The Only Problem (4 page)

The
only problem with Nathan was how to explain what he saw in them. They paid him
and fed him as well as they could, but it was supposed to be only a fill-in-job.
They were together as on a North Sea oil platform. It wasn’t that Nathan wouldn’t
leave them, it now seemed he couldn’t. Edward thought, He is hankering after
Effie, and we are the nearest he can get to her. Edward often wondered whether
Effie would really marry Ernie Howe when she got her divorce from Harvey.

When
Edward got back from France they had supper; he told Nathan and Ruth what had
happened at Harvey’s cottage, almost from start to finish. Ruth wanted actually
to see with her eyes the sealed letter to the lawyer; so that Edward got up
from the table and fished it out of his duffel bag.

She
turned it over and over in her hand; she examined it closely; she almost smelt
it. She said, ‘How rude to seal down a letter you were to carry by hand.’

‘Why?’
said Nathan.

‘Because
one doesn’t,’ Ruth piped primly, ‘seal letters that other people are to carry.

‘What
about the postman?’

‘Oh, I
mean one’s friends.’

‘Well,
open it,’ said Nathan.

Edward
had been rather hoping he would suggest this, and he knew Ruth had the same
idea in mind. If they’d been alone, neither of them would have suggested it out
loud, although it would certainly have occurred to them, so eager were they to
know what Harvey had settled on Effie in this letter to his solicitors. They
would have left the letter and their secret desires unopened. They were still
somewhat of the curate and his wife, Ruth and himself.

But
Nathan seemed to serve them like a gentleman who takes a high hand in matters
of form, or an unselfconscious angel. In a way, that is what he was there for,
if he had to be there. He often said things out of his inexperience and
cheerful ignorance that they themselves wanted to say but did not dare.

‘Open
it?’ said Ruth.

‘Oh, we
can’t do that,’ said Edward.

‘You
can steam it open,’ suggested Nathan, as if they didn’t know. ‘You only need a
kettle.’

‘Really?’
said Ruth.

Nathan proceeded,
very know-all: ‘It won’t be noticed. You can seal it up again. My mother
steamed open my aunt’s letters. Only wanted to know what was in them, that’s
all. Then later my aunt would tell a lot of lies about what was in the letters,
but my mother knew the truth, of course. That was after my father died, and my
mother and my auntie were living together.’

‘I don’t
know that we have the right,’ said Ruth.

‘It’s
your duty,’ Nathan pronounced. He turned to Edward, appealing: ‘In my mother’s
case it wasn’t a duty, although she said it was. But in your case it’s
definitely a duty to steam open that letter. It might be dynamite you’ve been
carrying.’

Edward
said, ‘He should have left it open. It might be really offensive or something.
It was ill-mannered of Harvey. I noticed it at the time, in fact.’

‘You
should have objected,’ Nathan said. Edward was now delighted that Nathan was
there with them that evening.

‘It’s
difficult to object,’ Ruth said. ‘But I think we have a right to know what’s in
it. At least you do, Edward, since you’re the bearer.’

They
steamed open the letter in the kitchen and stood reading it together.

Dear Stewart,

This letter is being brought to you by Edward Jansen, an old friend
of mine from university days. I don’t know if you’ve met him. He’s a sort of
actor but that is by the way. My wife Effie is his sister-in-law. He came to
see me about Effie’s divorce. As you know I’m not contesting it. She wants a settlement.
Let her go on wanting, let her sue.

The object of this letter is to tell you that I agree the date of
Job
is post-exile, that is, about 500 BC, but it could be the middle of the 5th
century. It could easily be contemporaneous with the
Prometheus Bound
of
Aeschylus. (The
Philoctetes
of Sophocles, another Job-style work, is
dated I think about 409.)

Yours,

Harvey

‘I won’t
deliver it,’ Edward said.

‘Oh,
you must,’ said Nathan. ‘You mustn’t let him think you’ve opened it.’

‘There’s
something fishy about it,’ Edward said. He was greatly annoyed.

