Doctor Fisher of Geneva

17

The fact that I have written this narrative tells well enough that, unlike Doctor Fischer, I never found the courage necessary to kill myself; that night I hadn’t needed courage, for I had a sufficiency of despair, but since the inquest demonstrated that the revolver had contained only one charge, my despair would not have served me even if Mr Steiner had not taken possession of the weapon. Courage is sapped by day-to-day mind-dulling routine, and despair deepens so much every day one lives, that death seems in the end to lose its point. I had felt Anna-Luise close to me when I held the whisky in my hand and again when I pulled the cracker with my teeth, but now I had lost all hope of ever seeing her in any future. Only if I had believed in a God could I have dreamt that the two of us would ever have that jour le plus long. It was as though my small half-belief had somehow shrivelled with the sight of Doctor Fischer’s body. Evil was as dead as a dog and why should goodness have more immortality than evil? There was no longer any reason to follow Anna-Luise if it was only into nothingness. As long as I lived I could at least remember her. I had two snapshots of her and a note in her hand written to make an appointment before we lived together; there was the chair which she used to sit in, and the kitchen where she had jangled the plates before we bought the machine. All these were like the relics of bone they keep in Roman Catholic churches. Once as I boiled myself an egg for my supper, I heard myself repeating a line which I had heard spoken by a priest at the midnight Mass at Saint Maurice: ‘As often as you do these things you shall do them in memory of me.’ Death was no longer an answer - it was an irrelevance.

Sometimes I have a cup of coffee with Mr Steiner - he isn’t a drinking man. He talks of Anna-Luise’s mother and I don’t interrupt him. I let him ramble on and I think of Anna-Luise. Our enemy is dead and our hate has died with him, and we are left with our two very different memories of love. The Toads still live in Geneva and I go to that city as seldom as I can. Once near the station I saw Belmont, but we didn’t speak. I have passed Mr Kips several times too, but he doesn’t see me with his gaze fixed on the pavement, and the only time I encountered Deane he was far too drunk to notice me. Only Mrs Montgomery once troubled me in Geneva, calling cheerfully from the doorway of a jeweller’s shop, ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Smith,’ but I pretended not to hear and hurried on to meet an Argentinian client.