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

resentment. Belmont even gave me a Christmas card.’
    â€˜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.”’
    â€˜You won’t get me to another party.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I’m not exactly in a gourmand mood.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜She told me they’d never accept cheques.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Go?’
    â€˜For greed, Jones. The greed of the rich which you are never likely to know.’
    â€˜You are rich yourself.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What do you want, Doctor Fischer?’
    â€˜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 was 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 all: 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 café 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