‘She was like her mother. In character as much as in face. She would have harmed you in the same way given the time. I wonder what sort of Steiner would have come out of the woodwork in your case. Perhaps the garbage man. They like to humiliate.’
‘Is that what you brought me here to say?’
‘Not all, but a little part of it, yes. I have been thinking ever since the last party that I owe you something, Jones, and I’m not in the habit of running up debts. You behaved better than the others.’
‘The Toads you mean?’
‘Toads? ‘
‘That was your daughter’s name for your friends.’
‘I have no friends,’ he said in the words of his servant, Albert. He added, ‘These people are acquaintances. One can’t avoid acquaintances. You mustn’t think I dislike such people. I don’t dislike them. One dislikes one’s equals. I despise them.’ .
‘Like I despise you?’
‘Oh, but you don’t, Jones, you don’t. You are not speaking accurately. You don’t despise me. You hate me or think you do.’
‘I know I do.’
He gave at that assurance the little smile which Anna-Luise had told me was dangerous. It was a smile of infinite indifference. It was the kind of smile which I could imagine a sculptor temerariously and heretically carving on the inexpressive armour-plated face of Buddha. ‘So Jones hates me,’ he said, ‘that is an honour indeed. You and I expect Steiner. And in a way for the same reason. My wife in one case, my daughter in the other.’
‘You never forgive, do you, even the dead?’
‘Oh, forgiveness, Jones. That’s a Christian term. Are you a Christian, Jones?’
‘I don’t know. I only know I’ve never despised anyone as I despise you.’
‘Again you are using the wrong term. Semantics are important, Jones. I tell you, you hate, you don’t despise. To despise comes out of a great disappointment. Most people are not capable of a great disappointment, and I doubt if you are. Their expectations are too low for that. When one despises, Jones, it’s like a deep and incurable wound, the beginning of death. And one must revenge one’s wound while there’s still time. When the one who inflicted it is dead, one has to strike back at others. Perhaps, if I believed in God, I would want to take my revenge on him for having made me capable of disappointment. I wonder by the way - it’s a philosophical question - how one would revenge oneself on God. I suppose Christians would say by hurting his son.’
‘Perhaps you are right, Fischer. Perhaps I shouldn’t even hate you. I think you are mad.’
‘Oh no, no, not mad,’ he said with that small unbearable smile of ineffable superiority. ‘You are not a man of great intelligence, Jones, or you wouldn’t at your age be translating letters about chocolates for a living. But sometimes I have a desire to talk a little way above my companion’s head. It comes on me suddenly even when I’m with one of my - what did my daughter call them? - Toads. It’s amusing to watch how they react. None of them would dare to call me mad as you have done. They might lose an invitation to my next party. ‘
‘And lose a plate of porridge?’
‘No, lose a present, Jones. They can’t bear to lose a present. Mrs Montgomery pretends to understand me. “Oh, how I agree, Doctor Fischer,” she says. Deane gets angry - he can’t bear anything which is beyond him.. He says that even King Lear is a pack of nonsense because he knows that he is incapable of playing him, even on the screen. Belmont listens attentively and then changes the subject. Income taxes have taught him to be evasive. The Divisionnaire… I have only broken out once with him when I couldn’t bear the old man’s stupidity any more. All he did was give a gruff laugh and say, “March to the sound of the guns.” Of course he has never heard a gun fired, only rifles on practice ranges. Kips is the best listener… I think he always hopes there may be a grain of sense in what I say which be useful to him. Ah, Kips… he brings me back to the point of why I have brought you here. The Trust.’
‘What about the Trust?’
‘You know - or perhaps you don’t - that my wife left the income of her little capital to her daughter, but for life only. Afterwards the capital goes to any child she may have had, but as she died childless it reverts to me. “To show her forgiveness” the will impertinently states. As if I could care a cent for her forgiveness - forgiveness of what? If I were to accept the money it would really be as though I had accepted her forgiveness - the forgiveness of a woman who betrayed me with a clerk of Mr Kips.’
‘Are you sure that she slept with him?’
‘Slept with him? She may have dozed beside him over some caterwauling record. If you mean did she copulate with him, no, I am not sure of that. It’s possible, but I’m not sure. It wouldn’t have mattered to me very much if she had. An animal impulse. I could have put it out of mind, but she preferred his company to mine. A clerk of Mr Kips earning a minimum wage.’
‘It’s all a question of money, is it, Doctor Fischer? He wasn’t rich enough to cuckold you.’
‘Money makes a difference certainly. Some people will even die for money, Jones. They don’t die for love except in novels.’
I thought I had tried to do just that, but I had failed, and was it for love I had tried or was it from the fear of an irremediable loneliness?
I had ceased to listen to him, and my attention only returned in time to catch the last of his words: ‘So the money is yours, Jones.’
‘What money?’
‘The Trust money of course.’
‘I don’t need it. We both of us managed on what I earned. On that alone.’
‘You surprise me. I thought you would at least have enjoyed while you could a little of her mother’s money.’
‘No, we kept that untouched. For the child we meant to have.’ I added, ‘When the skiing stopped,’ and through the window I saw the continuous straight falling of the snow as though the world had ceased revolving and lay becalmed at the centre of a blizzard.
Again I missed what he had been saying and caught only the final sentences. ‘It will be the last party I shall give. It will be the extreme test.’
‘You are giving another party?’
‘The last party and I want you to be there, Jones. I owe you something as I said. You humiliated them at the Porridge Party more than I ever succeeded in doing till now. You didn’t eat. You surrendered your present. You were an outsider and you showed them up. How they hated you. I enjoyed every moment of it.’
‘I saw them at Saint Maurice after the midnight Mass. They didn’t seem to feel any resentment. Belmont even gave me a Christmas card.’
‘Of course. If they had exhibited their feelings it would have been a further humiliation. They have to explain you away. Do you know what the Divisionnaire said to me a week later (it was probably Mrs Montgomery’s idea): “You were a bit hard on your son-in-law, not letting him have his present; poor fellow. It wasn’t his fault that he had a bad attack of collywobbles that night. It could have happened to any one of us. I was a bit queasy myself as it happens, but I didn’t want to spoil your joke.’”
‘You won’t get me to another party.’
‘This party is going to be a very serious party, Jones. No frivolity I promise. And it will be an excellent dinner, I promise that too.’
‘I’m not exactly in a gourmand mood.’
‘I tell you this party is the extreme test of their greed. You suggested to Mrs Montgomery that I should give them cheques, and cheques they will have.’
‘She told me they’d never accept cheques.’
‘We’ll see, Jones, we’ll see. They will be very, very substantial. I want you here as a witness of how far they’ll go.’
‘Go?’
‘For greed, Jones. The greed of the rich which you are never likely to know.’
‘You are rich yourself.’
‘Yes, but my greed - I told you before - is of a different order. I want…’ He raised the Christmas cracker rather as the priest at midnight Mass had raised the Host, as though he intended to make a statement of grave importance to a disciple - ‘This is my body.’ He repeated: ‘I want…’ and lowered the cracker again.