The Only Problem

by Muriel Spark

  ‘No,’ said Harvey. ‘Neither did the policeman. We do not get what we merit. The one thing has nothing to do with the other. Your only course is to prevent it happening again.

  ‘Depend on us,’ said the policeman.

  ‘If I may say so,’ said Harvey, ‘you are wasting efforts on me which might profitably be directed to that end.’

  ‘Any clue, any suggestion …’ said Chatelain, with great patience. He almost pleaded. ‘Are there any houses in Paris that you know of, where they might be found?’

  ‘None,’ said Harvey.

  ‘No friends?’

  ‘The few people I know with establishments in Paris are occupied with business affairs in rather a large, multinational way. I don’t believe they would like the FLE.’

  ‘Nathan Fox is a good housekeeper?’

  ‘I believe he can be useful in a domestic way.’

  ‘He could be keeping a safe house for the gang in Paris.’

  ‘I don’t see him as the gangster type. Honestly, you know, I don’t think he’s in it.’

  ‘But your wife … She is different?’

  ‘I didn’t say so.’

  ‘And yourself?’

  ‘What about myself? What are you asking?’ Harvey said.

  ‘You have a connection with the gang?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you hang baby clothes on the line outside your cottage as early as last spring?’ said Chatelain next.

  Harvey was given a break at about seven in the evening. He was accompanied to a café for a meal by the tall young Parisian inspector with metal-rimmed glasses, Louis Pomfret by name.

  Pomfret spoke what could be described as ‘perfect English’, that awful type of perfect English that comes over Radio Moscow. He said something apologetic, in semi-disparagement of the police. Harvey couldn’t now remember the exact words. But he recalled Pomfret remarking, too, on the way to the café, ‘You must understand that one of their men has been killed.’ (‘Their’ men, not ‘our men’, Harvey noted.)

  At the café table the policeman told Harvey, ‘A Canadian lady arrived in Paris who attempted to reach you on the telephone, and we intercepted her. She’s your aunt. We’ve escorted her safely to the château where she desired to go.

  ‘God, it’s my Aunt Pet. Don’t give her any trouble.’

  ‘But, no.

  If you think you’ll make me grateful for all this courtesy, thought Harvey, you are mistaken. He said, ‘I should hope not.

  The policeman said, ‘I’m afraid the food here is ghastly.’

  ‘They make a good omelette. I’ve eaten here before,’ said Harvey.

  Ham omelettes and wine from the Vosges.

  ‘It’s unfortunate for you, Gotham,’ said Pomfret, ‘but you appreciate, I hope, our position.’

  ‘You want to capture these members of the FLE before they do more damage.’

  ‘Yes, we do. And of course, we will. Now that a member of the police has been killed … You appreciate, his wife was shopping in a supermarket with her son of twelve, who had a transistor radio. She was taking no interest in the programme. At one point the boy said —’

  ‘Are you sure it was a boy?’ Harvey said.

  ‘It was a girl. How do you know?’

  ‘The scene has been described to me by your colleague.’

  ‘You’re very observant,’ Pomfret smiled, quite nicely.

  ‘Well, of course I’m observant in a case like this,’ said Harvey. ‘I’m hanging on your lips.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To hear if you have any evidence that my wife is involved with a terrorist gang.’

  ‘We have a warrant for her arrest,’ said Pomfret.

  ‘That’s not evidence.’

  ‘I know. But we don’t put out warrants without reason. Your wife was arrested in Trieste. She was definitely lodging there with a group which has since been identified as members of the FLE gang. When the police photograph from the incident at Trieste noticeably resembled the photograph we obtained from you, and also resembled the identikit made up from eyewitnesses of the bombings and incursions here in France, we call that sufficient evidence to regard your wife as a suspect.’

  ‘I would like to see the photograph from Trieste,’ said Harvey. ‘Why haven’t I been shown it?’

  ‘You are not investigating the case. We are.’

  ‘But I’m interested in her whereabouts,’ Harvey said. ‘What does this photograph from the police at Trieste look like?’

