The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

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