The Only Problem (6 page)

She
brought the fretful child close to Harvey so that he could make an ugly face.
He showed his teeth and growled, whereupon Clara temporarily forgot her woes.
She smelt of sour milk.

FOUR

Up at the château where
the neglected lawns were greener than the patch round Harvey’s house, and where
the shrubberies were thick and very dark evergreen, the workmen were putting in
the daylight hours of the last few days before the Christmas holidays. She had
already reclaimed one wing for habitation. The roof had been secured in that
part, but most of the rooms were cold. Ruth had arranged one sitting room,
however, with a fire, and two bedrooms with oil stoves. A good start.

What a
business it had been to persuade Harvey to buy the château! And now he was
enchanted. Once he agreed to buy — and that was the uphill work — it was
simple. Harvey sent for his London lawyer, Stewart Cowper, and for his French
lawyer, Martin Deschamps, to meet in Nancy and discuss the deal with the family
who owned the château. Ruth had gone with Harvey to this meeting, in October,
with Clara in her folding pram. When the hotel room got too boring for the
baby, Ruth hushed her, put her in her pram and took her for a walk in Place Stanislas.
It was not long before Ruth saw through the splendid gilt gates the whole
business group, with Harvey, trooping out to take the sun and continue the deal
in the glittering square. Harvey, his two lawyers, and the three members of the
de Remiremont family, which comprised a middle-aged man, his daughter and his
nephew, came and joined Ruth. The daughter put her hand on the handle of the
pram. They all ambled round in a very unprofessional way, talking of notaries
and tax and the laws governing foreigners’ property in France. You could see
that this was only a preliminary.

Harvey
said, ‘We have to leave you. I’m writing a book on the
Book of Job.’

It was
difficult to get across to them what the
Book of Job
was. Harvey’s
French wasn’t at fault, it was their knowledge of the Bible of which, like most
good Catholics, they had scant knowledge. They stood around, the father in his
old tweed coat and trousers, the daughter and nephew in their woollen jumpers
and blue jeans, puzzling out what was
Job.
Finally, the father
remembered. It all came back to him. ‘You shouldn’t be in a hurry, then,’ he
said. ‘Job had patience, isn’t that right? One says, “the patience of Job”.’

‘In
fact,’ said Harvey, ‘Job was the most impatient of men.’

‘Well,
it’s good to know what it is you’re writing in that wretched little cottage,’
said the elder man. ‘I often wondered.’

‘I hope
we’ll soon have the house,’ said Ruth.

‘So do we,’
said the owner. ‘We’ll be glad to get rid of it.’ The young man and the girl
laughed. The lawyers looked a little worried about the frankness and the
freedom, suspecting, no doubt, some façade covering a cunning intention.

Ruth
and Harvey left them then. It was all settled within a month except for the
final bureaucracy, which might drag on for years. Anyhow, Harvey had paid, and
Ruth was free to order her workmen to move in.

‘Instead
of disabusing myself of worldly goods in order to enter the spirit of
Job
I
seem to acquire more, ever more and more,’ was all that Harvey said.

Ruth
wrote to Effie with her letter-pad on her knee, beside the only fireplace,
while the workmen hammered away, a few days before Christmas.

Dear Effie,

I really am in love with Harvey and you have no reason to say I am
not. The lovely way he bought the house — so casual — we just walked round the
Place
with Clara and the family who used to own the château — and Harvey shook
hands and that was all. The lawyers are working it out, but the house is ours.

I can’t make out your letter. You don’t want Clara, at least not the
bother of her. You despise Harvey. What do you mean, that I have stolen your
husband and your child? Be civilised.

Ruth stopped, read what
she had written, and tore it up. Why should I reply to Effie? What do I owe
her? She stole a bit of chocolate, on principle. I stole her husband, not on
principle. As for her child, I haven’t stolen her, she has abandoned her baby.
All right, Effie is young and beautiful, and now has to work for her living.
Possibly she’s broke.

