Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party

  ‘Better not,’ she said. ‘You were right to accept and I was wrong. If you call it off now, you will think you are a coward and never forgive yourself. After all, it’s only one party. He can’t hurt us really. You aren’t Mr Kips and you aren’t rich and we don’t depend on him. You need never go to another.’

  ‘I certainly won’t,’ I said and I believed it. All the same the date was approaching fast. A great cloud lay over the sea, the island had gone from sight and I should never know the latitude and longtitude to mark it on any map. The time would come when I would doubt if I had ever really seen the island.

  There was something else we bought in that bout of shopping, and that was a pair of skis. Her mother had taught Anna-Luise to ski when she was four years old, so that to ski was as natural to her as to walk, and the season of snow was approaching. When she joined me in Vevey she had left her skis at home and nothing would induce her to return and fetch them . . . And there were boots, too, to find. It proved a long shopping day and we were still, I suppose, quite happy; as long as we were occupied we had no eye for clouds. I liked watching her expertise when she chose skis, and her feet had never seemed prettier than when she was trying on the heavy boots she needed.

  Coincidences in my experience are seldom happy. How hypocritically we say ‘What a happy coincidence!’ when we meet an acquaintance in a strange hotel where we want very much to be alone. We passed a librairie on our way home, and I always look in the window of any bookshop – it is almost an automatic reflex. In this one there was a window full of children’s books, for in November the shops are already preparing for the Christmas trade. I took my automatic glance, and there in the very centre of the window was Mr Kips, head bent to the pavement, in search of a dollar.

  ‘Look.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘there’s always a new edition in time for Christmas. Perhaps my father pays the publisher or perhaps there are always new children to read it.’

  ‘Mr Kips must wish the pill was universally used.’

  ‘When the skiing’s over,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘I’m going to drop the pill myself. So perhaps there’ll be another reader of Mr Kips.’

  ‘Why wait till then?’

  ‘I’m a good skier,’ she said, ‘but there are always accidents. I don’t want to be pregnant in plaster.’

  We couldn’t avoid the thought of Doctor Fischer’s party any longer. ‘Tomorrow’ had almost arrived and was already there in both our minds. It was as though a shark were nuzzling beside our small boat, from which we had once seen the island. We lay awake in bed for hours that night, a shoulder touching a shoulder, but we were separated an almost infinite distance by our distress.

  ‘How absurd we are,’ Anna-Luise argued, ‘what on earth can he do to us? You aren’t Mr Kips. Why, he could fill all the shops with a caricature of your face and what would we care? Who would recognize you? And your firm isn’t going to sack you because he pays them fifty thousand francs. That’s not half an hour’s income to them. We don’t depend on him for anything. We are free, free. Say it aloud after me. Free.’

  ‘Perhaps he hates freedom as much as he despises people.’

  ‘There’s no way he can turn you into a Toad.’

  ‘I wish I knew why he wants me there then.’

  ‘It’s just to show the others that he can get you to come. He may try to humiliate you in front of them – it would be like him. Bear it for an hour or two, and, if he goes too far, fling your wine in his face and walk out. Always remember we are free. Free, darling. He can’t hurt you or me. We are too little to be humiliated. It’s like when a man tries to humiliate a waiter – he only humiliates himself.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Of course you are right. It is absurd, but all the same I wish I knew what he had in mind.’

  We went to sleep at last and the next day moved as slowly as a cripple, like Mr Kips, towards the evening hour. The very secrecy in which Doctor Fischer’s dinners had been held, and the spate of unlikely rumours, made them sinister, but surely the presence of the same group of Toads must mean there was some entertainment to be found in them. Why did Mr Kips ever attend again after he had been so insulted? Well, perhaps that could be explained by his unwillingness to lose his retaining fee, but the Divisionnaire – surely he would not put up with anything really disgraceful? It isn’t easy to reach the rank of Divisionnaire in neutral Switzerland, and a Divisionnaire, a retired Divisionnaire, has the prestige of a rare and protected bird.

