Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party (11 page)

‘Perhaps you are right, Fischer. Perhaps I shouldn't even hate you. I think you are mad.'

‘Oh no, no, not mad,' he said with that small unbearable smile of ineffable superiority. ‘You are not a man of great intelligence, Jones, or you wouldn't at your age be translating letters about chocolates for a living. But sometimes I have a desire to talk a little way above my companion's head. It comes on me suddenly even when I'm with one of my – what did my daughter call them? – Toads. It's amusing to watch how they react. None of them would dare to call me mad as you have done. They might lose an invitation to my next party.'

‘And lose a plate of porridge?'

‘No, lose a present, Jones. They can't bear to lose a present. Mrs Montgomery pretends to understand me. “Oh, how I agree, Doctor Fischer,” she says. Deane gets angry – he can't bear anything which is beyond him. He says that even King Lear is a pack of nonsense because he knows that he is incapable of playing him, even on the screen. Belmont listens attentively and then changes the subject. Income taxes have taught him to be evasive. The Divisionnaire . . . I have only broken out once with him when I couldn't bear the old man's stupidity any more. All he did was give a gruff laugh and say, “March to the sound of the guns.” Of course he has never heard a gun fired, only rifles on practice ranges. Kips is the best listener . . . I think he always hopes there may be a grain of sense in what I say which would be useful to him. Ah, Kips . . . he brings me back to the point of why I have brought you here. The Trust.'

‘What about the Trust?'

‘You know – or perhaps you don't – that my wife left the income of her little capital to her daughter, but for life only. Afterwards the capital goes to any child she may have had, but as she died childless it reverts to me. “To show her forgiveness” the will impertinently states. As if I could care a cent for her forgiveness – forgiveness of what? If I were to accept the money it would really be as though I had accepted her forgiveness – the forgiveness of a woman who betrayed me with a clerk of Mr Kips.'

‘Are you sure that she slept with him?'

‘Slept with him? She may have dozed beside him over some caterwauling record. If you mean did she copulate with him, no, I am not sure of that. It's possible, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't have mattered to me very much if she had. An animal impulse. I could have put it out of mind, but she preferred his company to mine. A clerk of Mr Kips earning a minimum wage.'

‘It's all a question of money, is it, Doctor Fischer? He wasn't rich enough to cuckold you.'

‘Money makes a difference certainly. Some people will even die for money, Jones. They don't die for love except in novels.'

I thought I had tried to do just that, but I had failed, and was it for love I had tried or was it from the fear of an irremediable loneliness?

I had ceased to listen to him, and my attention only returned in time to catch the last of his words: ‘So the money is yours, Jones.'

‘What money?'

‘The Trust money of course.'

‘I don't need it. We both of us managed on what I earned. On that alone.'

‘You surprise me. I thought you would at least have enjoyed while you could a little of her mother's money.'

‘No, we kept that untouched. For the child we meant to have.' I added, ‘When the skiing stopped,' and through the window I saw the continuous straight falling of the snow as though the world had ceased revolving and lay becalmed at the centre of a blizzard.

Again I missed what he had been saying and caught only the final sentences. ‘It will be the last party I shall give. It will be the extreme test.'

‘You are giving another party?'

‘The last party and I want you to be there, Jones. I owe you something as I said. You humiliated them at the Porridge Party more than I ever succeeded in doing till now. You didn't eat. You surrendered your present. You were an outsider and you showed them up. How they hated you. I enjoyed every moment of it.'

‘I saw them at Saint Maurice after the midnight Mass. They didn't seem to feel any resentment. Belmont even gave me a Christmas card.'

‘Of course. If they had exhibited their feelings it would have been a further humiliation. They have to explain you away. Do you know what the Divisionnaire said to me a week later (it was probably Mrs Montgomery's idea): “You were a bit hard on your son-in-law, not letting him have his present, poor fellow. It wasn't his fault that he had a bad attack of collywobbles that night. It could have happened to any one of us. I was a bit queasy myself as it happens, but I didn't want to spoil your joke.”'

