The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘A whole war full. It seems years ago.’

  ‘So much has happened. Igor, listen – will you ring Dick Crossman and tell him he left his notebooks here? They are not lost. I have them. I will send them. Also Barney Litvinoff. Did you get that with Dick?’

  ‘You are sending his notebooks. They are not lost.’

  ‘Right. And with Barney they are going crazy in Jerusalem for his proofs of volume 5. He has them all, I don’t know why. You couldn’t get a set?’

  ‘Not really, darling. I have to go and see my father.’

  ‘Oh, well, so ring him. How are things there?’

  ‘Very nasty. It’s raining.’

  ‘So you’ll love it here. The oranges are out. I’ll go out tonight and pick some for you. I will do it right now.’

  ‘With orange blossom. Shalom, then, Connie.’

  ‘Shalom, shalom, Igor. L’hitraot.’

  L’hitraot. Till we meet again. The cadence seemed to carry its own delicious whiff of orange blossom. It was quite a shock to turn and see the long blond figure in her towel.

  ‘What did she say about me?’

  ‘She asked if you were engaged yet. I said not quite.’

  The corners of her mouth turned down. ‘All that orange blossom. It’s all right for some, isn’t it? Pissy London.’

  ‘You’ve got Willie tonight.’

  ‘Most true. Willie tonight.’ She drifted off.

  ‘Caroline.’ I went and embraced her, in her towel. ‘She said you were the most glamorous thing she could think of. She wished you were coming out, to give her a whiff of everything.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  She gave me a little kiss. ‘Not just brainy, then, eh?’

  The usual lightning transformation. I made an equally lightning one.

  I don’t think there was any mention of brains. She regards you as madly sexy, and aristocratic, and everything that ladies would like to be. As most people do.’

  ‘Do they, now?’

  ‘As I understand it, with my limited grasp of these things.’

  In your builder-of-Socialism guise.’

  ‘You will probably work a builder up, in your towel, with all my many things to see to.’

  ‘You’d better see to them, then.’

  She went off, in a cloud of my talc, well satisfied, and so did I; to the phone. I informed Mr Crossman of the missing notebooks, and Mr Litvinoff of the missing proofs, and put the phone down and looked at it for some time. It didn’t do anything.

  ‘Caroline.’

  ‘In the kitchen.’

  She was making herself something there. I wandered along.

  ‘Don’t you think it really is odd about Hopcroft? It’s gone three. He can’t be yarning all this time.’

  ‘Vava’s daughter isn’t on the phone, is she?’

  ‘Well, that’s the point.’

  She wasn’t. She’d just moved in to Swiss Cottage and the phone wasn’t connected yet. Her name was Olga Green, née Kutcholsky. The thing had blown up in the random way of many of the queries. Chaimchik had been writing to Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate in chemistry, and had mentioned Vava. The context was obviously scientific and not my preserve, but I had ringed the name all the same. No Vavas in our own biographical index, so I had sent it to Connie to see if they had anything on him in Rehovot. They hadn’t, which made her conclude it must be something for Professor Bergmann in Jerusalem; which turned out to be correct. Bergmann was doing the scientific volume on Chaimchik, and all relevant papers had been transferred to his own files. From Bergmann, after a lengthy delay, had come a note to say that Vava was a Dr Vladimir Kutcholsky and that he had worked with one or other of the oil companies in London in the mid-1930s; and then another letter to say that there must have been correspondence between him and Chaimchik, and could we find out if any of it existed.

  This was quite a routine thing to do, and Hopcroft had spent months on similar quests when we first started. My preserve was volumes 15 and 16 (1931–35, Chaimchik’s period in the wilderness: a fruitful wilderness), and Hopcroft had turned up several previously unknown letters. Research is much a matter of one thing leading to another, and his drifting and yarning tendencies made him good at it.

