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Authors: Muriel Spark

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Job’s
wife, tall, sweet-faced, with the intimation of a beautiful body inside the large
tent-like case of her firm clothes, bending, long-necked, solicitous over Job.
In her hand is a lighted candle. It is night, it is winter; Job’s wife wears a
glorious red tunic over her dress. Job sits on a plain cube-shaped block. He
might be in front of a fire, for the light of the candle alone cannot explain
the amount of light that is cast on the two figures. Job is naked except for a
loin-cloth. He clasps his hands above his knees. His body seems to shrink, but
it is the shrunkenness of pathos rather than want. Beside him is the piece of
broken pottery that he has taken to scrape his wounds. His beard is thick. He
is not an old man. Both are in their early prime, a couple in their thirties.
(Indeed, their recently-dead children were not yet married.) His face looks up
at his wife, sensitive, imploring some favour, urging some cause. What is his
wife trying to tell him as she bends her sweet face towards him? What does he
beg, this stricken man, so serene in his faith, so accomplished in argument?

The
scene here seemed to Harvey so altogether different from that suggested by the
text
of Job,
and yet so deliberately and intelligently contemplated that
it was impossible not to wonder what the artist actually meant. Harvey stared
at the picture and recalled the verses that followed the account of Job’s
affliction with boils:

 

And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal;
and he sat down among the ashes.

Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine
integrity? curse God, and die.

But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the
foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and
shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.

 

But
what is she saying to him, Job’s wife, in the serious, simple and tender
portrait of Georges de La Tour? The text of the poem is full of impatience,
anger; it is as if she is possessed by Satan. ‘Dost thou still retain thine
integrity?’ She seems to gloat, ‘Curse God and die.’ Harvey recalled that one
of the standard commentators has suggested a special interpretation, something
to the effect, ‘Are you still going to be so righteous? If you’re going to die,
curse God and get it off your chest first. It will do you good.’ But even this,
perhaps homely, advice doesn’t fit in with the painting. Of course, the painter
was idealising some notion of his own; in his dream, Job and his wife are
deeply in love.

Some
people had just arrived in the museum; Harvey could hear voices downstairs and
footsteps mounting. He continued to regard the picture, developing his
thoughts: Here, she is by no means the carrier of Satan’s message. She comes to
comfort Job, reduced as he is to a mental and physical wreck. ‘You speak,’ he
tells her, ‘as one of the foolish women;’ that is to say, he doesn’t call her a
foolish woman, he rather implies that she isn’t speaking as her normal self.
And he puts it to her, ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we
not receive evil?’ That domestic ‘we’ is worth noticing, thought Harvey; he
doesn’t mean to abandon his wife, he has none of the hostility towards her that
he has, later, for his friends. In order to have a better look at Job’s wife’s
face, Harvey put his head to one side. Right from the first he had been struck
by her resemblance to Effie in profile. She was like Ruth, too, but more like
Effie, especially about the upper part of her face. Oh, Effie, Effie, Effie.

There
were people behind Harvey. He glanced round and was amazed to see four men
facing towards him, not looking at the other pictures as he had expected. Nor
were they looking at the painting of Job. They were looking at him, approaching
him. At the top of the staircase two other men in police uniform appeared. The
keeper looked embarrassed, bewildered. Harvey got up to face them. He realised
that, unconsciously, he had been hearing police sirens for some time. With the
picture of Job still in his mind’s eye, Harvey had time only to form an abrupt
impression before they moved in on him, frisked him, and invited him to descend
to the waiting police cars.

Harvey
had time to go over again all the details of the morning, later, in between
interrogations. He found it difficult to get the rest of his life into focus;
everything seemed to turn on the morning: the time he had stopped at the
village shop; the drive to Epinal; the thoughts that had gone through his mind
in front of the painting,
Job visité par sa femme,
at the museum; the
moment he was taken to the police car, and driven over the bridge to the
commissariat for questioning.

He
answered the questions with lucidity so long as they lasted. On and off, he was
interrogated for the rest of the day and half the night.

‘No, I’ve
never heard of the FLE.’

‘Fronte
de la Libération de l’Europe.
You haven’t heard of
it?’

‘No, I
haven’t heard of it.’

‘You
know that your wife belongs to this organisation?’

‘I don’t
know anything about it.’

‘There
was an armed robbery in a supermarket outside Epinal this morning. You were
waiting here to join your wife.’

‘I’m
separated from my wife. I haven’t seen her for nearly two years.

‘It was
a coincidence that you were in Epinal this morning visiting a museum while your
estranged wife was also in Epinal engaged in an armed robbery?’

‘If my
wife was in Epinal, yes, it was a coincidence.’

‘Is
that your English sense of humour?’

‘I’m a
Canadian.’

‘Is it
a coincidence that other supermarkets and a jeweller’s shop in the Vosges have
been robbed by this gang in the last two weeks? Gérardmer, La Bresse, Baccarat;
this morning, Epinal.’

‘I don’t
read the papers.’

‘You
bought one this morning.’

‘I give
no weight to local crimes.’ If Effie’s involved, thought Harvey, plainly she’s
in this district to embarrass me. It was essential that he shouldn’t suggest
this, for at the same time it would point to Effie’s having directive authority
over the gang.

‘I
still can’t believe that my wife’s involved,’ said Harvey. He partly meant it.

 

 

‘Three of them, perhaps
four. Where are they?’

‘I don’t
know. You’d better look.’

‘You
recently bought the château. Why?’

‘I
thought I might as well. It was convenient.’

‘You’ve
been a year at the cottage?’

‘About
a year and a half.’

‘How
did you find it?’

‘I’ve
already explained —’

‘Explain
again.’

