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something
to the effect, ‘Are you still going to be so righteous? If you’re going to die,
curse God and get it off your chest first. It will do you good.’ But even this,
perhaps homely, advice doesn’t fit in with the painting. Of course, the painter
was idealising some notion of his own; in his dream, Job and his wife are
deeply in love.
    Some
people had just arrived in the museum; Harvey could hear voices downstairs and
footsteps mounting. He continued to regard the picture, developing his
thoughts: Here, she is by no means the carrier of Satan’s message. She comes to
comfort Job, reduced as he is to a mental and physical wreck. ‘You speak,’ he
tells her, ‘as one of the foolish women;’ that is to say, he doesn’t call her a
foolish woman, he rather implies that she isn’t speaking as her normal self.
And he puts it to her, ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we
not receive evil?’ That domestic ‘we’ is worth noticing, thought Harvey; he
doesn’t mean to abandon his wife, he has none of the hostility towards her that
he has, later, for his friends. In order to have a better look at Job’s wife’s
face, Harvey put his head to one side. Right from the first he had been struck
by her resemblance to Effie in profile. She was like Ruth, too, but more like
Effie, especially about the upper part of her face. Oh, Effie, Effie, Effie.
    There
were people behind Harvey. He glanced round and was amazed to see four men
facing towards him, not looking at the other pictures as he had expected. Nor
were they looking at the painting of Job. They were looking at him, approaching
him. At the top of the staircase two other men in police uniform appeared. The
keeper looked embarrassed, bewildered. Harvey got up to face them. He realised
that, unconsciously, he had been hearing police sirens for some time. With the
picture of Job still in his mind’s eye, Harvey had time only to form an abrupt
impression before they moved in on him, frisked him, and invited him to descend
to the waiting police cars.
    Harvey
had time to go over again all the details of the morning, later, in between
interrogations. He found it difficult to get the rest of his life into focus;
everything seemed to turn on the morning: the time he had stopped at the
village shop; the drive to Epinal; the thoughts that had gone through his mind
in front of the painting, Job visité par sa femme, at the museum; the
moment he was taken to the police car, and driven over the bridge to the
commissariat for questioning.
    He
answered the questions with lucidity so long as they lasted. On and off, he was
interrogated for the rest of the day and half the night.
    ‘No, I’ve
never heard of the FLE.’
    ‘Fronte
de la Libération de l’Europe. You haven’t heard of
it?’
    ‘No, I
haven’t heard of it.’
    ‘You
know that your wife belongs to this organisation?’
    ‘I don’t
know anything about it.’
    ‘There
was an armed robbery in a supermarket outside Epinal this morning. You were
waiting here to join your wife.’
    ‘I’m
separated from my wife. I haven’t seen her for nearly two years.
    ‘It was
a coincidence that you were in Epinal this morning visiting a museum while your
estranged wife was also in Epinal engaged in an armed robbery?’
    ‘If my
wife was in Epinal, yes, it was a coincidence.’
    ‘Is
that your English sense of humour?’
    ‘I’m a
Canadian.’
    ‘Is it
a coincidence that other supermarkets and a jeweller’s shop in the Vosges have
been robbed by this gang in the last two weeks? Gérardmer, La Bresse, Baccarat;
this morning, Epinal.’
    ‘I don’t
read the papers.’
    ‘You
bought one this morning.’
    ‘I give
no weight to local crimes.’ If Effie’s involved, thought Harvey, plainly she’s
in this district to embarrass me. It was essential that he shouldn’t suggest
this, for at the same time it would point to Effie’s having directive authority
over the gang.
    ‘I
still can’t believe that