Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.’
    â€˜Generals have taken bribes before now. Anyway, he can’t be a general if he’s Swiss. He’s probably only a Divisionnaire.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜They could always sell the new one back.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What about this?’ I asked.
    â€˜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
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I don’t like him.’ She added, ‘Yes, I think I do hate him.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜He made my mother miserable.’
    â€˜How?’
    â€˜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