Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party Page 3

  ‘Don’t take it,’ Anna-Luise said. We both in our ignorance thought it might be a writ.

  ‘Madame Jones, he has sent his best wishes for your happiness.’

  ‘You are a tax adviser, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘What are his best wishes worth? Do I have to declare them to the fisc?’

  I had opened the envelope. There was only a printed card inside. ‘Doctor Fischer requests the pleasure of the company of . . .’ (he had filled in the name Jones without so much as a Mister) ‘at a reunion of his friends and an informal dinner on . . .’ (he had written in ‘10 November’) ‘at 8.30 p.m. RSVP.’

  ‘It’s an invitation?’ Anna-Luise asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mustn’t go.’

  ‘He will be very disappointed,’ Monsieur Belmont said. ‘He particularly hopes that Monsieur Jones will come and join us all. Madame Montgomery will be there and of course Monsieur Kips and we hope that the Divisionnaire . . .’

  ‘A gathering of the Toads,’ Anna-Luise said.

  ‘Toads? Toads? I do not know the word. Please, he wishes very much to introduce your husband to all his friends.’

  ‘But I see from the card that my wife is not invited.’

  ‘None of our wives are invited. No ladies. It has become a rule for our little gatherings. I do not know why. There was once . . . but Madame Montgomery is the only exception now. You might say that in herself she is the representative of her sex.’ He added a piece of unfortunate slang, ‘She’s a good sort.’

  ‘I will send a reply this evening,’ I said.

  ‘You will miss a great deal, I assure you, if you do not come. Doctor Fischer’s parties are always very entertaining. He has a great sense of humour, and he is so generous. We have much fun.’

  We drank our bottle of champagne with Monsieur Excoffier at the Trois Couronnes and then we went home. The champagne was excellent, but the sparkle had gone out of the day. Doctor Fischer had introduced a conflict between us, for I began to argue that after all I had nothing really against Doctor Fischer. He could easily have opposed our marriage or at least expressed disapproval. By sending me an invitation to one of his parties he had in a sense given me a wedding present which it would be churlish to refuse.

  ‘He wants you to join the Toads.’

  ‘But I’ve got nothing against the Toads. Are they really as bad as you say? I’ve seen three of them. I admit I didn’t much care for Mrs Montgomery.’

  ‘They weren’t always Toads, I suppose. He’s corrupted all of them.’

  ‘A man can only be corrupted if he’s corruptible.’

  ‘And how do you know you aren’t?’

  ‘I don’t. Perhaps it’s a good thing to find out.’

  ‘So you’ll let him take you into a high place and show you all the kingdoms of the world.’

  ‘I’m not Christ, and he’s not Satan, and I thought we’d agreed he was God Almighty, although I suppose to the damned God Almighty looks very like Satan.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, ‘go and be damned.’

  The quarrel was like a dying wood fire: sometimes it seemed to dwindle out, but then a gathering of sparks would light a splinter of charred wood and flare for a moment into a flame. The dispute only ended when she wept against the pillow and I surrendered. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I don’t owe him anything. A piece of pasteboard. I won’t go. I promise I won’t go.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are right. I’m wrong. I know you aren’t a Toad, but you won’t know you aren’t unless you go to that damned party. Please go, I’m not angry any more, I promise. I want you to go.’ She added, ‘After all, he is my father. Perhaps he’s not all that bad. Perhaps he’ll spare you. He didn’t spare my mother.’

  We were tired out by the dispute. She fell asleep in my arms without making love and presently I slept too.

  Next morning I sent my formal reply to the invitation: ‘Mr A. Jones has pleasure in accepting Dr Fischer’s kind invitation . . .’ I couldn’t help saying to myself: What a fuss about nothing, but I was wrong, quite wrong.

  6

  The quarrel was not revived. That was one of the great qualities of Anna-Luise: she never went back to a quarrel or back on an agreed decision. I knew, when she decided to marry me, she meant it to be for life. She never once mentioned the party again and the next ten days were among the happiest I’ve ever spent. It was an extraordinary change for me to come home at night from the office to a flat which wasn’t empty and to the sound of a voice which I loved.

