‘What she wrote to me about was money. She wants money to get married with. I’m a busy man with things to do. Money; not enough money, but a lot. That’s what Effie boils down to.’
‘Oh, not entirely. I should have thought you wanted her to be happy. After all, you left her. You left Effie abruptly.’
Harvey waited a while. Time was not of an essence, here. ‘Well, she soon found consolation. But she can get a divorce quite easily. Ernie Howe has a job.’
Edward said, ‘I don’t know if you realise how hateful you can be, Harvey. If it wasn’t for your money you wouldn’t speak like that.’ For it struck him that, since Harvey had recently come into a vast share of a Canadian uncle’s fortune, he ought not to carry on as if he were the moderately well-off Harvey of old. This treatment of Effie was brutal.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Harvey, in his time. ‘I really don’t care what you mean, what you say. I’ll give you a letter to Stewart Cowper, my lawyer in London, with suitable instructions.’ Harvey got up and reached on a bookshelf for a block of writing paper and one envelope. He said, ‘I’ll write it now. Then you can go away.
He wrote without much reflection, almost as if he had come to an earlier decision about the paying off of Effie, and by how much, and had just been waiting for the moment Edward arrived to make a settlement. He addressed the envelope, put in the folded letter, then sealed it down. He handed it to Edward. ‘You can take it straight to him yourself. Quicker than posting it.’
Edward was astonished that Harvey had sealed the letter since he was to be the bearer. Bloody indelicate. He wondered why Harvey was trying to diminish him.
‘Harvey,’ he said, ‘are you putting on an act? Are you playing the part of a man who’s a swine merely because he can afford to be?’
Harvey took a lot of thought. Then, ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well, it doesn’t suit you. One meets that sort of character amongst the older generation of the motion picture and theatre world. I remember hearing a producer say to a script writer, “It’s the man who writes the cheque who has the final say in the script. And I’m the man who writes the cheque.” One still hears that sort of thing. He had yellow eye-balls.’
Harvey sat with folded arms staring at his loaded work-table.
‘I suppose you’re playing this part to relieve your feelings?’ Edward said.
‘I imagine you are relieving yours, Edward.’
‘I suppose you’re fairly disgusted with things,’ Edward said. ‘With Effie and so on. I know you left her that day in disgust when she was eating her stolen chocolate and talking about the sufferings of the hungry. All that. But Effie has some good points, you know. Some very good points.’
‘If you want a loan why don’t you ask for it?’ Harvey said, staring at his papers as if nostalgic for their lonely company.
Anxiety, suffering, were recorded in his face; that was certain. Edward wasn’t sure that this was not self-induced. Harvey had once said, ‘There can be only one answer to the question of why people suffer, irrespective of whether they are innocent or guilty; to the question of why suffering has no relation to the moral quality of the individual, of the tribe or of the nation, one way or another. If you believe that there is a Creator, a God, and that he is good, the only logical answer to the problem of suffering is that the individual soul has made a pact with God before he is born, that he will suffer during his lifetime. We are born forgetful of this pact, of course; but we have made it. Sufferers would, in this hypothesis, be pre-conscious volunteers. The same might apply to tribes or nations, especially in the past.’
Edward had been very impressed by this, by then the latest, idea of Harvey’s. (How many ideas about Job they had formulated in the past!) But he had said he still couldn’t see the need for suffering.
‘Oh, development involves suffering,’ Harvey had said.
‘I wonder if I made that agreement with God before I was born,’ said Edward at that time, ‘for I’ve suffered.’
‘We have all suffered,’ said Harvey, ‘but I’m talking about the great multitudes who are starving to death every year, for instance. The glaze—eyed infants.’
‘Could your theory be borne out by science?’
‘I think possibly there might be a genetic interpretation of it. But I’m talking theologically.’
When, now, Edward looked at his friend’s face and saw stress on it, rich and authoritative as Harvey was, swine as he could be, he envied him for the detachment with which he was able to set himself to working on the problem through the Book of Job. It was possible for a man like Harvey to be detached and involved at the same time. As an actor, Edward envied him. He also envied the ease with which he could write to his lawyer about his divorce from Effie without a thought for the money involved. As for Edward’s loan, Harvey had already written a cheque without a word, knowing, of course, that Edward would pay it back in time. And then, although Harvey wasn’t consistently generous, and had ignored Effie’s letters, Edward remembered how only a few months ago he had arranged bail through his ever-ready lawyer for Effie and Ruth’s student, Nathan, when they were arrested during a demonstration, and been had up for riot and affray. Effie didn’t need the bail money, for her lover came to the rescue first, but Nathan did. They were both bound over to keep the peace. Harvey’s money was so casual. Edward envied him that, and felt guilty, glimpsing again, for that sharp unthinkable instant, the possibility that he might like to part from Ruth as abruptly and as easily. Edward closed the subject in his mind quickly, very quickly. It had been established that Ruth and Edward always thought alike. Edward didn’t want to dwell on that thought, either.
As a theological student Edward had spent many an hour lying with Harvey Gotham on the grass in the great green university square if the weather was fine in the early summer, while the croquet mallets clicked on another part of the green, and the croquet players’ voices made slight exclamations, and together he and Harvey discussed the Book of Job, which they believed was not only as important, as amazing, a poem as it was generally considered to be, but also the pivotal book of the Bible.
Edward had always maintained that the link — or should he say fetter? — that first bound him to Harvey was their deep old love of marvellous Job, their studies, their analyses, their theories. Harvey used to lie on his back on the grass, one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee, while Edward sat by his side sunning his face and contemplating the old castle, while he listened with another part of his mind to Harvey’s talk. ‘It is the only problem. The problem of suffering is the only problem. It all boils down to that.’
‘Did you know,’ Edward remembered saying, ‘that when Job was finally restored to prosperity and family abundance, one of his daughters was called Box of Eye-Paint? Can we really imagine our tormented hero enjoying his actual reward?’
‘No,’ said Harvey. ‘He continued to suffer.’
‘Not according to the Bible.’
‘Still, I’m convinced he suffered on. Perhaps more.’
‘It seems odd, doesn’t it,’ Edward had said, ‘after he sat on a dung-heap and suffered from skin-sores and put up with his friends’ gloating, and lost his family and his cattle, that he should have to go on suffering.’
‘It became a habit,’ Harvey said, ‘for he not only argued the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable.’
‘But he wanted to argue with God.’
‘Yes, but God as a character comes out badly, very badly. Thunder and bluster and I’m Me, who are you? Putting on an act. Behold now Leviathan. Behold now Behemoth. Ha, ha among the trumpets. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? And Job, insincerely and wrongly, says, “I am vile.” And God says, All right, that being understood, I give you back double your goods, you can have fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses. And seven sons and three daughters. The third daughter was Kerenhappuch — that was Eye-Paint.’