‘I
found the cottage,’ recited Harvey, ‘because I was in the Vosges at that time.
I had come here to Epinal expressly to look at the painting Job
Visited by
His Wife
by Georges de La Tour. I had heard through some friends that the
château was for sale. I went to look it over. I said I’d think about it, but I
was struck by the suitability of the cottage to my needs, and took that on in
the meantime. The owner, Claude de Remiremont, let me have it.’

‘How
much rent do you pay?’

‘I have
no idea,’ Harvey said. ‘Very little. My lawyer attends to that.’

(The
rich!)

This
interrogator was a man of about Harvey’s age, not more than forty, black hair,
blue eyes, a good strong face, tall. A chief-inspector, special branch; no
fool. His tone of voice varied. Sometimes he put his questions with the frank
lilt of a query at the end; at other times he simply made a statement as if
enunciating a proved fact. At the end of the table where they sat facing each
other, was a hefty policeman in uniform, older, with sandy hair growing thin
and faded. The door of the room opened occasionally, and other men in uniform
and ordinary clothes came and went.

‘Where
did you learn French?’

‘I have
always spoken French.’

‘You
have taken part in the French-Canadian liberation movement.’

‘No.’

‘You
don’t believe in it?’

‘I don’t
know anything about it,’ said Harvey. ‘I haven’t lived in Canada since I was
eighteen.’

‘You
say that your wife’s sister has been living with you since last October.’

‘That’s
right.’

‘With a
baby.’

‘Yes. My
wife’s baby daughter.’

‘But
there was a woman with a baby in your house for a year before that.’

‘Not at
all. The baby was only born at the end of June last year.’

‘There
was another infant in your house. We have evidence, M. Gotham, that there was a
small child’s washing on the line outside your house at least from April of
last year.

‘That
is so. But there wasn’t any baby, there wasn’t any woman.’

‘Look,
M. Gotham, it is a simple trick for terrorists to take the precaution, in the
case of discovery, to keep a woman and a child in the house in order to avoid a
shoot-out. Rather a low and dangerous trick, using a baby as a cover, but
people of that nature —’There was no baby at all in my house, nobody but
myself,’ Harvey explained patiently. ‘It was a joke — for the benefit of my
brother-in-law who came to visit me. I brought some baby clothes and put them
out on the line. He obviously thought I had a girl living with me. I only put
them out a few times after that. I told my brother-in-law that I did it to keep
women from bothering me with offers of domestic care. As they do. They would
assume, you see, that there was a woman. I suppose I’m an eccentric. It was a
gesture.’

‘A
gesture.’

‘Well,
you might say,’ said Harvey, thinking fast how to say it, ‘that it was a
surrealistic gesture.’

The
inspector looked at Harvey for rather a long time. Then he left the room and
came back with a photograph in his hand. Effie, in half-profile, three years
ago, with her hair blowing around.

‘Is
that your wife?’

‘Yes,’
said Harvey. ‘Where did you get this photograph?’

‘And
the woman you are living with, Ruth, is her sister?’

‘Mine
Jansen is her sister. Where did you get this photograph of my wife? Have you
been ransacking through my papers?’

The
inspector took up the photograph and looked at it. ‘She resembles her sister,’
he said.

‘Did
you have a search warrant?’ said Harvey.

‘You
will be free to contact a lawyer as soon as you have answered our questions. I
presume you have a lawyer in Paris? He will explain the law to you.

‘I
have, of course, a French lawyer,’ Harvey said. ‘But I don’t need him at the
moment. Waste of money.

Just
then a thought struck him: Oh, God, will they shoot Ruth in mistake for Effie?

‘My
sister-in-law, Ruth Jansen, is, as you say, very like her sister. She’s caring
for the baby of nine months. Be very careful not to confuse them should you
come to a confrontation. She has the baby there in the château.’

‘We
have the baby.’

‘What?’

‘We are
taking care of the baby.’

‘Where
is she?’

The
sandy-faced policeman spoke up. He had a perfectly human smile: ‘I believe she
is taking the air in the courtyard. Come and see out of the window.’

Down in
the courtyard among the police cars and motor-bicycles, a large policeman in
uniform, but without his hat, whom Harvey recognised as one of those who had
escorted him from the museum, was holding Clara in his arms, wrapped up in her
woollies; he was jogging her up and down while a young policewoman was talking
to her. Another, younger policeman, in civilian clothes, was also attempting to
curry favour with her. Clara had her chubby arms round the large man’s neck,
enjoying the attention, fraternising with the police all round.

‘Is she
getting her feeds?’ said Harvey. ‘I believe she has some special regular feeds
that have to be —’

‘Mine
Jansen is seeing to all that, don’t worry. Let’s proceed.’

‘I want
to know where Ruth Jansen is,’ said Harvey.

‘She’s
downstairs, answering some questions. The sooner we proceed with the job the
sooner you will be able to join her. Why did you explain your baby clothes to
your brother-in-law Edward Jansen in the words, ‘“The police won’t shoot if
there’s a baby in the house”?’

‘Did I
say that?’ said Harvey.

‘Mme
Jansen has admitted it,’ said the inspector. Admitted it. What had Edward told
Ruth, what was Ruth telling them downstairs? But ‘admitted’ was not the same as
‘volunteered’ the information.

‘You
probably suggested the phrase to her,’ said Harvey. The old police trick: Is it
true that he said ‘The police won’t shoot …’?

‘Did
you or did you not say those words last April when M. Jansen came to see you?’

‘If I
did it was a joke.’ ‘Surrealism? ‘‘Yes, call it that. ‘‘You are a man of means?’
‘Oh, yes.

BOOK: The Only Problem
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