The Tenth Man (9 page)

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 feelings 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 naïve 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 of the market 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 Thérèse Mangeot shared a secret: when he caught her eyes 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 upwards 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 towards 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 in to the market on a fine autumn day. The road rose a few feet and carried them momentarily out of the mist: a long grey 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. Thérèse 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,’ Thérèse 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,’ Thérèse Mangeot said, ‘that you were a policeman.’

‘I’m of the Resistance,’ Roche replied. ‘It’s my business to keep an eye on things.’

‘The war’s over for us, isn’t it? You haven’t any more to do.’

‘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,’ Thérèse 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 Thérèse 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.’

Thérèse 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,’ Thérèse 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?’

‘Oh, 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 round 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 lopped 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, Thérèse 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 centre, 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 said 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 door bell 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 any time 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.’