Towards evening, on the day when Edward visited Harvey at his place near St Dié, Harvey went out and brought in the baby clothes. He didn’t fold them; he just dumped them on a chair in the little scullery at the back of the kitchen. He seemed to forget that he was impatient for Edward to leave. He brought out some wine, some glasses, cheese and bread. In fact, Edward could see that Harvey didn’t want him to leave, lest he should feel lonely afterwards. Edward had been feeling rather guilty at interrupting what was probably a fairly contented solitude. Now, it was not that he regretted imposing his presence, but that by doing so he must impose the absence to follow. For Harvey more and more seemed to want him to remain. Edward said something about catching a night ferry. He thought, Surely Harvey’s involved with the mother of the baby whose clothes he’s just brought in off the line. They must be the clothes of an infant not more than a year old. Where are the mother and child?
There was no sign of any mother or child apart from the clothes Harvey had dumped on a chair. Edward was envious, too. He was envious of Harvey’s woman and his child. He wanted, at that moment, to be free like Harvey and to have a girl somewhere, but not visible, with a baby.
Harvey said, ‘It’s fairly lonely here.’ By which Edward knew for certain that Harvey was suddenly very lonely indeed at the thought of his leaving. The mother and child were probably away for the night.
‘Stay the night,’ said Harvey. ‘There’s plenty of room.’
Edward wanted to know where Harvey had been and what he’d been doing since he disappeared on the autostrada. But they did not talk of that. Harvey told him that Effie was writing a thesis on child labourers in the Western democracies, basing much of it on Kingsley’s The Water Babies. She hadn’t told Edward this. Harvey seemed pleased that he had a bit more news of her than Edward had. But then they had a laugh over Effie and her zeal in the sociological industry.
Harvey made up a bed for him in a sort of cupboard-room upstairs. It was nearly four in the morning when he pulled the extra rough covers over a mattress and piled two cushions for a pillow. From the doorway into Harvey’s bedroom Edward could see that the bed was narrow, the furniture quite spare in a cheap new way. He said, ‘Where’s the baby?’
‘What baby?’ Harvey said.
‘The baby whose washing was out on the line.’
‘Oh that,’ said Harvey; ‘that’s only my safeguard. I put baby clothes out on the line every day and bring them in at night. I change the clothes every other day, naturally.’
Edward wondered if Harvey had really gone mad.
‘Well, I don’t understand,’ Edward said, turning away as if it didn’t matter.
‘You see,’ said Harvey, ‘the police don’t break in and shoot if there’s likely to be a baby inside. Otherwise they might just break in and shoot.’
‘Go to hell,’ Edward said.
‘Well, if I told you the truth you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ said Harvey.
‘All right, I don’t want to know.’
‘When I settled here I strung up the clothes-line. I have a sure system of keeping away the well-meaning women who always come round a lone man, wanting to cook and launder and mend socks and do the shopping; they love a bachelor; even in cities —no trouble at all getting domestic help for a single man. In my wanderings since I left Effie I’ve always found that a line of baby clothes, varying from day to day, keeps these solicitous women away; they imagine without thinking more of it, that there’s already a woman around.’
But Edward knew him too well; it was surely one of those demonstrative acts by which Harvey attempted to communicate with a world whose intelligence he felt was away behind his own. Harvey was always in a state of exasperation, and, it was true, always ten thoughts ahead of everybody around him. Always likely to be outrageous. The baby clothes probably belonged to his girl.
Edward left three hours later before Harvey was up. He still felt envious of Harvey for his invisible and probably non-existent girl and her baby.
TWO
Nathan Fox was sitting up with Ruth when Edward got back to London. It was a Sunday, a Pimlico Sunday with vacant parking spaces and lights in some of the windows.
Nathan had graduated in English literature, at the university where Ruth was now teaching, over a year before. He couldn’t get a job. Ruth looked after him most of the time. Edward always said he himself would do almost anything for Ruth; they saw eye to eye. So Nathan was quite welcome. But just that night on his return from France, very tired, and needing to get to bed for an early rise the next morning — he was due at the studio at seven —just that night Edward wished Nathan Fox wasn’t there. Edward was not at all sure how they would manage without Nathan. Nathan wasn’t ashamed of calling himself an intellectual, which, for people like themselves, made life so much easier; not that he was, in fact, an intellectual, really; he was only educated. But they could talk to Nathan about anything; and at the same time he made himself useful in the house. Indeed, he was a very fair cook. To a working couple like Ruth and Edward he was an invaluable friend.
It was just that night, and on a few previous occasions, Edward wished he wasn’t there. Edward wanted to talk to Ruth, to get to bed early. Nathan sat there in his tight jeans and his T-shirt with ‘Poetry Is Emotion Recollected In Tranquillity’ printed on it. He was a good-looking boy, tall, with an oval face, very smooth and rather silvery-green in colour — really olive. His eyebrows were smooth, black and arched, his hair heavy and sleek, quite black. But he wasn’t vain at all. He got up in the morning, took a shower, shaved and dressed, all in less than seven minutes. It seemed to Edward that the alarm in their room had only just gone off when he could smell the coffee brewing in the kitchen, and hear Nathan already setting the places for breakfast. Ruth, too, wondered how he managed it. His morning smile was delightful; he had a mouth like a Michelangelo angel and teeth so good, clear, strong and shapely it seemed to Edward, secretly, that they were the sexiest thing about him.
The only problem with Nathan was how to explain what he saw in them. They paid him and fed him as well as they could, but it was supposed to be only a fill-in-job. They were together as on a North Sea oil platform. It wasn’t that Nathan wouldn’t leave them, it now seemed he couldn’t. Edward thought, He is hankering after Effie, and we are the nearest he can get to her. Edward often wondered whether Effie would really marry Ernie Howe when she got her divorce from Harvey.
When Edward got back from France they had supper; he told Nathan and Ruth what had happened at Harvey’s cottage, almost from start to finish. Ruth wanted actually to see with her eyes the sealed letter to the lawyer; so that Edward got up from the table and fished it out of his duffel bag.
She turned it over and over in her hand; she examined it closely; she almost smelt it. She said, ‘How rude to seal down a letter you were to carry by hand.’
‘Why?’ said Nathan.
‘Because one doesn’t,’ Ruth piped primly, ‘seal letters that other people are to carry.
‘What about the postman?’
‘Oh, I mean one’s friends.’