  ‘It’s an ordinary routine photograph that’s taken of all people under arrest. Plain and flat, like a passport photograph. It looks like your wife. It’s of no account to you.

  ‘Why wasn’t I shown it, told about it?’

  ‘I think you can see it if you want.’

  ‘Your people at the commissariat evidently don’t believe me when I say I don’t know where Effie is.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s why you’ve been questioned. You’ve never been officially convoked.’

  ‘The English word is summoned.’

  ‘Summoned; I apologise.’

  ‘Lousy wine,’ said Harvey.

  ‘It’s what you get in a cheap café,’ said Pomfret.

  ‘They had better when I ate here before,’ said Harvey. ‘Look, all you’ve got to go on is an identikit made in France which resembles two photographs of my wife.’

  ‘And the address she was residing at in Trieste. That’s most important of all.’

  ‘She is inclined to take up with unconventional people,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Evidently, since she married yourself.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Harvey, ‘I’m very conventional, believe it or not.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your mode of life in France. For an affluent man to establish himself in a cottage and study the Book of Job is not conventional.’

  ‘Job was an affluent man. He sat among the ashes. Some say, on a dung-heap outside the city. He was very conventional. So much so that God was bored with him.’

  ‘Is that in the scriptures?’ said the policeman.

  ‘No, it’s in my mind.’

  ‘You’ve actually written it down. They took photocopies of some of your pages.

  ‘I object to that. They had no right.’

  ‘It’s possible they had no right. Why have you never brought in a lawyer?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Exactly. But it would be the conventional thing to do.’

  ‘I hope you’re impressed,’ said Harvey. ‘You see, if I were writing a film-script or a pornographic novel, you wouldn’t find it so strange that I came to an out-of-the way place to work. It’s the subject of Job you can’t understand my giving my time to.’

  ‘More or less. I think, perhaps, you’ve been trying to put yourself in the conditions of Job. Is that right?’

  ‘One can’t write an essay on Job sitting round a swimming pool in a ten-acre park, with all that goes with it. But I could just as well study the subject in a quiet apartment in some city. I came to these parts because I happened to find the cottage. There is a painting of Job and his wife here in Epinal which attracts me. You should see it.’

  ‘I should,’ said Pomfret. ‘I shall.’

  ‘Job’s wife looks remarkably like my wife. It was painted about the middle of the seventeenth century so it can’t be Effie, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘We were discussing Job, not Mine Effie.’

  ‘Then what am I doing here,’ said Harvey, ‘being interrogated by you?’

  Pomfret remained good-natured. He said something about their having a supper and a talk, not an interrogation. ‘I am genuinely interested,’ said Pomfret, ‘speaking for myself. You are isolated like Job. But you haven’t lost your goods and fortune. Any possibility of that?’

  ‘No, but I’m as good as without them here. More so before I took the château.’

  ‘Oh, I was fo
rgetting the château. I’ve only seen your cottage, from the outside. It looks impoverished enough.’

  ‘It was the boils that worried Job.’

  ‘Pardon? The boils?’

  ‘Boils. Skin-sores. He was covered with them.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that is correct. Don’t you, like Job, feel the need of friends to talk to in your present troubles?’

  ‘One thing that the Book of Job teaches us,’ Harvey said, ‘is the futility of friendship in times of trouble. That is perhaps not a reflection on friends but on friendship. Friends mean well, or make as if they do. But friendship itself is made for happiness, not trouble.’

  ‘Is your aunt a friend?’

  ‘My Aunt Pet, who you tell me has arrived at the château? — I suppose she thinks of herself as a friend. She’s a bore, coming at this moment. At any moment. — You don’t suppose this is anything but an interrogation, do you? Any more questions?’

  ‘Would you like some cheese?’

  Harvey couldn’t help liking the young man, within his reservation that the police had, no doubt, sent him precisely to be liked. Soften me up as much as you please, Harvey thought, but it doesn’t help you; it only serves to release my own love, my nostalgia, for Effie. And he opened his mouth and spoke in praise of Effie, almost to his own surprise describing how she was merry at parties, explaining that she danced well and was fun to talk to. ‘She’s an interesting woman, Effie.’

