Doctor Fisher of Geneva

10

‘It was revolting,’ I said to Anna-Luise. ‘Your father must be mad.’

‘It would be a lot less revolting if he were,’ she said.

‘You should have seen them scrambling for his presents - all except Mr Kips - he had to go to the lavatory first to vomit. Cold porridge hadn’t agreed with him. Compared with the Toads I must admit your father did keep a kind of dignity - a devilish dignity. They were all very angry with me because I hadn’t played their game. I was like an unfriendly audience. I suppose I held a mirror up to them, so that they became conscious of how badly they were behaving. Mrs Montgomery said that I should have been sent from the table as soon as I refused to eat the porridge. “Any of you could have done the same,” your father said. “Then what would you have done with all the presents?” she asked. “Perhaps I would have doubled the stakes next time,” he said.’

‘Stakes? What did he mean?’

‘I suppose he meant his bet on their greed against their humiliation.’

‘What were the prizes?’

‘Mrs Montgomery had a fine emerald set in platinum with a kind of diamond crown above it as far as I could see.’

‘And the men?’

‘Eighteen-carat gold watches - quartz watches with computers and all the works. All except poor Richard Deane. He had that photograph of himself in a pigskin frame which I saw in the shop. “You’ve only to sign it,” Doctor Fischer told him, “to get any teenage girl you want.” He walked out in a rage and I followed him. He said he was never going back. He said, “I don’t need a photograph to get any girl I want,” and he got into his Mercedes sports car.’

‘He’ll go back,’ Anna-Luise said. ‘That car was a present too. But you - you’ll never go back, will you?’

‘No.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise,’ I said.

But death, I was to argue later, annuls promises. A promise is made to a living person. A dead person is already not the same as the one who was alive. Even love changes its character. Love ceases to be happiness. Love becomes a sense of intolerable loss.

‘And you didn’t laugh at them?’

‘There was nothing to laugh at.’

‘That must have disappointed him,’ she said.

No further invitation came: we were left in peace and what a peace it was that winter, deep as the early snow that year and almost as quiet. Snow fell as I worked (it came down that year before November was out), while I translated letters from Spain and Latin America, and the silence of the settled snow outside the great tinted glass building was like the silence which lay happily between us at home - it was as if she were there with me on the other side of the office table just as she would be there in the late evening across another table as we played a last gin rummy before bed.