  I remember every detail of that uneasy day. The toast at breakfast was burnt – it was my fault; I arrived at the office five minutes late; two letters in Portuguese were sent me to translate, although I knew no Portuguese; I had to work through lunchtime thanks to the Spanish confectioner who, encouraged by our lunch together, had sent in twenty pages of suggestions and demanded a reply before he returned to Madrid (among other things he wanted a modification of one of our lines to suit Basque taste – it seemed that in some way that I didn’t understand we were underestimating the strength of Basque national feeling in our milk chocolates flavoured with whisky). I was very late in getting home and I cut myself shaving and nearly put on the wrong jacket with my only pair of dark trousers. I had to stop at a petrol station on the way to Geneva and pay cash because I had forgotten to transfer my credit card from one suit to another. All these things appeared to me like omens of an unpleasant evening.

  9

  The disagreeable manservant, whom I had hoped never to see again, opened the door. There were five expensive cars lounging in the drive, two of them with chauffeurs, and I thought that he looked at my little Fiat 500 with disdain. Then he looked at my suit and I could see that his eyebrows went up. ‘What name?’ he asked, though I felt sure that he remembered it well enough. He spoke in English with a bit of a cockney twang. So he had remembered my nationality.

  ‘Jones,’ I said.

  ‘Doctor Fischer’s engaged.’

  ‘He’s expecting me,’ I said.

  ‘Doctor Fischer’s dining with friends.’

  ‘I happen to be dining with him myself.’

  ‘Have you an invitation?’

  ‘Of course I have an invitation.’

  ‘Let me see the card.’

  ‘You can’t. I left it at home.’

  He scowled at me, but he wasn’t confident – I could tell that. I said, ‘I don’t think Doctor Fischer would be very pleased if there’s an empty place at his table. You’d better go and ask him.’

  ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Jones.’

  ‘Follow me.’

  I followed his white coat through the hall and up the stairs. On the landing he turned to me. He said, ‘If you’ve been lying to me . . . If you weren’t invited . . .’ He made a motion with his fists like a boxer sparring.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s that to do with you?’

  ‘I just want to tell the Doctor how you welcome his friends.’

  ‘Friends,’ he said. ‘He has no friends. I tell you, if you weren’t invited . . .’

  ‘I am invited.’

  We turned the opposite way from the study where I had last seen Doctor Fischer and he flung open a door. ‘Mr Jones,’ the man grunted and I walked in, and there stood all the Toads looking at me. The men wore dinner jackets and Mrs Montgomery a long dress.

  ‘Come in, Jones,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘You can serve dinner as soon as it’s ready, Albert.’

  The table was laid with crystal glasses which caught the lights of a chandelier overhead: even the soup plates looked expensive. I wondered a little at seeing them there: it was hardly the season for cold soup. ‘This is Jones, my son-in-law,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘You must excuse his glove. It covers a deformity. Mrs Montgomery, Mr Kips, Monsieur Belmont, Mr Richard Deane, Divisionnaire Krueger.’ (Not for him to mistitle Krueger.) I could feel the fumes of their hostility projected at me like tear-gas. Why? Perhaps it was my dark suit. I had lowered what
apartment builders would call the ‘standing’.

  ‘I have met Monsieur Jones,’ Belmont said as though he were a prosecution witness identifying the accused.

  ‘Me too,’ said Mrs Montgomery, ‘briefly.’

  ‘Jones is a great linguist,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘He translates letters about chocolates,’ and I realized he must have made inquiries about me from my employers. ‘Here, Jones, at our little parties we use English as our common language because Richard Deane, great star though he may be, speaks no other, though he sometimes attempts a kind of French in his cups – after his third one. On the screen you’ve only heard him dubbed in French.’

  Everyone laughed as though on cue except Deane who gave a mirthless smile. ‘He has the qualities after a drink or two to play Falstaff except a lack of humour and a lack of weight. The second tonight we shall do our best to remedy. The humour, I’m afraid, is beyond us. You may ask what is left. Only his fast-diminishing reputation among women and teenagers. Kips, you are not enjoying yourself. Is something wrong? Perhaps you miss our usual apéritifs, but tonight I didn’t want to spoil your palates for what’s coming.’

