The Tenth Man (12 page)

When he saw the two notices he had realized it was no good going further. Not until those notices everywhere had become torn and wind-blown and discoloured by time. He had got to lie up and there was only one house where that was possible. The man Charlot had already lied to his mistress by supporting Carosse’s imposture, and he had broken the law by harbouring a collaborator: there was evidently here a screw that could be turned sharply. But as he sat on a wheelbarrow and considered the situation further his imagination kindled with a more daring project. In his mind a curtain rose on a romantic situation that only an actor of the finest genius could make plausible, though it was perhaps not quite original: Shakespeare had thought of it first.

Watching through a knothole in the wall he saw Charlot cross the fields towards St Jean: it was too early for market and he was hurrying. Patiently Carosse waited, his plump backside grooved on the edge of the wheelbarrow, and he saw Charlot return with the priest. Some time later he saw the priest leave alone, carrying his attaché case. His visit could have only one meaning, and immediately the creative process absorbed the new fact and modified the scene he was going to play. But still he waited. If genius be
indeed
an infinite capacity for taking pains, Carosse was an actor of genius. Presently his patience was rewarded: he saw Charlot leave the house and make his way again towards St Jean. Brushing the leaf-mould off his overcoat Carosse stretched away the cramp like a large, lazy, neutered cat. The gun in his pocket thumped against his thigh.

No actor born has ever quite rid himself of stage fright and Carosse crossing in front of the house to the kitchen door was very frightened. The words of his part seemed to sink out of his mind: his throat dried and when he pulled the bell it was a short timid tiptoe clang that answered from the kitchen, unlike the peremptory summons of his previous visit. He kept his hand on the revolver in his pocket; it was like an assurance of manhood. When the door opened he stammered a little, saying, ‘Excuse me.’ But frightened as he was, he recognized that the involuntary stammer had been just right: it was pitiable, and pity had got to wedge the door open like a beggar’s foot. The girl was in shadow and he couldn’t see her face; he stumbled on, hearing his own voice, how it sounded, and gaining confidence. The door remained open: he didn’t ask for anything better yet.

He said, ‘I hadn’t got beyond the village when I heard about your mother. Mademoiselle, I had to come back. I know you hate me but, believe me, I never intended this—to kill your mother too.’

‘You needn’t have come back. She knew nothing
about
Michel.’ It was promising: he longed to put his foot across the threshold, but he knew such a move would be fatal. He was a man of cities, unused to country isolation, and he wondered what tradesman might at any moment come up behind his back: or Charlot might return prematurely. He was listening all the time for the scrunch of gravel.

‘Mademoiselle,’ he pleaded, ‘I had to come back. Last night you didn’t let me speak. I didn’t even finish the message from Michel.’ (Damnation, he thought, that’s not the part: what message?) He hedged: ‘He gave it to me the night he died,’ and was astonished by the success of his speech.

‘The night he died? Did he die in the night?’

‘Yes, of course. In the night.’

‘But Charlot told me it was in the morning—the next morning.’

‘Oh, what a liar that man has always been,’ Carosse moaned.

‘But why should he lie?’

‘He wanted to make it worse for me,’ Carosse improvised. He felt a wave of pride in his own astuteness that carried him over the threshold into the house: Thérèse Mangeot had stepped back to let him in. ‘It’s worse, isn’t it, to let a man die after a whole night to think about it in? I wasn’t villain enough for him.’

‘He said you tried once to take the offer back.’

‘Once,’ Carosse exclaimed. ‘Yes, once. That was all
the
chance I had before they fetched him out.’ The tears stood in his eyes as he pleaded, ‘Mademoiselle, believe me. It was at night.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know it was at night. I woke with the pain.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Just after midnight.’

‘That was the time,’ he said.

‘How mean of him,’ she said, ‘how mean to lie about that.’

‘You don’t know that man Charlot, mademoiselle, as we knew him in prison. Mademoiselle, I know I’m beneath your contempt. I bought my life at the expense of your brother’s, but at least I didn’t cheat to save it.’

‘What do you mean?’

