched the cold butt of a revolver. It wasn’t surprising: we had returned to the day of the armed citizen; it was as normal as a sword would have been three hundred years before. Nevertheless, he thought, it would be better in my pocket than his. It was a small old-fashioned revolver; he rotated the chamber with
his
finger and found five of the six compartments full. The sixth was empty, but when he held it to his nose he smelt the unmistakable odour of a recent discharge. Something like a rat moved on the bed among the meal sacks: it was the actor’s arm. He muttered a phrase Charlot couldn’t catch, a word like ‘
destin
’; he was probably, even in his sleep, playing a part.

Charlot put the revolver in his own pocket. Then again he felt Carosse’s jacket: he drew out a small bundle of papers, fastened with a rubber ring. It was too dark to examine them: carefully he opened the door and went into the passage. He left the door ajar for fear of noise and switched on a light. Then he examined the nature of his lucky dip.

It was obvious at once that these were not Carosse’s papers. There was a bill made out to a man called Toupard, a bill dated and receipted in Dijon on 30 March 1939 for a set of fish knives: a long time, he thought, to keep a receipt unless one were very careful, but careful Toupard undoubtedly was—there was his photograph on his identity card to prove it: a timid man afraid of being done, scenting a trap on every path. You could see him—Charlot had known dozens like him in the courts—making endless detours throughout his life with the idea of avoiding danger. How was it that now his papers had come into the possession of Carosse? Charlot thought of the empty chamber in the actor’s revolver. Papers nowadays were more valuable than money. The actor had been ready to play
impromptu
the part of Chavel for the sake of a night’s lodging, but could he have hoped to get away with
this
identity? The answer was, of course, that five years work many changes. At the end of a war all our portraits are out of date: the timid man had been given a gun to slay with, and the brave man had found his nerve fail him in the barrage.

He went back to his room and stowed the papers and the gun back in the actor’s pocket. He no longer wished to keep the gun. The door behind him shut suddenly with a crack like a shot, and Carosse leapt upon the bed. His eyes opened on Charlot and he cried with anxiety, ‘Who are you?’ but before an answer came he was again as soundly asleep as a child. Why couldn’t all those who have killed a man sleep as soundly, Charlot wondered?

14

‘WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?’
Thérèse said.

He scraped the mud off his shoes with a knife and replied, ‘In the night I thought I heard someone move by the garden shed. I wanted to make sure.’

‘Were there any signs?’

‘No.’

‘It may have been Chavel,’ she said. ‘I lay awake for hours thinking. It was an awful night to turn a man out in. There we were, my mother and I, praying and
praying
. And he was outside walking. So many
Pater Nosters
,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t leave out the bit about forgiveness every time or my mother would have spotted something.’

‘Better to be walking in the rain than shot.’

‘I don’t know. Is it? It depends, doesn’t it? When I spat in his face …’ She paused, and he remembered very clearly the actor lying on the bed boasting of his gesture. She’ll be thinking about it, he had said. It was horrifying to realize that a man as false as that could sum up so accurately the mind of someone so true. The other way round, he thought, it doesn’t work. Truth doesn’t teach you to know your fellow man.

He said, ‘It’s over now. Don’t think about it.’

‘Do you think he got some shelter? He’d have been afraid to ask for it in the village. It wouldn’t have done any harm to have let him spend a night here,’ she accused him. ‘Why didn’t you suggest that? You haven’t any reason to hate him.’

‘It’s better just to put him out of mind. You weren’t so anxious to forgive him before you’d seen him.’

‘It’s not so easy to hate a face you know,’ she said, ‘as a face you just imagine.’

He thought, If that’s true what a fool I’ve been.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘we are more alike than I thought, and when it came to the point I couldn’t shoot him. The test floored me just as it floored him!’

‘Oh, if you are looking for points like that,’ he told
her
, ‘take me as an example. Aren’t I failure enough for you?’

She looked up at him with a terrible lack of interest. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I suppose you are. Michel sent a message by him.’

‘So he said.’

‘I don’t see why he should have lied about that and not about the big thing. As a matter of fact,’ she said with an awful simplicity, ‘he didn’t strike me like a man who told lies.’

During the night Madame Mangeot had been taken ill: those large maternal breasts were after all a disguise of weakness: behind them unnoticeably she had crumbled. It was no case for a doctor and in any event there were not enough doctors in these days to cover so obscure a provincial corner as Brinac. The priest was of more importance to the sick woman, and for the first time Charlot penetrated into the dangerous territory of St Jean. It was too early in the morning for people to be about and he passed nobody on his way to the presbytery. But there his heart drummed on his ribs as he rang. He had known the old man well: he had been used to dining at the big house whenever Chavel visited St Jean. He was not a man who could be put off by a beard and the changes a few years wrought on the face, and Charlot felt a mixture of anxiety and expectation. How strange it would feel to be himself again, if only to one man.

But it was a stranger who replied to his ring: a dark
youngish
man with the brusque air of a competent and hardworked craftsman. He packed the sacrament in his bag as a plumber packs his tools. ‘Is it wet across the fields?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you must wait till I put on my galoshes.’

He walked quickly and Charlot had difficulty in maintaining the pace. Ahead of him the galoshes sucked and spat. Charlot said ‘There used to be a Father Russe here?’

‘He died,’ the young priest said, striding on, ‘last year.’ He added sombrely, ‘He got his feet wet.’ He added, ‘You would be surprised at the number of parish priests who die that way. You might call it a professional risk.’

‘He was a good man, they say.’

‘It isn’t difficult,’ Father Russe’s successor said with asperity, ‘to satisfy country people. Any priest who has been in a place forty years is a good old man.’ He sounded as though he sucked his teeth between every word, but it was really his galoshes drawing at the ground.

Thérèse met them at the door. Carrying his little attaché case the priest followed her upstairs: a man with his tools. He could have wasted no time: ten minutes had not passed before he was back in the hall drawing on his galoshes again. Charlot watched from the passage his brisk and businesslike farewell. ‘If you need me,’ he said, ‘send for me again but please
remember
, mademoiselle, that though I am at your service I am also at the service of everyone in St Jean.’

‘Can I have your blessing, father?’

‘Of course.’ He rubber-stamped the air like a notary and was gone. They were alone together, and Charlot had never felt their loneliness so complete. It was as if the death had already occurred, and they were left face to face with the
situation
.

THE TENTH MAN

PART

IV

15

THE GREAT ACTOR
Carosse sat in the potting shed and considered his situation. He was not cast down by his somewhat humiliating circumstances. He had the democratic feeling of a duke who feels himself safely outside questions of class and convention. Carosse had acted before George V of Great Britain, King Carol of Rumania, the Archduke Otto, the special envoy of the President of the United States, Field-Marshal Goering, innumerable ambassadors, including the Italian, the Russian and Herr Abetz. They glittered in his memory like jewels: he felt that one or another of these great or royal men could always when necessary be pawned in return for ‘the ready’. All the same he had been momentarily disquieted early that morning in St Jean, seeing side by side on the police station wall a poster that included his name in a list of collaborators at large and an announcement of a murder in a village more than fifty miles away. The details of the crime were, of course, unknown to the police, otherwise Carosse felt sure that the description would have read homicide. He had acted purely in self-defence to prevent the foolish little bourgeois from betraying him. He had left the body, he thought, safely concealed under the gorse-bushes on the common, and had borrowed the papers which might just
get
him past a formal cursory examination. Now that they could no longer be useful to him, and might prove dangerous, he had burnt them in the potting shed and buried the ashes in a flower pot.