Read The Only Problem Online

Authors: Muriel Spark

The Only Problem (2 page)

BOOK: The Only Problem
7.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Ruth
thought, and Edward agreed with her, that a lot must have led up to that final
parting of Harvey from Effie.

Edward
deeply envied Harvey, he didn’t know exactly what for. Or rather, perhaps he
had better not probe deeply enough into the possibility that if Ruth wasn’t
Ruth, and if they weren’t always so much in agreement, he would have liked to
walk off, just like that. When Harvey talked of his marriage it was always as
if he were thinking of something else, and he never talked about it unless
someone else did first. And then, it was as if the other person had mentioned
something quite irrelevant to his life, provoking from him a puzzled look, then
a frown, an effort of concentration, it seemed, then an impatient dismissal of
the apparently alien subject. It seemed, it seemed, Edward thought; because one
can only judge by appearances. How could Edward know Harvey wasn’t putting on
an act, as he so often implied that Edward did? To some extent we all put on
acts.

 

 

Harvey began to be more
sociable, for he had somehow dismissed the subject of Effie. He must have known
Edward would bring up Effie later, that in fact all he had come for was to talk
about her. Well, perhaps not all. Edward was an old friend. Harvey poured him a
drink, and, for the moment Edward gave up trying to get on to the subject of
Effie.

‘Tell
me,’ said Harvey, ‘about the new film. What’s it called? What sort of part are
you playing?’

‘It’s
called
The Love-Hate Relationship.
That’s only provisional as a title. I
don’t think it’ll sell as a film on that title. But it’s based on a novel
called
The Love-Hate Relationship.
And that’s what the film is about.
There’s a married couple and another man, a brother, in the middle. I’m playing
the other man, the brother.’ (Was Harvey listening? He was looking round into
the other room.)

‘If
there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a love-hate relationship,’ Harvey said,
turning back to Edward at last. ‘The element of love in such a relation simply
isn’t worthy of the name. It boils down to. hatred pure and simple in the end.
Love comprises among other things a desire for the well-being and spiritual
freedom of the one who is loved. There’s an objective quality about love.
Love-hate is obsessive, it is possessive. It can be evil in effect.’

‘Oh
well,’ Edward said, ‘love-hate is a frequent human problem. It’s a very
important problem, you can’t deny it.’

‘It’s
part of the greater problem,’ said Harvey after a while. Edward knew what
Harvey was coming round to and was pleased, now that he was sitting here with
his drink and his old friend. It was the problem of suffering as it is dealt
with in the biblical
Book of Job.
It was for this, in the first place,
that Harvey had come to study here in the French countryside away from the
environment of his family business and his friends.

Harvey
was a rich man; he was in his mid-thirties. He had started writing a monograph
about the
Book of Job
and the problem it deals with. For he could not face
that a benevolent Creator, one whose charming and delicious light descended and
spread over the world, and being powerful everywhere, could condone the
unspeakable sufferings of the world; that God did permit all suffering and was
therefore by logic of his omnipotence, the actual author of it, he was at a
loss how to square with the existence of God, given the premise that God is
good.

‘It is
the only problem,’ Harvey had always said. Now, Harvey believed in God, and
this was what tormented him. ‘It’s the only problem, in fact, worth discussing.’

 

 

It was just under a year
after Harvey had disappeared that Effie traced him to St Dié. She hadn’t been
to see him herself, but she had written several times through his lawyer asking
him what was the matter. She described to him the process by which she had
tracked him down; when she read Edward the letter before she posted it he felt
she could have left that part out, for she had traced him quite simply, but by
trickery, of which Harvey would not see the charm; furthermore, her revelation
of the trick compromised an innocent, if foolish, person, and this fact would
not be lost on Harvey. His moral sense was always intensified where Effie was
concerned.

‘Don’t
tell him, Effie,’ Edward said, ‘how you got his address. He’ll think you
unprincipled.’

‘He
thinks that already,’ she said.

‘Well,
this might be the finishing touch. There’s no need to tell.’

‘I don’t
want him back.’

‘You
only want his money,’ Edward said.

