Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party Page 6

  ‘You needn’t trouble about him,’ Mr Steiner said. ‘He doesn’t talk and he doesn’t hear when you speak to him. I sometimes wonder what he’s thinking. Of the long voyage ahead of him perhaps.’

  ‘I was afraid in the shop that you’d embarked on that voyage too.’

  ‘I’m not as lucky as that.’

  It was obvious that no conscious will in him had fought against death. He said, ‘She looks exactly like her mother did when she was that age.’

  ‘That gave you the shock.’

  ‘I thought at first it was my imagination. I used to look for likenesses in other women’s faces for years after she died, and then I gave it up. But this morning you used his name. He’s still alive, I suppose. I’d surely have read in the papers if he had died. Any millionaire gets an obituary in Switzerland. You must know him as you married his daughter.’

  ‘I’ve met him twice, that’s all, and it’s enough.’

  ‘You are not his friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s a hard man. He doesn’t even know me by sight, but he ruined me. He as good as killed her – though it was no fault of hers. I loved her, but she didn’t love me. He had nothing to fear. It would never have happened again.’ He looked quickly at the old man and was reassured. ‘She loved music,’ he said, ‘Mozart in particular. I have a disc of the Jupiter at home. I’d like to give it to your wife. You could tell her I found it in the stock room.’

  ‘We haven’t a gramophone – only a cassette player.’

  ‘It was made before the days of cassettes,’ he said as a man might have referred to ‘before the days of motorcars’.

  I asked him, ‘What do you mean – it would never have happened again?’

  ‘It was my fault – and Mozart’s . . . and her loneliness. She wasn’t responsible for her loneliness.’ He said with a touch of anger (perhaps, I thought, if he had been given enough time he might have learnt how to fight), ‘Perhaps he knows now what loneliness is like.’

  ‘So you were lovers,’ I said. ‘I thought from what Anna-Luise told me it had never come to that.’

  ‘Not lovers,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t call it that – not in the plural. She spoke to me next day, on the telephone, while he was at the office. We agreed it wasn’t right – not right, I mean, for her to get mixed up with a lot of lies. There was no future in it for her. There wasn’t much future for her anyway as it turned out.’

  ‘My wife says that she just willed herself to die.’

  ‘Yes. My will wasn’t strong enough. It’s strange, isn’t it, she didn’t love me and yet she had the will to die. I loved her and yet I hadn’t enough will to die. I was able to go to the cemetery because he didn’t know me by sight.’

  ‘So there was somebody there to cry for her – besides Anna-Luise and the servants.’

  ‘What do you mean? He cried. I saw him cry.’

  ‘Anna-Luise said he didn’t.’

  ‘She’s wrong. She was only a child. I don’t suppose she noticed. It’s not important anyway.’

  Who was right? I thought of Doctor Fischer at the party whipping on his hounds. I certainly couldn’t imagine him crying, and what did it matter? I said, ‘You know you’d always be welcome. I mean my wife would be glad to see you. A drink one evening?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not. I don’t think I could bear it. You see, they look so much alike.’

  There was nothing more to be said after that. I never expected to see him again. I took it for granted that he had recovered this time, though his death would not have appeared in any paper. He was not a millionaire.

  I repeated to Anna-Luise what he had told me. She said, ‘Poor mother. But it was only a little lie. If it only happened once.’

  ‘I wonder how he found out.’ It was odd how seldom we named names. It was generally ‘he’ or ‘she’, but there was no confusion. Perhaps it was part of the telepathy that exists between lovers.

  ‘She said that when he began to suspect – he put a thing on his telephone to record conversations. He told her so himself, so when that conversation took place he must have known. Anyway it wouldn’t surprise me if she told him herself – and told him that it wouldn’t happen again. Perhaps she lied to me because I was too young to understand. Holding hands and listening to Mozart together would have been almost the same as making love to me then – as it was to him – I mean my father.’

  ‘I wonder if he really wept at the funeral.’

  ‘I don’t believe that – unless he wept to see his victim disappear. Or perhaps it was hay fever. She died in the hay fever season.’

