‘I don’t smoke cigars,’ I said. I added, ‘You shouldn’t choose that. Didn’t he give those away at his wedding party? I don’t suppose Doctor Fischer likes repeating himself. ‘
‘Are you sure?’
‘No. I think after all they were swizzle sticks.’
‘But you aren’t sure?’ she asked in a tone of disappointment and put the cigar-cutter down. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is to find something which will please everybody - especially the men.’
‘Why not just give them cheques?’ I asked. ‘You can’t give cheques to people. It would be insulting. ‘
‘Perhaps none of you would be insulted if the cheques were large enough.’
I could see she was reflecting on what I said, and I have reason to believe from what happened later that she must have repeated my remark to Doctor Fischer. She said, ‘It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. Think of giving a cheque to the General - it would look like a bribe. ‘
‘Generals have taken bribes before now. Anyway, he can’t be a general if he’s Swiss. He’s probably only a Divisionnaire. ‘
‘But the idea of giving a cheque to Mr Kips. Why, it’s unthinkable. You mustn’t tell anyone I told you, but Mr Kips in fact owns this store.’ She brooded. ‘What about a quartz watch in gold - or better still platinum? But then perhaps they have one already.’
‘They could always sell the new one back.’
‘I’m sure not one of them would dream of selling a gift. Not a gift from Doctor Fischer.’
So my guess proved to be right and the secret was out. I saw her gulp as though she were trying to swallow it back.
I picked up a pigskin photograph frame. As though people who shopped in that store mightn’t be clever enough to know what one used a pigskin photograph frame for, the management had inserted a photograph of Richard Deane, the film star. Even I had read enough newspapers to recognize that handsome old-young face and the alcoholic smile.
‘What about this?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you’re impossible,’ Mrs Montgomery wailed, but all the same, as it turned out, she must have repeated even that mocking suggestion back to Doctor Fischer.
I think she was glad to see me go. I hadn’t been helpful.
7
‘Do you hate your father?’ I asked Anna-Luise after I had told her all the events of that day, beginning with my lunch with the Spanish confectioner.
‘I don’t like him.’ She added, ‘Yes, I think I do hate him.’
‘Why?’
‘He made my mother miserable.’
‘How?’
‘It was his pride. His infernal pride.’ She told me how her mother loved music, which her father hated - there was no doubt at all of that hatred. Why it was she had no idea, but it was as if music taunted him with his failure to understand it, with his stupidity. Stupid? The man who had invented Dentophil Bouquet and founded a fortune of many million francs stupid? So her mother began to slip away to concerts on her own and at one of them she met a man who shared her love of music. They even bought discs and listened to them in secret in his flat. When Doctor Fischer talked of the caterwauling of the strings she no longer tried to argue with him - she had only to walk down a street near the butcher’s, speak in a parlophone and take a lift to the third floor and listen for an hour happily to Heifetz. There was no sex between them - Anna-Luise was sure of that, it was not a question of fidelity. Sex was Doctor Fischer and her mother had never enjoyed it: sex was the pain of childbirth and a great sense of loneliness when Doctor Fischer grunted with pleasure. For years she had pretended pleasure herself; it wasn’t difficult to deceive him since her husband was not interested in whether she had pleasure or not. She might well have saved herself the trouble. All this she had told her daughter in one hysterical outburst.
Then Doctor Fischer had discovered what she was about. He questioned her and she told him the truth, and he didn’t believe the truth - or perhaps he did believe, but it made no difference to him whether she was betraying him with a man or with a record of Heifetz, a record of all that caterwauling he couldn’t understand. She was leaving him by entering a region into which he couldn’t follow her. His jealousy so infected her that she began to feel he must have a reason for it - she felt herself guilty of something, though of what she wasn’t sure. She apologized, she abased herself, she told him everything - even which record of Heifetz pleased her most, and ever after it seemed to her that he made love with hatred. She couldn’t explain that to her daughter, but I could imagine the way it went - how he thrust his way in, as though he were stabbing an enemy. But he couldn’t be satisfied with one final blow. It had to be the death of a thousand cuts. He told her he forgave her, which only increased her sense of guilt, for surely there had to be something to forgive, but he told her also that he could never forget her betrayal - what betrayal? So he would wake her in the night to stab her with his goad again. She learnt that he had discovered the name of her friend - that harmless little lover of music - and he went to the man’s employer and gave him fifty thousand francs to sack him without a reference. ‘That was Mr Kips,’ she said. Her friend was only a clerk - he wasn’t important - he was no better than a clone that you could replace with another clone. His only distinguishing feature had been his love of music, and Mr Kips knew nothing of that. To Doctor Fischer it was an added humiliation that the man earned so little. He wouldn’t have minded being betrayed by another millionaire - or so her mother believed. He would certainly have despised Christ for being the son of a carpenter, if the New Testament had not proved in time to be such a howling commercial success.
‘What happened to the man?’
