The Only Problem

by Muriel Spark

  ‘She has Ernie Howe’s baby in her arms. It would be natural to take her to the father. You can’t possess everything, Harvey.’

  ‘Do you know more than you say?’ said Harvey.

  ‘No, it’s only a supposition.’

  ‘I’ll ring Ernie Howe’s flat as soon as my call to Canada has come through. It’s hard on my uncle, mucking him about like this. He’s not so young. I’ve just put through a call.’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night in Toronto,’ said Stewart.

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Anne-Marie arrived in her thick coat, scarves and boots. ‘Good morning,’ she said, and then gave a pained wail. Her eyes were on the flowers that she had left in such a formal display the night before, now all pulled to pieces, even the petals torn to bits.

  ‘I was looking for an electronic bug,’ Harvey said.

  ‘I think you are not human,’ said Anne-Marie. She was now in tears, aimlessly lifting a daffodil, putting it down, then a blue, torn iris.

  ‘Who ordered them, who sent them?’ said Harvey.

  Stewart said, ‘I’ll help to clear the mess. Leave it to me.’

  ‘I had them sent myself,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘To give you some joy after your ordeal with the press and your loss of the baby. My sister-in-law has a flower shop and I made a special-messenger arrangement with her for the most beautiful flowers; a personal present. I thought that with the loss of Madame and Clara you would enjoy those lovely spring flowers.’

  Stewart had his arm round the police agent’s shoulders. ‘His nerves gave way,’ said Stewart. ‘That’s all.’

  The telephone rang; Harvey’s call to Canada. It was a sleepy manservant who answered, as Harvey had counted on. He was able to explain, without having to actually talk to his uncle, that Ruth and the baby were probably not coming after all, and that any references to him in the newspapers and on the television were probably false.

  He put down the receiver. The telephone rang: ‘Hallo, Harvey!’ The telephone rang off. Again it rang: ‘Harvey, it’s Ruth.’ She was speaking in a funny way. She was calling herself Ree-uth, although definitely the voice was hers. It must be the London influence, Harvey registered all in a moment. But she was going on. ‘I changed my mind, Harvey. I had to bring Clara (pronounced Clah-rah) to her father (pronounced fah-thar).’

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Harvey. ‘You mean you’re not going to my Uncle Joe in Toronto. You’ve decided to shack down with Ernie Howe, is that it?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Then I think you might have had enough consideration for my Uncle Joe — he’s seventy-eight — to let me know.’

  ‘Oh, I was busy with Clah-rah.’

  ‘Pass me Ernie,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Ernie, do you mind?’ said Ruth’s voice, apart.

  ‘Hallo,’ said the other voice.

  ‘Ernie Howe?’

  ‘That’s me.

  ‘What are you doing with Ruth?’

  ‘We’ve just had a tunah-fish salad. We fed Clah-rah.’

  Harvey then remembered Ernie’s voice (that’s where Ruth got the Clah-rah).

  ‘I make a good fah-thah,’ said Ernie; ‘and I don’t like your tone of superiority.’

  After a great many more hot words, Harvey began to recollect, at the back of his mind, that he really had no rights in the matter; not much to complain of at all. He said good night, hung up, and returned to the sitting room hoping for some consolation from his friend.

  His friend was sitting on the sofa holding hands with Anne-Marie. Harvey was in time to hear him say, ‘May I fall in love with you?’

  ‘She’s married,’ said Harvey in English.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Anne-Marie in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘I live with my married brother.’

  ‘Well, I thought you were married,’ said Harvey.

  ‘That’s when you thought I was a maid.’

  ‘If you’re not a maid then what are you doing here?’ said Harvey.

  ‘He’s exasperated,’ said Stewart. ‘Don’t mind him.’

  Anne-Marie took a long glance at the disorderly table of ruined flowers and said, ‘I have to remain here on duty. I’m going to make the coffee.’

  When she had left, Harvey said, ‘You’re behaving like an undergraduate who’s just put foot on the Continent for the first time, meeting his first Frenchwoman.’

  ‘What was the news from England?’

  ‘Ruth is with Ernie Howe.’

  ‘What do the newspapers say?’

