THE
ONLY PROBLEM
Muriel Spark
Surely I would speak to the Almighty,
and I desire to reason with God.
Book of Job, 13,3.
PART ONE
ONE
He was driving along the road in France from St Dié to Nancy in the district of Meurthe; it was straight and almost white, through thick woods of fir and birch. He came to the grass track on the right that he was looking for. It wasn’t what he had expected. Nothing ever is, he thought. Not that Edward Jansen could now recall exactly what he had expected; he tried, but the image he had formed faded before the reality like a dream on waking. He pulled off at the track, forked left and stopped. He would have found it interesting to remember exactly how he had imagined the little house before he saw it, but that, too, had gone.
He sat in the car and looked for a while at an old green garden fence and a closed gate, leading to a piece of overgrown garden. There was no longer a visible path to the stone house, which was something like a lodgekeeper’s cottage with loose tiles and dark, neglected windows. Two shacks of crumbling wood stood apart from the house. A wider path, on Edward’s side of the gate, presumably led to the château where he had no present interest. But he noticed that the car-tracks on the path were overgrown, very infrequently used, and yet the grass that spread over that path was greener than on the ground before him, inside the gate. If his wife had been there he would have pointed this out to her as a feature of Harvey Gotham, the man he had come to see; for he had a theory, too unsubstantiated to be formulated in public, but which he could share with Ruth, that people have an effect on the natural greenery around them regardless of whether they lay hands on it or not; some people, he would remark, induce fertility in their environment and some the desert, simply by psychic force. Ruth would agree with him at least in this case, for she didn’t seem to like Harvey, try as she might. It had already got to the point that everything Harvey did and said, if it was only good night, to her mind made him worse and worse. It was true there are ways and ways of saying good night. Yet Edward wondered if there wasn’t something of demonology in those confidences he shared with Ruth about Harvey; Ruth didn’t know him as well as Edward did. They had certainly built up a case against Harvey between themselves which they wouldn’t have aired openly. It was for this reason that Edward had thought it fair that he should come alone, although at first he expected Ruth to come with him. She had said she couldn’t face it. Perhaps, Edward had thought, I might be more fair to Harvey.
And yet, here he was, sitting in the car before his house, noting how the grass everywhere else was greener than that immediately surrounding the cottage. Edward got out and slammed the door with a bang, hoping to provoke the dark front door of the house or at least one of the windows into action. He went to the gate. It was closed with a rusty wire loop which he loosened. He creaked open the gate and walked up the path to the door and knocked. It was ten past three, and Harvey was expecting him; it had all been arranged. But he knocked and there was silence. This, too, was typical. He walked round the back of the house, looking for a car or a motor-cycle, which he supposed Harvey had. He found there a wide path, a sort of drive which led away from the back door, through the woods; this path had been hidden from the main road. There was no motor-cycle, but a newish small Renault, light brown, under a rush-covered shelter. Harvey, then, was probably at home. The back door was his front door, so Edward banged on that. Harvey opened it immediately and stood with that look of his, to the effect that he had done his utmost.
‘You haven’t cut your hair,’ he said.
Edward had the answer ready, heated-up from the pre-cooking, so many times had he told Harvey much the same thing. ‘It’s my hair, not your hair. It’s my beard, not your beard.’ Edward stepped into the house as he said this, so that Harvey had to make way for him.
Harvey was predictable only up to a point. ‘What are you trying to prove, Edward,’ he said, ‘wearing that poncho at your age?’ In the living room he pushed some chairs out of the way. ‘And your hair hanging down your back,’ he said.
Edward’s hair was in fact shoulder-length. ‘I’m growing it for a part in a film,’ he said then wished he hadn’t given any excuse at all since anyway it was his hair, not Harvey’s hair. Red hair.
‘You’ve got a part?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing here, then? Why aren’t you rehearsing?’
‘Rehearsals start on Monday.’
‘Where?’
‘Elstree.’
‘Elstree.’ Harvey said it as if there was a third party listening — as if to draw the attention of this third party to that definite word, Elstree, and whatever connotations it might breed.
Edward wished himself back in time by twenty minutes, driving along the country road from St Dié to Nancy, feeling the spring weather. The spring weather, the cherry trees in flower, and all the budding green on the road from St Dié had supported him, while here inside Harvey’s room there was no outward support. He almost said, ‘What am I doing here?’ but refrained because that would be mere rhetoric. He had come about his sister-in-law Effie, Harvey’s wife.
‘Your wire was too long,’ said Harvey. ‘You could have saved five words.’
‘I can see you’re busy,’ said Edward.
Effie was very far from Edward’s heart of hearts, but Ruth worried about her. Long ago he’d had an affair with beautiful Effie, but that was a thing of the past. He had come here for Ruth’s sake. He reminded himself carefully that he would do almost anything for Ruth.
‘What’s the act?’ said Harvey. ‘You are somehow not yourself, Edward.’
It seemed to Edward that Harvey always suspected him of putting on an act.
‘Maybe I can speak for actors in general; that, I don’t know,’ Edward said. ‘But I suppose that the nature of my profession is mirrored in my own experience; at least, for certain, I can speak for myself. That, I can most certainly do. In fact I know when I’m playing a part and when I’m not. It isn’t every actor who knows the difference. The majority act better off stage than on.’
Edward went into the little sitting room that Harvey had put together, the minimum of stuff to keep him going while he did the job he had set himself. Indeed, the shabby, green plush chairs with the stuffing coming out of them and the quite small work-table with the papers and writing materials piled on it (he wrote by hand) seemed out of all proportion to the project. Harvey was only studying a subject, preparing an essay, a thesis. Why all this spectacular neglect of material things? God knows, thought Edward, from where he has collected his furniture. There was a kitchen visible beyond the room, with a loaf of bread and a coffee mug on the table. It looked like a nineteenth century narrative painting. Edward supposed there were habitable rooms upstairs. He sat down when Harvey told him to. From where he sat he could see through a window a washing-line with baby clothes on it. There was no sign of a baby in the house, so Edward presumed this washing had nothing to do with Harvey; maybe it belonged to a daily help who brought along her child’s clothes to wash.
Harvey said, ‘I’m awfully busy.’
‘I’ve come about Effie,’ Edward said.
Harvey took a long time to respond. This, thought Edward, is a habit of his when he wants an effect of weightiness.
Then, ‘Oh, Effie,’ said Harvey, looking suddenly relieved; he actually began to smile as if to say he had feared to be confronted with some problem that really counted.