‘My mother never knew,’ Anna-Luise said. ‘He simply disappeared. And my mother disappeared too after a few years. I think she was like an African who can just will herself to die. She only spoke to me once about her private life and that’s what I’ve told you. As Iremember it.’
‘And you? How did he treat you?’
‘He never treated me badly. He wasn’t interested in me enough for that. But do you know, I think the little clerk of Mr Kips had really pricked him to the heart, and he never recovered from the prick. Perhaps it was then he learned how to hate and to despise people. So the Toads were summoned to amuse him after my mother died. Mr Kips, of course, was the first of them. He couldn’t have been happy about Mr Kips. He had in a way exposed himself to Mr Kips. So he had to humiliate him like he humiliated my mother, because Mr Kips knew. He made him his lawyer, because that shut his mouth. ‘
‘But what did he do to Mr Kips?’
‘Of Course you don’t know what Mr Kips looks like., ‘I do. I saw him when I tried to see your father the first time.’
‘Then you know he’s bent almost double. Something wrong with his spine.’
‘Yes. I thought he looked like the number seven. ‘
‘He hired a well-known writer for children and a very good cartoonist and between them they produced a kind of strip-cartoon book called “The Adventures of Mr Kips in Search of a Dollar”. He gave me an advance copy. I didn’t know there was a real Mr Kips and I found the book very funny and very cruel. Mr Kips in the book was always bent double and always seeing coins people had dropped on the pavement. It was the Christmas season when the book appeared and my father arranged - for money of course - a big display in every bookshop window. The display had to be at a certain height, so that Mr Kips bent double could see if he passed that way. A lawyer’s name - especially an international lawyer who doesn’t deal in popular things like crime - is never very well known, even in the city where he lives, and I think only one bookshop objected for fear of libel. My father simply guaranteed to pay any costs. The book - I suppose most children are cruel - became a popular success. There were many reprints. There was even a strip-cartoon in a newspaper. I believe my father - and that must have given him great pleasure - made a lot of money out of it. ‘
‘And Mr Kips?’
‘The first he kne
w about it was at the first of my father’s special dinners. Everyone had a small and magnificent present - something in gold or platinum - beside his plate, except Mr Kips who had a big brown paper parcel containing a specially bound copy of the book in red morocco. He must have been furious, but he had to pretend to be amused before the other guests, and anyway he could do nothing because my father was paying him a very large retaining fee for which he did nothing at all and which he would lose if there was a quarrel. Who knows? Perhaps it was he who bought up so many copies that the book became a success. My father told me all about it. He thought the story was very funny. “But why poor Mr Kips?” I asked. Of course he didn’t tell me the real reason. “Oh, I’ll have fun with all of them in time,” he told me. “Then you’ll lose all your friends in time, ” I said. “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “All my friends are rich and the rich are the greediest. The rich have no pride except in their possessions. You only have to be careful with the poor.”’
‘Then we are safe.’ I said. ‘We aren’t rich.’
‘Yes, but perhaps we aren’t poor enough for him.’
She had a wisdom which I couldn’t match. Perhaps that was another of the reasons why I loved her.
8
Now that I’m alone in this flat I try to remember the happiness we shared before that first party with the Toads. But how does one convey happiness? Unhappiness we can so easily describe - I was unhappy, we say, because… We remember this and that, giving good reasons, but happiness is like one of those islands far out in the Pacific which has been reported by sailors when it emerges from the haze where no cartographer has ever marked it. The island disappears again for a generation, but no navigator can be quite certain that it only existed in the imagination of some long-dead lookout. I tell myself over and over again how happy I was in those weeks, but when I search my head for the reason I can find nothing. adequate to explain my happiness.
Is there happiness in a sexual embrace? Surely not. That is an excitement, a kind of delirium, and sometimes it is close to pain. Is happiness simply the sound of a quiet breath on the pillow beside me, or kitchen noises in the evening when I returned from work and read the journal de Geneve in our only easy chair? We could have well afforded a second chair, but somehow we never had the time to find one in those weeks, and when finally we bought it in Vevey - and a dishwasher too which substituted the noise of an engine room for the cheerful clangour of a human washing-up - the island of great happiness had been lost already in the haze.
The approaching menace of Doctor Fischer’s party had come between us by that time and it filled our silences. A darker shadow than an angel passed over our heads. Once at the end of some such long pause I spoke my thought aloud: ‘I think I’ll write to him after all and tell him I can’t come. I’ll say…’
‘What?’
‘We are taking a holiday, I’ll say - on the only date the firm will allow me.’
‘People don’t take holidays in November.’
‘Then I’ll write that you are not well and I can’t leave you.’
‘He knows that I’m as strong as a horse.’
And that in a way was true, but the horse must have been a thoroughbred, which I believe always needs a great deal of care. She was slim and fine-boned. I liked to touch her cheek-bones and the curve of her skull. Her strength showed mainly in her small wrists which were as strong as whipcord: she could always open a screw-jar which foxed me.
‘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 longitude 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 library 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 hun 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 fau
lt; 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.’
Doctor Fisher of Geneva Page 3
