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Authors: Muriel Spark

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‘All
she said on the card was that she was going to Munich,’ said Nathan.

‘I wish
her well of Munich,’ said Harvey.

‘I
thought it was a beautiful town,’ Ruth said.

‘You
thought strangely. There is a carillon clock with dancers coming out of the
clock-tower twice a day. That’s all there is in Munich.’

‘She
has friends there,’ Nathan said. ‘She said on the card she was joining friends
in Munich. She seems to be getting around.’

‘Well,
I’m glad, for Effie, there is something else in Munich besides the carillon
clock. Who made this soup?’

‘Nathan
did,’ said Ruth.

‘It’s
great.’ He wondered why Stewart Cowper hadn’t told him about Effie being
arrested. He felt over-protected. How can you deal with the problem of
suffering if everybody conspires to estrange you from suffering? He felt like
the rich man in the parable: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of
a needle than for him to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

‘One
must approach these things with balanced thought,’ Ruth was saying, alarmingly.
Harvey bent his mind to take in what they were discussing. It emerged that they
were talking about the huge price Nathan had paid for the taxi from the airport
to the château.

‘There’s
a train service,’ Harvey said.

‘I’ve
just been telling him that,’ said Ruth. ‘Spending all that money, as much as
the air fare. He could have phoned me from the airport.’

‘I don’t
have the number,’ said Nathan.

‘Oh,
yes, I forgot,’ said Ruth. ‘No-one gets the number. Harvey has to be protected;
in his position everyone wants him for something. He’s here to study an
important subject, write a thesis, get away from it all. You have to realise
that, Nathan.’

Nathan
turned to Harvey. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about Effie.’

‘Oh,
that’s all right. I asked you about her, after all.’

‘Yes,
you did,’ said Ruth. She had served veal, delicately cooked in white wine. ‘You
did bring up the subject, Harvey.’

‘A
beautiful girl, Effie,’ said Nathan. ‘What a lovely girl she is!’

Harvey
wondered how much he knew about how beautiful Effie was. He looked at Nathan
and thought, He has barged into my peace, he’s taking his place for Christmas,
he’s discussing my wife as if she was everybody’s girl (which she is), and he’s
going to get together again with Ruth; they will conspire how to protect me.
Finally, he will ask me for a loan.

‘Will
you be all right up here alone in the château tonight?’ Harvey said with
determination. ‘Ruth and I always shack down in my cottage; Ruth brings the
baby back here immediately after early breakfast so that I can start on my work
at about seven-thirty.’

‘If you’ll
leave Clara with me I won’t feel lonely,’ said Nathan. ‘Not at all,’ said
Harvey. ‘We have a place for her. She’s teething. ‘Nathan’s used to Clara,’
said Ruth. ‘He’s known her and looked after her since she was born.’

‘I don’t
think we need ask our guests to baby-sit for us.’ Don’t think, Harvey said
within himself, that you are one of the family here; you are one of ‘our guests’
in this house.

‘Well,
as she’s teething,’ said Ruth, ‘I’d better take her with me. I really do think
so, Nathan.’

‘We’ll
move up here to the château for Christmas,’ Harvey said, now that Ruth was
winding up the feast with a cheese
soufflé
as light as could be. He
fetched the brandy glasses.

 

 

 

 

 

FIVE

 

 

 

Dear Edward,

Happy New Year. Thanks for yours.

The day before Christmas Eve he turned up. After dinner he sat up
late discussing his ideas on
Job
— he’d done some reading (for my benefit,
which I suppose is a compliment). I don’t agree with you that he seems ‘positively
calculating’, I don’t agree at all. I think he wanted to spend Christmas with
Ruth and the baby. He would have preferred to spend Christmas with Effie. He
didn’t want to spend Christmas alone with you; that’s why you’re sour. You
should get a lot of friends and some of your colleagues, pretty young
actresses, have parties. Nathan would like that.

We went to Midnight Mass at the local church. Nathan carried Clara
in a sling on his back and she slept throughout. There was a great crowd.

He hasn’t left yet. He shows no sign of leaving.

I agree that Job endlessly discusses morals but there is nothing
moral about the
Book of Job.
In fact it is shockingly amoral.

God has a wager with Satan that Job will not lose faith, however
much he is afflicted. Job never knows about this wager, neither do his friends.
But the reader knows. Satan finally makes the explicit challenge (2,5):

 

But put forth thy hand

now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will

curse thee to thy face.

 

And God says, Go ahead (‘Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his
life.’)

Consequently Job, having lost his sons and his goods, is now covered
with sores. He is visited by his bureaucratic friends who tell him he must have
deserved it. The result is that Job has a sort of nervous breakdown. He demands
an explanation and he never gets it.

Do you know that verse of Kipling’s?

 

The toad beneath the harrow knows

Exactly where each tooth-point goes;

The butterfly upon the road

Preaches contentment to that toad.

 

I think this expresses Job’s plight. The boils are personal, they
loosen his tongue, they set him off. He doesn’t reproach God in so many words,
but he does by implication.

I must tell you that early in the New Year we started to be bothered
by people hanging around the house. Some ‘tourists’ (at this time of year!)
went to the château and asked if they could see round the house — a couple of
young men. Nathan got rid of them. Ruth says she heard there were ‘strangers’
in the village shop asking questions about me the other day. A
suspicious-looking workman came to my cottage, saying he’d been sent to test
the electricity (not to read the meter, but to test). He showed me his card, it
looked all right. But the electricity department hadn’t heard of him. We
suspect that Effie is putting in some private detectives. I’ve written to
Stewart Cowper. Where would she get the money?