‘Oh,
God, Edward, if you only knew what he was like to live with.’

Edward
could guess. But he said, ‘What people are like to live with … It isn’t a
good test to generalise on.’

‘He’s
rich,’ said Effie. ‘He’s spoilt.’ Effie had a lover, Ernie Howe, an electronics
expert. Effie was very good-looking and it was hardly to be expected that she
would resist, year after year, the opportunities for love affairs that came her
way all the time; she was really beautiful. Ernie Howe was a nice-looking man,
too, but he lacked the sort of money Harvey had and Effie was used to. Ernie
had his job, and quite a good one; Edward supposed that Effie, who herself had
a job with an advertising firm, might have been content with the simpler life
with him, if she was in love with Ernie. It was only that now she was expecting
a baby she felt she might persuade Harvey to divorce her with a large
settlement. Edward didn’t see why this should not be.

Harvey
had never replied to any of Effie’s letters. She continued to write, care of
his lawyer. She told him of her love-affair and mentioned a divorce.

Finally
she managed to find his actual whereabouts in St Dié, in a quite unpremeditated
way. She had in fact visited the lawyer to try to persuade him to reveal the
address. He answered that he could only forward a letter. Effie went home and
wrote a letter, calling with it at the lawyer’s office the next day to save the
extra time it would have taken in the post. She gave it to the receptionist and
asked that it be forwarded. There were two or three letters on the girl’s desk,
in a neat pile, already stamped. Acting on a brainwave Effie said, casually, ‘If
you like, as I’m passing the post box, I’ll pop them all in.’

‘Oh,
thanks,’ said the foolish girl, ‘I have to go beyond the bus stop to post
letters.’ So she hastily filled in Harvey’s address and handed the letters to
Effie with a smile. And although Edward said to Effie, ‘You shouldn’t tell
Harvey how you got his address. It’ll put him right off. Counter-productive.
And rather unfair on the poor girl at the lawyer’s office,’ she went ahead and
wrote to Harvey direct, telling him of her little trick. ‘He’ll realise all the
more how urgent it is,’ she said.

But
still Harvey didn’t reply.

That
was how Edward came to be on this errand to Harvey on her behalf. Incidentally,
Edward also hoped for a loan. He was short of money till he got paid under his
contract with the film people.

 

 

Edward used to confide in
Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together. Harvey had never,
to Edward’s knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of
revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward
at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable,
especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would
rather have forgotten. Harvey seemed especially to choose the negative remarks
he made all those years ago, ten, twelve, years ago, such as when he had said
something unfavourable about Ruth, something that sounded witty, perhaps, at
the time, but which he probably didn’t mean. Scarcely ever did Harvey remind
him of the praise he devoted in sincere abundance to others, Ruth included. So
many sweet things seemed to have spilled out of his ears as soon as they
entered them; so many of the sour and the sharp, the unripe and frivolously
carping observations he made, Harvey had saved up in his memory-bank at
compound interest; it seemed to Edward that he capitalised on these past
confidences at a time when they were likely to have the most deflating effect
on him; he called this a breach of confidence in a very special sense. Harvey
would deny this, of course; he would claim that he had a clear memory, that his
reminders were salutary, that Edward was inclined to fool himself, and that the
uncomfortable truths of the past were always happier in their outcome than
convenient illusions.

And
undoubtedly Harvey was often right. That he had a cold side was no doubt a
personal matter. In Edward’s view it wasn’t incompatible with Harvey’s
extremely good mind and his occasional flashes of generosity. And indeed his
moral judgment. Perhaps a bit too much moral judgment.

Edward
always spoke a lot about himself and Harvey as they were in their young days,
even to people who didn’t know them. But few people listen carefully to the reminiscences
of someone who has achieved nothing much in life; the end-product of a personal
record has somehow to justify the telling. What did come across to Edward’s
friends was that he had Harvey more or less on his mind. Edward wished
something to happen in his own life to make him forget Harvey, get his
influence out of his system. Only some big change in my life could do that,
Edward thought. Divorce from Ruth, which was unthinkable (then how did I come
to think it?). Or great success as an actor; something I haven’t got.

