‘Are you off to Paris for Christmas?’ Harvey enquired. This was his first meeting with Nathan since the holiday in Italy when Harvey had abandoned his party on the autostrada; he felt he could be distant and impersonal without offence.
‘I’ve come mainly to visit Clara for Christmas,’ said Nathan. He was lifting the baby out of the carry-cot.
‘Let her sleep,’ Harvey said.
‘Oh, Nathan must stay over Christmas,’ Ruth said. ‘Paris will be crowded. And dreadfully expensive.’ She added, ‘Nathan is a marvellous cook.’
‘So I have heard.’
Ruth didn’t notice, or affected not to notice, a look of empty desperation on Harvey’s face; a pallor, a cornered look; his lips were parted, his eyes were focusing only on some anguished thought. And he was, in fact, suddenly aghast: What am I doing with these people around me? Who asked this fool to come and join us for Christmas? What do I need with Christmas, and Ruth, and a baby and a bloody little youth who needs a holiday? Why did I buy that château if not for Ruth and the baby to get out of my way? He looked at his writing-table, and panicked.
‘I’m going out, I’ll just fetch my coat,’ he said, thumping upstairs two at a time.
‘Harvey, what’s the matter?’ said Ruth when he appeared again with his sheepskin jacket, his woollen hat. Rain had started to splash down with foul eagerness.
‘Don’t you want lunch?’ she said.
‘Excuse me. I’m studious,’ said Harvey, as he left the cottage. The car door slammed. The starter wouldn’t work at first try. The sound of Harvey working and working at the starter became ever more furious until finally he was off.
When he came back in the evening the little house was deserted, all cleaned up. He poured himself a whisky, sat down and started to think of Effie. She was different from Ruth, almost a race apart. Ruth was kind, or comparatively so. Effie wasn’t comparatively anything, certainly not kind. She was absolutely fascinating. Harvey remembered Effie at parties, her beauty, part of which was a quick-witted merriment. How could two sisters be so physically alike and yet so totally different? At any moment Ruth might come in and reproach him for not having the Christmas spirit. Effie would never do that. Ruth was thoroughly bourgeois by nature; Effie, anarchistic, aristocratic. I miss Effie, I miss her a lot, Harvey told himself. The sound of Ruth’s little car coming down the drive, slowly in the mist, chimed with his thought as would the stroke of eight if there was a clock in the room. He looked at his watch, eight o’clock precisely. She had come to fetch him for dinner; three dinner-places set out on the table of the elegant room in the château, and the baby swinging in a hammock set up in a corner.
Ruth came in. ‘You know, Harvey,’ she said, ‘I think you might be nicer to Nathan. After all, it’s Christmas time. He’s come all this way, and one should have the Christmas spirit.’
Nathan was there, at the château, settled in for Christmas. Harvey thought: I should have told him to go. I should have said I wanted Ruth and the baby to myself for Christmas. Why didn’t I? —Because I don’t want them to myself. I don’t want them enough; not basically.
Ruth looked happy, having said her say. No need to say any more. I can’t hold these women, Harvey thought. Neither Effie nor Ruth. My mind isn’t on them enough, and they resent it, just as I resent it when they put something else before me, a person, an idea. Yes, it’s understandable.
He swallowed down a drink and put on his coat.
‘Nathan thinks it was marvellous of you to buy the château just to make me comfortable with Clara,’ said Ruth.
‘I bought it for myself, too, you know. I always thought I might acquire it.’
‘Nathan has been reading the Book of Job, he has some ideas.’
‘He did his homework, you mean. He must think I’m some sort of monster. In return for hospitality he thinks he has to discuss my subject.’
‘He’s polite. Besides, it’s my subject too, now,’ said Ruth.
‘Why?’ said Harvey. ‘Because I’ve put you in the château?’
He thought, on the way through the misty trees that lined the long drive, They think I’m such a bore that I have to bribe them to come and play the part of comforters.
He made himself cheerful at the château; he poured drinks. In his anxiety to avoid the subject of Job, to be normal, to make general conversation, Harvey blurted out the other thing he had on his mind:
‘Any news of Effie?’
God, I’ve said the wrong thing. Both Nathan and Ruth looked, for a moment, startled, uncomfortable; both, discernibly, for different reasons. Nathan, Harvey supposed, had been told to avoid the subject of Effie. Ruth didn’t want to bring Effie into focus; it was enough that she was still Harvey’s wife, out there vaguely somewhere else, out of sight.
‘Effie?’ said Ruth.
‘I heard from her,’ said Nathan. ‘Only a postcard, after she got out.’
‘Out from where?’
‘From prison in Trieste. Didn’t you hear about it?’
‘Harvey never discusses Effie,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ve only just heard about it. She wrote to me last week from London, but she didn’t mention prison.’
‘What happened?’ said Harvey.
‘She was caught shop-lifting in a supermarket in Trieste. She said she did it to obtain an opportunity to study a women’s prison at firsthand. She got out after three days. There was a small paragraph about it in the Telegraph, nothing in the other papers; it was about a month ago,’ Ruth said. ‘Nathan just told me.
‘All she said on the card was that she was going to Munich,’ said Nathan.
‘I wish her well of Munich,’ said Harvey.
‘I thought it was a beautiful town,’ Ruth said.
‘You thought strangely. There is a carillon clock with dancers coming out of the clock-tower twice a day. That’s all there is in Munich.’
‘She has friends there,’ Nathan said. ‘She said on the card she was joining friends in Munich. She seems to be getting around.’
‘Well, I’m glad, for Effie, there is something else in Munich besides the carillon clock. Who made this soup?’
‘Nathan did,’ said Ruth.
‘It’s great.’ He wondered why Stewart Cowper hadn’t told him about Effie being arrested. He felt over-protected. How can you deal with the problem of suffering if everybody conspires to estrange you from suffering? He felt like the rich man in the parable: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for him to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
‘One must approach these things with balanced thought,’ Ruth was saying, alarmingly. Harvey bent his mind to take in what they were discussing. It emerged that they were talking about the huge price Nathan had paid for the taxi from the airport to the château.
‘There’s a train service,’ Harvey said.
‘I’ve just been telling him that,’ said Ruth. ‘Spending all that money, as much as the air fare. He could have phoned me from the airport.’
‘I don’t have the number,’ said Nathan.
‘Oh, yes, I forgot,’ said Ruth. ‘No-one gets the number. Harvey has to be protected; in his position everyone wants him for something. He’s here to study an important subject, write a thesis, get away from it all. You have to realise that, Nathan.’
Nathan turned to Harvey. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about Effie.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I asked you about her, after all.’
‘Yes, you did,’ said Ruth. She had served veal, delicately cooked in white wine. ‘You did bring up the subject, Harvey.’
‘A beautiful girl, Effie,’ said Nathan. ‘What a lovely girl she is!’
Harvey wondered how much he knew about how beautiful Effie was. He looked at Nathan and thought, He has barged into my peace, he’s taking his place for Christmas, he’s discussing my wife as if she was everybody’s girl (which she is), and he’s going to get together again with Ruth; they will conspire how to protect me. Finally, he will ask me for a loan.