He had remembered the mayor’s description of how they all drew lots. He said, ‘Mademoiselle, we drew in alphabetical order starting at the wrong end because this man Charlot pleaded that it should be that way. At the end there were only two slips left for him and me, and one of them was marked with the death token. There was a draught in the cell and it must have lifted the slips of paper and shown him which was marked. He took out of turn—Charlot should have come after Chavel—and he took the unmarked slip.’

She pointed out doubtfully the obvious flaw: ‘You could have demanded the draw again.’

‘Mademoiselle,’ Carosse said, ‘I thought at the time it was an honest mistake. Where a life depended on it,
one
couldn’t penalize a man for an honest mistake.’

‘And yet you bought your life?’

He was playing, he knew it, a flawed character: the inconsistencies didn’t add up: the audience had to be stormed by romantic acting. He pleaded, ‘Mademoiselle, there are so many things you don’t know. That man has put the worst light on everything. Your brother was a very sick man.’

‘I know.’

He caught his breath with relief: it was as if now he couldn’t go wrong, and he became reckless. ‘How he loved you and worried about what would happen to you when he died. He used to show me your photograph …’

‘He had no photograph.’

‘That astonishes me.’ It was an understatement: momentarily it staggered him: he had been confident, but he recovered immediately. ‘There was a photograph he always showed me; it was a street scene torn out of a newspaper: a beautiful girl half hidden in the crowd. I can guess now who it was: it wasn’t you, but it seemed to him like you, and so he kept it and pretended … People behave strangely in prison, mademoiselle. When he asked me to sell him the slip …’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘no. You are too plausible. He asked
you
… That wasn’t how it happened.’

He told her mournfully, ‘You have been filled with lies, mademoiselle. I’m guilty enough, but would I
have
returned if I was as guilty as
he
makes out?’

‘It wasn’t Charlot. It was the man who sent me the will and the other papers. The Mayor of Bourge.’

‘You don’t have to tell me any more, mademoiselle. Those two men were as thick as thieves. I understand it all now.’

‘I wish
I
did. I wish I did.’

‘Between them they cooked it perfectly.’ With his heart in his mouth, he said, ‘I will say goodbye, mademoiselle—and God bless you.’
Dieu
—he dwelt on the word as though he loved it, and indeed it was a word he loved, perhaps the most effective single word on the romantic stage: ‘God bless’, ‘I call God to my witness’, ‘God may forgive you’—all the grand hackneyed phrases hung around
Dieu
like drapery. He turned as slowly as he dared towards the door.

‘But the message from Michel?’

16

CAROSSE LEANT ON
the fence gazing towards the small figure that approached across the fields from St Jean. He leant like a man taking his ease in his own garden: once he gave a small quiet giggle as a thought struck him, but this was succeeded, as the figure came closer and became recognizably Charlot, by a certain alertness, a tautening of the intelligence.

Charlot, who remembered the revolver in the
pocket
, stood a little distance away and stared back at him. ‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said.

‘I decided to stay.’

‘Here?’

Carosse said gently, ‘It’s my own place, after all.’

‘Carosse the collaborator?’

‘No. Jean-Louis Chavel the coward.’

‘You’ve forgotten two things,’ Charlot said, ‘if you are going to play Chavel.’

‘I thought I’d rubbed up the part satisfactorily.’

‘If you are going to be Chavel you won’t be allowed to stay—unless you want more spittle in your face.’

‘And the other thing?’

‘None of this belongs to Chavel any more.’

Again Carosse giggled, leaning back from the fence with his hand on the revolver ‘just in case’. He said, ‘I’ve got two answers, my dear fellow.’

His confidence shook Charlot who cried angrily across the grass, ‘Stop acting.’

‘You see,’ Carosse said gently, ‘I’ve found it quite easy to talk the girl round to my version of things.’

‘Version of what?’

‘Of what happened in the prison. I wasn’t there, you see, and that makes it so much easier to be vivid. I’m forgiven, my dear Charlot, but you on the contrary are branded—forgive my laughing, because, of course, I know how grossly unfair it is—as the liar.’ He gave a happy peal of laughter: it was as if he expected the other to share altruistically his sense of the comedy of
things
. ‘You are to clear out, Charlot. Now, at once. She’s very angry with you. But I’ve persuaded her to let you have three hundred francs for wages. That’s six hundred you owe me, my dear fellow.’ And he held out his left hand tentatively.

