The Tenth Man (8 page)

It was he who now went into Brinac on market day. The first time that he went he felt betrayed at every step by familiar things: it was as though even if no human spoke his name the signpost at the crossroads would betray him: the soles of his shoes signed his name along the margin of the road, and the slats of the bridge across the river sounded a personal note under his tread which seemed to him as unmistakable as an accent. Once on the road a cart passed him from St Jean and he recognized the driver—a local farmer who had been crippled as a boy, losing his right arm in an accident with a tractor. As children they had played together in the fields round St Jean, but after the boy’s accident and the long weeks in hospital obscure emotions of jealousy and pride kept them apart, and when
they
met at last it was as enemies. They couldn’t like duellists use the same weapons: his own strength was matched against the crippled boy’s wounding tongue which bore the bedsores of a long sickness.

Charlot stepped back into the ditch as the cart went by and put up his hand to shield his face, but Roche paid him no attention; the dark fanatical eyes watched the road in front, the great lopped torso stood like a ruined buttress between him and the world. In any case, as Charlot soon realized, there were too many on the roads to attract attention. All over France men were picking their way home, from prison camps, from hiding places, from foreign parts. If one had possessed a God’s eye view of France, one would have detected a constant movement of tiny grains moving like dust across a floor shaped like a map.

He felt an enormous sense of relief when he returned to the house: it was really as if he had emerged from a savage and unaccountable country. He came in at the front door and trod the long passage to the kitchen as though he were retreating into the interstices of a cave. Thérèse Mangeot looked up from the pot she was stirring and said, ‘It’s odd the way you always come in at the front. Why don’t you use the back door like we do? It saves a lot of cleaning.’

‘I’m sorry, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s because I came that way first.’

She didn’t treat him like a servant: it was as if in her eyes he was just another gypsy camping there until the
police
turned them out. Only the old woman sometimes fell into an odd apoplectic rage at nothing at all and swore that when her son returned, they would live properly, like the rich people they were, with servants who were really servants, and not tramps taken off the road … On these occasions Thérèse Mangeot would turn away as if she didn’t hear, but afterwards she would fling some rough inapposite remark to Charlot—the kind of remark you only make to an equal, giving him as it were the freedom of the street.

He said, ‘There wasn’t much to be got in the market. It seemed absurd to be buying so many vegetables with this big garden here. Next year you won’t have to …’ He counted out the money. He said, ‘I got some horse-meat. There wasn’t even a rabbit there. I think the change is right. You’d better check it.’

‘I’ll trust you,’ she said.

‘Your mother won’t. Here’s my account.’ He held out to her the list of things he had bought and watched her over her shoulder as she checked. ‘Jean-Louis Charlot …’ She stopped reading. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, and suddenly looking over her shoulder he realized what he had done—he had as near as made no difference signed his name as he had signed it on the deed of gift.

‘What’s strange?’ he asked.

‘I could almost swear,’ she said, ‘that I knew your
writing
, that I’d seen it somewhere …’

‘I suppose you’ve seen it on a letter I’ve written.’

‘You haven’t written any letters.’

‘No. That’s true.’ His lips were dry. He said, ‘Where do you think you’ve seen it …?’ and waited an age for her answer.

She stared at it and stared at it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s like those times when you think you’ve been in a place before. I don’t suppose it means a thing.’

10

NEARLY EVERY DAY
someone came to the door to beg or to ask for work. The vagrants flowed aimlessly west and south, towards the sun and the sea, as if they believed that on the warm wet margin of France anyone could live. The girl gave them money rather than food (it was less scarce), and they drifted on down the weedy path to the river. There was no stability anywhere, least of all in the big house. And yet the Mangeots had a great sense of property. In Paris Madame Mangeot had owned a small general shop—or rather she had owned the goods in the general shop. Year after year, since her husband had died, she had traded carefully—never giving credit and never accepting credit, and never making more than a bare livelihood. Her husband had had
ambitions
for his children: he had sent his daughter to a secretarial school to learn typewriting and his son to a technical college, but Janvier had run away, and Thérèse had been withdrawn soon after he died. It was all nonsense, that, in Madame Mangeot’s eyes, and the sole result of the few months’ training was a second-hand typewriter in the back of the shop on which she typed letters—very badly—to wholesalers. There was no future for the store, but Madame Mangeot didn’t worry about that. When you reach a certain age you don’t care about the future: it is success enough to be alive: every morning you wake with triumph. And there was always Michel. Madame Mangeot believed implicitly in Michel. Who knows what fairy stories of her infancy gathered about the enigmatic absent figure? He was the prince searching the world with a glass slipper; he was the cowherd who won the King’s daughter; he was an old woman’s youngest son who killed the giant. She was never allowed to know that he was after all just dead. Charlot learned this story slowly, from half-sentences, outbreaks of temper on the part of Madame Mangeot, even from the dreams the two women recounted at breakfast. It wasn’t quite the truth, of course—nothing is ever that, and Madame Mangeot’s neighbours in Menilmontant would never have recognized this coloured version of her commonplace story. Now suddenly she had come into a fortune. It was the complete justification of Madame Mangeot’s daydreams, but the stories of her
childhood
had also warned her that there was such a thing as fairy gold. Without knowing why, she never felt sure of anything in this house; even of the kitchen table or the chair she sat in, as she had felt sure of everything in Menilmontant, where she knew exactly what had been paid for and what hadn’t: here nothing, as far as she knew, had been paid for: she wasn’t to realize that the payment had been made elsewhere.

