Doctor Fisher of Geneva

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 fault; 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.