Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party (2 page)

Anna-Luise and I met first over a couple of sandwiches. I had ordered my usual midday meal, and she was taking a snack before visiting some little woman in Vevey who had been her nurse. I left my table to go to the lavatory while I waited for my sandwich; I had put a newspaper on my chair to keep my place, and Anna-Luise sat herself down on the opposite chair because she hadn't seen the newspaper. When I returned I think she must have noticed my missing hand – in spite of the glove I wore over the plastic substitute – and it was probably for that reason she didn't apologize and move away. (I have already written how kind she was. There was nothing of her father in her. I wish I had known her mother.)

Our sandwiches arrived at the same moment – hers was ham and mine was cheese and she had ordered coffee and I had ordered beer, and there was a moment of confusion with the waitress who assumed that we were together . . . And so, quite suddenly, we actually were, like two friends who encounter each other after years of separation. She had hair the colour of mahogany with a gloss on it like French polish, long hair which she had pulled up on her scalp and fastened by a shell with a stick through it in what I think is called the Chinese manner, and even while I gave her a polite good morning I was imagining myself pulling out that stick, so that the shell would fall to the floor and her hair down her back. She was so unlike the Swiss girls whom I would see every day in the street, their faces pretty and fresh, all butter and cream, and their eyes blank with an invulnerable lack of experience. She had had experience enough living alone with Doctor Fischer after her mother died.

We exchanged names very quickly before our sandwiches were finished and when she told me ‘Fischer', I exclaimed, ‘Not
the
Fischer.'

‘I wouldn't know who
the
Fischer is.'

‘Doctor Fischer of the dinners,' I said. She nodded and I could see I had given her pain.

‘I don't go to them,' she said, and I hastened to assure her that rumour always exaggerates.

‘No,' she said, ‘the dinners are abominable.'

Perhaps it was to change the subject that she then referred directly to my plastic hand over which I always wore a glove to hide the ugliness. Most people pretend not to notice it, though they often take a stealthy look when they think that my attention is elsewhere. I told her of the blitz night in the City of London and how the flames had lit the sky as far away as the West End, so that one could read a book at one in the morning. My station was off the Tottenham Court Road and we were not summoned to help in the east until the early hours. ‘More than thirty years ago,' I said, ‘but it still seems only a few months away.'

‘That was the year my father married. What a feast he gave after the ceremony, my mother said. Dentophil Bouquet had already made him a fortune, you see,' she added, ‘and we were neutral and the rich weren't really rationed. I suppose that might count as the first of his dinners. There was French scent for all the women and gold swizzle sticks for the men – he liked to have women at his table in those days. They didn't break up till five in the morning. Not my idea of a wedding night.'

‘The bombers left us at 5.30,' I said. ‘I was in hospital by then, but I heard the All Clear from my bed.' We both ordered another sandwich and she wouldn't let me pay for hers. ‘Another time,' she said, and the words were like the promise of meeting at least once again. The night of the blitz and the sandwich lunch – they are the closest and the clearest memories which I have, clearer even than those of the day when Anna-Luise died.

We finished the sandwiches and I watched her walk out of my sight before I turned towards the office and the five letters in Spanish and the three in Turkish which lay on my desk and were concerned with a new line in milk chocolate flavoured with whisky. No doubt Dentophil Bouquet would claim to render it harmless to the gums.

2

So it was that things began for us, but a month of stray meetings in Vevey and of watching classic films in a small cinema in Lausanne half way between our homes was needed before I realized we were both in love and that she was prepared to ‘make love' with me, an absurd phrase, for surely we had constructed love a long while before over the ham and cheese sandwiches. We were really a very old-fashioned couple, and I suggested marriage without much hope the first afternoon – it was a Sunday – when I slept with her in the bed I hadn't bothered to make that morning because I had no idea she would consent to come back with me after our rendezvous in the tea shop where we had first met. The way I put it was, ‘I wish we could be married.'