‘You won't get me to another party.'

‘This party is going to be a very serious party, Jones. No frivolity I promise. And it will be an excellent dinner, I promise that too.'

‘I'm not exactly in a
gourmand
mood.'

‘I tell you this party is the extreme test of their greed. You suggested to Mrs Montgomery that I should give them cheques, and cheques they will have.'

‘She told me they'd never accept cheques.'

‘We'll see, Jones, we'll see. They will be very, very substantial. I want you here as a witness of how far they'll go.'

‘Go?'

‘For greed, Jones. The greed of the rich which you are never likely to know.'

‘You are rich yourself.'

‘Yes, but my greed – I told you before – is of a different order. I want . . .' He raised the Christmas cracker rather as the priest at midnight Mass had raised the Host, as though he intended to make a statement of grave importance to a disciple – ‘This is my body.' He repeated: ‘I want . . .' and lowered the cracker again.

‘What do you want, Doctor Fischer?'

‘You aren't intelligent enough to understand if I told you.'

That night for the second time I dreamed of Doctor Fischer. I thought I wouldn't sleep, but perhaps the long cold drive from Geneva helped sleep to come and perhaps in attacking Fischer I had been able to forget for half an hour how meaningless my life had become. I fell asleep as I had the day before, suddenly, in my chair, and I saw Doctor Fischer with his face painted like a clown's and his moustache trained upwards like the Kaiser's as he juggled with eggs, never breaking one. He drew fresh ones from his elbow, from his arse, from the air – he created eggs, and at the end there must have been hundreds in the air. His hands moved around them like birds and then he clapped his hands and they fell to the ground and exploded and I woke. Next morning the invitation lay in my letter-box: ‘Doctor Fischer invites you to the Final Party.' It was to be held in a week's time.

I went to the office. People were surprised to see me, but what else was there to do? My attempt to die had failed. No doctor in the state I was in would prescribe me anything stronger than a tranquillizer. If I had the courage I could go up to the top floor of the building and throw myself out of the window – if any window there opened which I doubted – but I hadn't got the courage. An ‘accident' with my car might involve others and anyway it was not certain to kill. I had no gun. I thought of all these things rather than of the letter I had to write to the Spanish confectioner who was still obsessed by the Basque taste in liqueur chocolates. After work I didn't kill myself but went to the first cinema on the way home and sat for an hour before a soft porn film. The movements of the naked bodies aroused no sexual feeling at all: they were like designs in a pre-historic cave – writings in the unknown script of people I knew nothing about. I thought when I left: One must, I suppose, eat, and I went to a café and had a cup of tea and a cake, and when I had finished I thought: Why did I eat? I needn't have eaten. That's a possible way to die, starvation, but I remembered the Mayor of Cork who had survived for more than fifty days, wasn't it? I asked the waitress for a piece of paper and wrote on it: ‘Alfred Jones accepts Doctor Fischer's invitation,' and I put it in my pocket to guard against a change of mind. Next day I posted it almost without thinking.

Why had I accepted the invitation? I don't know myself. Perhaps I would have accepted any engagement which would give me an hour or two's escape from thought – thought which consisted mainly of wondering how I could die without too much pain for myself or too much unpleasantness for others. There was drowning: Lake Léman was only a short walk down the street – the ice-cold water would soon conquer any instinctive desire I might have to swim. But I hadn't the courage – death by drowning had been a phobia of mine since childhood ever since I had been pushed into the deep end of a
piscine
by a young Secretary of Embassy. Besides, my body might pollute the perch. Gas came to mind, but my flat was all electric. There were the fumes of my car, of course – I'd kept that idea in reserve, for after all starvation might perhaps be the proper answer, a clean and discreet and private way out: I was older, and less robust probably, than the Mayor of Cork. I would fix a date for beginning – the day after Doctor Fischer's feast.

