Doctor Fisher of Geneva

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.