‘Calling
you a sort of actor,’ Ruth said, in a soothing voice that made him nearly
choleric.

‘It’s
Effie’s fault,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s brought out this quality in Harvey.’

‘Well,
I’m too busy tomorrow to go in person to Gray’s Inn,’ Edward said.

‘I’ll
deliver it,’ said Nathan.

THREE

It was October. Harvey sat
at his writing-table, set against the wall of the main room in his little
house.

‘Job
37, 5,’ he wrote, ‘God thundereth marvellously with
his voice.’

‘I
think we’ll have to send to England for some more cretonne fabric,’ said Ruth,
looking over his shoulder.

It was
at the end of August that Ruth had moved in, bringing with her Effie’s baby, a
girl. The baby was now asleep for a merciful moment, upstairs.

Harvey
looked up from his work. ‘I try to exude goodwill,’ he said. ‘You positively
try to sweat it,’ Ruth said, kindly. And she wondered how it was that she had
disliked and resented Harvey for so many years. It still amazed her to find
herself here with him. That he was perfectly complacent about the arrangement,
even cheerful and happy, did not surprise her so much; everything around him,
she knew — all the comings and goings — were really peripheral to his
preoccupation with the
Book of Job.
But her being there, with Effie’s
baby, astonished her sometimes to the point of vertigo. This was not at all
what she had planned when she decided to turn up at the cottage with Effie’s
baby daughter.

Once,
after she had settled in, she said to Harvey, ‘I didn’t plan this.’

‘It
wasn’t a plan,’ said Harvey, ‘it was a plot.’

‘I
suppose it looks like that from the outside,’ Ruth said. To her, what she had
wanted was justice. Given Effie’s character, it was not to be expected that she
would continue to live with Ernie Howe on his pay in a small house. Ruth had
offered to take the baby when Effie decided she wasn’t in love with Ernie any
more. Harvey’s money would perhaps not have made much difference to Effie’s
decision. At any rate, Ruth had known that, somehow, in the end, she would have
to take on Effie’s baby. It rather pleased her.

Effie
was trying to sue Harvey for alimony, so far without success.

‘The
lawyers are always on the side of the money,’ she said. Harvey continued to
ignore her letters.

The baby, named Clara, had
been born toward the end of June. Effie went back to her job in advertising for
a short while after she had left Ernie Howe. Then she took a job with an
international welfare organisation in Rome. Ernie wasn’t at all happy, at
first, with Ruth’s plan to take the baby Clara to visit Harvey. They sat in the
fl at in Pimlico where Ernie often came, now, for consolation, as much as to
see his daughter.

‘He
doesn’t sound the sort of man to have any
sent-y-ments,’
Ernie said.

Edward
wanted very much to give Ernie some elocution lessons to restore his voice to
the plain tones of his origins. ‘He hasn’t any sentimentality, but of course he
has sentiments,’ said Edward.

‘Especially
about his wife’s baby by a, well, a lover.’

‘As to
that,’ said Edward, ‘he won’t care who the father is. He just won’t have any
sentimental feelings, full stop.’

‘It’s a
matter of justice,’ Ruth said.

‘How do
you work that out?’ said Nathan.

‘Well,
if it hadn’t been for Harvey leaving Effie she would never have had a baby by Ernie,’
Ruth said. ‘Harvey should have given her a child. So Harvey’s responsible for
Clara; it’s a question of justice, and with all his riches it would be the best
thing if he could take responsibility, pay Effie her alimony. He might even
take Effie back.’

‘Effie
doesn’t want to go back to Harvey Gotham,’ said Ernie.

‘Harvey
won’t take her back,’ Edward said. ‘He believes that Effie boils down to money.

‘Alas,
he’s right,’ said Ernie.

‘Why
can’t Clara go on living with us?’ said Nathan, who already knew how to prepare
the feeds and bath the baby.

‘I’m
only taking her for a visit,’ Ruth said. ‘What’s wrong with that? You went to
see Harvey, Edward. Now I’ll have a try.’