  On one occasion only the happiness seemed a little threatened when I had to go into Geneva to see an important Spanish confectioner from Madrid on some business for the firm. He gave me an excellent lunch at the Beau Rivage, but I couldn’t take full advantage of the meal because he talked about nothing but chocolate from our apéritifs on – I remember he chose an Alexander cocktail sprinkled with grains of chocolate. You might think the subject of chocolate a rather limited one, but it certainly wasn’t, not to an important confectioner with revolutionary ideas. He finished the meal with a chocolate mousse, which he criticized severely because it didn’t contain some scraps of orange skin. When I left I felt a bit liverish as though I had sampled every kind of chocolate my firm had ever manufactured.

  It was a heavy humid autumn day and I walked away towards the place where I had left my car, trying to escape the wetness of the air and the wetness of the lake and the taste of chocolate which clotted my tongue, when a woman’s voice said, ‘Why, Mr Smith, you are exactly the man I want.’ I turned and there was Mrs Montgomery in the doorway of an expensive shop – a kind of Swiss Asprey’s.

  I said, ‘Jones,’ automatically.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Oh, what a memory I have. I don’t know why I thought you were Mr Smith. But it doesn’t make any difference because it’s a man I want. Just a man. That’s all.’

  ‘Is this a proposition?’ I asked, but she didn’t see the joke.

  She said, ‘I want you to come in here and point out four objects which you would like to possess – if you were extravagant enough to buy them.’

  She pulled me into the shop by the arm and the sight of all those luxury goods sickened me rather as the chocolate at lunch had done – everything seemed to be in gold (eighteen carat) or platinum, although for the poorer customers there were objects in silver and pigskin. I remembered the rumours which I had heard about Doctor Fischer’s parties, and I thought I knew what Mrs Montgomery was after. She picked up a red morocco case containing a gold cigar-cutter. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have this?’ she asked. It would have cost me nearly a month’s salary.

  ‘I don’t smoke cigars,’ I said. I added, ‘You shouldn’t choose that. Didn’t he give those away at his wedding party? I don’t suppose Doctor Fischer likes repeating himself.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. I think after all they were swizzle sticks.’

  ‘But you aren’t sure?’ she asked in a tone of disappointment and put the cigar-cutter down. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is to find something which will please everybody – especially the men.’

  ‘Why not just give them cheques?’ I asked.

  ‘You can’t give cheques to people. It would be insulting.’

  ‘Perhaps none of you would be insulted if the cheques were large enough.’

  I could see she was reflecting on what I said, and I have reason to believe from what happened later that she must have repeated my remark to Doctor Fischer. She said, ‘It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. Think of giving a cheque to the General – it would look like a bribe.’

  ‘Generals have taken bribes before now. Anyway, he can’t be a general if he’s Swiss. He’s probably only a Divisionnaire.’

  ‘But the idea of giving a cheque to Mr Kips. Why, it’s unthinkable. You mustn’t tell anyone I told you, but Mr Kips in fact owns this store.’ She brooded. ‘What about a quartz watch in gold – or better still platinum? But then perhaps they have one alrea
dy.’

  ‘They could always sell the new one back.’

  ‘I’m sure not one of them would dream of selling a gift. Not a gift from Doctor Fischer.’

  So my guess proved to be right and the secret was out. I saw her gulp as though she were trying to swallow it back.

  I picked up a pigskin photograph frame. As though people who shopped in that store mightn’t be clever enough to know what one used a pigskin photograph frame for, the management had inserted a photograph of Richard Deane, the film star. Even I had read enough newspapers to recognize that handsome old-young face and the alcoholic smile.

  ‘What about this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you’re impossible,’ Mrs Montgomery wailed, but all the same, as it turned out, she must have repeated even that mocking suggestion back to Doctor Fischer.

  I think she was glad to see me go. I hadn’t been helpful.