16

Ironically I was delayed on the autoroute by an accident: a private car had smashed itself against a lorry on a frozen patch of the road. The police were there and an ambulance, and something was being removed from the wreck of the car with the help of an acetylene burner which flamed so brightly in the dark that it made the night twice as black when I had passed. Albert was already standing by the open door when I arrived. His manner had certainly improved (perhaps I had been accepted as one of the Toads), for he came down the steps to greet me and opened the door of the car and for the first time he allowed himself to remember my name. ‘Good evening, Mr Jones, Doctor Fischer suggests that you keep on your coat. Dinner is being served on the lawn.'

‘On the lawn?' I exclaimed. It was a clear night: the stars were as brilliant as chips of ice, and the temperature was below zero.

‘I think you will find it warm enough, sir.'

He led me through the lounge in which I had first met Mrs Montgomery and then through another room, where the walls were lined with books in expensive calf bindings – they had probably been bought in sets. (‘The library, sir.') It would have been much cheaper, I thought, to have used false backs, for the room had an unused air. French windows opened on to the great lawn which sloped down to the invisible lake and for a moment I could see nothing at all but a blaze of light. Four enormous bonfires crackled away across the snow, and lights were hanging from the branches of every tree.

‘Isn't it wonderful and crazy and beautiful?' Mrs Montgomery cried, as she advanced from the edge of the dark to meet me with the assured air of a hostess addressing an intimidated guest. ‘Why, it's a real fairyland. I don't believe you'll even need your coat, Mr Jones. We are all of us so glad to see you back among us. We've quite missed you.' ‘We' and ‘us' – I could see them now undazzled by the bonfires; the Toads were all there, standing around a table prepared in the centre of the fires; it glittered with crystal glasses which reflected the to and fro of the flames. The atmosphere was very different from what I remembered of the Porridge Party.

‘Such a shame that this is the very last party,' Mrs Montgomery said, ‘but you'll see how he's giving us a really great farewell. I helped him with the menu myself. No porridge!'

Albert was suddenly beside me, holding a tray of glasses, whisky, dry martinis and Alexanders. ‘I am an Alexander girl,' Mrs Montgomery said. ‘This is my third. How absurd it is when people tell you that cocktails spoil the palate. What I always say is, it's just not-feeling-hungry that spoils the palate.'

Richard Deane in his turn came out of the shadows carrying a gold-embossed menu. I could see he was already well plastered, and there beyond him, between two bonfires, was Mr Kips who actually seemed to be laughing: it was difficult to be quite sure because of his stoop which hid his mouth, but his shoulders were certainly shaking. ‘This is better than porridge,' Deane said, ‘what a pity that it's the last party. Do you think the old fellow's running out of cash?'

‘No, no,' Mrs Montgomery said. ‘He always told us that one day there would be the last and the best and the most exciting party of all. Anyway I don't think he has the heart to go on any longer. After what's happened. His poor daughter . . .'

‘Has he a heart?' I asked.

‘Ah, you don't know him as all of us do. His generosity . . .' With the automatic reflex of a Pavlov dog she touched the emerald hung around her throat.

‘Drink up and seat yourselves.'

It was Doctor Fischer's voice which brought us to heel from a dark corner of the garden. I hadn't seen until then where he was standing. He was stooped over a barrel some twenty yards away, and I could see his hands moving within it as though he were washing them.

‘Just look at the dear man,' Mrs Montgomery said. ‘He takes such an interest in every small detail.'

‘What's he doing?'

‘He's hiding the crackers in the bran tub.'

‘Why not have them on the table?'

‘He doesn't want people crackling them all through the dinner to find out what's inside. It was I who told him about the bran tub. Just fancy, he had never heard of such a thing before. I don't think he can have had a very happy childhood, do you? But he took to the idea at once. You see, he's put the presents in the crackers and the crackers in the bran tub and we'll all have to draw them out at random with our eyes shut.'

‘Suppose you get a gold cigar-cutter?'

‘Impossible. These presents have been chosen to suit everyone equally.'