  ‘Intellectual?’

  ‘We are all more intellectual than we know. She doesn’t think of herself as an intellectual type. But under a certain stimulus, she is.’

  They were walking back to the commissariat. Harvey had half a mind to go home and let them come for him with an official summons, if they wanted. But it was only half a mind; the other half, mesmerised and now worked up about Effie, propelled him on to the police station with his companion.

  ‘She tried some drugs, I suppose,’ said Pomfret.

  ‘You shouldn’t suppose so,’ said Harvey. ‘Effie is entirely antidrug. It would be extraordinary if she’s taken to drugs in the last two years.

  ‘You must recognise,’ said Pomfret, ‘that she is lively and vital enough to be a member of a terrorist gang.’

  ‘Lively and vital,’ said Harvey, ‘lively and vital — one of those words is redundant.’

  Pomfret laughed.

  ‘However,’ said Harvey, ‘it’s out of the question that she could be a terrorist.’ He had a suspicion that Pomfret was now genuinely fascinated by the images of Effie that Harvey was able to produce, Effie at a party, Effie an interesting talker, a rich man’s wife; his imagination was involved, beyond his investigator’s role, in the rich man’s mechanism, his free intellectual will, his casual purchase of the château; Pomfret was fascinated by both Effie and Harvey.

  ‘A terrorist,’ said Pomfret. ‘She obviously has an idealistic motive. Why did you leave her?’

  The thought that Effie was a member of a terrorist band now excited Harvey sexually.

  ‘Terrorist is out of the question,’ he said. ‘I left her because she seemed to want to go her own way. The marriage broke up, that’s all. Marriages do.’

  ‘But on a hypothesis, how would you feel if you knew she was a terrorist?’

  Harvey thought, I would feel I had failed her in action. Which I have. He said, ‘I can’t imagine.’

  At the police station Pomfret left him in a waiting-room. Patiently sitting there was a lean-faced man with a dark skin gone to a muddy grey, bright small eyes and fine features. He seemed to be a Balkan. What was he doing there? It was after nine in the evening. Surely it was in the morning that he would come about his papers. Perhaps he had been picked up without papers? What sort of work was he doing in Epinal? He wore a black suit, shiny with wear; a very white shirt open at the neck; brown, very pointed shoes; and he had with him a brown cardboard brief-case with tinny locks, materials such as Harvey had only seen before in the form of a suitcase on a train in a remote part of Sicily. The object in Sicily had been old and battered, but his present companion’s brief-case had a new-bought look. It was not the first time Harvey had noticed that poor people from Eastern Europe resembled, not only in their possessions and clothes, but in their build and expression, the poor of Western Europe years ago. Who he was, where he came from and why, Harvey was never to know, for he was just about to say something when the door opened and a policeman in uniform beckoned the man away. He followed with nervous alacrity and the door closed again on Harvey. Patience, pallor and deep anxiety: there goes suffering, Harvey reflected. And I found him interesting. Is it only by recognising how flat would be the world without the sufferings of others that we know how desperately becalmed our own lives would be without suffering? Do I suffer on Effie’s account? Yes, and perhaps I can live by that experience. We all need something to suffer about. But Job, my work on Job, all interrupted and neglected, probed into and interfered with: that is experience, too; real experience, not vicarious, as is often assumed. To study, to think, is to live and suffer painfully.

  Did Effie really kill or help to kill the policeman in Paris whose wife was shopping in the suburbs at the time? Since he had left the police station on Saturday night he had recurrently put himself to imagine the scene. An irruption at a department store. The police arrive. Shots fired. Effie and her men friends fighting their way back to their waiting car (with Nathan at the wheel?). Effie, lithe and long-legged, a most desirable girl, and quick-witted, unmoved, aiming her gun with a good aim. She pulls the trigger and is away all in one moment. Yes, he could imagine Effie in the scene; she was capable of that, capable of anything.

