The Tenth Man

12

THAT NIGHT, AFTER THEY HAD RETURNED FROM BRINAC, Therese 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 center, and portraits of dead Chavel’s hanging a little askew. The Chavel’s 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 commented 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 doorbell 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 anytime 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 collar band. 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.”