Free The Tenth Man by Graham Greene Page B

second-hand typewriter in the back of the shop on which she typed letters—very badly—to wholesalers. There was no future for the store, but Madame Mangeot didn’t worry about that. When you reach a certain age you don’t care about the future: it is success enough to be alive: every morning you wake with triumph. And there was always Michel. Madame Mangeot believed implicitly in Michel. Who knows what fairy stories of her infancy gathered about the enigmatic absent figure? He was the prince searching the world with a glass slipper; he was the cowherd who won the King’s daughter; he was an old woman’s youngest son who killed the giant. She was never allowed to know that he was after all just dead. Charlot learned this story slowly, from half-sentences, outbreaks of temper on the part of Madame Mangeot, even from the dreams the two women recounted at breakfast. It wasn’t quite the truth, of course—nothing is ever that, and Madame Mangeot’s neighbours in Menilmontant would never have recognized this coloured version of her commonplace story. Now suddenly she had come into a fortune. It was the complete justification of Madame Mangeot’s daydreams, but the stories of her childhood had also warned her that there was such a thing as fairy gold. Without knowing why, she never felt sure of anything in this house; even of the kitchen table or the chair she sat in, as she had felt sure of everything in Menilmontant, where she knew exactly what had been paid for and what hadn’t: here nothing, as far as she knew, had been paid for: she wasn’t to realize that the payment had been made elsewhere.
    Charlot slept at the top of the house in what had once been the best servant’s bedroom—a little room under a sloping roof with an iron bedstead and a flimsy bamboo chest of drawers, the flimsiest thing in the house where every piece of furniture was heavy and dark and built to last generations. This was the only part of the house he hadn’t known: as a child he was forbidden the top floor for some obscure maternal reason that seemed vaguely to be based on morality and hygiene. Up there, where the carpet stopped, beyond the region of bathroom and lavatory, the physical facts of life seemed to lurk with a peculiar menace. Once and once only had he penetrated into the forbidden territory: on tiptoe, under the light weight of six years, he had approached the bedroom he now slept in and peeked round the door. The old servant, whom his parents had inherited and whom they called with rather terrified respect Madame Warnier, was doing her hair—or rather she was taking off her hair: great strands of pale brown hair like dry seaweed were unpicked and laid on the dressing table. All over the region lay a sour miasma. For more than a year after Charlot believed that all long hair was like that—detachable.
    One night he couldn’t sleep: he followed that clandestine track of his childhood the opposite way in search of water. The servants’ stairs creaked under his tread, but unlike his footsteps on the way to Brinac they meant nothing: they were new hieroglyphs nobody had learned to read. On the floor below was his own old room: nobody slept in it now, perhaps because it bore too clearly the marks of his occupancy. He went in. It was exactly as he had left it four years before. He pulled open a drawer and there was a ring of stiff collars turning a little yellow like papyrus with disuse. A photograph of his mother stood in a silver frame on his wardrobe. She wore a high whalebone collar and stared out with an expression of complete calm on a scene that never changed: death and torture and loss had no effect on the small patch of wall that met her gaze—the old wallpaper with sprigs of flowers that
her
mother-in-law had ordered. Above one sprig was a small pencilled face: at fourteen it had meant someone and something he had forgotten: some vague romantic passion of adolescence, perhaps a love and a pain he had believed would