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frequently with the child, no doubt to let it cry
elsewhere. She took it with her when she went shopping.
    It was
three weeks after she had arrived that Ruth said, ‘I’m going to write to
Edward.’
    ‘I have
written,’ said Harvey.
    ‘I
know,’ she said, and he wondered how she knew, since he had posted the letter
himself. ‘But I’ll write myself. I couldn’t be the wife of an actor again.
    ‘If he
was a famous actor?’
    ‘Well,
he isn’t a famous actor. A part here, a part there, and sometimes a film. So
full of himself when he has a part. It was a much better life for me when he
was a curate.’
    But she
had no nostalgia even for those days of church fêtes, evening lectures and
sewing classes. She already had a grip of her new life, dominated as it was by
the Book of Job.
    ‘You feel
safer when you’re living with someone who’s in the God-business,’ Harvey said. ‘More
at home.’
    ‘Perhaps
that’s it,’ she said.
    ‘And a
steadier income.’
    ‘Such
as it is,’ she said, for she asked little for herself. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I was
bored. He always agreed with me, and you don’t.’
    ‘That’s
because you’re one of my comforters,’ Harvey said. ‘Job had his comforters to
contend with; why shouldn’t I?’
    ‘Do you
think of yourself as Job?’
    ‘Not
exactly, but one can’t help sympathising with the man.’
    ‘I don’t
know about that,’ said Ruth. ‘Job was a very rich man. He lost all his goods,
and all his sons and daughters, and took it all very philosophically. He said, “The
Lord gave, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Then he gets
covered with boils; and it’s only then that his nerve gives way, he’s touched
personally. He starts his complaint against God at that point only. No question
of why his sons should have lost their lives, no enquiries of God about the
cause of their fate. It’s his skin disease that sets him off.’
    ‘Maybe
it was shingles,’ Harvey said. ‘A nervous disease. Anyway, it got on his
nerves.
    Ruth
said, ‘He had to be touched himself before he would react. Touched in his own
body. Utterly selfish. He doesn’t seem to have suffered much or he wouldn’t
have been able to go into all that long argument. He couldn’t have had a
temperature.’
    ‘I don’t
agree. I think he had a high temperature all through the argument,’ Harvey
said. ‘Because it’s high poetry. Or else, maybe you’re right; maybe it was the
author who had the temperature. Job himself just sat there with a long face
arguing against the theories of his friends.’
    ‘Make a
note of that,’ Ruth commanded.
    ‘I’ll
make a note.’ He did so.
    ‘Someone
must have fed him,’ said Ruth. ‘Someone must have brought him meals to eat as
he sat on the dung—hill outside the town.’
    ‘I’m
not sure he sat on a dung-hill outside the town. That is an assumption based on
an unverified Greek version of the text. He is merely said to have sat in the
ashes on the ground. Presumably at his own hearth. And his good wife, no doubt,
brought him his meals.’
    Ruth
had proved to be an excellent cook, cramped in the kitchen with that weird
three-tiered kerosene stove of hers.
    ‘What
do you mean, “his good wife”?’ Ruth said. ‘She told him, “Curse God and die.”‘
    ‘That
was a way of expressing her exasperation. She was tired of his griping and she
merely wanted him to get it off his chest quickly, and finish.’
    ‘I
suppose the wife suffered,’ said Ruth. ‘But whoever wrote the book made nothing
of her. Job deserved all he got.’
    ‘That
was the point that his three friends tried to get across to him,’ Harvey said. ‘But
Job made the point that he didn’t deserve it. Suffering isn’t in proportion to
what the sufferer deserves.’
    Ruth
wrote in September:
     
    Dear Edward,
    I suppose you have gathered by now that I’ve changed my mind about
Harvey. I don’t know what he’s written to you.
    He really is a most