The Only Problem

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 visite 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 contemplated 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.

There were people behind Harvey. He glanced round and was amazed to see four men facing towards him, not looking at the other pictures as he had expected. Nor were they looking at the painting of Job. They were looking at him, approaching him. At the top of the staircase two other men in police uniform appeared. The keeper looked embarrassed, bewildered. Harvey got up to face them. He realised that, unconsciously, he had been hearing police sirens for some time. With the picture of Job still in his mind’s eye, Harvey had time only to form an abrupt impression before they moved in on him, frisked him, and invited him to descend to the waiting police cars.

Harvey had time to go over again all the details of the morning, later, in between interrogations. He found it difficult to get the rest of his life into focus; everything seemed to turn on the morning: the time he had stopped at the village shop; the drive to Epinal; the thoughts that had gone through his mind in front of the painting, Job visite par sa femme, at the museum; the moment he was taken to the police car, and driven over the bridge to the commissariat for questioning.

He answered the questions with lucidity so long as they lasted. On and off, he was interrogated for the rest of the day and half the night.

‘No, I’ve never heard of the FLE.’

‘Fronte de la Liberation de l’Europe. You haven’t heard of it?’

‘No, I haven’t heard of it.’

‘You know that your wife belongs to this organisation?’

‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘There was an armed robbery in a supermarket outside Epinal this morning. You were waiting here to join your wife.’

‘I’m separated from my wife. I haven’t seen her for nearly two years.

‘It was a coincidence that you were in Epinal this morning visiting a museum while your estranged wife was also in Epinal engaged in an armed robbery?’

‘If my wife was in Epinal, yes, it was a coincidence.’

‘Is that your English sense of humour?’

‘I’m a Canadian.’