  12

  Christmas came down and covered the land in snow up to the edge of the lake – one of the coldest Christmases for many years, enjoyed by dogs and children and skiers, but I didn’t belong to any of those categories. My office was very warmly heated, but the garden outside looked blue through the tinted glass and chilled me all the same. I felt much too old for my job – to deal with chocolates all the time, milk and plain, almond and hazel, seemed work more suitable to a younger man or a girl.

  I was surprised when one of my chiefs opened the door of my office and let in Mr Kips. It was as if a cartoon had come to life; bent almost double, Mr Kips advanced with his hand held out, as though it was in search of that lost dollar rather than in welcome. My colleague said, in a tone of respect I was unaccustomed to hear, ‘I believe you have met Mr Kips.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘at Doctor Fischer’s.’

  ‘I didn’t know that you knew Doctor Fischer.’

  ‘Mr Jones is married to his daughter,’ Mr Kips said.

  I thought I saw a look of fear on the face of my chief. I had been up till now far beneath his notice and suddenly I represented a danger – for a son-in-law of Doctor Fischer’s, might he not, with that influence behind him, find a place on the board?

  Unwisely I couldn’t help teasing him a little. ‘Dentophil Bouquet,’ I said, ‘tries to undo the damage we do in this building to the teeth.’ It was a very rash remark: it could be classed as disloyalty. Big business, like a secret service, demands loyalty from its employees more than honesty.

  ‘Mr Kips,’ my chief said, ‘is a friend of the managing director. He has a little problem of translation and the managing director would like you to help him.’

  ‘A letter I wish to send to Ankara,’ Mr Kips said. ‘I want to attach a copy in Turkish to prevent misunderstanding.’

  ‘I will leave you together,’ my chief said, and when the door closed, Mr Kips told me, ‘This is confidential, of course.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  Indeed I had seen it at the very first glance. There were references to Prague and Skoda, and Skoda to all the world means armaments. Switzerland is a land of strangely knotted business affiliations: a great deal of political as well as financial laundering goes on in that little harmless neutral state. The technical terms which had to be translated were all connected I could see with weapons. (For a short while I was in a world far removed from chocolates.) Apparently there was a firm called I.C.F.C. Inc. which was American and it was purchasing weapons, on behalf of a Turkish company, from Czechoslovakia. The final destination of the weapons – all small arms – was very unclear. A name which sounded as if it might be Palestinian or Iranian was somehow involved.

  My Turkish is more rusty than my Spanish because I have less practice (we don’t do much business with the land of Turkish Delight), and the letter took me quite a long while to translate. ‘I will get a fair copy typed,’ I told Mr Kips.

  ‘I would rather you did it yourself,’ Mr Kips said.

  ‘The secretary can’t read Turkish.’

  ‘All the same . . .’

  When I had finished typing, Mr Kips said, ‘I realize you have done this in office time, but all the same perhaps a little present . . .?’

  ‘Quite unnecessary.’

  ‘Might I perhaps send a box of chocolates to your wife? Perhaps liqueur chocolates?�
��

  ‘Oh, but you know, Mr Kips, in this business we are never short of chocolates.’

  Mr Kips, still bent nearly double so that his nose approached the desk, as though he were trying to find the elusive dollar by the smell, folded the letter and the original and tucked them away in his notecase. He said, ‘When we meet at Doctor Fischer’s, you won’t, of course, mention . . . This affair is most confidential.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever meet there again.’

  ‘But why? At this season of the year, if the weather is fine, never mind the snow, he usually gives the most magnificent party of all the year. Soon, I expect, we shall be getting our invitations.’

  ‘I’ve seen one party and that is enough for me.’

  ‘I must admit that the last party was perhaps a little crude. All the same it will go down in the memory of his friends as the Porridge Party. The Lobster Party was a good deal more entertaining. But then you never know what to expect with Doctor Fischer. There was the Quail Party which rather upset Madame Faverjon . . .’ He sighed. ‘She was very attached to birds. You can’t please everybody.’

  ‘But I suppose his presents always do, please I mean.’

  ‘He’s very, very generous.’

