The Only Problem

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.

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 chateau 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, pate, 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 supermarches, les supermarches …’ 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 Musee of Epinal. He parked his car