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

the first of my father’s special dinners. Everyone had a small and magnificent present – something in gold or platinum – beside his plate, except Mr Kips who had a big brown paper parcel containing a specially bound copy of the book in red morocco. He must have been furious, but he had to pretend to be amused before the other guests, and anyway he could do nothing because my father was paying him a very large retaining fee for which he did nothing at all and which he would lose if there was a quarrel. Who knows? Perhaps it was he who bought up so many copies that the book became a success. My father told me all about it. He thought the story was very funny. “But why poor Mr Kips?” I asked. Of course he didn’t tell me the real reason. “Oh, I’ll have fun with all of them in time,” he told me. “Then you’ll lose all your friends in time,” I said. “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “All my friends are rich and the rich are the greediest. The rich have no pride except in their possessions. You only have to be careful with the poor.”’
    â€˜Then we are safe,’ I said. ‘We aren’t rich.’
    â€˜Yes, but perhaps we aren’t poor enough for him.’
    She had a wisdom which I couldn’t match. Perhaps that was another of the reasons why I loved her.

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 Genève 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 . . .’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜We are taking a holiday, I’ll say – on the only date the firm will allow me.’
    â€˜People don’t take holidays in November.’
    â€˜Then I’ll write that you are not well and I can’t leave you.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.