  ‘No, no, I assure you nothing is wrong, Doctor Fischer. Nothing.’

  ‘I always insist,’ Doctor Fischer said, ‘at my little parties that everybody enjoys himself.’

  ‘They are a riot,’ Mrs Montgomery said, ‘a riot.’

  ‘Doctor Fischer is invariably a very good host,’ Divisionnaire Krueger informed me with condescension.

  ‘And so generous,’ Mrs Montgomery said. ‘This necklace I’m wearing – it was a prize at our last party.’ She was wearing a heavy necklace of gold pieces – they seemed to me from a distance to be Krugerrands.

  ‘There is always a little prize for everyone,’ the Divisionnaire murmured. He was certainly old and grey and he was probably full of sleep. I liked him the best because he seemed to have accepted me more easily than the others.

  ‘There the prizes are,’ Mrs Montgomery said. ‘I helped him choose.’ She went over to a side-table where I noticed now a pile of gift-wrapped parcels. She touched one with the tip of a finger like a child testing a Christmas stocking to tell from the crackle what is within.

  ‘Prizes for what?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly not for intelligence,’ Doctor Fischer said, ‘or the Divisionnaire would never win anything.’

  Everyone was watching the pile of gifts.

  ‘All we have to do is just to put up with his little whims,’ Mrs Montgomery explained, ‘and then he distributes the prizes. There was one evening – can you believe it? – he served up live lobsters with bowls of boiling water. We had to catch and cook our own. One lobster nipped the General’s finger.’

  ‘I bear the scar still,’ Divisionnaire Krueger complained.

  ‘The only wound in action which he has ever received,’ Doctor Fischer said.

  ‘It was a riot,’ Mrs Montgomery told me as though I might not have caught the point.

  ‘Anyway it turned her hair blue,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘Before that night it was an unsavoury grey stained with nicotine.’

  ‘Not grey – a natural blonde – and not nicotine-stained.’

  ‘Remember the rules, Mrs Montgomery,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘If you contradict me once again you will lose your prize.’

  ‘That happened once at one of our parties to Mr Kips,’ Monsieur Belmont said. ‘He lost an eighteen-carat gold lighter. Like this one. ‘He took a leather case from his pocket.

  ‘It was little loss to me,’ Mr Kips said. ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Be careful, Kips. Don’t denigrate my gifts – or yours might disappear a second time tonight.’

  I thought: But surely this is a madhouse ruled by a mad doctor. It was only curiosity which kept me there – certainly it was not for any prize that I stayed.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Doctor Fischer said, ‘before we sit down to dinner – a dinner I very much hope that you’ll enjoy and do full justice to as I have given a great deal of thought to the menu – I should explain to our new guest the etiquette we observe at these dinners.’

  ‘Most necessary,’ Belmont said. ‘I think – if you will excuse me – you should perhaps have put his appearance here – shall we say? – to the vote? After all, we are a kind of club.’

  Mr Kips said, ‘I agree with Belmont. We all of us know where we stand. We accept certain conditions. It’s all in the spirit of fun. A stranger might misunderstand.’

  ‘Mr Kips in search of a dollar,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘You are afraid that the value of the prizes may be reduced with another guest just as you hoped the value would rise after the death of two of our number.’

  There was a silence. I thought from the expression in his eyes that Mr Kips was about to make an angry reply, but he didn’t: all he said was, ‘You misunderstand me.’

  Now all of this, read by someone not present at the party, might well sound no more than the jolly banter of clubmen who insult each other in a hearty way before sitting down to a good dinner and some heavy drinking and good companionship. But to me, as I watched the faces and detected how near the knuckle the teasing seemed to go, there was a hollowness and a hypocrisy in the humorous exchanges and hate like a raincloud hung over the room – hatred of his guests on the part of the host and hatred of the host on the part of the guests. I felt a complete outsider for, though I disliked every one of them, my emotion was too weak as yet to be called hatred.

  ‘To the table then,’ Doctor Fischer said, ‘and I will explain to our new guest the purpose of my little parties, while Albert brings in the dinner.’

