Free The Tenth Man by Graham Greene Page A

between him and the world. In any case, as Charlot soon realized, there were too many on the roads to attract attention. All over France men were picking their way home, from prison camps, from hiding places, from foreign parts. If one had possessed a God’s eye view of France, one would have detected a constant movement of tiny grains moving like dust across a floor shaped like a map.
    He felt an enormous sense of relief when he returned to the house: it was really as if he had emerged from a savage and unaccountable country. He came in at the front door and trod the long passage to the kitchen as though he were retreating into the interstices of a cave. Thérèse Mangeot looked up from the pot she was stirring and said, ‘It’s odd the way you always come in at the front. Why don’t you use the back door like we do? It saves a lot of cleaning.’
    ‘I’m sorry, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s because I came that way first.’
    She didn’t treat him like a servant: it was as if in her eyes he was just another gypsy camping there until the police turned them out. Only the old woman sometimes fell into an odd apoplectic rage at nothing at all and swore that when her son returned, they would live properly, like the rich people they were, with servants who were really servants, and not tramps taken off the road … On these occasions Thérèse Mangeot would turn away as if she didn’t hear, but afterwards she would fling some rough inapposite remark to Charlot—the kind of remark you only make to an equal, giving him as it were the freedom of the street.
    He said, ‘There wasn’t much to be got in the market. It seemed absurd to be buying so many vegetables with this big garden here. Next year you won’t have to …’ He counted out the money. He said, ‘I got some horse-meat. There wasn’t even a rabbit there. I think the change is right. You’d better check it.’
    ‘I’ll trust you,’ she said.
    ‘Your mother won’t. Here’s my account.’ He held out to her the list of things he had bought and watched her over her shoulder as she checked. ‘Jean-Louis Charlot …’ She stopped reading. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, and suddenly looking over her shoulder he realized what he had done—he had as near as made no difference signed his name as he had signed it on the deed of gift.
    ‘What’s strange?’ he asked.
    ‘I could almost swear,’ she said, ‘that I knew your writing , that I’d seen it somewhere …’
    ‘I suppose you’ve seen it on a letter I’ve written.’
    ‘You haven’t written any letters.’
    ‘No. That’s true.’ His lips were dry. He said, ‘Where do you think you’ve seen it …?’ and waited an age for her answer.
    She stared at it and stared at it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s like those times when you think you’ve been in a place before. I don’t suppose it means a thing.’

10
    NEARLY EVERY DAY someone came to the door to beg or to ask for work. The vagrants flowed aimlessly west and south, towards the sun and the sea, as if they believed that on the warm wet margin of France anyone could live. The girl gave them money rather than food (it was less scarce), and they drifted on down the weedy path to the river. There was no stability anywhere, least of all in the big house. And yet the Mangeots had a great sense of property. In Paris Madame Mangeot had owned a small general shop—or rather she had owned the goods in the general shop. Year after year, since her husband had died, she had traded carefully—never giving credit and never accepting credit, and never making more than a bare livelihood. Her husband had had ambitions for his children: he had sent his daughter to a secretarial school to learn typewriting and his son to a technical college, but Janvier had run away, and Thérèse had been withdrawn soon after he died. It was all nonsense, that, in Madame Mangeot’s eyes, and the sole result of the few months’ training was a