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 defense.”
“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 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 Mangeot’s,” 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 feeling 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 naive 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 it was market day at Brinac, Madame Mangeot was more difficult than usuaclass="underline" 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 Therese Mangeot shared a secret. When he caught her eye he believed that they were recalling to each other a secret intimacy.
But when they were alone he only said, “Can I find you 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 upward 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 toward 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 into the market on a fine autumn day. The road rose a few feet and carried them momentarily out of the mist. A long gray 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.”