The Tenth Man by Graham Greene Page B

dripping from the eaves. It wasn’t a night for any human being to be abroad in, and he thought, how she must hate Chavel. He thought of Chavel detachedly as another man: he had been enabled to lose his identity, he thought, for ever.
    It was a silent meal. When it was over Madame Mangeot lumbered straight off to bed. She never helped in the house now, nor would she wait to see her daughter working. What she didn’t see she didn’t know. The Mangeots were landowners: they didn’t work: they hired others …
    ‘He didn’t look a coward,’ Thérèse said.
    ‘You can forget him now.’
    ‘That rain’s following him,’ Thérèse said. ‘All the way from this house it’s followed him. That particular rain. It’s like a link.’
    ‘You needn’t think about him any more.’
    ‘And Michel’s dead. He’s really dead now.’ She passed her palm across the window to wipe away the steam. ‘Now he’s come and he’s gone again, and Michel’s dead. Nobody else knew him.’
    ‘I knew him.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ she said vaguely: it seemed to be a knowledge that didn’t count.
    ‘Thérèse,’ he said. It was the first time he had called her by that name.
    ‘Yes?’ she asked.
    He was a conventional man: nothing affected that. His life provided models for behaviour in any likely circumstance: they stood around him like tailor’s dummies. There had been no model for a man condemned to death, but he had not grown to middle age without making more than one proposal of marriage. The circumstances, however, had been easier. He had been able to state in fairly exact figures the annual amount of his income and the condition of his property. He had been able before that to establish an atmosphere of the right intimacy, and he had been fairly certain that he and the young woman thought alike on such things as politics, religion and family life. Now he saw himself reflected in a canister carrying a dishcloth; he was without money, property or possessions, and he knew nothing of the woman—except this blind desire of heart and body, this extra-ordinary tenderness, a longing he had never experienced before to protect …
    ‘What is it?’ she said. She was still turned to the window as though she couldn’t dissociate herself from the long, wet tramp of the pseudo-Chavel.
    He said stiffly, ‘I’ve been here more than two weeks. You don’t know anything about me.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ she said.
    ‘Have you thought what you’ll do when she dies?’
    ‘I don’t know. There’s time enough to think.’ She took her eyes reluctantly away from the streaming pane. ‘Maybe I’ll marry,’ she said and smiled at him.
    A feeling of sickness and despair took him. There was no reason after all for him to assume that she had not left a man behind her in Paris, some stupid boy probably of her own class who shared her
gamin
knowledge of the streets round Menilmontant.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘How do I know?’ she said lightly. ‘There aren’t many round here, are there? Roche, the one-armed hero: I don’t much fancy marrying a piece of a man. There’s you, of course …’
    He found his mouth was dry: it was absurd to experience this excitement before asking a tradeswoman’s daughter … but he had missed the opportunity before he could get his tongue to move. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to go to Brinac market for one. I always heard that when you were rich, there were lots of fortune hunters around. I can’t see any about here.’
    He began formally again, ‘Thérèse.’ He paused, ‘Who’s that?’
    ‘Only my mother,’ she said, ‘who else could it be?’
    ‘Thérèse,’ a voice called from the stairs. ‘Thérèse.’
    ‘You’ll have to finish washing-up without me,’ Thérèse said. ‘I know that voice. It’s her praying voice. She won’t sleep now till we’ve done a rosary at least. Goodnight , Monsieur Charlot.’ That was what she always formally called him at the day’s end to heal any wound to