Read Online The Only Problem by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page B

my wife’s involved,’ said Harvey. He partly meant it.
     
     
    ‘Three of them, perhaps
four. Where are they?’
    ‘I don’t
know. You’d better look.’
    ‘You
recently bought the château. Why?’
    ‘I
thought I might as well. It was convenient.’
    ‘You’ve
been a year at the cottage?’
    ‘About
a year and a half.’
    ‘How
did you find it?’
    ‘I’ve
already explained —’
    ‘Explain
again.’
    ‘I
found the cottage,’ recited Harvey, ‘because I was in the Vosges at that time.
I had come here to Epinal expressly to look at the painting Job Visited by
His Wife by Georges de La Tour. I had heard through some friends that the
château was for sale. I went to look it over. I said I’d think about it, but I
was struck by the suitability of the cottage to my needs, and took that on in
the meantime. The owner, Claude de Remiremont, let me have it.’
    ‘How
much rent do you pay?’
    ‘I have
no idea,’ Harvey said. ‘Very little. My lawyer attends to that.’
    (The
rich!)
    This
interrogator was a man of about Harvey’s age, not more than forty, black hair,
blue eyes, a good strong face, tall. A chief-inspector, special branch; no
fool. His tone of voice varied. Sometimes he put his questions with the frank
lilt of a query at the end; at other times he simply made a statement as if
enunciating a proved fact. At the end of the table where they sat facing each
other, was a hefty policeman in uniform, older, with sandy hair growing thin
and faded. The door of the room opened occasionally, and other men in uniform
and ordinary clothes came and went.
    ‘Where
did you learn French?’
    ‘I have
always spoken French.’
    ‘You
have taken part in the French-Canadian liberation movement.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You
don’t believe in it?’
    ‘I don’t
know anything about it,’ said Harvey. ‘I haven’t lived in Canada since I was
eighteen.’
    ‘You
say that your wife’s sister has been living with you since last October.’
    ‘That’s
right.’
    ‘With a
baby.’
    ‘Yes. My
wife’s baby daughter.’
    ‘But
there was a woman with a baby in your house for a year before that.’
    ‘Not at
all. The baby was only born at the end of June last year.’
    ‘There
was another infant in your house. We have evidence, M. Gotham, that there was a
small child’s washing on the line outside your house at least from April of
last year.
    ‘That
is so. But there wasn’t any baby, there wasn’t any woman.’
    ‘Look,
M. Gotham, it is a simple trick for terrorists to take the precaution, in the
case of discovery, to keep a woman and a child in the house in order to avoid a
shoot-out. Rather a low and dangerous trick, using a baby as a cover, but
people of that nature —’There was no baby at all in my house, nobody but
myself,’ Harvey explained patiently. ‘It was a joke — for the benefit of my
brother-in-law who came to visit me. I brought some baby clothes and put them
out on the line. He obviously thought I had a girl living with me. I only put
them out a few times after that. I told my brother-in-law that I did it to keep
women from bothering me with offers of domestic care. As they do. They would
assume, you see, that there was a woman. I suppose I’m an eccentric. It was a
gesture.’
    ‘A
gesture.’
    ‘Well,
you might say,’ said Harvey, thinking fast how to say it, ‘that it was a
surrealistic gesture.’
    The
inspector looked at Harvey for rather a long time. Then he left the room and
came back with a photograph in his hand. Effie, in half-profile, three years
ago, with her hair blowing around.
    ‘Is
that your wife?’
    ‘Yes,’
said Harvey. ‘Where did you get this photograph?’
    ‘And
the woman you are living with, Ruth, is her sister?’
    ‘Mine
Jansen is her sister. Where did you get this photograph of my wife? Have you
been ransacking through my papers?’
    The
inspector took up the photograph and looked at it. ‘She resembles her sister,’
he said.
    ‘Did
you have a search