Dear Effie,

What attracted me most about the château was the woodpecker in the
tree outside the bedroom window. Why don’t you come and visit Clara?

Love,

Ruth

She sealed it up and put
it on the big plate in the hall to be posted, for all the world as if the
château was already a going concern. The big plate on a table by the door was
all there was in the huge dusty hall, but it was a beginning.

Now she
took sleeping Clara in her carry-cot and set her beside the driver’s seat in
the car. She put a basket in the back containing bread, pâté, a roast bantam
hen and a bottle of Côte du Rhône, and she set off down the drive to Harvey’s
house for lunch. The tired patch of withered shrubbery round Harvey’s cottage
was still noticeably different from the rest of the château’s foliage, although
Ruth had dug around a few bushes to improve them, and planted some bulbs. As
soon as she pushed open the door she saw he had a visitor. She dumped the food
basket and went back for the baby, having glimpsed the outline of a student, a
young man, any student, with those blue jeans of such a tight fit, they were
reminiscent of Elizabethan women’s breasts, in that you wondered, looking at
their portraits, where they put their natural flesh. The student followed her
out to the car. It was Nathan. ‘Nathan! It’s you, — you here. I didn’t
recognise …’ He woke Clara with his big kiss, and the child wailed. He picked
her up and pranced up and down with the wakened child. Harvey’s studious
cottage was a carnival. Harvey said to Ruth, ‘I’ve told Nathan there will be
room for him up at the house.’

Nathan
had brought some food, too. He had been skilful as ever in finding the glasses,
the plates; everything was set for lunch. Ruth got Clara back to sleep again,
but precariously, clutching a ragged crust.

Harvey
said very little. He had closed the notebook he was working on, and unnaturally
tidied his papers; his pens were arranged neatly, and everything on his
writing-table looked put-away. He sat looking at the floor between his feet.

Nathan
announced, ‘I just had to come. I had nothing else to do. It’s a long time
since I had a holiday.’

‘And Edward,
how’s Edward?’ Ruth said.

‘Don’t
you hear from Edward?’

‘Yes of
course,’ said Ruth, and Harvey said the same.

Nathan
opened his big travel pack and brought out yet more food purchases that he had
picked up on the way: cheese, wine, pâté and a bottle of Framboise. He left the
pack open while he took them to the table. Inside was a muddle of clothes and
spare shoes, but Harvey noticed the edges of Christmas-wrapped parcels sticking
up from the bottom of the pack. My God, he has come for Christmas. Harvey
looked at Ruth: did she invite him? Ruth fluttered about with her thanks and
her chatter.

‘Are
you off to Paris for Christmas?’ Harvey enquired. This was his first meeting
with Nathan since the holiday in Italy when Harvey had abandoned his party on
the
autostrada;
he felt he could be distant and impersonal without
offence.

‘I’ve
come mainly to visit Clara for Christmas,’ said Nathan. He was lifting the baby
out of the carry-cot.

‘Let
her sleep,’ Harvey said.

‘Oh,
Nathan must stay over Christmas,’ Ruth said. ‘Paris will be crowded. And
dreadfully expensive.’ She added, ‘Nathan is a marvellous cook.’

‘So I
have heard.’

Ruth
didn’t notice, or affected not to notice, a look of empty desperation on Harvey’s
face; a pallor, a cornered look; his lips were parted, his eyes were focusing
only on some anguished thought. And he was, in fact, suddenly aghast: What am I
doing with these people around me? Who asked this fool to come and join us for
Christmas? What do I need with Christmas, and Ruth, and a baby and a bloody
little youth who needs a holiday? Why did I buy that château if not for Ruth
and the baby to get out of my way? He looked at his writing-table, and
panicked.

‘I’m
going out, I’ll just fetch my coat,’ he said, thumping upstairs two at a time.

‘Harvey,
what’s the matter?’ said Ruth when he appeared again with his sheepskin jacket,
his woollen hat. Rain had started to splash down with foul eagerness.

