The Only Problem

will be.”‘

Edward was disconcerted. ‘Oh, I was only putting on an act. You know how it was in those days.’

In those days Edward had been a curate, doing so well with church theatricals that he was in demand from other parishes up and down the country. It wasn’t so very long before he realised he was an actor, not a curate, not a vicar in bud. Only his sermons interested him and that was because he had his own little stage up there in the pulpit, and an audience. The congregation loved his voice and his delivery. When he resigned, what they said mostly in their letters was ‘You were always so genuine in your sermons,’ and ‘One knew you felt every word.’ Well, in fact Edward was and did. But in fact he was more involved in the delivery of his sermons than in the substance. He said good-bye to the fund-raising performances of The Admirable Crichton and The Silver Box, not to mention A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the one chilly midsummer night when he was a curate.

He had played parts in repertory theatre, then that principal part (in The Curate’s Egg) on the West End, and was well launched in his film career, spasmodic and limited though it was, by the time he sat talking to Harvey on Effie’s behalf, largely for Ruth’s sake. To himself, Edward now described his acting career as ‘limited’ in the sense that too often he had been cast as a clergyman, an unfrocked priest or a welfare worker. But, at present, in the film provisionally entitled The Love-Hate Relationship, he had been cast in a different role, to his great pleasure; he was playing a sardonic scholar, a philosopher. Thinking himself into the part had made him feel extraordinarily equal to his discussion with Harvey; and he returned, with the confidence of the part, to the subject of Effie.

‘She wants a divorce,’ he said, and waited the inevitable few seconds for Harvey’s reply.

‘Nothing to stop her.’

‘She wants to get married, she’s expecting a baby by Ernie Howe. And you know very well she’s written to you about it.’

‘What she wrote to me about was money. She wants money to get married with. I’m a busy man with things to do. Money; not enough money, but a lot. That’s what Effie boils down to.’

‘Oh, not entirely. I should have thought you wanted her to be happy. After all, you left her. You left Effie abruptly.’

Harvey waited a while. Time was not of an essence, here. ‘Well, she soon found consolation. But she can get a divorce quite easily. Ernie Howe has a job.’

Edward said, ‘I don’t know if you realise how hateful you can be, Harvey. If it wasn’t for your money you wouldn’t speak like that.’ For it struck him that, since Harvey had recently come into a vast share of a Canadian uncle’s fortune, he ought not to carry on as if he were the moderately well-off Harvey of old. This treatment of Effie was brutal.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Harvey, in his time. ‘I really don’t care what you mean, what you say. I’ll give you a letter to Stewart Cowper, my lawyer in London, with suitable instructions.’ Harvey got up and reached on a bookshelf for a block of writing paper and one envelope. He said, ‘I’ll write it now. Then you can go away.

He wrote without much reflection, almost as if he had come to an earlier decision about the paying off of Effie, and by how much, and had just been waiting for the moment Edward arrived to make a settlement. He addressed the envelope, put in the folded letter, then sealed it down. He handed it to Edward. ‘You can take it straight to him yourself. Quicker than posting it.’

Edward was astonished that Harvey had sealed the letter since he was to be the bearer. Bloody indelicate. He wondered why Harvey was trying to diminish him.

‘Harvey,’ he said, ‘are you putting on an act? Are you playing the part of a man who’s a swine merely because he can afford to be?’

Harvey took a lot of thought. Then, ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well, it doesn’t suit you. One meets that sort of character amongst the older generation of the motion picture and theatre world. I remember hearing a producer say to a script writer, “It’s the man who writes the cheque who has the final say in the script. And I’m the man who writes the cheque.” One still hears that sort of thing. He had yellow eye-balls.’

Harvey sat with folded arms staring at his loaded work-table.

‘I suppose you’re playing this part to relieve your feelings?’ Edward said.

‘I imagine you are relieving yours, Edward.’

‘I suppose you’re fairly disgusted with things,’ Edward said. ‘With Effie and so on. I know you left her that day in disgust when she was eating her stolen chocolate and talking about the sufferings of the hungry. All that. But Effie has some good points, you know. Some very good points.’

‘If you want a loan why don’t you ask for it?’ Harvey said, staring at his papers as if nostalgic for their lonely company.

Anxiety, suffering, were recorded in his face; that was certain. Edward wasn’t sure that this was not self-induced. Harvey had once said, ‘There can be only one answer to the question of why people suffer, irrespective of whether they are innocent or guilty; to the question of why suffering has no relation to the moral quality of the individual, of the tribe or of the nation, one way or another. If you believe that there is a Creator, a God, and that he is good, the only logical answer to the problem of suffering is that the individual soul has made a pact with God before he is born, that he will suffer during his lifetime. We are born forgetful of this pact, of course; but we have made it. Sufferers would, in this hypothesis, be pre-conscious volunteers. The same might apply to tribes or nations, especially in the past.’

Edward had been very impressed by this, by then the latest, idea of Harvey’s. (How many ideas about Job they had formulated in the past!) But he had said he still couldn’t see the need for suffering.

‘Oh, development involves suffering,’ Harvey had said.

‘I wonder if I made that agreement with God before I was born,’ said Edward at that time, ‘for I’ve suffered.’

‘We have all suffered,’ said Harvey, ‘but I’m talking about the great multitudes who are starving to death every year, for instance. The glaze—eyed infants.’

‘Could your theory be borne out by science?’