  ‘I don’t know. Find out; it’s your job.’ ‘Is it?’ said Stewart.

  ‘If it isn’t, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I suppose I’m just a comforter,’ Stewart said. ‘I suppose you are.

  EIGHT

  ‘Is it possible,’ said Harvey, ‘for anyone to do something perfectly innocent but altogether unusual, without giving rise to suspicion?’

  Stewart said, ‘Not if his wife is a terrorist.’

  ‘Assume that she is not.’

  ‘All right, I assume. But here you were in a small hamlet in France, a rich man living in primitive conditions. Well, nobody bothered you until the police began to suspect a link between you and the FLE a certain time ago, and even then they only had you under surveillance, from a distance; they didn’t haul you in immediately or harass you so that your life was uncomfortable. You weren’t even aware of their presence till lately. And now you’ve been questioned, grilled; it’s only natural. It might have been worse. Much worse. You don’t know the police.’

  ‘My papers have been scrutinised, all my work, my private things —’

  ‘I can’t sympathise too much, Harvey. I can’t say you’ve really suffered. These police obviously are going carefully with you. They’re protecting you from the mob, the phone calls. They probably believe you; they know by now, I should think, that you have no contact with Effie. I think they’re right to watch out in case she has any contact with you.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Harvey, ‘to say that I haven’t suffered. Did you hear the press round-up on the radio this morning? — My name’s worse than Effie’s in the eyes of the press.’

  The local newspaper, the only one so far to arrive in his hands, was on the coffee-table in front of them, with the front page uppermost. The headline, ‘The Guru of the Vosges’ stretched above a picture of Harvey, distraught, in his sitting room of final disorder at the press conference. Under the picture was the title-paragraph of the subsequent article:

  Harvey Gotham, the American ‘prophet’, inveighing against God, who he claims has unjustly condemned the world to suffering. God is a Shit was one of the blasphemies preached at an international press conference held yesterday in his 40-roomed château recently acquired by this multimillionaire husband of the gangster-terrorist Effie Gotham, leading activist of FLE.

  In the article, the writer of it reflected on the influence of Harvey on a girl like Effie ‘from the poorer classes of London’, and on her sister and an infant, Clara, still under his control at the château.

  Harvey said to Stewart, ‘I never once said “Dieu est merde.”‘

  ‘Maybe you implied it.’

  ‘Perhaps I did. But I did not speak as a prophet; I discussed some aspects of Job in an academic sense.’

  ‘For a man of your intelligence, you are remarkably stupid,’ said Stewart. ‘It’s Effie they wanted news of. Failing that, they made the best of what they got. You should have let Effie divorce you with a huge settlement a long time ago. She can get a divorce any time; it’s the money she wanted.’

  ‘To finance FLE?’

  ‘You asked me to assume she isn’t involved.’

  ‘I don’t want to divorce Effie. I don’t want a divorce.’

  ‘Are you still in love with Effie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’re an unhappy man. Why did you leave her?’

  ‘I couldn’t stand her sociological clap-trap. If she want
ed to do some good in the world she had plenty of opportunity. There was nothing to stop her taking up charities and causes; she could have had money for them, and she always had plenty of time. But she has to rob supermarkets and banks and sleep with people like that.’ He pointed to a row of photographs in the paper. Three young men and Effie. The photograph of Effie was that which the police had found among his papers. Harvey told Stewart this, and said, ‘They don’t seem to have any other picture of Effie. I wonder how they got photos of her friends.’

  ‘In the same way that they got Effie’s, I expect. Through rummaging in the homes of their families, their girl-friends.’

  ‘What can she see in them?’ Harvey said. Stewart turned the paper round to see it better. One of the men was dressed in a very padded-shouldered coat, a spotted bow tie and hair falling down past the point where the picture ended, which was just above his elbow; the second man was a blond, blank-faced boy with thick lips; the third seemed to be positively posing as the criminal he was alleged to be, being sneery, narrow-eyed and double-chinned, and bearing a two-day stubble beard. There was Effie amongst them, looking like Effie. The men were identified by French names, Effie by the name of Effie Gotham, wife of the millionaire guru.

