The Tenth Man (6 page)

But he had to do more than wander: he had to get a job. There were moments—after his first glass of wine in freedom—when he felt quite capable of beginning over again: of re-amassing the money he had signed away, and finally in a burst of day-dream he had bought back his home at St Jean de Brinac and was wandering happily from room to room when he saw the reflection of his face—Charlot’s bearded face—in the water decanter. It was the face of failure. It was odd, he thought, that one failure of nerve had ingrained the face as deeply as a tramp’s, but, of course, he had the objectivity to tell himself, it wasn’t one failure, it was a whole lifetime of preparation for the event. An artist paints his picture not in a few hours but in all the years of experience before he takes up the brush, and it is the same with failure. It was his good fortune to have been a fashionable lawyer: he had inherited more money than he had ever earned: if it had depended upon himself he would never, he believed now, have reached the heights he had.

All the same, he now made several attempts to earn his living in a reasonable way. He applied for the post of a teacher at one of the innumerable language
institutes
in the city. Although the war still muttered outside the borders of France, the Berlitzes and kindred organizations were already doing a thriving trade: there were plenty of foreign soldiers anxious to learn French to take the place of peacetime tourists.

He was interviewed by a dapper thin man in a frock coat, which smelled very faintly of moth balls. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said at length, ‘your accent is not good enough.’

‘Not good enough!’ Charlot exclaimed.

‘Not good enough for this institute. We exact a very high standard. Our teachers must have the best, the very best, of Parisian accents. I am sorry, monsieur.’ He enunciated himself with terrible clarity, as though he was used to speaking only to foreigners, and he used only the simplest phrases—he was trained in the direct method. His eyes dwelt ruminatively on Charlot’s battered shoes. Charlot went.

Perhaps something about the man reminded him of Lenôtre. It occurred to him immediately he had left the institute that he might earn a reasonably good living as a clerk: his knowledge of law would be useful, and he could explain it by saying that at one time he had hoped to be called to the Bar, but his money had given out …

He answered an advertisement in
Figaro
: the address was on the third floor of a high grey building off the Boulevard Haussmann. The office into which he found his way gave the impression of having been just
cleaned
up after enemy occupation: dust and straw had been swept against the walls and the furniture looked as though it had been recently uncrated from the boxes in which it had been stored away ages ago. When a war ends one forgets how much older oneself and the world have become: it needs something like a piece of furniture or a woman’s hat to waken the sense of time. This furniture was all of tubular steel, giving the room the appearance of an engine room in a ship, but this was a ship which had been beached for years—the tubes were tarnished. Out of fashion in 1939, in 1944 they had the air of period pieces. An old man greeted Charlot: when the furniture was new he must have been young enough to have an eye for the fashionable, the chic, for appearances. He sat down among the steel chairs at random as though he was in a public waiting room and said sadly, ‘I suppose like everyone else you have forgotten everything?’

‘Oh,’ Charlot said, ‘I remember enough.’

‘We can’t pay much here at present,’ the old man said, ‘but when things get back to normal … there was always a great demand for our product …’

‘I would begin,’ Charlot said, ‘at a low salary …’

‘The great thing,’ the old man said, ‘is enthusiasm, to believe in what we are selling. After all, our product has proved itself. Before the war our figures were very good, very good indeed. Of course, there was a season, but in Paris there are always foreign visitors. And even the provinces bought our product. I’d show you our
figures
only our books are lost.’ From his manner you would have thought he was attracting an investor rather than interviewing a would-be employee.

‘Yes,’ Charlot said, ‘yes.’

‘We’ve got to make our product known again. When once it’s known, it can’t fail to be as popular as before. Craftsmanship tells.’

‘I expect you are right.’

‘So you see,’ the old man said, ‘we’ve all got to put our backs into it … a co-operative enterprise … the sense of loyalty … your savings will be quite safe.’ He waved his hand above the wilderness of tubular chairs. ‘I promise you that.’

