The Only Problem (3 page)

Edward
was astonished that Harvey had sealed the letter since he was to be the bearer.
Bloody indelicate. He wondered why Harvey was trying to diminish him.

‘Harvey,’
he said, ‘are you putting on an act? Are you playing the part of a man who’s a
swine merely because he can afford to be?’

Harvey
took a lot of thought. Then, ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well,
it doesn’t suit you. One meets that sort of character amongst the older
generation of the motion picture and theatre world. I remember hearing a
producer say to a script writer, “It’s the man who writes the cheque who has
the final say in the script. And I’m the man who writes the cheque.” One still
hears that sort of thing. He had yellow eye-balls.’

Harvey
sat with folded arms staring at his loaded work-table.

‘I
suppose you’re playing this part to relieve your feelings?’ Edward said.

‘I
imagine you are relieving yours, Edward.’

‘I
suppose you’re fairly disgusted with things,’ Edward said. ‘With Effie and so
on. I know you left her that day in disgust when she was eating her stolen
chocolate and talking about the sufferings of the hungry. All that. But Effie
has some good points, you know. Some very good points.’

‘If you
want a loan why don’t you ask for it?’ Harvey said, staring at his papers as if
nostalgic for their lonely company.

Anxiety, suffering, were
recorded in his face; that was certain. Edward wasn’t sure that this was not
self-induced. Harvey had once said, ‘There can be only one answer to the
question of why people suffer, irrespective of whether they are innocent or
guilty; to the question of why suffering has no relation to the moral quality
of the individual, of the tribe or of the nation, one way or another. If you
believe that there is a Creator, a God, and that he is good, the only logical
answer to the problem of suffering is that the individual soul has made a pact
with God before he is born, that he will suffer during his lifetime. We are
born forgetful of this pact, of course; but we have made it. Sufferers would,
in this hypothesis, be pre-conscious volunteers. The same might apply to tribes
or nations, especially in the past.’

Edward
had been very impressed by this, by then the latest, idea of Harvey’s. (How
many ideas about
Job
they had formulated in the past!) But he had said
he still couldn’t see the need for suffering.

‘Oh,
development involves suffering,’ Harvey had said.

‘I
wonder if I made that agreement with God before I was born,’ said Edward at
that time, ‘for I’ve suffered.’

‘We
have all suffered,’ said Harvey, ‘but I’m talking about the great multitudes who
are starving to death every year, for instance. The glaze—eyed infants.’

‘Could
your theory be borne out by science?’

‘I
think possibly there might be a genetic interpretation of it. But I’m talking
theologically.’

When,
now, Edward looked at his friend’s face and saw stress on it, rich and
authoritative as Harvey was, swine as he could be, he envied him for the
detachment with which he was able to set himself to working on the problem
through the
Book of Job.
It was possible for a man like Harvey to be
detached and involved at the same time. As an actor, Edward envied him. He also
envied the ease with which he could write to his lawyer about his divorce from
Effie without a thought for the money involved. As for Edward’s loan, Harvey had
already written a cheque without a word, knowing, of course, that Edward would
pay it back in time. And then, although Harvey wasn’t consistently generous,
and had ignored Effie’s letters, Edward remembered how only a few months ago he
had arranged bail through his ever-ready lawyer for Effie and Ruth’s student,
Nathan, when they were arrested during a demonstration, and been had up for
riot and affray. Effie didn’t need the bail money, for her lover came to the
rescue first, but Nathan did. They were both bound over to keep the peace.
Harvey’s money was so casual. Edward envied him that, and felt guilty,
glimpsing again, for that sharp unthinkable instant, the possibility that he
might like to part from Ruth as abruptly and as easily. Edward closed the subject
in his mind quickly, very quickly. It had been established that Ruth and Edward
always thought alike. Edward didn’t want to dwell on that thought, either.

As a theological student
Edward had spent many an hour lying with Harvey Gotham on the grass in the
great green university square if the weather was fine in the early summer,
while the croquet mallets clicked on another part of the green, and the croquet
players’ voices made slight exclamations, and together he and Harvey discussed
the
Book of Job,
which they believed was not only as important, as
amazing, a poem as it was generally considered to be, but also the pivotal book
of the Bible.

Edward
had always maintained that the link — or should he say fetter? — that first
bound him to Harvey was their deep old love of marvellous Job, their studies,
their analyses, their theories. Harvey used to lie on his back on the grass,
one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee, while Edward sat by his side
sunning his face and contemplating the old castle, while he listened with
another part of his mind to Harvey’s talk. ‘It is the only problem. The problem
of suffering is the only problem. It all boils down to that.’

‘Did
you know,’ Edward remembered saying, ‘that when Job was finally restored to
prosperity and family abundance, one of his daughters was called Box of
Eye-Paint? Can we really imagine our tormented hero enjoying his actual reward?’

‘No,’
said Harvey. ‘He continued to suffer.’

‘Not
according to the Bible.’

‘Still,
I’m convinced he suffered on. Perhaps more.’

‘It
seems odd, doesn’t it,’ Edward had said, ‘after he sat on a dung-heap and
suffered from skin-sores and put up with his friends’ gloating, and lost his
family and his cattle, that he should have to go on suffering.’

‘It
became a habit,’ Harvey said, ‘for he not only argued the problem of suffering,
he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable.’

‘But he
wanted to argue with God.’

‘Yes,
but God as a character comes out badly, very badly. Thunder and bluster and I’m
Me, who are you? Putting on an act. Behold now Leviathan. Behold now Behemoth.
Ha, ha among the trumpets. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the
earth? And Job, insincerely and wrongly, says, “I am vile.” And God says, All
right, that being understood, I give you back double your goods, you can have
fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke of oxen,
and a thousand she-asses. And seven sons and three daughters. The third
daughter was Kerenhappuch — that was Eye-Paint.’