  Mr Kips began to make his bent-pin way to the door: it was as though the grey moquette were a map printed with the route which he had to follow. I called after him, ‘I met an old employee of yours. He works in a music shop. Called Steiner.’

  He said, ‘I don’t remember the name,’ and continued without pausing along the route which had been traced for him on the moquette.

  That night I told Anna-Luise of my encounter. ‘You can’t get away from them,’ she said. ‘First poor Steiner and then Mr Kips.’

  ‘Mr Kips’s business had nothing to do with your father. In fact he asked me not to mention our meeting if I saw your father.’

  ‘And you promised?’

  ‘Of course. I don’t intend ever to see him again.’

  ‘But now they’ve attached you to him by a secret, haven’t they? They don’t intend to let you go. They want you to be one of them. Otherwise they won’t feel safe.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Safe from being laughed at by someone on the outside.’

  ‘Well, the fear of being laughed at doesn’t seem to deter them much.’

  ‘I know. Greed wins every time.’

  ‘I wonder what the Quail Party can have been that so upset Madame Faverjon.’

  ‘Something beastly. You may be sure of that.’

  The snow continued to fall. It was going to be a very white Christmas. There were blocks even on the autoroute and Cointrin airport was closed for twenty-four hours. It mattered nothing to us. It was the first Christmas we had ever had together, and we celebrated it like children with all the trimmings. Anna-Luise bought a tree and we laid our presents for each other at its foot, gift-wrapped in the shops with gay paper and ribbons. I felt more like a father than a lover or a husband. That didn’t worry me – a father dies first.

  On the eve of Christmas the snow stopped and we went to the old abbey at Saint Maurice for midnight Mass and listened to that still more ancient story of the Emperor Augustus’s personal decree and how all the world came to be taxed. We were neither of us Roman Catholics, but this was the universal feast of childhood. It seemed quite suitable to see Belmont there, listening carefully to the decree of the Emperor, all by himself, as he had been at our wedding. Perhaps the Holy Family should have taken his advice and somehow evaded registration at Bethlehem.

  He was waiting at the door when we came out, and we couldn’t avoid him, dark suit, dark tie, dark hair, thin body and thin lips and an unconvincing smile. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, winking at us, and pressed an envelope into my hand like a tax demand. I could tell from the feel that it contained a card. ‘I don’t trust the post,’ he said, ‘at Christmas.’ He waved his hand. ‘There’s Mrs Montgomery. I felt sure she would be here. She’s very ecumenical.’

  Mrs Montgomery wore a pale blue scarf over her pale blue hair, and I could see the new emerald in the hollow of her scrawny throat. ‘Ha ha, Monsieur Belmont and his cards as usual. And the young couple. A very happy Christmas to you all. I didn’t see the General in church. I hope he’s not ill. Ah! There he is.’ Yes, there the Divisionnaire certainly was, framed in the church doorway like a portrait of a Crusader, stiff as a ramrod in the back and in one rheumatic leg, with his conquistador nose and his fierce moustache – it was difficult to believe that he had never heard a shot fired in anger. He too was alone.

  ‘And Mr Deane,’ Mrs Montgomery exclaimed, ‘surely he must be here. Why, he’s always here if he’s not filming somewhere abroad.’

  I could see we had made a very bad mistake. Midnight Mass at Saint Maurice was as social as a cocktail party. We would never have got away if at that moment Richard Deane had not appeared from the church, swollen and flushed with drink. We just had time to notice that he had a pretty girl in tow before we escaped.

  ‘Good God,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘a party of the Toads.’

  ‘We couldn’t have known they would be there.’

  ‘I don’t believe in all this Christmas business, only I want to believe – but the Toads . . . Why on earth do they go?’

  ‘I suppose it’s a Christmas habit like our tree. I went last year alone. For no reason. I expect they were all there, but I didn’t know any of them in those days – in those days – it seems years ago. I didn’t even know that you existed.’

  Lying happily in bed that night in the short interval between love and sleep, we could talk of the Toads humorously, as though they were a kind of comic chorus to our own story which was the only important one.

  ‘Do you suppose that the Toads have souls?’ I asked Anna-Luise.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone have a soul – I mean if you believe in souls?’