Charlot never learned what the product was, but on the landing below a wooden crate had been opened and standing in the straw was a table-lamp about three feet high built hideously in steel in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. The flex ran down the lift shaft like the rope of an ancient hotel lift, and the bulb screwed in on the top floor. Perhaps it was the only desk lamp the old man had been able to obtain in Paris: perhaps—who knows?—it may have been the product itself …

Three hundred francs wouldn’t last long in Paris. Charlot answered one more advertisement, but the employer demanded proper papers. He was not impressed by the prison dossier. ‘You can buy any number of those,’ he said, ‘for a hundred francs,’ and he refused to be persuaded by the elaborate measurements of the German authorities. ‘It’s not my job to
measure
your skull,’ he said, ‘or feel your bumps. Go off to the city hall and get proper papers. You seem a capable fellow. I’ll keep the job open until noon tomorrow …’ But Charlot did not return.

He hadn’t eaten more than a couple of rolls for thirty-six hours: it suddenly occurred to him that he was back exactly where he had started. He leaned against a wall in the late afternoon sun and imagined that he heard the ticking of the mayor’s watch. He had come a long way and taken a deal of trouble and was back at the end of the cinder track with his back against the wall. He was going to die and he might just as well have died rich and saved everybody trouble. He began to walk towards the Seine.

Presently he couldn’t hear the mayor’s watch any more: instead there was a shuffle and pad whichever way he turned. He heard it just as he had heard the mayor’s watch and he half realized that both were delusions. At the end of a long empty street the river shone. He found that he was out of breath and he leaned against a urinal and waited for a while with his head hanging down because the river dazzled his eyes. The shuffle and pad came softly up behind him and stopped. Well, the watch had stopped too. He refused to pay attention to delusion.

‘Pidot,’ a voice said, ‘Pidot.’ He looked sharply up, but there was no one there.

‘It is Pidot, surely?’ the voice said.

‘Where are you?’ Charlot asked.

‘Here, of course.’ There was a pause and then the voice said like conscience almost in his ear, ‘You look all in, finished. I hardly recognized you. Tell me, is anyone coming?’

‘No.’ In childhood, in the country, in the woods behind Brinac one had believed that voices might suddenly speak out of the horns of flowers or from the roots of trees, but in the city when one had reached the age of death one couldn’t believe in voices from paving stones. He asked again, ‘Where are you?’ and then realized his own dull-wittedness—he could see the legs from the shins downwards under the green cape of the urinal. They were black pin-striped trousers, the trousers of a lawyer or a doctor or even a deputy, but the shoes hadn’t been cleaned for some days.

‘It’s Monsieur Carosse, Pidot.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know how it is. One’s misunderstood.’

‘Yes.’

‘What could I have done? After all, I had to keep the show going. My behaviour was strictly correct—and distant. No one knows better than you, poor Pidot. I suppose they are holding things against you too?’

‘I’m finished.’

‘Courage, Pidot. Never say die. A second cousin of mine who was in London is doing his best to put things right. Surely you know one of them?’

‘Why don’t you come out from there and let me see you?’

‘Better not, Pidot. Separately we might pass muster, but together … it’s too risky.’ The pin-striped trousers moved uneasily. ‘Anyone coming, Pidot?’

‘No one.’

‘Listen, Pidot. I want you to take a message to Madame Carosse. Tell her I’m well: I’ve gone south. I shall try to get into Switzerland till it all blows over. Poor Pidot, you could do with a couple of hundred francs, couldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll leave them on a ledge in here. You’ll take the message, won’t you, Pidot?’

‘Where to?’

‘Oh, the same old place. You know—on the third floor. I hope the old lady’s still got her hair. The old bitch was proud of it. Well, goodbye and good luck, Pidot.’ There was a scuffle in the urinal, and then the shuffle and pad went off in the other direction. Charlot watched the stranger go: tall and stout and black-clothed, with a limp and the kind of hat Charlot himself would have worn—so many years ago—between the Rue Miromesnil and the law courts.

On a shelf of the urinal there was a screw of paper—three hundred francs. Whoever Monsieur Carosse was, he had the rare virtue of being better than his word. Charlot laughed: the sound was hollow among the metal alcoves. A week had gone by and he was back exactly where he had started with three hundred francs. It was as if all that time he had lived
upon
air—or rather as if some outwardly friendly but inwardly malign witch had granted him the boon of an inexhaustible purse, but a purse from which he could never draw more than three hundred francs. Was it perhaps that the dead man had allocated him this allowance out of his three hundred thousand?

