Doctor Fisher of Geneva
Graham Greene
Graham Greene - Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party
I think that I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman. What a strange thing that she and I ever came to meet, leave alone to marry. Anna-Luise and her millionaire father inhabited a great white mansion in the classical style by the lakeside at Versoix outside Geneva while I worked as a translator and letter-writer in the immense chocolate factory of glass in Vevey. We might have been a world and not a mere canton apart. I would begin work at 8.30 in the morning while she would be still asleep in her pink and white bedroom, which she told me was like a wedding cake, and when I would go out to eat a hasty sandwich for my lunch, she was probably sitting before her glass in a dressing-gown doing her hair. From the sale of their chocolates my employers paid me three thousand francs a month which I suppose may have represented half an hour’s income to Doctor Fischer who many years before had invented Dentophil Bouquet, a toothpaste which was supposed to hold at bay the infections caused by eating too many of our chocolates. The word Bouquet was meant to indicate the choice of perfume, and the first advertisement showed a tasteful bunch of flowers. ‘ Which is your favourite flower? ‘ Later glamorous girls in soft photography would be seen holding between their teeth a flower, which varied with every girl.
But it was not for his money that I detested Doctor Fischer. I hated him for his pride, his contempt of all the world, and his cruelty. He loved no one, not even his daughter. He didn’t even bother to oppose our marriage, since he had no greater contempt for me than for his so-called friends who would always flock to him at a nod. Anna-Luise called them ‘Toads’, her English not being perfect. She meant, of course, toadies, but I soon adopted the title which she had given them. Among the Toads was an alcoholic film actor called Richard Deane, a Divisionnaire - a very high rank in the Swiss army, which only has a general in time of war - called Krueger, an international lawyer named Kips, a tax adviser, Monsieur Belmont, and an American woman with blue hair called Mrs Montgomery. The General, as some of the others called him, was retired, Mrs Montgomery was satisfactorily widowed, and they all had settled around Geneva for the same reason, either to escape taxes in their own countries or take advantage of favourable cantonal conditions. Doctor Fischer and the Divisionnaire were the only Swiss nationals in the group when I came to know them and Fischer was by a long way the richest. He ruled them all as a man might rule a donkey with a whip in one hand and a carrot in the other. They were very well lined themselves, but how they enjoyed the carrots. It was only for the carrots that they put up with his abominable parties at which they were always first humiliated (‘Have you no sense of humour?’ I can imagine him demanding at the early dinners) and then rewarded. In the end they learnt to laugh even before the joke was sprung. They felt themselves to be a select group - there were plenty of people around Geneva who envied them their friendship with the great Doctor Fischer. (Of what he was a doctor I don’t know to this day. Perhaps they had invented the title to honour him, just as they called the Divisionnaire ‘General’.)
How was it that I came to love Fischer’s daughter? That needs no explanation. She was young and pretty, she was warm-hearted and intelligent, and I cannot think of her now without tears coming to my eyes; but what a mystery must have lain behind her love for me.
She was more than thirty years younger than I when we met, and there was certainly nothing about me to attract a girl of her age. As a young man I had lost my left hand when I was a fireman in the blitz - that night in December 1940 when the City of London was set ablaze - and the small pension which I received when the war was over just enabled me to settle in Switzerland where the languages that I knew, thanks to my parents, made it possible for me to make a living. My father had been a minor diplomat, so as a child I had lived in France, Turkey and Paraguay and learnt their respective tongues. By a curious coincidence my father and mother were both killed on the same night that I lost my hand; they were buried under the rubble of a house in West Kensington while my hand was left behind somewhere in Leadenhall Street close to the Bank of England.
Like all diplomats my father ended his days as a knight, Sir Frederick Jones - a name which with its dignified prefix no one found comic or unusual in England, though I was to find that a plain Mr A. Jones was ridiculous in the eyes of Doctor Fischer.
Unfortunately for me my father had combined diplomacy with the study of Anglo-Saxon history and, of course with my mother’s consent, he gave me the name of Alfred, one of his heroes (I believe she had boggled at Aelfred). This Christian name, for some inexplicable reason, had become corrupted in the eyes of our middle-class world; it belonged exclusively now to the working class and was usually abbreviated to Alf.
Perhaps that was why Doctor Fischer, the inventor of Dentophil Bouquet, never called me anything but Jones, even after I married his daughter.
But Anna-Luise - what could have attracted her to a man in his fifties? Perhaps she was seeking a father more sympathetic than Doctor Fischer, just as I may have been unconsciously engaged on a parallel pursuit, of a daughter rather than a wife. My wife had died in childbirth twenty years before, taking with her the child who doctors told me would have been a girl. I was in love with my wife, but I had not reached the age when a man really loves and perhaps there had not been the time. I doubt if one ever ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy. The memory of my wife faded quickly enough and it was not constancy which stopped me looking for another wife - to have found one woman who accepted me as a lover in spite of my plastic imitation of a hand and my unattractive income had been a near miracle, and I couldn’t expect a miracle like that to be repeated. When the necessity to have a woman became imperative I could always buy a copulation, even in Switzerland, after I had found my employment in the chocolate factory to augment my pension and the little which I had inherited from my parents (very little it was, but as their capital had been invested in War Loan, at least it paid no English tax).
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 befo
re 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 lowed 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 r
ather 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.
Doctor Fisher of Geneva Page 1
