‘Don’t tell him, Effie,’ Edward said, ‘how you got his address. He’ll think you unprincipled.’
‘He thinks that already,’ she said.
‘Well, this might be the finishing touch. There’s no need to tell.’
‘I don’t want him back.’
‘You only want his money,’ Edward said.
‘Oh, God, Edward, if you only knew what he was like to live with.’
Edward could guess. But he said, ‘What people are like to live with … It isn’t a good test to generalise on.’
‘He’s rich,’ said Effie. ‘He’s spoilt.’ Effie had a lover, Ernie Howe, an electronics expert. Effie was very good-looking and it was hardly to be expected that she would resist, year after year, the opportunities for love affairs that came her way all the time; she was really beautiful. Ernie Howe was a nice-looking man, too, but he lacked the sort of money Harvey had and Effie was used to. Ernie had his job, and quite a good one; Edward supposed that Effie, who herself had a job with an advertising firm, might have been content with the simpler life with him, if she was in love with Ernie. It was only that now she was expecting a baby she felt she might persuade Harvey to divorce her with a large settlement. Edward didn’t see why this should not be.
Harvey had never replied to any of Effie’s letters. She continued to write, care of his lawyer. She told him of her love-affair and mentioned a divorce.
Finally she managed to find his actual whereabouts in St Dié, in a quite unpremeditated way. She had in fact visited the lawyer to try to persuade him to reveal the address. He answered that he could only forward a letter. Effie went home and wrote a letter, calling with it at the lawyer’s office the next day to save the extra time it would have taken in the post. She gave it to the receptionist and asked that it be forwarded. There were two or three letters on the girl’s desk, in a neat pile, already stamped. Acting on a brainwave Effie said, casually, ‘If you like, as I’m passing the post box, I’ll pop them all in.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ said the foolish girl, ‘I have to go beyond the bus stop to post letters.’ So she hastily filled in Harvey’s address and handed the letters to Effie with a smile. And although Edward said to Effie, ‘You shouldn’t tell Harvey how you got his address. It’ll put him right off. Counter-productive. And rather unfair on the poor girl at the lawyer’s office,’ she went ahead and wrote to Harvey direct, telling him of her little trick. ‘He’ll realise all the more how urgent it is,’ she said.
But still Harvey didn’t reply.
That was how Edward came to be on this errand to Harvey on her behalf. Incidentally, Edward also hoped for a loan. He was short of money till he got paid under his contract with the film people.
Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together. Harvey had never, to Edward’s knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten. Harvey seemed especially to choose the negative remarks he made all those years ago, ten, twelve, years ago, such as when he had said something unfavourable about Ruth, something that sounded witty, perhaps, at the time, but which he probably didn’t mean. Scarcely ever did Harvey remind him of the praise he devoted in sincere abundance to others, Ruth included. So many sweet things seemed to have spilled out of his ears as soon as they entered them; so many of the sour and the sharp, the unripe and frivolously carping observations he made, Harvey had saved up in his memory-bank at compound interest; it seemed to Edward that he capitalised on these past confidences at a time when they were likely to have the most deflating effect on him; he called this a breach of confidence in a very special sense. Harvey would deny this, of course; he would claim that he had a clear memory, that his reminders were salutary, that Edward was inclined to fool himself, and that the uncomfortable truths of the past were always happier in their outcome than convenient illusions.
And undoubtedly Harvey was often right. That he had a cold side was no doubt a personal matter. In Edward’s view it wasn’t incompatible with Harvey’s extremely good mind and his occasional flashes of generosity. And indeed his moral judgment. Perhaps a bit too much moral judgment.
Edward always spoke a lot about himself and Harvey as they were in their young days, even to people who didn’t know them. But few people listen carefully to the reminiscences of someone who has achieved nothing much in life; the end-product of a personal record has somehow to justify the telling. What did come across to Edward’s friends was that he had Harvey more or less on his mind. Edward wished something to happen in his own life to make him forget Harvey, get his influence out of his system. Only some big change in my life could do that, Edward thought. Divorce from Ruth, which was unthinkable (then how did I come to think it?). Or great success as an actor; something I haven’t got.
Eventually Edward said, as he sat in Harvey’s cottage in France, ‘I’ve come about Effie, mainly. Ruth’s anxious about her, very anxious. I’ve come here for Ruth’s sake.’
‘I recall,’ Harvey said, ‘how you told me once, when you first married Ruth, “Ruth is a curate’s wife and always 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.’