Charlot slept at the top of the house in what had once been the best servant’s bedroom—a little room under a sloping roof with an iron bedstead and a flimsy bamboo chest of drawers, the flimsiest thing in the house where every piece of furniture was heavy and dark and built to last generations. This was the only part of the house he hadn’t known: as a child he was forbidden the top floor for some obscure maternal reason that seemed vaguely to be based on morality and hygiene. Up there, where the carpet stopped, beyond the region of bathroom and lavatory, the physical facts of life seemed to lurk with a peculiar menace. Once and once only had he penetrated into the forbidden territory: on tiptoe, under the light weight of six years, he had approached the bedroom he now slept in and peeked round the door. The old servant, whom his parents had inherited and whom they called with rather terrified respect Madame Warnier, was doing her hair—or rather she was taking off her hair: great strands of pale brown hair like dry seaweed were unpicked and laid on the dressing table.
All
over the region lay a sour miasma. For more than a year after Charlot believed that all long hair was like that—detachable.

One night he couldn’t sleep: he followed that clandestine track of his childhood the opposite way in search of water. The servants’ stairs creaked under his tread, but unlike his footsteps on the way to Brinac they meant nothing: they were new hieroglyphs nobody had learned to read. On the floor below was his own old room: nobody slept in it now, perhaps because it bore too clearly the marks of his occupancy. He went in. It was exactly as he had left it four years before. He pulled open a drawer and there was a ring of stiff collars turning a little yellow like papyrus with disuse. A photograph of his mother stood in a silver frame on his wardrobe. She wore a high whalebone collar and stared out with an expression of complete calm on a scene that never changed: death and torture and loss had no effect on the small patch of wall that met her gaze—the old wallpaper with sprigs of flowers that
her
mother-in-law had ordered. Above one sprig was a small pencilled face: at fourteen it had meant someone and something he had forgotten: some vague romantic passion of adolescence, perhaps a love and a pain he had believed would last as long as his life. He turned and saw Thérèse Mangeot watching him from the doorway. Seeing her was like remembering. It was as if he had connected a broken wire and the forgotten voice spoke to him out of thirty years ago.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked roughly. She wore a thick corded dressing-gown like a man’s.

‘I couldn’t sleep, so I came down for water. And then I thought I heard a rat in this room.’

‘Oh, no, there hasn’t been a rat here for years.’

‘Why don’t you clear out all these things?’

Her dressing-gown cord trailed wearily across the floor. ‘It would almost make one sick, wouldn’t it,’ she said, ‘to touch them? But I would all the same. Even the collars.’ She sat down on the bed: it seemed to Charlot inexpressibly sad that anyone so young should be so tired—and yet awake. ‘Poor thing,’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if she knew?’

‘I didn’t mean my mother. I mean her—in the photograph. It can’t have been much to boast about, can it, being his mother?’

For the first time since his arrival he found himself stung into protest. ‘I think you’re wrong. I knew him, after all, and you didn’t. Believe me—he wasn’t such a bad chap.’

‘Good God,’ she said.

‘He acted like a coward, of course, but, after all, anybody’s liable to play the coward once. Most of us do and forget about it. It was just that the once in his case proved—well, so spectacular.’

She said, ‘You can’t tell me he was unlucky. It’s as you say. That thing happens to everyone once. All one’s life one has to think: Today it may happen.’ It was obvious that she had brooded and brooded on this
subject
, and now at last she brought out the result aloud for anyone’s hearing. ‘When it happens you know what you’ve been all your life.’

He had no answer: it seemed to him quite true. He asked her sourly, ‘Has it happened to you yet?’

‘Not yet. But it will.’

‘So you don’t know what you are. Perhaps you are no better than he is.’ He picked up a yellow collar and twirled it angrily and trivially round his wrist.

‘That doesn’t make him any better,’ she said, ‘does it? If I’m a murderer, must I pretend that other murderers …?’

He interrupted her, ‘You’ve got an answer, haven’t you, to everything? If you were a man you’d make a good lawyer. Only you’d be a better counsel for the prosecution than for the defence.’

‘I wouldn’t want to be a lawyer,’ she told him seriously. ‘He was one.’

‘How you hate him.’

‘I’ve got such hate,’ she said, ‘it goes on and on all day and all night. It’s like a smell you can’t get rid of when something’s died under the floorboards. You know that I don’t go to Mass now. I just leave my mother there and come back. She wanted to know why, so I told her I’d lost my faith. That’s a little thing that can happen to anyone, can’t it? God wouldn’t pay much account to anyone losing faith. That’s just stupidity and stupidity’s good.’ She was crying but from her eyes only: it was as if she had everything
under
control except the mere mechanism of the ducts. ‘I wouldn’t mind a thing like that. But it’s the hate that keeps me away. Some people can drop their hate for an hour and pick it up again at the church door. I can’t. I wish I could.’ She put her hands over her eyes as if she was ashamed of this physical display of grief. He thought, This is all my work.

‘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.