The Tenth Man by Graham Greene Page A

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.
    He thought, Where do we go from here? And his lawyer’s mind began to unpick the threads of the case, and to feel some encouragement. In all his legal experience there had never been a case which didn’t contain an element of hope. After all, he argued, only Janvier is responsible for Janvier’s death: no guilt attaches to me whatever I may feel—one mustn’t go by feelings or many an innocent man would be guillotined. There was no reason in law, he told himself, why he should not love her: no reason except her hate why she should not love him. If he could substitute love for hate, he told himself with exquisite casuistry, he would be doing her a service which would compensate for anything. In her naïve belief, after all, he would be giving her back the possibility of salvation. He picked up a pebble and aimed it at a distant cabbage: it swerved unerringly to its mark, and he gave a little satisfied sigh. Already the charge against himself had been reduced to a civil case in which he could argue the terms of compensation. He wondered why last night he had despaired—this was no occasion for despair, he told himself, but for hope. He had something to live for, but somewhere at the back of his mind the shadow remained, like a piece of evidence he had deliberately not confided to the court.
    With their coffee and bread, which they took early because of the market at Brinac, Madame Mangeot was more difficult than usual: she had now accepted his presence in the house, but she had begun to treat him as she imagined a great lady would treat a servant and she resented his presence at their meals. She had got it firmly into her head that he had been a manservant to Michel, and that one day her son would return and be ashamed of her for failing to adapt herself to riches. Charlot didn’t care: he and Thérèse Mangeot shared a secret: when he caught her eyes he believed that they were recalling to each other a secret intimacy.
    But when they were alone he only said, ‘Can I find you