Free The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

of grace with the sacrament in his mouth, forgiving all his enemies. He won’t die before he can cheat the Devil.’
    ‘How you hate him.’
    ‘I’ll be the one who’s damned. Because I shan’t forgive. I shan’t die in a state of grace.’ She said, ‘I thought you were hungry. You don’t eat much of that cheese. It’s good cheese.’
    ‘It’s time I got along,’ he said.
    ‘You don’t have to hurry. Did they let him have a priest?’
    ‘Oh, yes, I think so. They had a priest in one of the other cells who used to do that sort of job.’
    ‘Where are you going from here?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Looking for a job?’
    ‘I’ve given up looking.’
    She said, ‘We could do with a man here. A couple of women can’t keep a place like this clean. And there’s the garden.’
    ‘It wouldn’t do.’
    ‘It’s as you like. Wages wouldn’t be a difficulty,’ she said bitterly. ‘We’re rich.’
    He thought, If only for a week … to be quiet … at home.
    She said, ‘But your chief job, what I’d be paying you for, is just to keep on looking out—for him.’

9
    FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS it was strange and bitter to be living in his own house as an odd-job man, but after another twenty-four it was familiar and peaceful. If a man loves a place enough he doesn’t need to possess it: it’s enough for him to know that it is safe and unaltered—or only altered in the natural way by time and circumstance. Madame Mangeot and her daughter were like temporary lodgers: if they took a picture down it was only for some practical purpose—to save dusting, not because they wished to put another in its place: they would never have cut down a tree for the sake of a new view, or refurbished a room according to some craze of the moment. It was exaggeration even to regard them as legal lodgers: they were more like gypsies who had found the house empty and now lived in a few rooms, cultivated a corner of the garden well away from the road, and were careful to make no smoke by which they could be detected.
    This was not entirely fanciful: he found they were in fact afraid of the village. Once a week the girl went into Brinac to the market, walking both ways though Charlot knew there was a cart they could have hired in St Jean, and once a week the old woman went to Mass, her daughter taking her to the door of the church and meeting her there afterwards. The old woman never entered until a few moments before the Gospel was read, and at the very first moment, when the priest had pronounced the
Ita Missa
, she was on her feet. Thus she avoided all contact outside the church with the congregation. This suited Charlot well. It never occurred to either of them as strange that he too should avoid the village.
    It was he who now went into Brinac on market day. The first time that he went he felt betrayed at every step by familiar things: it was as though even if no human spoke his name the signpost at the crossroads would betray him: the soles of his shoes signed his name along the margin of the road, and the slats of the bridge across the river sounded a personal note under his tread which seemed to him as unmistakable as an accent. Once on the road a cart passed him from St Jean and he recognized the driver—a local farmer who had been crippled as a boy, losing his right arm in an accident with a tractor. As children they had played together in the fields round St Jean, but after the boy’s accident and the long weeks in hospital obscure emotions of jealousy and pride kept them apart, and when they met at last it was as enemies. They couldn’t like duellists use the same weapons: his own strength was matched against the crippled boy’s wounding tongue which bore the bedsores of a long sickness.
    Charlot stepped back into the ditch as the cart went by and put up his hand to shield his face, but Roche paid him no attention; the dark fanatical eyes watched the road in front, the great lopped torso stood like a ruined buttress