The Only Problem

There’s an objective quality about love. Love-hate is obsessive, it is possessive. It can be evil in effect.’

‘Oh well,’ Edward said, ‘love-hate is a frequent human problem. It’s a very important problem, you can’t deny it.’

‘It’s part of the greater problem,’ said Harvey after a while. Edward knew what Harvey was coming round to and was pleased, now that he was sitting here with his drink and his old friend. It was the problem of suffering as it is dealt with in the biblical Book of Job. It was for this, in the first place, that Harvey had come to study here in the French countryside away from the environment of his family business and his friends.

Harvey was a rich man; he was in his mid-thirties. He had started writing a monograph about the Book of Job and the problem it deals with. For he could not face that a benevolent Creator, one whose charming and delicious light descended and spread over the world, and being powerful everywhere, could condone the unspeakable sufferings of the world; that God did permit all suffering and was therefore by logic of his omnipotence, the actual author of it, he was at a loss how to square with the existence of God, given the premise that God is good.

‘It is the only problem,’ Harvey had always said. Now, Harvey believed in God, and this was what tormented him. ‘It’s the only problem, in fact, worth discussing.’

It was just under a year after Harvey had disappeared that Effie traced him to St Die. She hadn’t been to see him herself, but she had written several times through his lawyer asking him what was the matter. She described to him the process by which she had tracked him down; when she read Edward the letter before she posted it he felt she could have left that part out, for she had traced him quite simply, but by trickery, of which Harvey would not see the charm; furthermore, her revelation of the trick compromised an innocent, if foolish, person, and this fact would not be lost on Harvey. His moral sense was always intensified where Effie was concerned.

‘Don’t tell him, Effie,’ Edward said, ‘how you got his address. He’ll think you unprincipled.’

‘He thinks that already,’ she said.

‘Well, this might be the finishing touch. There’s no need to tell.’

‘I don’t want him back.’

‘You only want his money,’ Edward said.

‘Oh, God, Edward, if you only knew what he was like to live with.’

Edward could guess. But he said, ‘What people are like to live with … It isn’t a good test to generalise on.’

‘He’s rich,’ said Effie. ‘He’s spoilt.’ Effie had a lover, Ernie Howe, an electronics expert. Effie was very good- looking and it was hardly to be expected that she would resist, year after year, the opportunities for love affairs that came her way all the time; she was really beautiful. Ernie Howe was a nice-looking man, too, but he lacked the sort of money Harvey had and Effie was used to. Ernie had his job, and quite a good one; Edward supposed that Effie, who herself had a job with an advertising firm, might have been content with the simpler life with him, if she was in love with Ernie. It was only that now she was expecting a baby she felt she might persuade Harvey to divorce her with a large settlement. Edward didn’t see why this should not be.

Harvey had never replied to any of Effie’s letters. She continued to write, care of his lawyer. She told him of her love-affair and mentioned a divorce.

Finally she managed to find his actual whereabouts in St Die, in a quite unpremeditated way. She had in fact visited the lawyer to try to persuade him to reveal the address. He answered that he could only forward a letter. Effie went home and wrote a letter, calling with it at the lawyer’s office the next day to save the extra time it would have taken in the post. She gave it to the receptionist and asked that it be forwarded. There were two or three letters on the girl’s desk, in a neat pile, already stamped. Acting on a brainwave Effie said, casually, ‘If you like, as I’m passing the post box, I’ll pop them all in.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ said the foolish girl, ‘I have to go beyond the bus stop to post letters.’ So she hastily filled in Harvey’s address and handed the letters to Effie with a smile. And although Edward said to Effie, ‘You shouldn’t tell Harvey how you got his address. It’ll put him right off. Counter-productive. And rather unfair on the poor girl at the lawyer’s office,’ she went ahead and wrote to Harvey direct, telling him of her little trick. ‘He’ll realise all the more how urgent it is,’ she said.

But still Harvey didn’t reply.

That was how Edward came to be on this errand to Harvey on her behalf. Incidentally, Edward also hoped for a loan. He was short of money till he got paid under his contract with the film people.

Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together. Harvey had never, to Edward’s knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten. Harvey seemed especially to choose the negative remarks he made all those years ago, ten, twelve, years ago, such as when he had said something unfavourable about Ruth, something that sounded witty, perhaps, at the time, but which he probably didn’t mean. Scarcely ever did Harvey remind him of the praise he devoted in sincere abundance to others, Ruth included. So many sweet things seemed to have spilled out of his ears as soon as they entered them; so many of the sour and the sharp, the unripe and frivolously carping observations he made, Harvey had saved up in his memory-bank at compound interest; it seemed to Edward that he capitalised on these past confidences at a time when they were likely to have the most deflating effect on him; he called this a breach of confidence in a very special sense. Harvey would deny this, of course; he would claim that he had a clear memory, that his reminders were salutary, that Edward was inclined to fool himself, and that the uncomfortable truths of the past were always happier in their outcome than convenient illusions.

And undoubtedly Harvey was often right. That he had a cold side was no doubt a personal matter. In Edward’s view it wasn’t incompatible with Harvey’s extremely good mind and his occasional flashes of generosity. And indeed his moral judgment. Perhaps a bit too much moral judgment.

Edward always spoke a lot about himself and Harvey as they were in their young days, even to people who didn’t know them. But few people listen carefully to the reminiscences of someone who has achieved nothing much in life; the end-product of a personal record has somehow to justify the telling. What did come across to Edward’s friends was that he had Harvey more or less on his mind. Edward wished something to happen in his own life to make him forget Harvey, get his influence out of his system. Only some big change in my life could do that, Edward thought. Divorce from Ruth, which was unthinkable (then how did I come to think it?). Or great success as an actor; something I haven’t got.

Eventually Edward said, as he sat in Harvey’s cottage in France, ‘I’ve come about Effie, mainly. Ruth’s anxious about her, very anxious. I’ve come here for Ruth’s sake.’

‘I recall,’ Harvey said, ‘how you told me once, when you first married Ruth, “Ruth is a curate’s wife and always