The Tenth Man (7 page)

‘What for, Monsieur Chavel?’

‘After these years haven’t we all reason to be sorry for a hundred things?’

‘We have no reason to be sorry here, Monsieur Chavel. I assure you our attitude has always been strictly correct. I have always made a point of serving Frenchmen first—yes, even if the German was a general.’

He envied Jules: to have been able to remain ‘correct’: to have saved his self-respect by small doses of rudeness or inattention. But for him—to have remained correct would have meant death. He said suddenly, ‘Do you know if any trains are running yet from the Gare Montparnasse?’

‘A few and they are very slow. They haven’t got the fuel. They stop at every station. Sometimes they stop all night. You wouldn’t get to Brinac before morning.’

‘There’s no hurry.’

‘Are they expecting you, Monsieur Chavel?’

‘Who?’

‘Your tenants.’

‘No.’ The unaccustomed brandy was running along the dry subterranean channels of his mind: sitting there in the familiar café, where even the mirrors and cornices were chipped in the places he remembered them, he felt an enormous longing just to be able to get up and catch a train and go home as he had often done in past years. Suddenly and unexpectedly to give way to a whim and find a welcome at the other end. He thought: After all, there is always time to die in.

8

THE BELL LIKE
most things about the place was old-fashioned. His father had disliked electricity, and though he could well have afforded to bring it to Brinac, he had preferred lamps almost until his death (saying they were better for the eyes) and ancient bells which dangled on long fronds of metal. Himself he had loved the place too much to change things: when he came down to Brinac it was to a quiet cave of dusk and silence—no telephone could petulantly pursue him there. So now he could hear the long twanging wire before the bell began to swing at the back of the house, in the room next to the kitchen. Surely if he had
been
in the house that bell would have had a different tone: one less hollow, more friendly: less sporadic like a cough in a worn-out breast … A cold early-morning breeze blew through the bushes and stirred at ankle level the weeds in the drive: somewhere—perhaps in the potting shed—a loose board flapped. Without warning the door opened.

This was Janvier’s sister. He recognized the type and in a flash built her up on the lines of her brother. Fair and thin and very young she had still had time to develop what must have been the family trait of recklessness. Now that he was here and she was there, he found he had no words of explanation: he stood like a page of type waiting to be read.

‘You want a meal,’ she said. She had read the whole page like so many women do at a glance, even to the footnote of his thin shoes. He made a gesture which might have been deprecation or acceptance. She said, ‘We haven’t much in the house. You know how things are. It would be easier to give you money.’

He said, ‘I’ve got money … three hundred francs.’

She said, ‘You’d better come in. Make as little dirt as you can. I’ve been scrubbing these steps.’

‘I’ll take off my shoes,’ he said humbly, and he followed her in, feeling the parquet floor cold under his socks. Everything had changed a little for the worse: there was no question but that the house had been surrendered to strangers: the big mirror had been taken down and left an ugly patch on the wall: the
tallboy
had been shifted, a chair had gone: the steel engraving of a naval engagement off Brest had been hung in a new place—tastelessly he thought. He looked in vain for a photograph of his father, and exclaimed suddenly, furiously, ‘Where’s …?’

‘Where’s what?’

He checked himself. ‘Your mother,’ he said.

She turned round and looked at him as though she had missed something on the first reading. ‘How do you know about my mother?’

‘Janvier told me.’

‘Who’s Janvier? I don’t know any Janvier.’

‘Your brother,’ he said. ‘We used to call your brother that in the prison.’

‘You were with him there?’

‘Yes.’

He was to learn in time that she never quite did the expected thing: he had imagined that now she would call her mother, but instead she laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘Don’t speak so loud.’ She explained, ‘My mother doesn’t know.’

‘About his death?’

‘About anything. She thinks he’s made a fortune—somewhere. Sometimes it’s England, sometimes South America. She says she always knew he was a clever son. What’s your name?’

‘Charlot. Jean-Louis Charlot.’

‘Did you know the other one too?’

‘You mean … Yes, I knew him. I think I’d better go
before
your mother comes.’

A high old voice cried from the stairs, ‘Thérèse, who’s that you’ve got?’

‘Somebody,’ the girl said, ‘who knows Michel.’