  He had gone to various oil companies and professional bodies, and had finally run Vava to earth, rather literally, in a cemetery at Bushey, where he had been since 1962. His wife had predeceased him, and probate (as another line of research revealed) had been granted to a daughter, Olga, a doctor of medicine. Finding Olga had presented no difficulties, except that Hopcroft’s moment of doing so had been unpropitious. She was separating from her husband, and conducting a piecemeal removal operation.

  She confirmed the existence of correspondence between Chaimchik and her father, but couldn’t immediately lay hands on it because it was in one of twenty or so brown-paper parcels either at Wimbledon or Swiss Cottage. Urged on by Rehovot, which after the original dilatoriness had suddenly become very urgent and demanding, I had spurred Hopcroft, who had spurred Olga. She had promised to have the stuff today, so that I could take it away with me. She’d taken off a few days, anyway, to complete her removal before Christmas.

  This last reflection now provoked another.

  I said, ‘Do you know, it just occurred to me what Ettie was hinting about. She was hinting about Christmas. Another thing to be seen to!’

  ‘Well, I’ll see to that. Leave me a check.’

  ‘I wish I didn’t feel so terribly uneasy,’ I said.

  ‘It’s probably the disquiet of youth.’

  ‘I wish you’d save your mots for Willie.’

  ‘Well, would you like to know something?’ she said. She was looking down, slowly nibbling toasted cheese. ‘To tell the truth, I’m a bit pissed off with Willie.’

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s nice.’

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

  ‘He’s not madly there on top, you know.’

  ‘I thought you were a bit off the brain.’

  ‘In ladies.’

  ‘What in God’s name do you suppose has happened to Hopcroft?’

  ‘Oh, well, bugger Hopcroft. I thought we were having an interesting talk,’ she said.

  ‘Caroline, what’s up with you?’

  ‘Well, what’s up with you?’

  Her normally pale cheeks had become pink and her eyes were gleaming a little. There were toast crumbs round her mouth, and she licked them off. The phone went while she was staring at me, and she said, ‘Yes,’ nodding, and went to answer it herself. The yes did not seem to be a response to the summoning phone, and I stared after her. What was it a response to? The idiot girl couldn’t conceivably have taken a fancy to me? She’d just not ten minutes ago been conducting a perfectly normal conversation while in her bath – or, rather, my bath. I’d given her my heavenly talc. I thought over this complication, and heard her mumbling away in the other room, and she called,’ Igor.’

  She’d put the phone down and was staring at a bit of paper. ‘Well, that was Hopcroft – or, rather, from Hopcroft. He’s been knocked down.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Is he hurt?’

  ‘Well, he’s in hospital. That was them. Not badly enough not to want to see you. In fact, he does want to see you.’

  ‘Has he got the –’ I said, and bit off the uncharitable inquiry.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s got. She said he’s got contusions. The St Mary and St Joseph Hospital,’ she said, reading.

  ‘Where the devil is that?’

  ‘Around Swiss Cottage, apparently. I told you. He was probably just drifting about there … Well, look. I’ll get on with the urgent things. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Oh, damn it, I don’t know.’ I was scrambling into my coat. ‘I’m all in a flutter. I’d better get my ticket while I’m out.’

  ‘What about Kaplan?’

  ‘I’ve practically done Kaplan. You’ll see w
hat I’ve done. Send him the completed ones. Write a little covering note. Dear, oh, dear,’ I said.

  ‘Any calls to be made?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. Poor old Hopcroft.’

  ‘Yes. In the midst of life, et cetera. He can’t be all that bad, you idiot.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning, will I?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘All right.’ I hurried out, on the point of remembering to wish her an enjoyable evening, and then remembering not to, and got a cab outside, in Russell Square.

  2

  The St Mary and St Joseph was a snug small hospital, and Hopcroft had already established himself quite snugly in it. He was sitting up in bed in a small ward with three other men, all smiling as they listened to their headphones. Hopcroft was smiling himself, but not wearing headphones. He was wearing a pad of lint, like a little skullcap in his bushy hair, and he was smiling at a corpulent old lady with a dewlap who was not noticeably a nurse. She nodded and moved away as I approached, and Hopcroft said in an undertone, ‘Nice old thing. She’s a visitor. Her father was Skene, you know, the biographer of ‘the Liberator,’ O’Connell. She read Modern History herself under Namier at Manchester. Namier. Odd, isn’t it?’