‘Why shouldn't we be?' she asked, lying on her back and looking at the ceiling and the shell which the Swiss call the
barrette
lying on the floor and her hair all over the pillow.

‘Doctor Fischer,' I said. I hated him even before I had met him and to say ‘Your father' was repugnant to me, for hadn't she told me that all the rumours about his parties were true?

‘We needn't ask him,' she said. ‘Not that I think he'd care anyway.'

‘I've told you what I earn. It's not much in Swiss terms for two.'

‘We can manage. My mother left me a little.'

‘And there's my age,' I added. ‘I'm old enough to be your father,' thinking that perhaps I was just that, a substitute for the father she didn't love and that I owed my success to Doctor Fischer. ‘I could even be your grandfather if I'd started early enough.'

She said, ‘Why not? You're my lover and my father, my child and my mother, you're the whole family – the only family I want,' and she put her mouth on mine so that I couldn't reply and she pressed me down on to the bed, so that her blood was smeared on my legs and my stomach, and thus it was we married for better or worse without the consent of Doctor Fischer or a priest if it comes to that. There was no legality in our kind of marriage and therefore there could be no divorce. We took each other for good and all.

She went back to the classical white house by the lake and packed a suitcase (it's amazing how much a woman can get into one case) and came away without a word to anyone. It was only when we had bought a wardrobe and some new things for the kitchen (I hadn't even a frying pan) and a more comfortable mattress for the bed, and perhaps three days had passed, that I said, ‘He'll wonder where you are.' ‘He' – not ‘your father'.

She was getting her hair right in the Chinese style which I loved. ‘He may not have noticed,' she said.

‘Don't you eat together?'

‘Oh, he's often out.'

‘I'd better go and see him.'

‘Why?'

‘He might set the police looking for you.'

‘They wouldn't look very hard,' she said. ‘I'm above the age of consent. We haven't committed a crime.' But all the same I wasn't sure that I had not committed one – a man with only one hand, who was well past fifty, who wrote letters all day about chocolates and who had induced a girl who wasn't yet twenty-one to live with him: not a legal crime of course, but a crime in the eyes of the father. ‘If you really want to go,' she said, ‘go, but be careful. Please be careful.'

‘Is he so dangerous?'

‘He's hell,' she said.

3

I took a day off from work and drove down by the lake, but I very nearly turned back when I saw the extent of the grounds, the silver birches and the weeping willows and the great green cascade of the lawn in front of a pillared portico. A greyhound lay asleep like an heraldic emblem. I felt I should have gone to the tradesmen's entrance.

When I rang the bell a man in a white jacket opened the door. ‘Doctor Fischer?' I asked.

‘What name?' he asked abruptly. I could tell he was English.

‘Mr Jones.'

He led me up some stairs into a sort of corridor-lounge with two sofas and several easy chairs and a big chandelier. An elderly woman with blue hair and a blue dress and lots of gold rings occupied one of the sofas. The man in the white jacket disappeared.

We looked at each other, and then I looked at the room, and I thought of the origin of it all – Dentophil Bouquet. This lounge might have been the waiting-room of a very expensive dentist and the two of us sitting there patients. After a while the woman said in English with a faint American accent, ‘He's such a busy man, isn't he? He has to keep even his friends waiting. I'm Mrs Montgomery.'

‘My name is Jones,' I said.

‘I don't think I've seen you at one of his parties.'

‘No.'

‘Of course I sometimes miss one myself. One isn't always around. One can't be, can one? Not always.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘Of course you know Richard Deane.'

‘I've never met him. But I've read about him in the newspapers.'

She giggled. ‘You're a wicked one, I can tell that. You know General Krueger?'

‘No.'

‘But you must know Mr Kips?' she asked with what seemed like anxiety and incredulity.

‘I've heard of him,' I said. ‘He's a tax consultant, isn't he?'

‘No, no. That's Monsieur Belmont. How strange that you don't know Mr Kips.'

