“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. Therese 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,” Therese 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,” Therese 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 for us, isn’t it? You haven’t any more to do.”
“Don’t you believe it. It’s just beginning down here. You’d better show me your papers,” he said to Charlot.
“And if I don’t?”
“Some of us will call on you at the house.”
“Show them to him,” Therese Mangeot said.
Roche had to drop the reins to take them and the pony, released, moved a little way down the road. Suddenly he looked odd and powerless like a boy who has been left in charge of a horse he can’t control. “Here,” he said, “take them back,” and snatched the reins.
“I’ll hold the pony for you if you like,” Charlot offered with studied insulting kindness.
“You’d better get proper papers. These aren’t legal.” He turned his face to Therese Mangeot. “You want to be careful. There are a lot of queer fish about these days, hiding, most of them. I’ve seen this fellow somewhere before, I’ll swear to that.”
“He markets every week. You’ve probably seen him there.”
“I don’t know.”
Therese Mangeot said, “You don’t want to raise trouble. The man’s all right. I know he’s been in a German prison. He knew Michel.”
“Then he knew Chavel too?”
“Yes.”
Roche peered at him again. “It’s odd,” he said. “That’s why I thought I knew him. He’s a bit like Chavel himself. It’s the voice: the face of course is quite different.”
Charlot said slowly, wondering which syllable betrayed him: “You wouldn’t think my voice was like his if you could hear him now. He’s like an old man. He took prison hard.”
“He would. He’d lived soft.”
“I suppose you were his friend,” Therese Mangeot said. “They all are in St. Jean.”
“You suppose wrong. You couldn’t know him well and be his friend. Even when he was a boy he was a mean little squirt. No courage. Afraid of the girls,” He laughed. “He used to confide in me. He thought I was his friend until I had this accident. He couldn’t stand me after that because I’d grown as wise as he thought he was. If you are in bed for months you grow wise or die. But the things he used to tell me. I can remember some of them now. There was a girl at Brinac mill he was sweet on…”
It was extraordinary what things one could forget. Was that the face, he wondered, that he had drawn so inexpertly on the wallpaper? He could remember nothing, and yet once-“Oh, she was everything to him,” Roche said, “but he never dared speak to her. He was fourteen or fifteen then. A coward if ever there was one.”
“Why do they like him there in the village?”
“0h, they don’t like him,” Roche said. “It’s just they didn’t believe your story. They couldn’t believe anyone would die for money like your brother did. They thought the Germans must be mixed up in it somehow.” His dark fanatic eyes brooded on her. “I believe it all right. It was you he was thinking about.”
“I wish you’d convince them.”
“Have they troubled you?” Roche asked.
“I don’t suppose it’s a case of what you call trouble. I tried to be friendly, but I didn’t like being shouted at. They were afraid to do it themselves, but they taught their children…”
“People are suspicious around here.”
“Just because one comes from Paris one isn’t a… collaborator.”
“You ought to have come to me,” Roche said.
She turned to Charlot and said, “We didn’t know the great man existed, did we?”
Roche laid his whip to the pony’s flank and the cart moved away: as it receded the looped arm came into view-the sleeve sewn up above the elbow, the stump like a bludgeon of wood.
Charlot rebuked her gently: “Now you’ve made another enemy.”
“He’s not so bad,” she said, looking after the cart for so long a time that Charlot felt the first septic prick of jealousy.
“You’d better be careful of him.”
“You say that just as if you knew him. You don’t know him, do you? He seemed to think he’d seen you…”
He interrupted her: “I know his type, that’s all.”
12
THAT NIGHT, AFTER THEY HAD RETURNED FROM BRINAC, Therese Mangeot behaved in an unaccustomed way-she insisted that they should eat in future in the dining room instead of in the kitchen where previously they had taken all their meals, hurriedly as if they were prepared at any moment for the real owner of the house to appear and claim his rights again. What made the change Charlot had no means of knowing, but his thoughts connected the change with the meeting on the Brinac road. Perhaps the farmer’s attack on Chavel had given her confidence, the idea that one man at any rate in St. Jean was prepared to play her friend against him.
Charlot said, “It’ll need sweeping out,” and took a broom. He was making for the stairs when the girl stopped him.
She said, “We’ve never used the room before.”
“No?”
“I’ve kept it locked. It’s the kind of room he’d have swaggered in. It’s smart. Can’t you imagine him drinking his wine and ringing for his servants?”
“You sound like a romantic novel,” he said and moved to the foot of the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“To give the room the once-over of course.”
“But how do you know where it is?” It was like putting his foot on a step that didn’t exist: he felt his heart lurching with the shock; for days he had been so careful, pretending ignorance of every detail, the position of every room or cupboard.
“What am I thinking of?” he said. “Of course. I was listening to you.”
But she wasn’t satisfied. She watched him closely. She said, “I sometimes think you know this house far better than I do.”
“I’ve been in this sort of house before. They follow a pattern.”
“Do you know what I’ve been thinking? That perhaps Chavel used to boast about his house in prison, draw pictures of it even, until you got to know…”
“He talked a lot,” he said.
She opened the door of the dining room and they went in together. The room was shuttered and in darkness, but he knew where to turn on the light. He was cautious now and shuffled a long time before he found the switch. It was the biggest room in the house with a long table under a dust sheet standing like a catafalque in the center, and portraits of dead Chavel’s hanging a little askew. The Chavel’s had been lawyers since the seventeenth century with the exception of a few younger sons in the church; a bishop with a long twisted nose hung between the windows, and the long nose followed them round from wall to wall, portrait to portrait.