  ‘Will you come this way, please, Mr Gotham?’

  There was a stack of files on Chatelain’s desk.

  The rest of that night Harvey remembered as a sort of roll-call of his visitors over the past months; it seemed to him like the effect of an old-fashioned village policeman going his rounds, shining his torch on name-plates and door-knobs; one by one, each name surrounded by a nimbus of agitated suspicion as his friends’ simple actions, their ordinary comings and goings came up for questioning. It was strange how guilty everything looked under the policeman’s torch, how it sounded here in the police headquarters. Chatelain asked Harvey if he would object to the conversation being tape-recorded.

  ‘No, it’s a good thing. I was going to suggest it. Then you won’t have to waste time asking me the same questions over and over again.’

  Chatelain smiled sadly. ‘We have to check.’ Then he selected one of the files and placed it before him.

  ‘Edward Jansen,’ he said, ‘came to visit you.

  ‘Yes, he’s the husband of my wife’s sister, Ruth, now separated. He came to see me last April.’

  Chatelain gave a weak smile and said, ‘Your neighbours seem to remember a suspicious-looking character who visited you last spring.’

  ‘Yes, I daresay that was Edward Jansen. He has red hair down to his shoulders. Or had. He’s an actor and he’s now famous. He is my brother-in-law through his marriage to my wife’s sister, but he’s now separated from his wife. A lot can happen in less than a year.

  ‘He asked you why there were baby clothes on the line?’

  ‘I don’t remember if he actually asked, but he made some remark about them because I answered, as you know, “The police won’t shoot if there’s a baby in the house.”‘

  ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘I can’t answer precisely. I didn’t foresee any involvement with the police, or I wouldn’t have said it.’

  ‘It was a joke?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘Do you still hear from Edward Jansen?’ Chatelain opened one of the files.

  ‘I haven’t heard for some time.’

  Chatelain flicked through the file. ‘

  ‘There’s a letter from him waiting for you at your house.’

  ‘Thanks. I expect you can tell me the contents. ‘

  ‘No, we can’t.’r />
  ‘That could be taken in two senses,’ Harvey said.

  ‘Well, you can take it in one sense: we haven’t opened it. The name and address of the sender is on the outside of the envelope. As it happens, we know quite a lot about Mr Jansen, and he doesn’t interest us at the moment. He’s also been questioned.’ Chatelain closed the file, evidently Edward’s dossier; it was rather thin compared with some of the others. Chatelain took up another and opened it, as if starting on a new subject. Then, ‘What did you discuss with Edward Jansen last April?’

  ‘I can’t recall. I know his wife, Ruth, was anxious for me to make a settlement on her sister and facilitate a divorce. I am sure we didn’t discuss that very much, for I had no intention of co-operating with my wife to that end. I know we discussed the Book of Job.’

  ‘And about Ruth Jansen. Did you invite her to stay?’

  ‘No, she came unexpectedly with her sister’s baby, about the end of August.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘August is a very boring month for everybody.’

  ‘You really must be serious, Mr Gotham.’

  ‘It’s as good a reason as any. I can’t analyse the motives of a woman who probably can’t analyse them herself.’

  Chatelain tapped the file. ‘She says here that she brought the baby, hoping to win you over to her view that the child would benefit if you made over a substantial sum of money to its mother, that is, to your wife Effie.’

  ‘If that’s what Ruth says, I suppose it is so.’

  ‘She greatly resembles your wife.’

  ‘Yes, feature by feature. But of course, to anyone who knows them they are very different. Effie is more beautiful, really. Less practical than Ruth.’

  Pomfret came in and sat down. He was less free of manner in the presence of the other officer. He peered at the tape-recording machine as if to make sure everything was all right with it.

  ‘So you had a relation with Mrs Jansen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your sister-in-law and wife of your friend.’

  ‘Yes, I grew fond of Ruth. I was particularly taken by the baby. Of course, by this time Ruth and Edward had parted.’