‘Well, if I told you the truth you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ said Harvey.
‘All right, I don’t want to know.’
‘When I settled here I strung up the clothes-line. I have a sure system of keeping away the well-meaning women who always come round a lone man, wanting to cook and launder and mend socks and do the shopping; they love a bachelor; even in cities —no trouble at all getting domestic help for a single man. In my wanderings since I left Effie I’ve always found that a line of baby clothes, varying from day to day, keeps these solicitous women away; they imagine without thinking more of it, that there’s already a woman around.’
But Edward knew him too well; it was surely one of those demonstrative acts by which Harvey attempted to communicate with a world whose intelligence he felt was away behind his own. Harvey was always in a state of exasperation, and, it was true, always ten thoughts ahead of everybody around him. Always likely to be outrageous. The baby clothes probably belonged to his girl.
Edward left three hours later before Harvey was up. He still felt envious of Harvey for his invisible and probably non-existent girl and her baby.
TWO
Nathan Fox was sitting up with Ruth when Edward got back to London. It was a Sunday, a Pimlico Sunday with vacant parking spaces and lights in some of the windows.
Nathan had graduated in English literature, at the university where Ruth was now teaching, over a year before. He couldn’t get a job. Ruth looked after him most of the time. Edward always said he himself would do almost anything for Ruth; they saw eye to eye. So Nathan was quite welcome. But just that night on his return from France, very tired, and needing to get to bed for an early rise the next morning — he was due at the studio at seven —just that night Edward wished Nathan Fox wasn’t there. Edward was not at all sure how they would manage without Nathan. Nathan wasn’t ashamed of calling himself an intellectual, which, for people like themselves, made life so much easier; not that he was, in fact, an intellectual, really; he was only educated. But they could talk to Nathan about anything; and at the same time he made himself useful in the house. Indeed, he was a very fair cook. To a working couple like Ruth and Edward he was an invaluable friend.
It was just that night, and on a few previous occasions, Edward wished he wasn’t there. Edward wanted to talk to Ruth, to get to bed early. Nathan sat there in his tight jeans and his T-shirt with ‘Poetry Is Emotion Recollected In Tranquillity’ printed on it. He was a good-looking boy, tall, with an oval face, very smooth and rather silvery-green in colour — really olive. His eyebrows were smooth, black and arched, his hair heavy and sleek, quite black. But he wasn’t vain at all. He got up in the morning, took a shower, shaved and dressed, all in less than seven minutes. It seemed to Edward that the alarm in their room had only just gone off when he could smell the coffee brewing in the kitchen, and hear Nathan already setting the places for breakfast. Ruth, too, wondered how he managed it. His morning smile was delightful; he had a mouth like a Michelangelo angel and teeth so good, clear, strong and shapely it seemed to Edward, secretly, that they were the sexiest thing about him.
The only problem with Nathan was how to explain what he saw in them. They paid him and fed him as well as they could, but it was supposed to be only a fill-in-job. They were together as on a North Sea oil platform. It wasn’t that Nathan wouldn’t leave them, it now seemed he couldn’t. Edward thought, He is hankering after Effie, and we are the nearest he can get to her. Edward often wondered whether Effie would really marry Ernie Howe when she got her divorce from Harvey.
When Edward got back from France they had supper; he told Nathan and Ruth what had happened at Harvey’s cottage, almost from start to finish. Ruth wanted actually to see with her eyes the sealed letter to the lawyer; so that Edward got up from the table and fished it out of his duffel bag.
She turned it over and over in her hand; she examined it closely; she almost smelt it. She said, ‘How rude to seal down a letter you were to carry by hand.’
‘Why?’ said Nathan.
‘Because one doesn’t,’ Ruth piped primly, ‘seal letters that other people are to carry.
‘What about the postman?’
‘Oh, I mean one’s friends.’
‘Well, open it,’ said Nathan.
Edward had been rather hoping he would suggest this, and he knew Ruth had the same idea in mind. If they’d been alone, neither of them would have suggested it out loud, although it would certainly have occurred to them, so eager were they to know what Harvey had settled on Effie in this letter to his solicitors. They would have left the letter and their secret desires unopened. They were still somewhat of the curate and his wife, Ruth and himself.
But Nathan seemed to serve them like a gentleman who takes a high hand in matters of form, or an unselfconscious angel. In a way, that is what he was there for, if he had to be there. He often said things out of his inexperience and cheerful ignorance that they themselves wanted to say but did not dare.
‘Open it?’ said Ruth.
‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ said Edward.
‘You can steam it open,’ suggested Nathan, as if they didn’t know. ‘You only need a kettle.’
‘Really?’ said Ruth.
Nathan proceeded, very know-all: ‘It won’t be noticed. You can seal it up again. My mother steamed open my aunt’s letters. Only wanted to know what was in them, that’s all. Then later my aunt would tell a lot of lies about what was in the letters, but my mother knew the truth, of course. That was after my father died, and my mother and my auntie were living together.’
‘I don’t know that we have the right,’ said Ruth.
‘It’s your duty,’ Nathan pronounced. He turned to Edward, appealing: ‘In my mother’s case it wasn’t a duty, although she said it was. But in your case it’s definitely a duty to steam open that letter. It might be dynamite you’ve been carrying.’
Edward said, ‘He should have left it open. It might be really offensive or something. It was ill-mannered of Harvey. I noticed it at the time, in fact.’
