by Muriel Spark
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.’
‘Well, open it,’ said Nathan.
Edward had been rather hoping he would suggest this, and he knew Ruth had the same idea in mind. If they’d been alone, neither of them would have suggested it out loud, although it would certainly have occurred to them, so eager were they to know what Harvey had settled on Effie in this letter to his solicitors. They would have left the letter and their secret desires unopened. They were still somewhat of the curate and his wife, Ruth and himself.
But Nathan seemed to serve them like a gentleman who takes a high hand in matters of form, or an unselfconscious angel. In a way, that is what he was there for, if he had to be there. He often said things out of his inexperience and cheerful ignorance that they themselves wanted to say but did not dare.
‘Open it?’ said Ruth.
‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ said Edward.
‘You can steam it open,’ suggested Nathan, as if they didn’t know. ‘You only need a kettle.’
‘Really?’ said Ruth.
Nathan proceeded, very know-all: ‘It won’t be noticed. You can seal it up again. My mother steamed open my aunt’s letters. Only wanted to know what was in them, that’s all. Then later my aunt would tell a lot of lies about what was in the letters, but my mother knew the truth, of course. That was after my father died, and my mother and my auntie were living together.’
‘I don’t know that we have the right,’ said Ruth.
‘It’s your duty,’ Nathan pronounced. He turned to Edward, appealing: ‘In my mother’s case it wasn’t a duty, although she said it was. But in your case it’s definitely a duty to steam open that letter. It might be dynamite you’ve been carrying.’
Edward said, ‘He should have left it open. It might be really offensive or something. It was ill-mannered of Harvey. I noticed it at the time, in fact.’
‘You should have objected,’ Nathan said. Edward was now delighted that Nathan was there with them that evening.
‘It’s difficult to object,’ Ruth said. ‘But I think we have a right to know what’s in it. At least you do, Edward, since you’re the bearer.’
They steamed open the letter in the kitchen and stood reading it together.
Dear Stewart,
This letter is being brought to you by Edward Jansen, an old friend of mine from university days. I don’t know if you’ve met him. He’s a sort of actor but that is by the way. My wife Effie is his sister-in-law. He came to see me about Effie’s divorce. As you know I’m not contesting it. She wants a settlement. Let her go on wanting, let her sue.
The object of this letter is to tell you that I agree the date of Job is post-exile, that is, about 500 BC, but it could be the middle of the 5th century. It could easily be contemporaneous with the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. (The Philoctetes of Sophocles, another Job-style work, is dated I think about 409.)
Yours,
Harvey
‘I won’t deliver it,’ Edward said.
‘Oh, you must,’ said Nathan. ‘You mustn’t let him think you’ve opened it.’
‘There’s something fishy about it,’ Edward said. He was greatly annoyed.
‘Calling you a sort of actor,’ Ruth said, in a soothing voice that made him nearly choleric.
‘It’s Effie’s fault,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s brought out this quality in Harvey.’
‘Well, I’m too busy tomorrow to go in person to Gray’s Inn,’ Edward said.
‘I’ll deliver it,’ said Nathan.
THREE
It was October. Harvey sat at his writing-table, set against the wall of the main room in his little house.
‘Job 37, 5,’ he wrote, ‘God thundereth marvellously with his voice.’
‘I think we’ll have to send to England for some more cretonne fabric,’ said Ruth, looking over his shoulder.
It was at the end of August that Ruth had moved in, bringing with her Effie’s baby, a girl. The baby was now asleep for a merciful moment, upstairs.
Harvey looked up from his work. ‘I try to exude goodwill,’ he said. ‘You positively try to sweat it,’ Ruth said, kindly. And she wondered how it was that she had disliked and resented Harvey for so many years. It still amazed her to find herself here with him. That he was perfectly complacent about the arrangement, even cheerful and happy, did not surprise her so much; everything around him, she knew — all the comings and goings — were really peripheral to his preoccupation with the Book of Job. But her being there, with Effie’s baby, astonished her sometimes to the point of vertigo. This was not at all what she had planned when she decided to turn up at the cottage with Effie’s baby daughter.
Once, after she had settled in, she said to Harvey, ‘I didn’t plan this.’
‘It wasn’t a plan,’ said Harvey, ‘it was a plot.’
‘I suppose it looks like that from the outside,’ Ruth said. To her, what she had wanted was justice. Given Effie’s character, it was not to be expected that she would continue to live with Ernie Howe on his pay in a small house. Ruth had offered to take the baby when Effie decided she wasn’t in love with Ernie any more. Harvey’s money would perhaps not have made much difference to Effie’s decision. At any rate, Ruth had known that, somehow, in the end, she would have to take on Effie’s baby. It rather pleased her.