  It was odd, but even odder (though I’d noted before his natural ability for the work) was the speed with which Hopcroft had extracted this information. Allowing time off for having his injuries dressed, and his clothes taken away, and for the insertion of himself into pajamas, and into bed, he couldn’t have had long with her.

  I said, ‘Hopcroft, what on earth happened to you?’

  ‘It takes a bit of beating, doesn’t it?’ One lens of his spectacles was cracked and there was a small blue bruise on his forehead. His bushy little mustache put me again in mind of one of Wells’s wistful counter-jumpers, some colleague of Kipps or Polly. He was an ageless twenty-four. ‘I mean, the whole thing happened in a flash. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘Where did it happen?’

  ‘Tancred Court. I was just going out. Didn’t they tell you?’ He seemed rather disappointed.

  ‘They simply said you were knocked down.’

  ‘And how. Whang. I went over like a tree. Incredible, really.’

  ‘You were knocked down outside the block of flats?’

  ‘Not outside. I hadn’t even got outside.’

  ‘You were knocked down inside the block of flats?’

  ‘Like a light. I mean, boff! I came down in the lift and this chap at the bottom said, “Can you give us a hand, Guv?” And I thought somebody had been taken ill or something, he looked so anxious. It’s just at the back of the hall, there’s a sort of recess, and there was another man there and he said, “Could you see your way to helping us out with a quid?” And I thought, Oh-oh. I mean. I’d got six quid in my wallet. I didn’t want to sort of flash it. But at the same time it occurred to me, I’d been reading the paper in the tube, about people being laid off, these power cuts, and I thought. Well, reason with them, they might need a job, you know, sort of start a chat.’

  Hopcroft had started a chat, and one of the men had hit him on the head.

  ‘I mean – boff! I didn’t even know what happened. I was just lying there. No wallet, no case – that smashing executive case of mine! I did notes on it, marvelous case, my mother gave me it. And I sort of staggered about, blood all down here, and the porter came out from somewhere, and that’s it. I mean, you know, cool, eh? Broad daylight!’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Hopcroft said, pleased at my reaction. ‘Mugged in the middle of Swiss Cottage, at lunchtime. I’d not two minutes before been having a plate of soup with Olga – Doctor Green. She wanted to fry up a bit of veal, she was having some, but there was no phone, and I’d promised you, so I said, no, well, I’d better dash. And zap!’

  ‘Did you – did you have anything in the case?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, crikey, yes. I found the agreement for his lease on the Featherstone Laboratory, 1931. That was yesterday’s – I forgot to tell you about that. I got it from a solicitor in Gray’s Inn. Copy of it. Quite interesting, too. I think he understated his expenses – you know, when he was going on about how modest the whole budget was, five hundred a year to cover the rent and salaries and so on. That would be a bit tricky. The rent was three hundred. Interesting point, eh? Though, of course, we can always get another copy, now we know where it is.’

  ‘Yes. Anything else?’

  ‘Something today. What was it? I had a bit of a clonk, you know.’

  ‘Vava’s papers?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She hasn’t got them.’

  ‘She hasn’t got them?’

  ‘Not with her. I checked myself. It’s a bit of a mess up there. It’s this barmy way she’s moving. There’s one of the drivers at the hospital – University College – he’s doing it for her. He keeps going there and back. There’s apparently this one parcel with diplomas and so forth, birth certificates, that kind of thing. And she’s got the letters in it. It’s still at Wimbledon.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you. Sorry to drag you out here.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Hopcroft. I was worried about you.’

  ‘It was a bit of a clonk,’ he said, cautiously touching his skullcap. ‘Thudding slightly. They insisted on keeping me in. We had the lot, you know – police, ambulance. The porter got them. Incredible, really. What else was there? There was something else, damn it.’