  ‘What does she see in them?’ demanded Harvey. ‘It’s not so much that I’m jealous as that I’m intellectually insulted by the whole thing. I always have been by Effie’s attitude to life. I thought she’d grow out of it.’

  ‘I am to assume that Effie is not involved,’ said Stewart.

  ‘Well, there’s her picture along with the others. It’s difficult for me to keep up the fiction,’ Harvey said.

  ‘Do you mean that the photograph convinces you?’ Stewart said. ‘You know where the police got the photograph. Out of a drawer in your desk.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly out of a drawer in a desk,’ Harvey said. ‘It was out of a box. I keep things in boxes down there in my working cottage. I’ll take you to see it. I haven’t been back to the cottage since I was arrested in Epinal three days ago.’

  ‘Were you really arrested?’

  ‘Perhaps not technically. I was definitely invited to come along to the commissariat. I went.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Stewart, ‘why there’s been so little in the press about Nathan Fox. I only heard on the radio that he’d disappeared suddenly from your house. And they don’t include him in the gang. Maybe they couldn’t find a photograph of him. A photo makes a gangster real.’

  ‘There was an identikit of Effie in the papers the day I was hauled in,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Did it look like Effie?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. In fact it looked like Ruth. But it would pass for Effie. It looked like Job’s wife, too. You know, it was a most remarkable thing, Stewart, I was sitting in the museum at Epinal reflecting on that extraordinary painting of Job and his wife by Georges de La Tour, when suddenly the police —’

  ‘You told me that last night,’ said Stewart.

  ‘I know. I want to talk about it.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ said Stewart, ‘that it would be odd if Effie wanted alimony from you simply to finance the FLE, when she could have sold her jewellery?’

  ‘Hasn’t she done that?’

  ‘No, it’s still in the safety-box at the bank. I hold the second key. There’s still enough money in her bank to meet the standing orders for insurances and charities. Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Well, why did she want to fleece me?’

  ‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t have tried to get maintenance of some sort from you. It’s true that her child by Ernie Howe damaged her case. But you walked out on her. She behaved like a normal woman married to a man in your position.’

  ‘Effie is not a normal woman,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Oh, if you’re talking in a basic sense, what woman is?’

  ‘Women who don’t get arrested in Trieste for shoplifting are normal,’ said Harvey. ‘Especially women with her kind of jewellery in the bank. Whose side are you on, anyway, mine or Effie’s?’

  ‘In a divorce case, that is the usual question that the client puts, sooner or later. It’s inevitable,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘But this is something different from a divorce case. Don’t you realise what’s happened?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do,’ said Stewart.

  Next day was a Saturday. They sat in Harvey’s cottage, huddling over the stove because the windows had been opened to air the place. There had been a feeling of spring in the early March morning, but this had gone by eleven o’clock; it was now winter again, bleak, with a slanting rain. As Harvey unlocked the door of his little house Stewart said, ‘Lousy soil you’ve got here. Nothing much growing.’

  ‘I haven’t bothered to cultivate it.’

  ‘It’s better up at the château.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s had more attention.’

  This was Harvey’s first visit to the cottage since the police had pounced. He looked round carefully, opening the windows upstairs and downstairs, while Stewart lit the stove. ‘They haven’t changed the décor,’ Harvey said. ‘But a few bundles of papers are not in the places I left them in. Shifted, a matter of inches—but I know, I know.’

  ‘Have they taken any of your papers, letters, business documents?’

  ‘What letters and business papers? You have the letters and the business papers. All I have are my notes, and the manuscript of my little book, so far as it goes — it’s to be a monograph, you know. I don’t know if they’ve subtracted the few files, but they could have photographed them; much good might it do them. Files of notes on the Book of Job. They did take the photograph of Effie; that, they did take. I want it back.’

  ‘You’re entitled to ask for it,’ said Stewart.

  From the window, a grey family Citroën could be seen parked round a bend in the path, out of sight of the road; in it were two men in civilian clothes occupying the front seats. The rain plopped lazily on to the roof of the car and splashed the windscreen. ‘Poor bastards,’ Harvey said. ‘They do it in three— or four-hour shifts.’

  ‘Well, it’s a protection for you, anyway. From the press if not from the terrorists.’