‘Be
sure to bring her back, Ree-uth,’ said Ernie. ‘The legal position —’

‘Do you
still want to marry Effie?’ Edward asked him.

‘No,
quite frankly, I don’t.’

‘Effie’s
so beautiful,’ Nathan said. He got up to replenish the drinks. ‘What a
beautiful girl she is!’

‘A matter of justice. A
balancing of accounts.’ This was how Ruth put it to Harvey. ‘I’m passionate
about justice,’ she said.

‘People
who want justice,’ Harvey said, ‘generally want so little when it comes to the
actuality. There is more to be had from the world than a balancing of accounts.’

She
supposed he was thinking of his character Job, as in fact he was. She was used
to men answering her with one part of their mind on religion. That was one of
the reasons why Edward had become so unsatisfactory after he had ceased to be a
curate and become an actor.

Ruth and Effie grew up in
a country rectory that to-day is converted into four commodious fats. The
shabbiness of the war still hung over it in the late fifties, but they were
only aware of the general decay by the testimony of their elders as to how
things were ‘in the old days’, and the evidence of pre-war photographs of
garden parties where servants and trees stood about, well-tended, and the
drawing room chintzes were well-fitted and new. Otherwise, they simply accepted
that life was a muddle of broken barrows, tin buckets in the garden sheds,
overgrown gardens, neglected trees. They had an oak of immense girth; a
mulberry tree older than the house, to judge from early sketches of the place.
The graveyard had a yew the circumference and shape of their oval
dining-table; the tree was hollow inside and the bark had formed itself into
the shape of organ pipes. Yews were planted in graveyards, originally, because
they poisoned cattle, and as they were needed for long-bows they were planted
in a place where cattle didn’t go. All this Ruth picked up from God knows
where; the air she breathed informed her. House-martins nested under the eaves
outside Ruth’s room and used to make a dark-and-white flash almost up to the
open window as they came and fled in the morning.

There
was a worn carpet on the staircase up to the first landing.

After
that, bare wood. Most of the rooms were simply shut for ever. They had been
civil servants’ bedrooms in war-time before Ruth was born, and she never knew
what it was like to see the houseful of people that the rectory was made for.

For
most of Ruth’s life, up to the time Edward became an actor, religion was her
bread and butter. Her father was what Edward at one time called a
career-Christian; she assumed he was a believer too, as was her mother; but she
never got the impression that either had time to think about it.

Effie
was three years younger than Ruth. The sisters were very close to each other
all their schooldays and in their early twenties. Ruth often wondered when
exactly they had separated in their attitude to life. It was probably after
Ruth’s return from Paris where she had spent a year with a family. Shortly
afterwards Effie, too, went off to be an
au pair
in France.

If you
are the child of a doctor or a butcher you don’t have to believe in your father’s
occupation. But, in their childhood, they had to believe in their father’s job
as a clergyman in a special way. Matins and Sunday services and Evensong were
part of the job; the family was officially poor, which was to say they were not
the poor in the streets and cottages, but poor by the standards of a country
rector. Ruth’s mother was a free-lance typist and always had some work in hand.
She could do seventy words a minute on her old pre-war typewriter. Before her
marriage she had done a hundred and thirty words a minute at Pitman’s
shorthand. Ruth used to go to sleep on a summer night hearing the tap-tapping
of the typewriter below, and wake to the almost identical sound of the
woodpecker in the tree outside her window. Ruth supposed this was Effie’s
experience too, but when she reminded her sister of it many years later Effie
couldn’t recall any sound effects.

Effie
went to a university on her return from France and left after her first year
about the time that Ruth graduated and married Edward. Ruth worked with and for
Edward and the parish, organising a live crib at Christmas with a real baby, a
real cow and a real virgin; she wrote special prayers to the Holy Spirit and
the Trinity for the parish magazine (which she described as Prayers to the HS
etc.) and she arranged bring-and-pay garden lunches. She lectured and made
bedspreads, and she taught child-welfare and jam preserving.