Why didn’t you tell me that Effie had been arrested for shop-lifting
in Trieste?

I hope you get that part in the play you write about in your letter.
You must know by now.

Yours,

Harvey

 

Please check the
crocodiles for me at the London Zoo. Their eyelids are vertical, are they not?
Leviathan in
Job
is generally supposed to be the crocodile. It is
written of Leviathan, ‘his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.’ None of
the commentaries is as yet satisfactory on this. You may remember they never
were.

 

 

 

 

 

PART
TWO

 

 

 

 

 

SIX

 

 

 

The village shop, about
two kilometres from Harvey’s cottage, was normally busy when, about nine in the
morning, Harvey stopped to buy a newspaper and cigarettes. He remembered this
clearly later, when the day had developed and in the later profusion of events
he set about to decipher them, starting from this, the beginning of his day.

The
shop was divided into two parts, one leading into the other. The owner, a large
man in his forties, wearing a dark grey working apron the colour of his hair,
looked after the part which sold groceries, detergents, ham, pâté, sausage,
cheese, fruit, vegetables, all well laid out; and also a large stock of very
good Vosges wines stacked in rows and arranged according to types and prices.
The other part of the shop was presided over by the wife, plump, ruddy-cheeked,
with short black curly hair, in her mid-thirties. She looked after the coffee
machine, the liquor bar, the pre-wrapped buns and sweets, the newspapers and
cigarettes, some stationery and other conveniently saleable goods.

That
morning Harvey took an espresso coffee, his packet of cigarettes and the Vosges
local paper which he scarcely glanced at. He looked around as he drank his
coffee; the suspect people were not there to-day; it was not to be expected
that they would always be at the bar, it would have been too obvious had they
been hanging around all day and every day: two young Belgians, touring forests
and caves, students, campers, the shopkeepers had said. It seemed unlikely;
they were too old for students. There had been another man and woman, older
still, in their forties; they looked like a couple of
concierges
from
Paris. Harvey was convinced these were Effie’s detectives, getting enough
evidence for Effie’s huge alimonial scoop. The owners of the shop had seemed to
take them for granted as they walked up and down in the road. The so-called
Belgians had a dormobile with a Lyons registration number — that meant nothing,
they had probably hired it.

The
middle-aged couple, both of them large and solid, came and went in a sad green
Citroen Dyane 6. Harvey, having got such a brisk reply to his casual enquiries
about the Belgians, had not ventured to enquire about the second couple. Maybe
the shopkeepers were in their pay.

This
morning, the strangers were not in sight. Only two local youths were at the
bar; some countrywomen queued up at the counter on the grocery side. Harvey
drank his coffee, paid, took up his paper and cigarettes and left. As he went
out he heard behind him the chatter of the women, just a little more excited
and scandalised than usual.
‘Les supermarchés, les supermarchés
…’ was
the phrase he took in most, and assumed there was a discussion in progress
about prices and food.

He put
down the paper beside him and as he drove off his eye caught a picture on the
front page. It was a group of three identikits, wanted people, two men and a
girl. The outlines of the girl’s face struck him as being rather like Ruth’s.
He must remember to let her see it. He turned at the end of the road towards Epinal,
the town he was bound for.

After
about two kilometres he ran into a road-block; two police motor cycles, three
police cars, quite a lot. It was probably to do with the identikits. Harvey
produced his papers and sat patiently while the policeman studied them, gave a
glance at the car, and waved him on. While waiting, Harvey looked again at the
newspaper on the seat by his side. The feature with the identikits was headed ‘Armed
Robberies in the Vosges’. Undoubtedly the police were looking for the gang. At
Epinal he noticed a lot of police actively outside the commissariat on the
banks of the Moselle, and, above that, at the grand prefecture. There, among
the fountains and flags, he could see in the distance flashes of blue and white
uniforms, blue, red and white police cars, a considerable display. He noticed,
and yet took no notice. He had come to look once more, as he had often done
before, at the sublime painting,
Job
Visited by His Wife
at the
Musée
of Epinal. He parked his car and went in.

He was
well known to the receptionist who gave him a sunny greeting as he passed the
desk.

‘No
schoolchildren to-day,’ she said. Sometimes when there were school-groups or
art-college students in the gallery Harvey would turn away, not even attempting
to see the picture. But very often there were only one or two visitors.
Sometimes, he had the museum to himself; he was already half-way up the stairs
when the receptionist told him so; she watched him approvingly, even
admiringly, as he ran up the staircase, as if even his long legs, when they
reached the first turning of the stairs, had brought a touch of pleasure into
her morning. The dark-blue custodian with his hands behind his back as he made
his stately round, nodded familiarly as Harvey reached the second floor; as
usual the man went to sit patiently on a chair at the other end of the room as
Harvey took his usual place on a small bench in front of the picture.

The
painting was made in the first part of the seventeenth century by Georges de La
Tour, a native of Lorraine. It bears a resemblance to the Dutch candlelight
pictures of the time. Its colours and organisation are superb. It is extremely
simple, and like so much great art of the past, surprisingly modern.

Job visité
par sa femme:
To Harvey’s mind there was much more
in the painting to illuminate the subject of Job than in many of the lengthy
commentaries that he knew so well. It was eloquent of a new idea, and yet,
where had the painter found justification for his treatment of the subject?

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