‘And she’s letting you stay?’ Charlot asked, keeping his distance.

‘She hasn’t any choice, my dear. She hadn’t heard of the Decree of the 17th—nor you either? You don’t see the papers here, of course. The decree which makes illegal all change of property that took place during the German occupation if denounced by one party? Do you really mean to say you never thought of that? But there, I only thought of it myself this morning.’

Charlot stared back at him with horror. The fleshy and porky figure of the actor momentarily was transformed into its own ideal—the carnal and the proud, leaning negligently there on the axis of the globe offering him all the kingdoms of the world in the form of six freehold acres and a house. He could have everything—or his three hundred francs miraculously renewed. It was as if all that morning he had moved close to the supernatural: an old woman was dying and the supernatural closed in: God came into the house in an attaché case, and when God came the Enemy was always present. He was God’s shadow: he was the bitter proof of God. The actor’s silly laugh tinkled again, but he heard the ideal laughter swinging
behind
, a proud and comradely sound, welcoming him to the company of the Devil.

‘I bet you Chavel thought of it when he signed the transfer. Oh, what a cunning devil,’ Carosse giggled with relish. ‘It’s the nineteenth today. I bet he won’t be far behind the decree.’

The actual trivial words made no impression on Charlot’s mind: behind them he heard the Enemy greeting him like a company commander with approval—‘Well done, Chavel,’ and he felt a wave of happiness—this was home and he owned it. He said, ‘What’s the good of your pretending to be Chavel any longer, Carosse? It’s as you say. Chavel will be on his way home.’

Carosse said, ‘I like you, old man. You do remind me of good old Pidot. I’ll tell you what—if I pull this thing off you need never want for a few thousand francs.’

The grass was his and he looked at it with love: he must have it scythed before winter, and next year he would take the garden properly in hand … The indentation of footmarks ran up from the river: he could recognise his own narrow shoe-marks and the wide heavy galoshes of the priest. By this route God had moved into the house, where it was suddenly as if the visible world healed and misted and came back into focus, and he saw Carosse quite clearly again, porky and triumphant, and he knew exactly what he had to do. The Decree of the 17th—even the gifts of the
Enemy
were gifts also of God. The Enemy was unable to offer any gift without God simultaneously offering the great chance of rejection. He asked again, ‘But what’s the good, Carosse?’

‘Why,’ Carosse said, ‘even a day’s shelter, you know, is a gain to a man like me. People will come to their senses soon, and the right ones will get on top. One just has to keep on hiding.’ But he couldn’t resist a boast. ‘But that’s not all, my dear man. What a triumph if I married her before Chavel came. I could do it. I’m Carosse, aren’t I? You know your Richard III. “Was ever woman in this humour wooed?” And the answer of course is Yes. Yes, Charlot, yes.’

It is always necessary to know one’s enemy through and through. Charlot asked a third time, ‘Why? What’s the good?’

‘I need money, my dear. Chavel can’t refuse a split. That would be too abominable after swindling the brother of his life.’

‘And you think I won’t interfere? You said last night that I loved the girl.’

‘Oh, that!’ Carosse breathed the objection away. ‘You don’t love her enough, my dear man, to injure your own chances. You and I are too old for that kind of love. After all, if Chavel comes back you get nothing, but if I win, well, you know I’m generous.’ It was quite true: he was generous. His generosity was an integral part of his vulgarity. ‘And anyway,’ he added, ‘what can I do? You’ve told her I’m Chavel.’

‘You forget I know who you are: Carosse the collaborationist—and murderer.’

The right hand shifted in the pocket: a finger moved where the safety catch should be. ‘You think I’m that dangerous?’

‘Yes.’ Charlot watched the hand. ‘And there’s another thing—I know where Chavel is.’

‘Where?’

‘He’s nearly here. And there’s another thing. Look down there across the fields. You see the church?’

‘Of course.’

‘You see the hill behind, a little to the right, divided into fields?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the top right-hand corner there’s a man working.’

‘What about it?’

‘You can’t tell who he is from this distance, but I know him. He’s a farmer called Roche, and he’s the Resistance leader in St Jean.’