Towards evening, on the
day when Edward visited Harvey at his place near St Dié, Harvey went out and
brought in the baby clothes. He didn’t fold them; he just dumped them on a
chair in the little scullery at the back of the kitchen. He seemed to forget
that he was impatient for Edward to leave. He brought out some wine, some
glasses, cheese and bread. In fact, Edward could see that Harvey didn’t want
him to leave, lest he should feel lonely afterwards. Edward had been feeling
rather guilty at interrupting what was probably a fairly contented solitude.
Now, it was not that he regretted imposing his presence, but that by doing so
he must impose the absence to follow. For Harvey more and more seemed to want
him to remain. Edward said something about catching a night ferry. He thought,
Surely Harvey’s involved with the mother of the baby whose clothes he’s just
brought in off the line. They must be the clothes of an infant not more than a
year old. Where are the mother and child?

There
was no sign of any mother or child apart from the clothes Harvey had dumped on
a chair. Edward was envious, too. He was envious of Harvey’s woman and his
child. He wanted, at that moment, to be free like Harvey and to have a girl
somewhere, but not visible, with a baby.

Harvey
said, ‘It’s fairly lonely here.’ By which Edward knew for certain that Harvey
was suddenly very lonely indeed at the thought of his leaving. The mother and
child were probably away for the night.

‘Stay
the night,’ said Harvey. ‘There’s plenty of room.’

Edward
wanted to know where Harvey had been and what he’d been doing since he
disappeared on the
autostrada.
But they did not talk of that. Harvey
told him that Effie was writing a thesis on child labourers in the Western
democracies, basing much of it on Kingsley’s
The Water Babies.
She hadn’t
told Edward this. Harvey seemed pleased that he had a bit more news of her than
Edward had. But then they had a laugh over Effie and her zeal in the
sociological industry.

Harvey
made up a bed for him in a sort of cupboard-room upstairs. It was nearly four
in the morning when he pulled the extra rough covers over a mattress and piled
two cushions for a pillow. From the doorway into Harvey’s bedroom Edward could
see that the bed was narrow, the furniture quite spare in a cheap new way. He
said, ‘Where’s the baby?’

‘What
baby?’ Harvey said.

‘The
baby whose washing was out on the line.’

‘Oh
that,’ said Harvey; ‘that’s only my safeguard. I put baby clothes out on the
line every day and bring them in at night. I change the clothes every other
day, naturally.’

Edward
wondered if Harvey had really gone mad.

‘Well,
I don’t understand,’ Edward said, turning away as if it didn’t matter.

‘You
see,’ said Harvey, ‘the police don’t break in and shoot if there’s likely to be
a baby inside. Otherwise they might just break in and shoot.’

‘Go to
hell,’ Edward said.

‘Well,
if I told you the truth you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Thanks,’
he said.

‘You
wouldn’t believe,’ said Harvey.

‘All
right, I don’t want to know.’

‘When I
settled here I strung up the clothes-line. I have a sure system of keeping away
the well-meaning women who always come round a lone man, wanting to cook and
launder and mend socks and do the shopping; they love a bachelor; even in
cities —no trouble at all getting domestic help for a single man. In my
wanderings since I left Effie I’ve always found that a line of baby clothes,
varying from day to day, keeps these solicitous women away; they imagine
without thinking more of it, that there’s already a woman around.’

But
Edward knew him too well; it was surely one of those demonstrative acts by
which Harvey attempted to communicate with a world whose intelligence he felt
was away behind his own. Harvey was always in a state of exasperation, and, it
was true, always ten thoughts ahead of everybody around him. Always likely to
be outrageous. The baby clothes probably belonged to his girl.

Edward
left three hours later before Harvey was up. He still felt envious of Harvey
for his invisible and probably non-existent girl and her baby.

TWO

Nathan Fox was sitting up
with Ruth when Edward got back to London. It was a Sunday, a Pimlico Sunday
with vacant parking spaces and lights in some of the windows.

Nathan
had graduated in English literature, at the university where Ruth was now
teaching, over a year before. He couldn’t get a job. Ruth looked after him most
of the time. Edward always said he himself would do almost anything for Ruth;
they saw eye to eye. So Nathan was quite welcome. But just that night on his
return from France, very tired, and needing to get to bed for an early rise the
next morning — he was due at the studio at seven —just that night Edward wished
Nathan Fox wasn’t there. Edward was not at all sure how they would manage
without Nathan. Nathan wasn’t ashamed of calling himself an intellectual,
which, for people like themselves, made life so much easier; not that he was,
in fact, an intellectual, really; he was only educated. But they could talk to
Nathan about anything; and at the same time he made himself useful in the
house. Indeed, he was a very fair cook. To a working couple like Ruth and
Edward he was an invaluable friend.

It was
just that night, and on a few previous occasions, Edward wished he wasn’t
there. Edward wanted to talk to Ruth, to get to bed early. Nathan sat there in
his tight jeans and his T-shirt with ‘Poetry Is Emotion Recollected In
Tranquillity’ printed on it. He was a good-looking boy, tall, with an oval
face, very smooth and rather silvery-green in colour — really olive. His
eyebrows were smooth, black and arched, his hair heavy and sleek, quite black.
But he wasn’t vain at all. He got up in the morning, took a shower, shaved and
dressed, all in less than seven minutes. It seemed to Edward that the alarm in
their room had only just gone off when he could smell the coffee brewing in the
kitchen, and hear Nathan already setting the places for breakfast. Ruth, too,
wondered how he managed it. His morning smile was delightful; he had a mouth
like a Michelangelo angel and teeth so good, clear, strong and shapely it
seemed to Edward, secretly, that they were the sexiest thing about him.