We’ll soon test that out, Charlot thought; what’s the good of making this last a week and be only a week older and a week shabbier at the end of it? It was the hour of apéritifs and for the first time since he had entered Paris, he deliberately stepped into his own territory, the territory of which he knew every yard.

He had not until then properly appreciated the strangeness of Paris: an unfamiliar street might always have been an unfrequented one, but now he noticed the emptiness, the silent little bicycle taxis gliding by, the shabbiness of awnings and the strange faces. Only here and there he saw the familiar face of the customary stranger sitting where he had sat for years, sipping the same drink. They were like the remains of an old flower garden sticking up in a wilderness of weeds after a careless tenant’s departure.

I am going to die tonight, Charlot thought: what does it matter if someone does recognize me, and he pushed through the glass door of his accustomed café and made for the very corner—the right-hand end of the long sofa under the gilt mirror—in which he had always sat as a kind of right. It was occupied.

An American soldier sat there: a young man with
high
cheekbones and a rough puppy innocence: and the waiter bowed and smiled and exchanged words with him as though he were the oldest customer in the place. Charlot sat and watched: it was like an act of adultery. The head waiter, who had always stopped for a word, went past him as though he did not exist, and he too paused by the American’s table. The explanation soon came—the big bundle of notes the Yankee produced to pay with—and suddenly it occurred to Charlot that he too formerly had possessed a big bundle of notes, had been a payer; it wasn’t that he was a ghost now: he was merely a man without much money. He drank his brandy and called for another: the slowness of the service angered him. He called the head waiter. The man tried to avoid him but at last he had to come.

‘Well, Jules,’ Charlot said.

The shallow eyes flickered disapproval: the man only liked his intimates—the payers, Charlot thought—to call him by his name.

‘You don’t remember me, Jules,’ Charlot said.

The man became uneasy: perhaps some tone of voice echoed in his ear. The times were confusing: some customers had disappeared altogether, others who had been in hiding had returned changed by imprisonment, and others who had not been in hiding it was now in the interests of his business to discourage. ‘Well, monsieur, you have not been here for some time …’

The American began to hit loudly on the table with a coin. ‘Excuse me,’ the waiter said.

‘No, no, Jules, you can’t leave an old customer like that. Leave out the beard.’ He laid his hand across his chin. ‘Can’t you see a fellow called Chavel, Jules?’

The American beat again with his coin, but this time Jules paid him no attention, simply signalled another waiter across to take the man’s order. ‘Why, Monsieur Chavel,’ he said, ‘you are so much changed. I’m astonished … I heard …’ But it was obvious that he couldn’t remember what he had heard. It was difficult to remember which of his customers were heroes and which traitors and which simply customers.

‘The Germans locked me up,’ Chavel said.

‘Ah, that must have been it,’ Jules said with relief. ‘Paris is nearly itself again now, Monsieur Chavel.’

‘Not quite, Jules.’ He nodded at his old place.

‘Ah, I’ll see that seat is kept for you tomorrow, Monsieur Chavel. How is your house—where was it?’

‘Brinac. There are tenants there now.’

‘It hasn’t suffered?’

‘I don’t think so. I haven’t visited it yet. To tell you the truth, Jules, I only arrived in Paris today. I’ve barely enough money for a bed.’

‘I can accommodate you a little, Monsieur Chavel?’

‘No, no. I shall manage somehow.’

‘At least you must be our guest this evening. Another cognac, Monsieur Chavel?’

‘Thank you, Jules.’ The test, he thought, has
worked
: the pocket book is inexhaustible. I still have my three hundred francs.

‘Do you believe in the Devil, Jules?’

‘Naturally, Monsieur Chavel.’

He was moved to recklessness. ‘You hadn’t heard, Jules, that I am selling Brinac?’

‘Are you getting a good price, Monsieur Chavel?’

Suddenly Charlot felt a great distaste for Jules: it seemed to him incredible that a man could be so crass. Had he no possession in the world for which a good price was an insufficient inducement? He was a man who would sell his life … He said, ‘I’m sorry.’