‘She’s a very big alleviation,’ I said. ‘If it’s God who gave her to me I’m grateful to him.’
‘And yet perhaps Mrs Montgomery’s necklace will last longer than your so-called love.’
‘Why should he wish to humiliate us? ‘
‘Don’t I wish to humiliate? And they say he made us in his image. Perhaps he found he was a rather bad craftsman and he is disappointed in the result. One throws a faulty article into the dustbin. Do look at them and laugh, Jones. Have you no humour? Everyone has an empty plate but Mr Kips, and how impatient they’re all getting now. Why, Belmont is even finishing up his plate for him. I’m not sure it’s quite in accordance with my rules, but I’ll let it pass. Bear with me a moment longer, my friends, while I finish my Caviare. You can untie their bibs, Albert.’
10
‘It was revolting,’ I said to Anna-Luise. ‘Your father must be mad.’
‘It would be a lot less revolting if he were,’ she said.
‘You should have seen them scrambling for his presents - all except Mr Kips - he had to go to the lavatory first to vomit. Cold porridge hadn’t agreed with him. Compared with the Toads I must admit your father did keep a kind of dignity - a devilish dignity. They were all very angry with me because I hadn’t played their game. I was like an unfriendly audience. I suppose I held a mirror up to them, so that they became conscious of how badly they were behaving. Mrs Montgomery said that I should have been sent from the table as soon as I refused to eat the porridge. “Any of you could have done the same,” your father said. “Then what would you have done with all the presents?” she asked. “Perhaps I would have doubled the stakes next time,” he said.’
‘Stakes? What did he mean?’
‘I suppose he meant his bet on their greed against their humiliation.’
‘What were the prizes?’
‘Mrs Montgomery had a fine emerald set in platinum with a kind of diamond crown above it as far as I could see.’
‘And the men?’
‘Eighteen-carat gold watches - quartz watches with computers and all the works. All except poor Richard Deane. He had that photograph of himself in a pigskin frame which I saw in the shop. “You’ve only to sign it,” Doctor Fischer told him, “to get any teenage girl you want.” He walked out in a rage and I followed him. He said he was never going back. He said, “I don’t need a photograph to get any girl I want,” and he got into his Mercedes sports car.’
‘He’ll go back,’ Anna-Luise said. ‘That car was a present too. But you - you’ll never go back, will you?’
‘No.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise,’ I said.
But death, I was to argue later, annuls promises. A promise is made to a living person. A dead person is already not the same as the one who was alive. Even love changes its character. Love ceases to be happiness. Love becomes a sense of intolerable loss.
‘And you didn’t laugh at them?’
‘There was nothing to laugh at.’
‘That must have disappointed him,’ she said.
No further invitation came: we were left in peace and what a peace it was that winter, deep as the early snow that year and almost as quiet. Snow fell as I worked (it came down that year before November was out), while I translated letters from Spain and Latin America, and the silence of the settled snow outside the great tinted glass building was like the silence which lay happily between us at home - it was as if she were there with me on the other side of the office table just as she would be there in the late evening across another table as we played a last gin rummy before bed.
11
At weekends in early December I would take her up to Les Diablerets for a few hours’ skiing. I was too old to learn, but I sat in a cafe and read the Journal de Geneve, glad to know that she was happy, looping like a swallow down the slopes in the below-zero whiteness. The hotels had begun opening to the snow as flowers to an early spring. They were going to have a wonderful Christmas season. I loved seeing her come in to the cafe to join me with the snow on her boots and the cold like candles lighting up her cheeks.
I said to her once, ‘I’ve never been so happy.’
‘Why do you say that?’ she asked me. ‘You were married. You were happy with Mary.’
‘I was in love with her,’ I said. ‘But I never felt secure. She and I were the same age when we married, and I was afraid always that she would die the first and that’s what she did. But I’ve got you for life - unless you leave me. And if you do, that will be my fault.’
‘What about me? You’ve got to go on living long enough so that we can go away - wherever it is one goes - together.’ .
‘I shall try.’
‘At the same hour?’
‘At the same hour.’ I laughed and so did she. Death was not a serious subject to either of us. We were going to be together for ever and a day - le jour le plus long we called it.
I suppose, though he had given us no sign of his continuing existence, that Doctor Fischer lingered all the same somewhere in the cave of my unconscious, for one night I had a vivid dream of him. He was dressed in a dark suit and he stood beside an open grave. I watched him from the other side of the hole and I called out to him in a tone of mockery, ‘Whom are you burying, Doctor? Is it your Dentophil Bouquet that did it?’ He raised his eyes and looked at me. He was weeping and I felt the deep reproach of his tears. I woke myself and Anna-Luise with a cry.
It is strange how one can be affected for a whole day by a dream. Doctor Fischer accompanied me to work: he filled the moments of inaction between one translation and another, and he was always the sad Doctor Fischer of my dream and not the arrogant Doctor Fischer whom I had seen presiding at his mad party, who mocked at his guests and drove them on to disclose the shameful depths of their greed.
That evening I said to Anna-Luise, ‘Do you think we’ve been too hard on your father?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He must be a very lonely man in that great house by the lake.’
‘He has his friends,’ she said. ‘You’ve met them.’
‘They are not his friends.’
‘He’s made them what they are.’
Then I told her my dream. All she said was, ‘Perhaps it was my mother’s grave.’
‘He was there?’
‘Oh yes, he was there, but I didn’t see any tears.’
‘The grave was open. In my dream there was no coffin, no minister, no mourners except himself - unless I was one.’
‘There were a lot of people at the grave,’ she said, ‘my mother was much loved. All the servants were there.’
‘Even Albert?’
‘Albert didn’t exist in those days. There was an old butler - I can’t remember his name. He left after my mother died, and so did all the other servants. My father started life again with a lot of strange faces. Please don’t let’s talk about your dream any more. It’s like when you find an end of wool on a sweater. You pull at it and you begin to unravel the whole sweater.’
She was right, it was as if my dream had started a whole process of unravelment. Perhaps we had been a little too happy. Perhaps we had escaped a little too far into a world where only the two of us existed. The next day was a Saturday and I didn’t work on Saturdays.
Anna-Luise wanted to find a cassette for her player (like her mother she loved music), and we went to a shop in the old part of Vevey near the market. She wanted a new cassette of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony.
A small elderly man came to serve us from the back of the shop. (I don’t know why I write’ elderly’, for I don’t suppose he was much older than myself.) I was looking idly at an album of discs by a French television singer and he came to ask me if he could help. Perhaps what made him appear old to me was a kind of humble look, the look of a man who had reached the end of any expectation except of a small commission on the sales he made. I doubt if there was anybody else in that shop who would have heard of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. Pop music formed the main part of the stock.