The Only Problem

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 chateau.’

‘Oh, I was forgetting the chateau. 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 chateau? — 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 chateau; 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