  7

  ‘Do you hate your father?’ I asked Anna-Luise after I had told her all the events of that day, beginning with my lunch with the Spanish confectioner.

  ‘I don’t like him.’ She added, ‘Yes, I think I do hate him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He made my mother miserable.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was his pride. His infernal pride.’ She told me how her mother loved music, which her father hated – there was no doubt at all of that hatred. Why it was she had no idea, but it was as if music taunted him with his failure to understand it, with his stupidity. Stupid? The man who had invented Dentophil Bouquet and founded a fortune of many million francs stupid? So her mother began to slip away to concerts on her own and at one of them she met a man who shared her love of music. They even bought discs and listened to them in secret in his flat. When Doctor Fischer talked of the caterwauling of the strings she no longer tried to argue with him – she had only to walk down a street near the butcher’s, speak in a parlophone and take a lift to the third floor and listen for an hour happily to Heifetz. There was no sex between them – Anna-Luise was sure of that, it was not a question of fidelity. Sex was Doctor Fischer and her mother had never enjoyed it: sex was the pain of childbirth and a great sense of loneliness when Doctor Fischer grunted with pleasure. For years she had pretended pleasure herself: it wasn’t difficult to deceive him since her husband was not interested in whether she had pleasure or not. She might well have saved herself the trouble. All this she had told her daughter in one hysterical outburst.

  Then Doctor Fischer had discovered what she was about. He questioned her and she told him the truth, and he didn’t believe the truth – or perhaps he did believe, but it made no difference to him whether she was betraying him with a man or with a record of Heifetz, a record of all that caterwauling he couldn’t understand. She was leaving him by entering a region into which he couldn’t follow her. His jealousy so infected her that she began to feel he must have a reason for it – she felt herself guilty of something, though of what she wasn’t sure. She apologized, she abased herself, she told him everything – even which record of Heifetz pleased her most, and ever after it seemed to her that he made love with hatred. She couldn’t explain that to her daughter, but I could imagine the way it went – how he thrust his way in, as though he were stabbing an enemy. But he couldn’t be satisfied with one final blow. It had to be the death of a thousand cuts. He told her he forgave her, which only increased her sense of guilt, for surely there had to be something to forgive, but he told her also that he could never forget her betrayal – what betrayal? So he would wake her in the night to stab her with his goad again. She learnt that he had discovered the name of her friend – that harmless little lover of music – and he went to the man’s employer and gave him fifty thousand francs to sack him without a reference. ‘That was Mr Kips,’ she said. Her friend was only a clerk – he wasn’t important – he was no better than a clone that you could replace with another clone. His only distinguishing feature had been his love of music, and Mr Kips knew nothing of that. To Doctor Fischer it was an added humiliation that the man earned so little. He wouldn’t have minded being betrayed by another millionaire – or so her mother believed. He would certainly have despised Christ for being the son of a carpenter, if the New Testament had not proved in time to be such a howling commercial success.

  ‘What happened to the man?’

  ‘My mother never knew,’ Anna-Luise said. ‘He simply disappeared. And my mother disappeared too after a few years. I think she was like an African who can just will herself to die. She only spoke to me once about her private life and that’s what I’ve told you. As I remember it.’

  ‘And you? How did he treat you?’

  ‘He never treated me badly. He wasn’t interested in me enough for that. But do you know, I think the little clerk of Mr Kips had really pricked him to the heart, and he never recovered from the prick. Perhaps it was then he learned how to hate and to despise people. So the Toads were summoned to amuse him after my mother died. Mr Kips, of course, was the first of them. He couldn’t have been happy about Mr Kips. He had in a way exposed himself to Mr Kips. So he had to humiliate him like he humiliated my mother, because Mr Kips knew. He made him his lawyer, because that shut his mouth.’

  ‘But what did he do to Mr Kips?’

  ‘Of course you don’t know what Mr Kips looks like.’

  ‘I do. I saw him when I tried to see your father the first time.’

  ‘Then you know he’s bent almost double. Something wrong with his spine.’

