Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene Page A

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.’
    â€˜And lose a plate of porridge?’
    â€˜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 would be useful to him. Ah, Kips . . . he brings me back to the point of why I have brought you here. The Trust.’
    â€˜What about the Trust?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Are you sure that she slept with him?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜It’s all a question of money, is it, Doctor Fischer? He wasn’t rich enough to cuckold you.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜What money?’
    â€˜The Trust money of course.’
    â€˜I don’t need it. We both of us managed on what I earned. On that alone.’
    â€˜You surprise me. I thought you would at least have enjoyed while you could a little of her mother’s money.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You are giving another party?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I saw them at Saint Maurice after the midnight Mass. They didn’t seem to feel any