‘Don’t
you want lunch?’ she said.

‘Excuse
me. I’m studious,’ said Harvey, as he left the cottage. The car door slammed.
The starter wouldn’t work at first try. The sound of Harvey working and working
at the starter became ever more furious until finally he was off.

When he came back in the
evening the little house was deserted, all cleaned up. He poured himself a
whisky, sat down and started to think of Effie. She was different from Ruth,
almost a race apart. Ruth was kind, or comparatively so. Effie wasn’t
comparatively anything, certainly not kind. She was absolutely fascinating.
Harvey remembered Effie at parties, her beauty, part of which was a
quick-witted merriment. How could two sisters be so physically alike and yet so
totally different? At any moment Ruth might come in and reproach him for not
having the Christmas spirit. Effie would never do that. Ruth was thoroughly bourgeois
by nature; Effie, anarchistic, aristocratic. I miss Effie, I miss her a lot, Harvey
told himself. The sound of Ruth’s little car coming down the drive, slowly in
the mist, chimed with his thought as would the stroke of eight if there was a
clock in the room. He looked at his watch, eight o’clock precisely. She had
come to fetch him for dinner; three dinner-places set out on the table of the
elegant room in the château, and the baby swinging in a hammock set up in a
corner.

Ruth
came in. ‘You know, Harvey,’ she said, ‘I think you might be nicer to Nathan.
After all, it’s Christmas time. He’s come all this way, and one should have the
Christmas spirit.’

Nathan
was there, at the château, settled in for Christmas. Harvey thought: I should
have told him to go. I should have said I wanted Ruth and the baby to myself
for Christmas. Why didn’t I? —Because I don’t want them to myself. I don’t want
them enough; not basically.

Ruth
looked happy, having said her say. No need to say any more. I can’t hold these
women, Harvey thought. Neither Effie nor Ruth. My mind isn’t on them enough,
and they resent it, just as I resent it when they put something else before me,
a person, an idea. Yes, it’s understandable.

He
swallowed down a drink and put on his coat.

‘Nathan
thinks it was marvellous of you to buy the château just to make me comfortable
with Clara,’ said Ruth.

‘I
bought it for myself, too, you know. I always thought I might acquire it.’

‘Nathan
has been reading the
Book of Job,
he has some ideas.’

‘He did
his homework, you mean. He must think I’m some sort of monster. In return for
hospitality he thinks he has to discuss my subject.’

‘He’s
polite. Besides, it’s my subject too, now,’ said Ruth.

‘Why?’
said Harvey. ‘Because I’ve put you in the château?’

He
thought, on the way through the misty trees that lined the long drive, They
think I’m such a bore that I have to bribe them to come and play the part of
comforters.

He made
himself cheerful at the château; he poured drinks. In his anxiety to avoid the
subject of
Job,
to be normal, to make general conversation, Harvey
blurted out the other thing he had on his mind:

‘Any
news of Effie?’

God, I’ve
said the wrong thing. Both Nathan and Ruth looked, for a moment, startled,
uncomfortable; both, discernibly, for different reasons. Nathan, Harvey
supposed, had been told to avoid the subject of Effie. Ruth didn’t want to
bring Effie into focus; it was enough that she was still Harvey’s wife, out
there vaguely somewhere else, out of sight.

‘Effie?’
said Ruth.

‘I
heard from her,’ said Nathan. ‘Only a postcard, after she got out.’

‘Out
from where?’

‘From
prison in Trieste. Didn’t you hear about it?’

‘Harvey
never discusses Effie,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ve only just heard about it. She wrote to
me last week from London, but she didn’t mention prison.’

‘What
happened?’ said Harvey.

‘She
was caught shop-lifting in a supermarket in Trieste. She said she did it to
obtain an opportunity to study a women’s prison at firsthand. She got out
after three days. There was a small paragraph about it in the
Telegraph,
nothing
in the other papers; it was about a month ago,’ Ruth said. ‘Nathan just told
me.