‘What do you want, Doctor Fischer?’
‘You aren’t intelligent enough to understand if I told you.’
That night for the second time I dreamed of Doctor Fischer. I thought I wouldn’t sleep, but perhaps the long cold drive from Geneva helped sleep to come and perhaps in attacking Fischer I had been able to forget for half an hour how meaningless my life had become. I fell asleep as I had the day before, suddenly, in my chair, and I saw Doctor Fischer with his face painted like a clown’s and his moustache trained upwards like the Kaiser’s as he juggled with eggs, never breaking one. He drew fresh ones from his elbow, from his arse, from the air - he created eggs, and at the end there must have been hundreds in the air. His hands moved around them like birds and then he clapped his hands and they fell to the ground and exploded and I woke. Next morning the invitation lay in my letter-box: ‘Doctor Fischer invites you to the Final Party.’ It was to be held in a week’s time.
I went to the office. People were surprised to see me, but what else was there to do? My attempt to die had failed. No doctor in the state I was in would prescribe me anything stronger than a tranquillizer. If I had the courage I could go up to the top floor of the building and throw myself out of the window - if any window there opened which I doubted - but I hadn’t got the courage. An ‘accident’ with my car might involve others and anyway it was not certain to kill. I had no gun. I thought of all these things rather than of the letter I had to write to the Spanish confectioner who still obsessed by the Basque taste in liqueur chocolates. After work I didn’t kill myself but went to the first cinema on the way home and sat for an hour before a soft porn film. The movements of the naked bodies aroused no sexual feeling at alclass="underline" they were like designs in a pre-historic cave - writings in the unknown script of people I knew nothing about. I thought when I left: One must, I suppose, eat, and I went to a cafe and had a cup of tea and a cake, and when I had finished I thought: Why did I eat? I needn’t have eaten. That’s a possible way to die, starvation, but I remembered the Mayor of Cork who had survived for more than fifty days, wasn’t it? I asked the waitress for a piece of paper and wrote on it: ‘Alfred Jones accepts Doctor Fischer’s invitation,’ and I put it in my pocket to guard against a change of mind. Next day I posted it almost without thinking.
Why had I accepted the invitation? I don’t know myself. Perhaps I would have accepted any engagement which would give me an hour or two’s escape from thought - thought which consisted mainly of wondering how I could die without too much pain for myself or too much unpleasantness for others. There was drowning: Lake Leman was only a short walk down the street - the ice-cold water would soon conquer any instinctive desire I might have to swim. But I hadn’t the courage - death by drowning had been a phobia of mine since childhood ever since I had been pushed into the deep end of a piscine by a young Secretary of Embassy. Besides, my body might pollute the perch. Gas came to mind, but my flat was all electric. There were the fumes of my car, of course - I’d kept that idea in reserve, for after all starvation might perhaps be the proper answer, a clean and discreet and private way out: I was older, and less robust probably, than the Mayor of Cork. I would fix a date for beginning - the day after Doctor Fischer’s feast.
16
Ironically I was delayed on the auto route by an accident: a private car had smashed itself against a lorry on a frozen patch of the road. The police were there and an ambulance, and something was being removed from the wreck of the car with the help of an acetylene burner which flamed so brightly in the dark that it made the night twice as black when I had passed. Albert was already standing by the open door when I arrived. His manner had certainly improved (perhaps I had been accepted as one of the Toads), for he came down the steps to greet me and opened the door of the car and for the first time he allowed himself to remember my name. ‘Good evening, Mr Jones, Doctor Fischer suggests that you keep on your coat. Dinner is being served on the lawn.’
‘On the lawn? ‘ I exclaimed. It was a clear night: the stars were as brilliant as chips of ice, and the temperature was below zero.
‘I think you will find it warm enough, sir.’
He led me through the lounge in which I had first met Mrs Montgomery and then through another room, where the walls were lined with books in expensive calf bindings - they had probably been bought in sets. (‘ The library, sir.’) It would have been much cheaper, I thought, to have used false backs, for the room had an unused air. French windows opened on to the great lawn which sloped down to the invisible lake and for a moment I could see nothing at all but a blaze of light. Four enormous bonfires crackled away across the snow, and lights were hanging from the branches of every tree.
‘Isn’t it wonderful and crazy and beautiful?’ Mrs Montgomery cried, as she advanced from the edge of the dark to meet me with the assured air of a hostess addressing an intimidated guest. ‘Why, it’s a real fairyland. I don’t believe you’ll even need your coat, Mr Jones. We are all of us so glad to see you back among us. We’ve quite missed you.’
‘We’ and ‘us’ - I could see them now undazzled by the bonfires; the Toads were all there, standing around a table prepared in the centre of the fires; it glittered with crystal glasses which reflected the to and fro of the flames. The atmosphere was very different from what I remembered of the Porridge Party.
‘Such a shame that this is the very last party,’ Mrs Montgomery said, ‘but you’ll see how he’s giving us a really great farewell. I helped him with the menu myself. No porridge!’
Albert was suddenly beside me, holding a tray of glasses, whisky, dry martinis and Alexanders. ‘I am an Alexander girl,’ Mrs Montgomery said. ‘This is my third. How absurd it is when people tell you that cocktails spoil the palate. What I always say is, it’s just not-feeling-hungry that spoils the palate.’
Richard Deane in his turn came out of the shadows carrying a gold-embossed menu. I could see he was already well plastered, and there beyond him, between two bonfires, was Mr Kips who actually seemed to be laughing: it was difficult to be quite sure because of his stoop which hid his mouth, but his shoulders were certainly shaking. ‘This is better than porridge,’ Deane said, ‘what a pity that it’s the last party. Do you think the old fellow’s running out of cash?’
‘No, no,’ Mrs Montgomery said. ‘He always told us that one day there would be the last and the best and the most exciting party of all. Anyway I don’t think he has the heart to go on any longer. After what’s happened. His poor daughter…’
‘Has he a heart?’ I asked.
‘Ah, you don’t know him as all of us do. His generosity…’ With the automatic reflex of a Pavlov dog she touched the emerald hung around her throat.
‘Drink up and seat yourselves.’
It was Doctor Fischer’s voice which brought us to heel from a dark corner of the garden. I hadn’t seen until then where he was standing. He was stooped over a barrel some twenty yards away, and I could see his hands moving within it as though he were washing them.
‘Just look at the dear man,’ Mrs Montgomery said.
‘He takes such an interest in every small detai1.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He’s hiding the crackers in the bran tub.’
‘Why not have them on the table?’
‘He doesn’t want people crackling them all through the dinner to find out what’s inside. It was I who told him about the bran tub. Just fancy, he had never heard of such a thing before. I don’t think he can have had a very happy childhood, do you? But he took to the idea at once. You see, he’s put the presents in the crackers and the crackers in the bran rub and we’ll all have to draw them out at random with our eyes shut.’