An old woman heaved herself down the last stairs into the hall, a huge old woman draped in shawl after shawl until she appeared like an unturned bed: even the feet were swathed, they padded and slopped towards him. It was difficult to see pathos in this mountain or appreciate the need to shelter her. Surely these huge maternal breasts were there to comfort, not to require comfort. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘how’s Michel?’

‘He’s well,’ the girl said.

‘I didn’t ask you. You. How did you leave my son?’

‘He was well,’ Charlot repeated. ‘He asked me to look you up and see how you were.’

‘He did, did he? He might have given you a pair of shoes to come in,’ she said sharply. ‘He hasn’t done anything foolish, has he, lost his money again?’

‘No. No.’

‘He bought all this for his old mother,’ she went on with fond fanaticism. ‘He’s a foolish boy. I was all right where I was. We had three rooms in Menilmontant. Manageable they were, but here you can’t get help. It’s too much for an old woman and a girl. He sent us money too, of course, but he doesn’t realize there’s things nowadays money won’t buy.’

‘He’s hungry,’ the girl interrupted.

‘All right, then,’ the old woman said. ‘Give him
food
. You’d think he was a beggar the way he stands there. If he wants food why doesn’t he ask for food?’ she went on just as though he were out of earshot.

‘I’ll pay,’ Charlot snapped at her.

‘Oh, you’ll pay, will you? You’re too ready with your money. You won’t get anywhere that way. You don’t want to offer money till you’re asked for it.’ She was like an old weather-worn emblem of wisdom—something you find in desert places, like the Sphinx—and yet inside her was that enormous vacancy of ignorance which cast a doubt on all her wisdom.

One turned out of the hall on the left, through a door with a chipped handle: this led to a long stone passage leading halfway round the house: he remembered in winter how the food was never quite hot after its journey from the kitchen and how his father had always planned alterations, but in the end the house had won. Now without thinking he took a step towards the door as though he would find his own way there: then stopped and thought, I must be careful, so careful. He followed silently behind Thérèse and thought how odd it was to see someone young in that house where he only remembered old, trustworthy, crusty servants. Only in portraits were people young: the photograph in the best bedroom of his mother on her wedding day, of his father when he had taken his degree in law: his grandmother with her first child. Following the girl he thought with melancholy that it was as if he had brought a bride to the old house.

She gave him bread and cheese and a glass of wine and sat down opposite to him at the kitchen table. He was silent because of his hunger and because of his thoughts. He had hardly been in the kitchen since he was a child: then he would come in from the garden about eleven and see what he could scrounge: there was an old cook—old again—who loved him and fed him and gave him odd toys to play with—he could remember only a potato forked like a man, a merry-thought dressed carefully up as an old woman in a bonnet, and a mutton-bone which he believed then was like an assegai.

The girl said, ‘Tell me about him.’ It was what he had dreaded, arming himself with suitable false phrases. He said, ‘He was the life and soul of the prison—even the guards liked him.’

She interrupted him: ‘I didn’t mean Michel … I mean the other one.’

‘The man who …’

‘I mean Chavel,’ she said. ‘You don’t think I’d forget his name, do you? I can see it just as he wrote it on the documents. Jean-Louis Chavel. Do you know what I tell myself? I tell myself that one day he will come back here because he won’t be able to resist seeing what’s happened to his beautiful house. We have lots of strangers passing through here like yourself, hungry, but every time that bell starts swinging, I think to myself, “Maybe it’s him.”’

‘And then?’ Charlot said.

‘I’d spit in his face,’ she said and for the first time he noticed the shape of her mouth: a beautiful mouth as he remembered Janvier’s had been. ‘That’s the first thing I’d do …’

He watched it when he said, ‘All the same, it’s a lovely house.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘if it wasn’t for the old woman I think I’d set it alight. What a fool he was,’ she cried out at Charlot as though this was the first time she had had a chance of saying what she thought aloud. ‘Did he really think I’d rather have this than him?’

‘You were twins, weren’t you?’ Charlot said, watching her.

‘Do you know the night they shot him? I felt the pain. I sat up in bed crying …’

‘It wasn’t at night,’ Charlot said, ‘it was in the morning.’

‘Not in the night?’

‘No.’

‘What did it mean then?’

