The Only Problem

by Muriel Spark

  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.

  ‘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.

&
nbsp; 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?

  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 conte
mplated 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.