  ‘I wish I was without the need for protection, and I wish you were in your office in London.’

  ‘I don’t go to the office on Saturday,’ Stewart said.

  ‘What do you do at the week-ends?’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Stewart.

  ‘Do you mean, fuck the question or that on Saturdays and Sundays you fuck?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Don’t you ever go to a concert or a film on Sundays? Never go to Church?’

  ‘Sometimes I go to a concert. I go away for the week-ends, often. I do the usual things.’

  ‘Well, you’re wasting your time here,’ Harvey said.

  ‘No, because first you’re my most valuable client. That’s from a practical point of view. And secondly, I’m interested in your Book of Job; it just beats me how a man of your scope should choose to hide himself away in this hole. And thirdly, of course, I’m a friend; I want to see you out of this mess. I strongly advise you to come back to London here and now. Do you have your passport?’

  ‘Yes, they gave me back my passport.’

  ‘Oh, they took it away?’

  ‘Yes, they took the stuff out of my pockets,’ Harvey said. ‘They gave it all back. I’m not leaving.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, all my books and things are here. I don’t see why I should run away. I intend to go on as usual. Besides, I’m anxious about Effie.’

  ‘Maybe Effie would move to another field of action if you weren’t in the Vosges,’ said Stewart. ‘You see, I don’t want you to become an unwilling accomplice.’

  ‘Effie follows the gang,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Doesn’t she lead it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know for certain that she’s in it. It’s all mere allegation on the part of the police.’

  Stewa
rt walked about the little room, with his scarf wound round his neck. ‘It’s chilly,’ he said. He was looking at the books. ‘Does Anne-Marie cook for you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, indifferently. She’s a police agent by profession.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t mean much,’ said Stewart, ‘when you know that she is.’

  ‘I used to love mealtimes with Effie,’ said Harvey. ‘I enjoyed the mealtimes more than the meals.’

  ‘Let’s go out somewhere for lunch,’ said Stewart.

  ‘We can go in to Nancy. Undoubtedly we’d be followed.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean much if you know you are being followed,’ said Stewart.

  Harvey stood in the middle of the room watching with an irritated air while Stewart fingered his books.

  ‘There’s nothing of interest,’ said Harvey, ‘unless you’re interested in the subject.’

  ‘Well, you know I am. I still don’t see why you can’t write your essay elsewhere.’

  ‘I’ve got used to it here.’

  ‘Would you like to have Ruth back?’ said Stewart.

  ‘Not particularly. I would like to have Clara back.’

  ‘With Effie?’

  ‘No, Effie isn’t a motherly type.’

  ‘Ruth is a mother?’

  ‘She is a born children’s nurse.’

  ‘But you would like to have Effie back?’ Stewart said, and he made light of this, as of all his questions, by putting them simultaneously with a flicking-through of the pages of Harvey’s books.

  ‘Yes, I would; in theory,’ said Harvey. ‘That is the New English Bible. The translation is godforsaken.’

  ‘Then you’d be willing to take Ruth back if she brought Clara. But you’d prefer to have Effie to make love to?’

  ‘That is the unattainable ideal. The New English Bible’s version of Job makes no distinction between Behemoth and Leviathan. They translate the two as “the crocodile”, which has of course some possibility as a theory, but it simply doesn’t hold in the context.’

  ‘I thought Behemoth was the hippopotamus,’ said Stewart.

  ‘Well, that’s the general view, not necessarily correct. However, the author of Job turns God into a poet at that point, proclaiming wonderful hymns to his own creation, the buffalo, the ostrich, the wild ass, the horse, the eagle; then there’s the sparrow-hawk. And God says, Consider this, look at that, reflect on their ways, how they live and survive; I did it all; where were you when I did it? Finally come Behemoth and Leviathan. Well, if you are going to translate both Behemoth and Leviathan as the crocodile, it makes far too long a passage, it gives far more weight to the crocodile as one of God’s marvels than is obviously intended. As for the features of Behemoth, they fit in with the hippopotamus or some large and similar creature equally as well as with the crocodile. Why should God be so proud of his crocodile that he devotes thirty-eight verses to it, and to the horse only seven?’