The Tenth Man by Graham Greene Page B

anything at the market? For yourself, I mean?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing I want. Anyway, what would there be at Brinac?’
    ‘Why don’t you come yourself?’ he said. ‘The walk would do you good … a bit of air? You never get out.’
    ‘Somebody might come when I was away.’
    ‘Tell your mother not to open the door. Nobody’s going to break in.’
    ‘He might come.’
    ‘Listen,’ Charlot earnestly implored her, ‘you’re driving yourself crazy. You’re imagining things. Why, in heaven’s name, should he come
here
to be tormented by the sight of everything he’s signed away? You’re making yourself ill with a dream.’
    Reluctantly she lifted up one corner of her fear like a child exposing the broken crinkled edge of a transfer. ‘They don’t like me in the village,’ she said. ‘They like him.’
    ‘We aren’t going to the village.’
    She took him by surprise at the suddenness and completeness of her capitulation. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘all right. Have it your own way. I’ll come.’
    An autumn mist moved slowly upwards from the river: the slats of the bridge were damp beneath their feet, and brown leaves lay in drifts across the road. Shapes faded out a hundred yards ahead. For all the two of them knew they were one part of a long scattered procession on the way to Brinac market, but they were as alone on this strip of road between the two mists as in a room. For a long while they didn’t speak: only their feet moving in and out of step indulged in a kind of broken colloquy. His feet moved steadily towards their end like a lawyer’s argument: hers were uneven like a succession of interjections. It occurred to him how closely life was imitating the kind of future he had once the right to expect, and yet how distantly. If he had married and brought his wife to St Jean, they too might in just this way have been walking silently together in to the market on a fine autumn day. The road rose a few feet and carried them momentarily out of the mist: a long grey field stretched on either side of them, flints gleaming like particles of ice, and a bird rose and flapped away: then again they moved downhill between their damp insubstantial walls, and his footsteps continued the steady unanswerable argument.
    ‘Tired?’ he asked.
    ‘No.’
    ‘It’s still strange for me to be walking on and on in a straight line, instead of up and down.’
    She made no reply and her silence pleased him: nothing was more intimate than silence, and he had the feeling that if they remained quiet long enough everything would be settled between them.
    They didn’t speak again until they were nearly in Brinac. ‘Let’s rest a little,’ he said ‘before we go in.’ Leaning against a gate they took the weight off their legs and heard the clip clop of a cart coming down the road from the direction of St Jean.
    It was Roche. He checked his pony and the cart drew slowly up beside them.
    ‘Want a lift?’ he asked. He had developed a habit of keeping himself in profile, so as to hide his right side and it gave him an air of arrogance, a ‘take it or leave it’ manner. Thérèse Mangeot shook her head.
    ‘You’re Mademoiselle Mangeot, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘You don’t need to walk into Brinac.’
    ‘I wanted to walk.’
    ‘Who’s this?’ Roche said. ‘Your man-of-all-work? We’ve heard about him in St Jean.’
    ‘He’s a friend of mine.’
    ‘You Parisians ought to be careful,’ Roche said. ‘You don’t know the country. There are a lot of beggars about now who are better left begging.’
    ‘How you gossip in the country,’ Thérèse Mangeot said sullenly.
    ‘And you,’ Roche addressed Charlot, ‘you are very quiet? Haven’t you anything to say for yourself? Are you a Parisian too?’
    ‘One would think,’ Thérèse Mangeot said, ‘that you were a policeman.’
    ‘I’m of the Resistance,’ Roche replied. ‘It’s my business to keep an eye on things.’
    ‘The war’s over