  I found myself sitting next to Mrs Montgomery who was on the right of the host. I had Belmont on my right and the actor Richard Deane opposite me. Beside every plate was a bottle of good Yvorne, except beside our host’s, who, I noticed, preferred Polish vodka.

  ‘First,’ Doctor Fischer said, ‘I would ask you to toast the memory of our two – friends shall I call them on this occasion? – on the anniversary of their deaths two years ago. An odd coincidence. I chose the date for that reason. Madame Faverjon died by her own hand. I suppose she could no longer stomach herself – it was difficult enough for me to stomach her, though I had found her at first an interesting study. Of all the people at this table she was the greediest – and that is saying a good deal. She was also the richest of all of you. There have been moments when I have watched each one of you show a sign of rebelling against the criticisms I have made of you and I have been forced to remind you of the presents at the end of dinner which you were in danger of forfeiting. That was never the case with Madame Faverjon. She accepted everything and anything in order to qualify for her present, though she could easily have afforded to buy one of equal value for herself. She was an abominable woman, an unspeakable woman, and yet I had to admit she showed a certain courage at the end. I doubt if one of you would ever show as much, not even our gallant Divisionnaire. I doubt if one of you has even contemplated ridding the world of his unnecessary presence. So I’ll ask you to toast the ghost of Madame Faverjon.’

  I obeyed like all the others.

  Albert entered carrying a silver tray on which there was a large pot of caviare and little silver dishes of egg and onion and sliced lemons.

  ‘You will excuse Albert for serving me first,’ Doctor Fischer said.

  ‘I adore caviare,’ Mrs Montgomery said. ‘I could live on it.’

  ‘You could afford to live on it if you were prepared to spend your own money.’

  ‘I’m not such a rich woman as all that.’

  ‘Why bother to lie to me? If you weren’t as rich as you are you would not be sitting at this table. I invite only the very rich.’

  ‘What about Mr Jones?’

  ‘He is here as an observer rather than as a guest, but of course, as he is my son-in-law, he may imagine he has great expectations. Expectations too are a form of wealth. I am sure Mr Kips could arrange him substantial credits, and expectations are not taxable
– he wouldn’t need to consult Monsieur Belmont. Albert, the bibs.’

  For the first time I noticed that there were no napkins by our places. Albert was fastening a bib round Mrs Montgomery’s neck. She gave a squeal of pleasure. ‘Ecrevisses! I love écrevisses.’

  ‘We haven’t toasted the late lamented Monsieur Groseli,’ the Divisionnaire said, adjusting his bib. ‘I won’t pretend that I ever liked that man.’

  ‘Hurry up then, while Albert fetches your dinner. To Monsieur Groseli. He only attended two of our dinners before dying of cancer, so I had no time to study his character. If I had known of the cancer I would never have invited him to join us. I expect my guests to entertain me for a much longer time. Ah, here is your dinner, so I can now begin my own.’

  Mrs Montgomery gave a high shriek. ‘Why, this is porridge, cold porridge.’

  ‘Real Scotch porridge. You should appreciate it, with your Scotch name.’ Doctor Fischer gave himself a helping of caviare and poured himself out a glass of vodka.

  ‘It will destroy all our appetite,’ Deane said.

  ‘Don’t be afraid of that. There is nothing to follow.’

  ‘This is going too far, Doctor Fischer,’ Mrs Montgomery said. ‘Cold porridge. Why, it’s totally inedible.’

  ‘Don’t eat it then. Don’t eat it, Mrs Montgomery. By the rules you will only lose your little present. To tell you the truth I ordered porridge especially for Jones. I had thought of some partridges, but how could he have managed with one hand?’

  To my astonishment I saw that the Divisionaire and Richard Deane had begun to eat and Mr Kips had at least picked up his spoon.

  ‘If we could have a little sugar,’ Belmont said, ‘it might perhaps help.’

  ‘I understand that the Welsh – no, no, I remember, Jones – I mean the Scots – consider it a blasphemy to spoil their porridge with sugar. They even eat it, I am told, with salt. You may certainly have salt. Offer the gentlemen salt, Albert. Mrs Montgomery has decided to go hungry.’