  ‘That’s the official doctrine, but mine is different. I think souls develop from an embryo just as we do. Our embryo is not a human being yet, it still has something of a fish about it, and the embryo soul isn’t yet a soul. I doubt if small children have souls any more than dogs – perhaps that’s why the Roman Catholic Church invented Limbo.’

  ‘Have you a soul?’

  ‘I think I may have one – shop-soiled but still there. If souls exist you certainly have one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve suffered. For your mother. Small children don’t suffer, or dogs, except for themselves.’

  ‘What about Mrs Montgomery?’

  ‘Souls don’t dye their hair blue. Can you imagine her even asking herself if she has a soul?’

  ‘And Monsieur Belmont?’

  ‘He hasn’t had the time to develop one. Countries change their tax laws every budget, closing loopholes, and he has to think up new ways to evade them. A soul requires a private life. Belmont has no time for a private life.’

  ‘And the Divisionnaire?’

  ‘I’m not so sure about the Divisionnaire. He might just possibly have a soul. There’s something unhappy about him.’

  ‘Is that always a sign?’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘And Mr Kips?’

  ‘I’m not sure about him either. There’s a sense of disappointment about Mr Kips. He might be looking for something he has mislaid. Perhaps he’s looking for his soul and not a dollar.’

  ‘Richard Deane?’

  ‘No. Definitely not. No soul. I’m told he has copies of all his old films and he plays them over every night to himself. He has no time even to read the books of the films. He’s satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can’t be satisfied.’

  There was a long silence between us. We should in the nature of things have fallen asleep, but each was aware that the other was awake, thinking the same thought. My silly joke had turned serious. It was Anna-Luise who spoke the thought aloud.

  ‘And my father?’

  ‘He has a soul all right,’ I said, ‘but I think it may
be a damned one.’

  13

  I suppose there is a day in most lives when every trivial detail is held in the memory as though stamped in wax. Such a day proved for me to be the last day of the year – a Saturday. The night before we had decided to drive up in the morning to Les Paccots if the weather proved fine enough for Anna-Luise to ski. There had been a slight thaw on Friday, but Friday night it was freezing. We would go early before the slopes were crowded and have lunch together at the hotel there. I woke at half-past seven and rang the météo to find out the conditions. Everything was OK though caution was advised. I made some toast and boiled two eggs and gave her breakfast in bed. ‘Why two eggs?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you’ll be half dead of hunger before lunch if you are going to be there when the ski-lift opens.’ She put on a new sweater that I had given her for Christmas: heavy white wool with a wide red band round the shoulders: she looked wonderful in it. We started off at half-past eight. The road was not bad, but as the météo had announced there were icy patches, so I had to put on chains at the Chatel St Denis, and the ski-lift was open before we arrived. We had a small argument at St Denis. She wanted to make a long round from Corbetta and ski down the black piste from Le Pralet, but my anxiety persuaded her to come down the easier red piste to La Cierne.

  I was secretly relieved that a number of people were already waiting to go up at Les Paccots. It seemed safer that way. I never fancied Anna-Luise skiing on an empty slope. It was too like bathing from an empty beach. One always fears there must be some good reason for the emptiness – perhaps an invisible pollution or a treacherous current.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d been the first. I love an empty piste.’

  ‘Safety in numbers,’ I said. ‘Remember what the road was like. Be careful.’

  ‘I’m always careful.’

  I waited until she was on the move and waved to her as she went up. I watched her until she was out of sight among the trees; I found it easy to pick her out because of the red band on the sweater. Then I went into the Hôtel Corbetta with the book I had brought with me. It was an anthology of prose and verse called The Knapsack made by Herbert Read and published in 1939, after the war broke out, in a small format so that it could be carried easily in a soldier’s kit. I had never been a soldier, but I had grown attached to the book during the phoney war. It whiled away many hours of waiting in the firemen’s post for the blitz on London which never seemed to be coming, as the others played their compulsory round of darts wearing their gas masks. I have thrown away the book now, but some of the passages I read that day remain embedded in the wax, just as on that night in 1940 when I lost my hand. I remember clearly what I was reading when the siren sounded: it was, ironically, Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Um: