‘Yes.’
‘This is Mrs Montgomery.’ So the Toads had caught up with me after all.
‘Are you still there, Mr Jones?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wanted to say . . . we’ve only just heard . . . how sorry we all are . . .’
‘Thank you,’ I said and rang off, but before I could get back to my chair, the telephone sounded again. Reluctantly I returned.
‘Yes?’ I said. I wondered which one it would be this time, but it was still Mrs Montgomery. How long it takes such women to say good-bye even on the telephone.
‘Mr Jones, you didn’t give me time to speak. I have a message for you from Doctor Fischer. He wants to see you.’
‘He could have seen me if he had come to his daughter’s funeral.’
‘Oh, but there were reasons . . . You mustn’t blame him . . . He will explain to you . . . He wants you to go and see him tomorrow . . . Any time in the afternoon . . .’
‘Why can’t he telephone himself?’
‘He very much dislikes the telephone. He always uses Albert . . . or one of us if we are around.’
‘Then why doesn’t he write?’
‘Mr Kips is away at the moment.’
‘Does Mr Kips have to write his letters?’
‘His business letters, yes.’
‘I have no business with Doctor Fischer.’
‘Something to do with a trust, I think. You will go, won’t you?’
‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘tell him . . . I will consider it.’
I rang off. At least that would keep him guessing all the next afternoon, for I had no intention of going. All I wanted was to return to my chair and the half-pint glass of neat whisky: a little sediment of aspirin had formed again, and I stirred this with my finger, but the sense of happiness had gone. I wasn’t alone any more. Doctor Fischer seemed to permeate the room like smoke. There was one way to get rid of him and I drained the glass without drawing breath.
I had expected, judging from the detective story, that the heart would stop as suddenly as a clock, but I found I was still alive. I think now that the aspirin had been a mistake – two poisons can counteract each other. I should have trusted the detective novelist: such people are said to research carefully when it comes to medical details, and then, if I remember aright, the character who drank the sconce was already half drunk while I was dead sober. So it is that we often bungle our own deaths.
I wasn’t, for a moment, even sleepy. I felt more than usually clear-headed as one does when a little drunk, and in my temporary clarity I thought: trust, trust, and the reason for Doctor Fischer’s message suddenly came to me. Anna-Luise’s money from her mother, I remembered, was held in some kind of a trust: she had received the income only. I had no idea to whom the capital would belong now, and I thought with hatred: He doesn’t come to her funeral, but he’s already thinking of the financial consequences. Perhaps he gets the money – the blood money. I remembered her white Christmas sweater stained with blood. He was as greedy as the Toads, I thought. He was a Toad himself – the King Toad of them all. Then suddenly, in the way that I had pictured death would come, I was struck down by sleep.
15
When I woke I thought that perhaps I had been asleep for an hour or two. My head was quite clear, but when I looked at my watch, the hands seemed to have mysteriously retreated. I looked out of the window, but the grey snow sky gave nothing away – it looked much as it had looked before I slept. A morning sky, an evening sky, take your pick. It was quite a while before I realized I had slept for more than eighteen hours, and then it was the chair I sat in and the empty glass which brought back to me the fact that Anna-Luise was dead. The glass was like an emptied revolver or a knife that had been broken uselessly on the bone of the chest. I had to begin to find another way to die.
Then I remembered the telephone call and Doctor Fischer’s concern with the trust. I was a man sick with grief and surely a sick man can be forgiven his sick thoughts. I wanted to humiliate Fischer who had killed Anna-Luise’s mother and ruined Steiner. I wanted to prick his pride. I wanted him to suffer as I was suffering. I would go and see him as he asked.
I borrowed a car from my garage and drove to Versoix. I realized my head was not so clear as I had believed. On the autoroute I nearly crashed into the back of a lorry turning into one of the exits, and it occurred to me that this could have been as good a death as the whisky – but then perhaps it would have failed me more completely. I might have been dragged out of the wreck a cripple unable afterwards to compass my own destruction. I drove more carefully from then on, but my thoughts still wandered – to the distant spot of red which I had watched as it mounted on the ski-lift towards the piste rouge, to the all-red sweater on the stretcher, and the bandages I had taken for the white hair of a stranger. I nearly missed the exit to Versoix.
The great white house stood above the lake like a Pharaoh’s tomb. It dwarfed my car, and the bell seemed to tinkle absurdly in the depths of the enormous grave. Albert opened the door. For some reason he was dressed in black. Had Doctor Fischer put his servant into mourning in his place? The black suit seemed to have changed his character for the better. He made no show of not recognizing me. He didn’t sneer at me, but led the way promptly up the great marble staircase.
Doctor Fischer was not in mourning. He sat as he had done at our first meeting behind his desk (it was almost bare except for one large, obviously expensive Christmas cracker, shiny in scarlet and gold) and he said as before, ‘Sit down, Jones.’ Then there was a long silence. For once it seemed that he was at a loss for words. I looked at the cracker and he picked it up and put it down again and the silence went on and on, so it was I who eventually spoke. I accused him. ‘You didn’t come to your daughter’s funeral.’
He said, ‘She had too much of her mother in her.’ He added, ‘She even looked like her, when she grew up.’
‘That was what Mr Steiner said.’
‘Steiner?’
‘Steiner.’
‘So! Is that little man still living?’
‘Yes. At least he was a few weeks ago.’
‘A bug is difficult to finish,’ he said. ‘They get back into the woodwork where your fingernail won’t reach.’
‘Your daughter never did you any harm.’
‘She was like her mother. In character as much as in face. She would have harmed you in the same way given the time. I wonder what sort of Steiner would have come out of the woodwork in your case. Perhaps the garbage man. They like to humiliate.’
‘Is that what you brought me here to say?’
‘Not all, but a little part of it, yes. I have been thinking ever since the last party that I owe you something, Jones, and I’m not in the habit of running up debts. You behaved better than the others.’
‘The Toads you mean?’
‘Toads?’
‘That was your daughter’s name for your friends.’
‘I have no friends,’ he said in the words of his servant Albert. He added, ‘These people are acquaintances. One can’t avoid acquaintances. You mustn’t think I dislike such people. I don’t dislike them. One dislikes one’s equals. I despise them.’
‘Like I despise you?’
‘Oh, but you don’t, Jones, you don’t. You are not speaking accurately. You don’t despise me. You hate me or think you do.’
‘I know I do.’
He gave at that assurance the little smile which Anna-Luise had told me was dangerous. It was a smile of infinite indifference. It was the kind of smile which I could imagine a sculptor temerariously and heretically carving on the inexpressive armour-plated face of Buddha. ‘So Jones hates me,’ he said, ‘that is an honour indeed. You and I expect Steiner. And in a way for the same reason. My wife in one case, my daughter in the other.’
‘You never forgive, do you, even the dead?’
‘Oh, forgiveness, Jones. That’s a Christian term. Are you a Christian, Jones?’
‘I don’t know.
I only know I’ve never despised anyone as I despise you.’
‘Again you are using the wrong term. Semantics are important, Jones. I tell you, you hate, you don’t despise. To despise comes out of a great disappointment. Most people are not capable of a great disappointment, and I doubt if you are. Their expectations are too low for that. When one despises, Jones, it’s like a deep and incurable wound, the beginning of death. And one must revenge one’s wound while there’s still time. When the one who inflicted it is dead, one has to strike back at others. Perhaps, if I believed in God, I would want to take my revenge on him for having made me capable of disappointment. I wonder by the way – it’s a philosophical question – how one would revenge oneself on God. I suppose Christians would say by hurting his son.’
‘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.’