I felt that some explanation was needed. I said, ‘I'm a friend of his daughter.'

‘But Mr Kips isn't married.'

‘I meant Doctor Fischer's daughter.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I've never met her. She's very retiring. She doesn't go to Doctor Fischer's parties. Such a pity. We'd all like to know her better.'

The man in the white jacket returned and said in what sounded to me a rather insolent tone, ‘Doctor Fischer has a bit of fever, ma'am, and he regrets that he can't receive you.'

‘Ask him if there's anything he needs – I'll go and get it at once. Some nice Muscat grapes?'

‘Doctor Fischer has Muscat grapes.'

‘I only meant it as an example. Ask him if there is anything I can do for him, anything at all.'

The front door bell rang and the servant, disdaining a reply, went to answer it. He came back up the steps to the lounge followed by a thin old man in a dark suit bowed almost double. He projected his head forward and looked, I thought, rather like the numeral seven. He held his left arm bent at his side, so that he resembled the continental way of writing that number.

‘He has a cold,' Mrs Montgomery said, ‘he won't see us.'

‘Mr Kips has an appointment,' the manservant said, and taking no more notice of us, he led Mr Kips up the marble staircase. I called after him, ‘Tell Doctor Fischer that I have a message from his daughter.'

‘A bit of fever!' Mrs Montgomery exclaimed. ‘Don't you believe it. That's not the way to his bedroom. That's the way to his study. But of course, you know the house.'

‘It's the first time I've been here.'

‘Oh, I see. That explains it – you're not one of us.'

‘I'm living with his daughter.'

‘Really,' she said. ‘How interesting and how forthright. A pretty girl, I've been told. But I've never seen her. As I said, she doesn't like parties.' She put her hand up to her hair, jangling a gold bracelet. ‘I have all the responsibilities, you see,' she said. ‘I have to act as hostess whenever Doctor Fischer gives a party. I am the only woman he invites nowadays. It's a great honour, of course – but all the same . . . General Krueger generally chooses the wine . . . If there is wine,' she added mysteriously. ‘The General's a great connoisseur.'

‘Isn't there always wine at his parties?' I asked.

She looked at me in silence as though my question was an impertinent one. Then she relented a little. ‘Doctor Fischer,' she said, ‘has a great sense of humour. I wonder he hasn't invited you to one of his parties, but perhaps under the circumstances it wouldn't do. We are a
very small
group,' she added. ‘We all know each other well, and we are all so fond, so very, very fond, of Doctor Fischer. But surely you at least know Monsieur Belmont – Monsieur Henri Belmont? He'll solve any tax problem.'

‘I have no tax problems,' I admitted.

As I sat on the second sofa under the great crystal chandelier I realized it was almost as though I had told her that I dropped my h's. Mrs Montgomery had looked away from me in obvious embarrassment.

In spite of my father's small title which had procured him a niche for a time in
Who's Who
I felt myself an outcast in Mrs Montgomery's company and now, to add to my shame, the manservant tripped down the stairs and without giving me a glance announced, ‘Doctor Fischer will see Mr Jones at five o'clock on Thursday,' and moved away into the unknown regions of the great house which it seemed strange to think had been so recently Anna-Luise's home.

‘Well, Mr Jones, was that the name? It has been pleasant meeting you. I shall stay on a while to hear from Mr Kips how our friend fares. We have to look after the dear man.'

It was only later that I realized I had encountered the first two Toads.

4

‘Give it up,' Anna-Luise advised me. ‘You don't owe him anything. You are not one of the Toads. He knows quite well where I am now.'

‘He knows you are with someone called Jones – that's all.'

‘If he wants to he can find out your name, profession, place of business, everything. You are a resident foreigner. The police have your name on the files. He's only got to ask.'

‘The files are secret.'

‘Don't believe anything is secret as far as my father is concerned. There's probably a Toad even among the police.'