The Only Problem

Yours,

Harvey

Ruth came in, jogging in her arms the baby Clara who had a whole fist in her mouth and who made noises of half-laughing, half-crying. Soon, she would start to bawl. Ruth’s hair fell over her face, no longer like that of a curate’s wife.

‘Did you know that they want to sell the chateau?’ she said.

The chateau was half a mile up the grassy pathway which led away from the cottage. Harvey knew the owner and had seen the house; that was when he first rented the cottage. He knew it was up for sale, and had been for some years.

‘It’s falling to bits,’ he said to Ruth.

‘What a pity to neglect it like that!’ Ruth said. ‘It’s a charming house. It reminds me of something from my childhood, I don’t know quite what. Perhaps somewhere we visited. I think something could be done to it.’

She brought the fretful child close to Harvey so that he could make an ugly face. He showed his teeth and growled, whereupon Clara temporarily forgot her woes. She smelt of sour milk.

FOUR

Up at the chateau where the neglected lawns were greener than the patch round Harvey’s house, and where the shrubberies were thick and very dark evergreen, the workmen were putting in the daylight hours of the last few days before the Christmas holidays. She had already reclaimed one wing for habitation. The roof had been secured in that part, but most of the rooms were cold. Ruth had arranged one sitting room, however, with a fire, and two bedrooms with oil stoves. A good start.

What a business it had been to persuade Harvey to buy the chateau! And now he was enchanted. Once he agreed to buy — and that was the uphill work — it was simple. Harvey sent for his London lawyer, Stewart Cowper, and for his French lawyer, Martin Deschamps, to meet in Nancy and discuss the deal with the family who owned the chateau. Ruth had gone with Harvey to this meeting, in October, with Clara in her folding pram. When the hotel room got too boring for the baby, Ruth hushed her, put her in her pram and took her for a walk in Place Stanislas. It was not long before Ruth saw through the splendid gilt gates the whole business group, with Harvey, trooping out to take the sun and continue the deal in the glittering square. Harvey, his two lawyers, and the three members of the de Remiremont family, which comprised a middle-aged man, his daughter and his nephew, came and joined Ruth. The daughter put her hand on the handle of the pram. They all ambled round in a very unprofessional way, talking of notaries and tax and the laws governing foreigners’ property in France. You could see that this was only a preliminary.

Harvey said, ‘We have to leave you. I’m writing a book on the Book of Job.’

It was difficult to get across to them what the Book of Job was. Harvey’s French wasn’t at fault, it was their knowledge of the Bible of which, like most good Catholics, they had scant knowledge. They stood around, the father in his old tweed coat and trousers, the daughter and nephew in their woollen jumpers and blue jeans, puzzling out what was Job. Finally, the father remembered. It all came back to him. ‘You shouldn’t be in a hurry, then,’ he said. ‘Job had patience, isn’t that right? One says, “the patience of Job”.’

‘In fact,’ said Harvey, ‘Job was the most impatient of men.’

‘Well, it’s good to know what it is you’re writing in that wretched little cottage,’ said the elder man. ‘I often wondered.’

‘I hope we’ll soon have the house,’ said Ruth.

‘So do we,’ said the owner. ‘We’ll be glad to get rid of it.’ The young man and the girl laughed. The lawyers looked a little worried about the frankness and the freedom, suspecting, no doubt, some facade covering a cunning intention.

Ruth and Harvey left them then. It was all settled within a month except for the final bureaucracy, which might drag on for years. Anyhow, Harvey had paid, and Ruth was free to order her workmen to move in.

‘Instead of disabusing myself of worldly goods in order to enter the spirit of Job I seem to acquire more, ever more and more,’ was all that Harvey said.

Ruth wrote to Effie with her letter-pad on her knee, beside the only fireplace, while the workmen hammered away, a few days before Christmas.

Dear Effie,

I really am in love with Harvey and you have no reason to say I am not. The lovely way he bought the house — so casual — we just walked round the Place with Clara and the family who used to own the chateau — and Harvey shook hands and that was all. The lawyers are working it out, but the house is ours.

I can’t make out your letter. You don’t want Clara, at least not the bother of her. You despise Harvey. What do you mean, that I have stolen your husband and your child? Be civilised.

Ruth stopped, read what she had written, and tore it up. Why should I reply to Effie? What do I owe her? She stole a bit of chocolate, on principle. I stole her husband, not on principle. As for her child, I haven’t stolen her, she has abandoned her baby. All right, Effie is young and beautiful, and now has to work for her living. Possibly she’s broke.

Dear Effie,

What attracted me most about the chateau was the woodpecker in the tree outside the bedroom window. Why don’t you come and visit Clara?

Love,

Ruth

She sealed it up and put it on the big plate in the hall to be posted, for all the world as if the chateau was already a going concern. The big plate on a table by the door was all there was in the huge dusty hall, but it was a beginning.

Now she took sleeping Clara in her carry-cot and set her beside the driver’s seat in the car. She put a basket in the back containing bread, pate, a roast bantam hen and a bottle of Cote du Rhone, and she set off down the drive to Harvey’s house for lunch. The tired patch of withered shrubbery round Harvey’s cottage was still noticeably different from the rest of the chateau’s foliage, although Ruth had dug around a few bushes to improve them, and planted some bulbs. As soon as she pushed open the door she saw he had a visitor. She dumped the food basket and went back for the baby, having glimpsed the outline of a student, a young man, any student, with those blue jeans of such a tight fit, they were reminiscent of Elizabethan women’s breasts, in that you wondered, looking at their portraits, where they put their natural flesh. The student followed her out to the car. It was Nathan. ‘Nathan! It’s you, — you here. I didn’t recognise …’ He woke Clara with his big kiss, and the child wailed. He picked her up and pranced up and down with the wakened child. Harvey’s studious cottage was a carnival. Harvey said to Ruth, ‘I’ve told Nathan there will be room for him up at the house.’