Effie was trying to sue Harvey for alimony, so far without success.
‘The lawyers are always on the side of the money,’ she said. Harvey continued to ignore her letters.
The baby, named Clara, had been born toward the end of June. Effie went back to her job in advertising for a short while after she had left Ernie Howe. Then she took a job with an international welfare organisation in Rome. Ernie wasn’t at all happy, at first, with Ruth’s plan to take the baby Clara to visit Harvey. They sat in the fl at in Pimlico where Ernie often came, now, for consolation, as much as to see his daughter.
‘He doesn’t sound the sort of man to have any sent-y-ments,’ Ernie said.
Edward wanted very
much to give Ernie some elocution lessons to restore his voice to the plain tones of his origins. ‘He hasn’t any sentimentality, but of course he has sentiments,’ said Edward.
‘Especially about his wife’s baby by a, well, a lover.’
‘As to that,’ said Edward, ‘he won’t care who the father is. He just won’t have any sentimental feelings, full stop.’
‘It’s a matter of justice,’ Ruth said.
‘How do you work that out?’ said Nathan.
‘Well, if it hadn’t been for Harvey leaving Effie she would never have had a baby by Ernie,’ Ruth said. ‘Harvey should have given her a child. So Harvey’s responsible for Clara; it’s a question of justice, and with all his riches it would be the best thing if he could take responsibility, pay Effie her alimony. He might even take Effie back.’
‘Effie doesn’t want to go back to Harvey Gotham,’ said Ernie.
‘Harvey won’t take her back,’ Edward said. ‘He believes that Effie boils down to money.
‘Alas, he’s right,’ said Ernie.
‘Why can’t Clara go on living with us?’ said Nathan, who already knew how to prepare the feeds and bath the baby.
‘I’m only taking her for a visit,’ Ruth said. ‘What’s wrong with that? You went to see Harvey, Edward. Now I’ll have a try.’
‘Be sure to bring her back, Ree-uth,’ said Ernie. ‘The legal position —’
‘Do you still want to marry Effie?’ Edward asked him.
‘No, quite frankly, I don’t.’
‘Effie’s so beautiful,’ Nathan said. He got up to replenish the drinks. ‘What a beautiful girl she is!’
‘A matter of justice. A balancing of accounts.’ This was how Ruth put it to Harvey. ‘I’m passionate about justice,’ she said.
‘People who want justice,’ Harvey said, ‘generally want so little when it comes to the actuality. There is more to be had from the world than a balancing of accounts.’
She supposed he was thinking of his character Job, as in fact he was. She was used to men answering her with one part of their mind on religion. That was one of the reasons why Edward had become so unsatisfactory after he had ceased to be a curate and become an actor.
Ruth and Effie grew up in a country rectory that to-day is converted into four commodious fats. The shabbiness of the war still hung over it in the late fifties, but they were only aware of the general decay by the testimony of their elders as to how things were ‘in the old days’, and the evidence of pre-war photographs of garden parties where servants and trees stood about, well-tended, and the drawing room chintzes were well-fitted and new. Otherwise, they simply accepted that life was a muddle of broken barrows, tin buckets in the garden sheds, overgrown gardens, neglected trees. They had an oak of immense girth; a mulberry tree older than the house, to judge from early sketches of the place. The graveyard had a yew the circumference and shape of their oval dining-table; the tree was hollow inside and the bark had formed itself into the shape of organ pipes. Yews were planted in graveyards, originally, because they poisoned cattle, and as they were needed for long-bows they were planted in a place where cattle didn’t go. All this Ruth picked up from God knows where; the air she breathed informed her. House-martins nested under the eaves outside Ruth’s room and used to make a dark-and-white flash almost up to the open window as they came and fled in the morning.
There was a worn carpet on the staircase up to the first landing.
After that, bare wood. Most of the rooms were simply shut for ever. They had been civil servants’ bedrooms in war-time before Ruth was born, and she never knew what it was like to see the houseful of people that the rectory was made for.
For most of Ruth’s life, up to the time Edward became an actor, religion was her bread and butter. Her father was what Edward at one time called a career-Christian; she assumed he was a believer too, as was her mother; but she never got the impression that either had time to think about it.
Effie was three years younger than Ruth. The sisters were very close to each other all their schooldays and in their early twenties. Ruth often wondered when exactly they had separated in their attitude to life. It was probably after Ruth’s return from Paris where she had spent a year with a family. Shortly afterwards Effie, too, went off to be an au pair in France.
