The Only Problem

‘He wouldn’t like that,’ she said. ‘Four in the car.

‘It’s a big car.’

‘You couldn’t afford your share,’ said Effie, ‘could you?’

‘No, not all of it.’

‘What all this has to do with my love affairs, real or imagined,’ said Effie, ‘I really do not know.’

‘Don’t you?’ said Ruth.

‘Ruth,’ she said, ‘you’re a blackmailer, aren’t you?’

‘Only in your eyes. In my eyes it is simply that we’re going to come to Italy with you. Harvey won’t mind the money.’

‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘I’d rather you went ahead and told him all you know. Think of all the suffering in the world, the starving multitudes. Can’t you sacrifice a pleasure? Go ahead and tell Harvey what you know. Your sordid self- interest, your —’You shock me,’ Ruth said. ‘Stick to the point. Is it likely that I would go to your husband and say…?’

They went on holiday with Effie and Harvey, and they took Ruth’s student, Nathan, as well. Effie stole two bars of chocolate from the supermarket on the autostrada and Harvey left them abruptly. It was the end of their marriage. Fortunately Effie had enough money on her to pay for the rest of the trip. It was a holiday of great beauty. Effie tried to appreciate the pictures in the art galleries, the fountains in the squares, the ancient monuments and the Mediterranean abundance, but even basking on the beach she was uneasy.

Harvey saw Effie’s features in Ruth; it struck him frequently that she was what Effie should have been. It had been that situation where the visitor who came to stay remained to live. (Harvey had heard of an author who had reluctantly granted an interview to a young critic, who then remained with him for life. ) The arrangement was not as uncomfortable as it might have been, for Ruth had claimed and cleared one of the shacks outside the house, where she spent most of the daytime with the baby. She was careful to make the changes unobtrusively. Delivery vans drove up with rugs or with an extra stove, but it was all done in a morning. Harvey paid for the things. When the baby cried it upset him, but that was seldom, for Ruth drove off frequently with the child, no doubt to let it cry elsewhere. She took it with her when she went shopping.

It was three weeks after she had arrived that Ruth said, ‘I’m going to write to Edward.’

‘I have written,’ said Harvey.

‘I know,’ she said, and he wondered how she knew, since he had posted the letter himself. ‘But I’ll write myself. I couldn’t be the wife of an actor again.

‘If he was a famous actor?’

‘Well, he isn’t a famous actor. A part here, a part there, and sometimes a film. So full of himself when he has a part. It was a much better life for me when he was a curate.’

But she had no nostalgia even for those days of church fetes, evening lectures and sewing classes. She already had a grip of her new life, dominated as it was by the Book of Job.

‘You feel safer when you’re living with someone who’s in the God-business,’ Harvey said. ‘More at home.’

‘Perhaps that’s it,’ she said.

‘And a steadier income.’

‘Such as it is,’ she said, for she asked little for herself. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I was bored. He always agreed with me, and you don’t.’

‘That’s because you’re one of my comforters,’ Harvey said. ‘Job had his comforters to contend with; why shouldn’t I?’

‘Do you think of yourself as Job?’

‘Not exactly, but one can’t help sympathising with the man.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Ruth. ‘Job was a very rich man. He lost all his goods, and all his sons and daughters, and took it all very philosophically. He said, “The Lord gave, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Then he gets covered with boils; and it’s only then that his nerve gives way, he’s touched personally. He starts his complaint against God at that point only. No question of why his sons should have lost their lives, no enquiries of God about the cause of their fate. It’s his skin disease that sets him off.’

‘Maybe it was shingles,’ Harvey said. ‘A nervous disease. Anyway, it got on his nerves.

Ruth said, ‘He had to be touched himself before he would react. Touched in his own body. Utterly selfish. He doesn’t seem to have suffered much or he wouldn’t have been able to go into all that long argument. He couldn’t have had a temperature.’

‘I don’t agree. I think he had a high temperature all through the argument,’ Harvey said. ‘Because it’s high poetry. Or else, maybe you’re right; maybe it was the author who had the temperature. Job himself just sat there with a long face arguing against the theories of his friends.’

‘Make a note of that,’ Ruth commanded.

‘I’ll make a note.’ He did so.

‘Someone must have fed him,’ said Ruth. ‘Someone must have brought him meals to eat as he sat on the dung—hill outside the town.’

‘I’m not sure he sat on a dung-hill outside the town. That is an assumption based on an unverified Greek version of the text. He is merely said to have sat in the ashes on the ground. Presumably at his own hearth. And his good wife, no doubt, brought him his meals.’

Ruth had proved to be an excellent cook, cramped in the kitchen with that weird three-tiered kerosene stove of hers.

‘What do you mean, “his good wife”?’ Ruth said. ‘She told him, “Curse God and die.”‘