  His eyes were crossing very slightly.

  ‘I don’t think you ought to be talking, Hopcroft.’

  ‘That’s all right. My mother will be here soon. Not much chance of getting that case back,’ he said ruefully. ‘Worth more than the six quid. My initials were on it. Rotters. Oh, yes. I know. Olga. She’s sending you the stuff. I told her you were going to Israel and that they were mustard keen, so she’s posting it. I said make it express, because of the Christmas mail and so forth, so you’ll get it there. She’s popping down the day after tomorrow; her husband won’t be there.’

  ‘The originals?’

  ‘Oh, sure, the genuine thing.’

  ‘You told her to make a copy.’

  ‘Did I? Oh, crikey, I didn’t. I don’t think so. Oh, gosh, sorry.’

  It’s all right. I’ll go and see her myself.’

  ‘Yes, well, you can’t.’ Hopcroft was looking very unhappy. She was going off after lunch to stay with this friend in Frognal. I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know who the friend is.’

  ‘She can’t be reached anywhere?’

  ‘Well, no. She’s staying with her. She can’t sort of stand being on her own. She’s a bit cut up, just at the moment.’

  ‘Could we perhaps get in touch with the husband? He might leave her a note.’

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘What time is she going to Wimbledon, when she goes?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, there was no reason to ask her. Gosh, what an idiot I am.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a piece of luck she didn’t have the papers. They’d have taken those as well.’

  ‘Yes. They must have spotted me coming out of the bank. There’s a Barclay’s just below. I’d topped up a bit on my way in, got five quid out on my credit card. I mean, with that spiffy case and everything I might have looked a bit important. They probably hung around waiting for me to come down. There were people around when I went in, you see. I told the police that. They thought there was something in it. A bit cool, eh? Mid-day!’

  ‘Lousy luck. I am sorry, old chap. Stop talking now, though.’

  ‘It is thudding a bit,’ he said on a fainter note, and looked slowly round as a simultaneous titter came from the three other occupants of the room. They were grinning at each other. A tiny batlike shrieking and a crackle of twigs were just audible from their headphones. ‘Well, I think I will dry up,’ he said. ‘Have a good time in Israel, et cetera.’

  ‘Than
ks. Rest, Hopcroft,’ I told him.

  Chapter Two

  I was walking in Central Park South (this was the previous year, not long after my book on the 1930s had appeared) when from the opposite direction another figure came walking: a dapper small figure, white mane of hair, Red Indian face, hands clasped behind him. Our eyes locked some distance off, and he stopped as he came abreast and said, ‘Hey – Igor Druyanov?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, nice to see you, Igor.’ He was giving me a most charming smile, and also his hand, which I shook. ‘Isn’t this the damnedest thing?’ he said. ‘I am Meyer Weisgal.’

  ‘How are you, Mr Weisgal?’ I was having my hand shaken a good deal lately by very affable once-met folk. I racked my brains.

  ‘So what are you doing in New York, Igor? I saw you were at Harvard.’

  ‘I’m doing a couple of lectures.’

  ‘Well, it beats everything. Here I take a walk and turn over in my mind The Betrayed Decade, and who walks along? You know, you don’t have to make things happen.’ He was doing a kind of shuffle, salty eyes smiling up from under his brows. ‘They just happen. They happened so often in my life!’ (So they did. Interested readers may turn to his autobiography, So Far, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.) ‘Quit worrying, we didn’t meet yet,’ he said.’ I am from the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It’s a very good – even an excellent book.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘I don’t know if I would have passed the title. It takes the teeth out if you have to say it: I’m a good editor.’ The salty eyes were still radiating away.

  ‘You are – an editor at the Weizmann Institute?’ I said in some confusion.

  ‘Well, no, I’m not. I’m really the Chancellor there – whatever the hell that happens to be. Say, Igor, why don’t you and I take a stroll?’ He turned and we strolled back the way he had come.

  ‘How’s your father?’ he said.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘That’s Maxim Druyanov, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What’s he doing now?’