If you are the child of a doctor or a butcher you don’t have to believe in your father’s occupation. But, in their childhood, they had to believe in their father’s job as a clergyman in a special way. Matins and Sunday services and Evensong were part of the job; the family was officially poor, which was to say they were not the poor in the streets and cottages, but poor by the standards of a country rector. Ruth’s mother was a free-lance typist and always had some work in hand. She could do seventy words a minute on her old pre-war typewriter. Before her marriage she had done a hundred and thirty words a minute at Pitman’s shorthand. Ruth used to go to sleep on a summer night hearing the tap-tapping of the typewriter below, and wake to the almost identical sound of the woodpecker in the tree outside her window. Ruth supposed this was Effie’s experience too, but when she reminded her sister of it many years later Effie couldn’t recall any sound effects.
Effie went to a university on her return from France and left after her first year about the time that Ruth graduated and married Edward. Ruth worked with and for Edward and the parish, organising a live crib at Christmas with a real baby, a real cow and a real virgin; she wrote special prayers to the Holy Spirit and the Trinity for the parish magazine (which she described as Prayers to the HS etc.) and she arranged bring-and-pay garden lunches. She lectured and made bedspreads, and she taught child-welfare and jam preserving.
Ruth was very much in the business. Effie, meanwhile, went off the rails, and when this was pointed out to her in so many words, she said, ‘What rails? Whose rails?’ It was Effie who first called Edward an actor more than a man of God, and she probably put the idea in his mind.
Effie was doing social work when Ruth got married. The sisters looked very much alike in their separate features; it was one of those cases where the sum total of each came out with a difference, to the effect that Effie was extremely beautiful and Ruth was nothing remarkable; perhaps it was a question of colouring and complexion. Whatever the reason, everyone looked at Effie in a special way. Both sisters were fair with the fair-lashed look and faint eyebrows of some Dutch portraits.
It was Edward who introduced Effie to Harvey Gotham. Effie was in the habit of despising the rich, but she married him. They had a small house in Chelsea and at first they travelled everywhere together.
When Edward became an actor Ruth got a job in a university, teaching twentieth century history. Edward had a television part which came to an end about the time Ruth discerned that Effie and Harvey were not getting on. Effie’s young men-friends from her days of welfare-work were always in her house, discussing their social conscience. Harvey was often away.
‘You’re sleeping around,’ Ruth said to Effie.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘I know,’ Ruth said.
‘What do you know?’
Ruth said, ‘I know all about it.’ What she meant was that she knew Effie.
‘You must be guessing,’ said Effie, very shaken.
‘I know,’ Ruth said, ‘that you’re having affairs. Not one only. Plural.’
Edward was still out of a job. They hadn’t any prospect of a holiday that year, but Effie and Harvey had planned a motoring trip in Italy.
Ruth said, ‘Why don’t you get Harvey to invite us to join you on your holiday in Italy?’
‘He wouldn’t like that,’ she said. ‘Four in the car.
‘It’s a big car.’
‘You couldn’t afford your share,’ said Effie, ‘could you?’
‘No, not all of it.’
‘What all this has to do with my love affairs, real or imagined,’ said Effie, ‘I really do not know.’
‘Don’t you?’ said Ruth.
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br /> ‘Ruth,’ she said, ‘you’re a blackmailer, aren’t you?’
‘Only in your eyes. In my eyes it is simply that we’re going to come to Italy with you. Harvey won’t mind the money.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘I’d rather you went ahead and told him all you know. Think of all the suffering in the world, the starving multitudes. Can’t you sacrifice a pleasure? Go ahead and tell Harvey what you know. Your sordid self-interest, your —’You shock me,’ Ruth said. ‘Stick to the point. Is it likely that I would go to your husband and say…?’
They went on holiday with Effie and Harvey, and they took Ruth’s student, Nathan, as well. Effie stole two bars of chocolate from the supermarket on the autostrada and Harvey left them abruptly. It was the end of their marriage. Fortunately Effie had enough money on her to pay for the rest of the trip. It was a holiday of great beauty. Effie tried to appreciate the pictures in the art galleries, the fountains in the squares, the ancient monuments and the Mediterranean abundance, but even basking on the beach she was uneasy.
Harvey saw Effie’s features in Ruth; it struck him frequently that she was what Effie should have been. It had been that situation where the visitor who came to stay remained to live. (Harvey had heard of an author who had reluctantly granted an interview to a young critic, who then remained with him for life. ) The arrangement was not as uncomfortable as it might have been, for Ruth had claimed and cleared one of the shacks outside the house, where she spent most of the daytime with the baby. She was careful to make the changes unobtrusively. Delivery vans drove up with rugs or with an extra stove, but it was all done in a morning. Harvey paid for the things. When the baby cried it upset him, but that was seldom, for Ruth drove off frequently with the child, no doubt to let it cry elsewhere. She took it with her when she went shopping.