‘Just nothing,’ Charlot said. He began to cut a bit of cheese into tiny squares. ‘That’s often the way. We think there’s a meaning but then we find the facts are wrong—there just isn’t one. You wake with a pain and afterwards you think that was love—but the facts don’t fit.’

She said, ‘We loved each other so much. I feel dead too.’

He cut the cheese and cut the cheese. He said
gently
, ‘The facts are wrong. You’ll see.’ He wanted to convince himself that he wasn’t responsible for two deaths. He felt thankful that it was in the night that she had woken and not in the morning, at seven o’clock.

‘You haven’t told me,’ she said, ‘what
he
looks like.’

He chose his words with great care. ‘He’s a little taller than I am—perhaps an inch, or not so much. He’s a clean shaven …’

‘That doesn’t mean a thing,’ she said. ‘You can grow a beard in a week. What colour eyes?’

‘Blue. They looked grey in some lights, though.’

‘Can’t you think of a single thing you can tell him by for certain? Hasn’t he got a scar somewhere?’

He was tempted to lie but resisted: ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember anything like that about him. He was just a man like the rest of us.’

‘I thought once,’ the girl said, ‘that I’d have someone from the village here to help us and to keep an eye out for him. But I wouldn’t trust one of them. He was popular there. I suppose because they’d known him from when he was a kid. You don’t trouble about a kid’s meanness, and by the time he’s grown up, you’re so used to it, you don’t notice.’ She had her wise sayings as her mother had, but hers had not been inherited: they had been learned in the street with her brother: they had an odd masculine tinge.

‘Do they know down there,’ he asked, ‘what he’s done?’

‘It wouldn’t make any difference if they did. He’d
have
just put a smart one over on a Parisian. They’d sit back and wait to see him do it again. That’s what I’m waiting for too. He was a lawyer, wasn’t he? You don’t tell me he hasn’t managed somehow to make those papers just rubbish.’

‘I think,’ Charlot said, ‘he was too frightened to think as clearly as that. If he’d thought all that clearly, he’d have died, wouldn’t he?’

‘When he dies,’ the girl said, ‘you can take your oath it will be in a state of grace with the sacrament in his mouth, forgiving all his enemies. He won’t die before he can cheat the Devil.’

‘How you hate him.’

‘I’ll be the one who’s damned. Because I shan’t forgive. I shan’t die in a state of grace.’ She said, ‘I thought you were hungry. You don’t eat much of that cheese. It’s good cheese.’

‘It’s time I got along,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to hurry. Did they let him have a priest?’

‘Oh, yes, I think so. They had a priest in one of the other cells who used to do that sort of job.’

‘Where are you going from here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Looking for a job?’

‘I’ve given up looking.’

She said, ‘We could do with a man here. A couple of women can’t keep a place like this clean. And there’s the garden.’

‘It wouldn’t do.’

‘It’s as you like. Wages wouldn’t be a difficulty,’ she said bitterly. ‘We’re rich.’

He thought, If only for a week … to be quiet … at home.

She said, ‘But your chief job, what I’d be paying you for, is just to keep on looking out—for him.’

9

FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
it was strange and bitter to be living in his own house as an odd-job man, but after another twenty-four it was familiar and peaceful. If a man loves a place enough he doesn’t need to possess it: it’s enough for him to know that it is safe and unaltered—or only altered in the natural way by time and circumstance. Madame Mangeot and her daughter were like temporary lodgers: if they took a picture down it was only for some practical purpose—to save dusting, not because they wished to put another in its place: they would never have cut down a tree for the sake of a new view, or refurbished a room according to some craze of the moment. It was exaggeration even to regard them as legal lodgers: they were more like gypsies who had found the house empty and now lived in a few rooms, cultivated a corner of the garden well away from the road, and were careful to make no smoke by which they could be detected.

This was not entirely fanciful: he found they were in fact afraid of the village. Once a week the girl went into Brinac to the market, walking both ways though Charlot knew there was a cart they could have hired in St Jean, and once a week the old woman went to Mass, her daughter taking her to the door of the church and meeting her there afterwards. The old woman never entered until a few moments before the Gospel was read, and at the very first moment, when the priest had pronounced the
Ita Missa
, she was on her feet. Thus she avoided all contact outside the church with the congregation. This suited Charlot well. It never occurred to either of them as strange that he too should avoid the village.