Graham Greene - Dr.Fischer of Geneva

Doctor Fischer of Geneva

or

The Bomb Party

Graham Greene

First published in 1980

I think that I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman. What a strange thing that she and I ever came to meet, leave alone to marry. Anna-Luise and her millionaire father inhabited a great white mansion in the classical style by the lakeside at Versoix outside Geneva while I worked as a translator and letter-writer in the immense chocolate factory of glass in Vevey. We might have been a world and not a mere canton apart. I would begin work at 8.30 in the morning while she would be still asleep in her pink and white bedroom, which she told me was like a wedding cake, and when I would go out to eat a hasty sandwich for my lunch, she was probably sitting before her glass in a dressing-gown doing her hair. From the sale of their chocolates my employers paid me three thousand francs a month which I suppose may have represented half an hour's income to Doctor Fischer who many years before had invented Dentophil Bouquet, a toothpaste which was supposed to hold at bay the infections caused by eating too many of our chocolates. The word Bouquet was meant to indicate the choice of perfume, and the first advertisement showed a tasteful bunch of flowers. ' Which is your favourite flower? ' Later glamorous girls in soft photography would be seen holding between their teeth a flower, which varied with every girl.

But it was not for his money that I detested Doctor Fischer. I hated him for his pride, his contempt of all the world, and his cruelty. He loved no one, not even his daughter. He didn't even bother to oppose our marriage, since he had no greater contempt for me than for his so-called friends who would always flock to him at a nod. Anna-Luise called them 'Toads', her English not being perfect. She meant, of course, toadies, but I soon adopted the title which she had given them. Among the Toads was an alcoholic film actor called Richard Deane, a Divisionnaire ~ a very high rank in the Swiss army, which only has a general in time of war ~ called Krueger, an international lawyer named Kips, a tax adviser, Monsieur Belmont, and an American woman with blue hair called Mrs Montgomery. The General, as some of the others called him, was retired, Mrs Montgomery was satisfactorily widowed, and they all had settled around Geneva for the same reason, either to escape taxes in their own countries or take advantage of favourable cantonal conditions. Doctor Fischer and the Divisionnaire were the only Swiss nationals in the group when I came to know them and Fischer was by a long way the richest. He ruled them all as a man might rule a donkey with a whip in one hand and a carrot in the other. They were very well lined themselves, but how they enjoyed the carrots. It was only for the carrots that they put up with his abominable parties at which they were always first humiliated ('Have you no sense of humour?' I can imagine him demanding at the early dinners) and then rewarded. In the end they learnt to laugh even before the joke was sprung. They felt themselves to be a select group ~ there were plenty of people around Geneva who envied them their friendship with the great Doctor Fischer. (Of what he was a doctor I don't know to this day. Perhaps they had invented the title to honour him, just as they called the Divisionnaire 'General'.)

How was it that I came to love Fischer's daughter? That needs no explanation. She was young and pretty, she was warm-hearted and intelligent, and I cannot think of her now without tears coming to my eyes; but what a mystery must have lain behind her love for me.

She was more than thirty years younger than I when we met, and there was certainly nothing about me to attract a girl of her age. As a young man I had lost my left hand when I was a fireman in the blitz ~ that night in December 1940 when the City of London was set ablaze ~ and the small pension which I received when the war was over just enabled me to settle in Switzerland where the languages that I knew, thanks to my parents, made it possible for me to make a living. My father had been a minor diplomat, so as a child I had lived in France, Turkey and Paraguay and learnt their respective tongues. By a curious coincidence my father and mother were both killed on the same night that I lost my hand; they were buried under the rubble of a house in West Kensington while my hand was left behind somewhere in Leadenhall Street close to the Bank of England.

Like all diplomats my father ended his days as a knight, Sir Frederick Jones ~ a name which with its dignified prefix no one found comic or unusual in England, though I was to find that a plain Mr A. Jones was ridiculous in the eyes of Doctor Fischer.

Unfortunately for me my father had combined diplomacy with the study of Anglo-Saxon history and, of course with my mother's consent, he gave me the name of Alfred, one of his heroes (I believe she had boggled at Aelfred). This Christian name, for some inexplicable reason, had become corrupted in the eyes of our middle-class world; it belonged exclusively now to the working class and was usually abbreviated to Alf.

Perhaps that was why Doctor Fischer, the inventor of Dentophil Bouquet, never called me anything but Jones, even after I married his daughter.

But Anna-Luise ~ what could have attracted her to a man in his fifties? Perhaps she was seeking a father more sympathetic than Doctor Fischer, just as I may have been unconsciously engaged on a parallel pursuit, of a daughter rather than a wife. My wife had died in childbirth twenty years before, taking with her the child who doctors told me would have been a girl. I was in love with my wife, but I had not reached the age when a man really loves and perhaps there had not been the time. I doubt if one ever ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy. The memory of my wife faded quickly enough and it was not constancy which stopped me looking for another wife ~ to have found one woman who accepted me as a lover in spite of my plastic imitation of a hand and my unattractive income had been a near miracle, and I couldn't expect a miracle like that to be repeated. When the necessity to have a woman became imperative I could always buy a copulation, even in Switzerland, after I had found my employment in the chocolate factory to augment my pension and the little which I had inherited from my parents (very little it was, but as their capital had been invested in War Loan, at least it paid no English tax).

Anna-Luise and I met first over a couple of sandwiches. I had ordered my usual midday meal, and she was taking a snack before visiting some little woman in Vevey who had been her nurse. I left my table to go to the lavatory while I waited for my sandwich; I had put a newspaper on my chair to keep my place, and Anna-Luise sat herself down on the opposite chair because she hadn't seen the newspaper. When I returned I think she must have noticed my missing hand ~ in spite of the glove I wore over the plastic substitute ~ and it was probably for that reason she didn't apologize and move away. (I have already written how kind she was. There was nothing of her father in her. I wish I had known her mother.)

Our sandwiches arrived at the same moment ~ hers was ham and mine was cheese and she had ordered coffee and I had ordered beer, and there was a moment of confusion with the waitress who assumed that we were together... And so, quite suddenly, we actually were, like two friends who encounter each other after years of separation. She had hair the colour of mahogany with a gloss on it like French polish, long hair which she had pulled up on her scalp and fastened by a shell with a stick through it in what I think is called the Chinese manner, and even while I gave her a polite good morning I was imagining myself pulling out that stick, so that the shell would fall to the floor and her hair down her back. She was so unlike the Swiss girls whom I would see every day in the street, their faces pretty and fresh, all butter and cream, and their eyes blank with an invulnerable lack of experience. She had had experience enough living alone with Doctor Fischer after her mother died.