 

 

Eventually Edward said, as
he sat in Harvey’s cottage in France, ‘I’ve come about Effie, mainly. Ruth’s
anxious about her, very anxious. I’ve come here for Ruth’s sake.’

‘I
recall,’ Harvey said, ‘how you told me once, when you first married Ruth, “Ruth
is a curate’s wife and always will be.”‘

Edward
was disconcerted. ‘Oh, I was only putting on an act. You know how it was in
those days.’

In
those days Edward had been a curate, doing so well with church theatricals that
he was in demand from other parishes up and down the country. It wasn’t so very
long before he realised he was an actor, not a curate, not a vicar in bud. Only
his sermons interested him and that was because he had his own little stage up
there in the pulpit, and an audience. The congregation loved his voice and his
delivery. When he resigned, what they said mostly in their letters was ‘You
were always so genuine in your sermons,’ and ‘One knew you felt every word.’
Well, in fact Edward was and did. But in fact he was more involved in the
delivery of his sermons than in the substance. He said good-bye to the
fund-raising performances of
The Admirable Crichton
and
The Silver
Box,
not to mention
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
on the one chilly
midsummer night when he was a curate.

He had
played parts in repertory theatre, then that principal part (in
The Curate’s
Egg)
on the West End, and was well launched in his film career, spasmodic
and limited though it was, by the time he sat talking to Harvey on Effie’s
behalf, largely for Ruth’s sake. To himself, Edward now described his acting
career as ‘limited’ in the sense that too often he had been cast as a
clergyman, an unfrocked priest or a welfare worker. But, at present, in the
film provisionally entitled
The Love-Hate Relationship,
he had been cast
in a different role, to his great pleasure; he was playing a sardonic scholar,
a philosopher. Thinking himself into the part had made him feel extraordinarily
equal to his discussion with Harvey; and he returned, with the confidence of
the part, to the subject of Effie.

‘She
wants a divorce,’ he said, and waited the inevitable few seconds for Harvey’s
reply.

‘Nothing
to stop her.’

‘She
wants to get married, she’s expecting a baby by Ernie Howe. And you know very
well she’s written to you about it.’

‘What
she wrote to me about was money. She wants money to get married with. I’m a
busy man with things to do. Money; not enough money, but a lot. That’s what
Effie boils down to.’

‘Oh,
not entirely. I should have thought you wanted her to be happy. After all, you
left her. You left Effie abruptly.’

Harvey
waited a while. Time was not of an essence, here. ‘Well, she soon found
consolation. But she can get a divorce quite easily. Ernie Howe has a job.’

Edward
said, ‘I don’t know if you realise how hateful you can be, Harvey. If it wasn’t
for your money you wouldn’t speak like that.’ For it struck him that, since
Harvey had recently come into a vast share of a Canadian uncle’s fortune, he
ought not to carry on as if he were the moderately well-off Harvey of old. This
treatment of Effie was brutal.

‘I don’t
know what you mean,’ said Harvey, in his time. ‘I really don’t care what you
mean, what you say. I’ll give you a letter to Stewart Cowper, my lawyer in
London, with suitable instructions.’ Harvey got up and reached on a bookshelf
for a block of writing paper and one envelope. He said, ‘I’ll write it now.
Then you can go away.

He
wrote without much reflection, almost as if he had come to an earlier decision
about the paying off of Effie, and by how much, and had just been waiting for
the moment Edward arrived to make a settlement. He addressed the envelope, put
in the folded letter, then sealed it down. He handed it to Edward. ‘You can
take it straight to him yourself. Quicker than posting it.’

BOOK: The Only Problem
7.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Pro Puppet by James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune
Serpent's Storm by Benson, Amber
Create Your Own Religion by Daniele Bolelli
Mask of the Verdoy by Lecomber, Phil
Winter of Discontent by Jeanne M. Dams
The Manga Girl by Lorenzo Marks
Demon Lord III - Grey God by T C Southwell
The Great Tree of Avalon by T. A. Barron