  ‘Yes. I thought he looked like the number seven.’

  ‘He hired a well-known writer for children and a very good cartoonist and between them they produced a kind of strip-cartoon book called The Adventures of Mr Kips in Search of a Dollar. He gave me an advance copy. I didn’t know there was a real Mr Kips and I found the book very funny and very cruel. Mr Kips in the book was always bent double and always seeing coins people had dropped on the pavement. It was the Christmas season when the book appeared and my father arranged – for money of course – a big display in every bookshop window. The display had to be at a certain height, so that Mr Kips bent double could see if he passed that way. A lawyer’s name – especially an international lawyer who doesn’t deal in popular things like crime – is never very well known, even in the city where he lives, and I think only one bookshop objected for fear of libel. My father simply guaranteed to pay any costs. The book – I suppose most children are cruel – became a popular success. There were many reprints. There was even a strip-cartoon in a newspaper. I believe my father – and that must have given him great pleasure – made a lot of money out of it.’

  ‘And Mr Kips?’

  ‘The first he knew about it was at the first of my father’s special dinners. Everyone had a small and magnificent present – something in gold or platinum – beside his plate, except Mr Kips who had a big brown paper parcel containing a specially bound copy of the book in red morocco. He must have been furious, but he had to pretend to be amused before the other guests, and anyway he could do nothing because my father was paying him a very large retaining fee for which he did nothing at all and which he would lose if there was a quarrel. Who knows? Perhaps it was he who bought up so many copies that the book became a success. My father told me all about it. He thought the story was very funny. “But why poor Mr Kips?” I asked. Of course he didn’t tell me the real reason. “Oh, I’ll have fun with all of them in time,” he told me. “Then you’ll lose all your friends in time,” I said. “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “All my friends are rich and the rich are the greediest. The rich have no pride except in their possessions. You only have to be careful with the poor.”’

  ‘Then we are safe,’ I said. ‘We aren’t rich.’

  ‘Yes, but perhaps we aren’t poor enough for him.’

  She had a wisdom which I couldn’t match. Perhaps that was another of the reasons why I loved her.

  8

  Now that I’m alone in this flat I try to remember the happine
ss we shared before that first party with the Toads. But how does one convey happiness? Unhappiness we can so easily describe – I was unhappy, we say, because . . . We remember this and that, giving good reasons, but happiness is like one of those islands far out in the Pacific which has been reported by sailors when it emerges from the haze where no cartographer has ever marked it. The island disappears again for a generation, but no navigator can be quite certain that it only existed in the imagination of some long-dead lookout. I tell myself over and over again how happy I was in those weeks, but when I search my head for the reason I can find nothing adequate to explain my happiness.

  Is there happiness in a sexual embrace? Surely not. That is an excitement, a kind of delirium, and sometimes it is close to pain. Is happiness simply the sound of a quiet breath on the pillow beside me, or kitchen noises in the evening when I returned from work and read the Journal de Genève in our only easy chair? We could have well afforded a second chair, but somehow we never had the time to find one in those weeks, and when finally we bought it in Vevey – and a dishwasher too which substituted the noise of an engine room for the cheerful clangour of a human washing-up – the island of great happiness had been lost already in the haze.

  The approaching menace of Doctor Fischer’s party had come between us by that time and it filled our silences. A darker shadow than an angel passed over our heads. Once at the end of some such long pause I spoke my thought aloud: ‘I think I’ll write to him after all and tell him I can’t come. I’ll say . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We are taking a holiday, I’ll say – on the only date the firm will allow me.’

  ‘People don’t take holidays in November.’

  ‘Then I’ll write that you are not well and I can’t leave you.’

  ‘He knows that I’m as strong as a horse.’

  And that in a way was true, but the horse must have been a thoroughbred, which I believe always needs a great deal of care. She was slim and fine-boned. I liked to touch her cheek-bones and the curve of her skull. Her strength showed mainly in her small wrists which were as strong as whipcord: she could always open a screw-jar which foxed me.