The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘Patel?’ I said, surprised. ‘I hardly know him at all.’

  ‘He seemed to know a lot about you. He dropped by this morning. He mentioned something about – well, about Marta,’ she said doggedly.

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Stop me if you don’t want me to go on. He said he’d seen you with Marta on some occasions – apparently leaving the Weizmann House last night, and earlier in the – in the orange groves, Igor. He takes exercise at night, apparently.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Believe me, after a lifetime of campus gossip – I mean, naturally Ham said the hell with it. But I don’t know. He said a curious thing, Patel. He said you ought to be dissuaded from the relationship.’

  The question of discreet Marta had to be considered, so I kept my mouth shut.

  She looked at her watch. ‘We have some time. I told Ham to pick up some things for me in the village … Igor, did you know Marta’s husband was an oil engineer?’

  ‘I knew he was an engineer.’

  ‘An oil engineer, Patel says.’

  I lit a cigarette.

  ‘He asked if you had told Marta where these lab books were in London.’

  I drew on the cigarette and thought about this. How came Patel to know of lab books in London? How did Marie-Louise herself know? Husbands and wives were a special case, of course, but still. Apparently Meyer was right: people did gab.

  ‘Which lab books?’ I said.

  ‘I am telling you what he said. I know nothing of it.’

  ‘What did Ham say?’

  ‘He said he wasn’t your keeper.’

  I didn’t say anything for a while. Marie-Louise watched me, troubled.

  ‘Igor, I’m telling you this because – you saw how he behaved today. I’m not sure of his judgment lately. If this is important, I thought you’d better know, however embarrassing.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We all love Marta,’ she said. Her eyes were still troubled. ‘I discussed it with Ham, whether we ought to tell you, and he just said …’

  I could imagine Ham’s short reply. He returned just then, and not before time; we were due at the President’s in a quarter of an hour. I heard the car pull up, and he came up the path fairly steadily, my trousers over his arm.

  Marie-Louise glared at him. ‘Take them in the bedroom.’ He opened his mouth and closed it again, but meekly obeyed.

  She said quietly, ‘Don’t mention this.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  A few minutes later, we were at the Presidential tea party.

  *

  It wasn’t so very Presidential. Katzir was in a sports shirt, jovial, very friendly. I’d briefly met him once, but we had a lengthy chat this time. He seemed well up on the Pickles Effect, took down Kaplan’s details himself, and promised a suitable letter would go off.

  All through the tea party, with something of a delayed shock, I wondered about Marta’s oil engineer, and about that man of many theories, Dr Patel, and his night exercises.

  4

  I wasn’t clear what to do about it. Since Patel had been so explicit about the grounds for discouraging the relationship, he evidently intended me to know. Why hadn’t he told me himself? He was certainly making himself scarce. All Monday and Tuesday I didn’t see him. I heard him moving in his room, and wondered whether to beard him. Far better to ask Marta. But not very wise, of course, if he was right …

  I tried to remember all she’d told me about her husband. They’d met in Stockholm. He’d worked in foreign parts, Rumania, Russia; last year in Norway. Hadn’t there been an oil strike in Norway? There was oil, of course, in Russia and Rumania … Well, it wasn’t a crime to marry an oil engineer. Only why hadn’t she told me? Perhaps because one engineer was very like another. She’d told me little more about any of her family. The family-mindedness hadn’t actually run to many details. I’d put it down to reticence, a sense of propriety.

  There was also the odd matter of Patel himself. Hadn’t he been the one tying himself in knots to produce alternative theories, that it wasn’t, needn’t, be anyone at Rehovot? Why the sudden rethink?

  I had a rethink: of the former ubiquity of this man. He’d approached me at breakfast the morning after I’d arrived in December – a very late breakfast. I remembered the long length of him, uncoiling like a python after the mispplaced cucumber. After this, early or late, I’d scarcely moved without bumping into him: peering into the plant genetics lab, offering to accompany me to the Weizmann House, carefully reading the address on the back of Olga’s letter. Now, all of a sudden, no Patel.

  I’d been brooding for a couple of days, and it was now Tuesday evening. I hadn’t told Meyer. There was the question of what to tell him. The extramural antics of a distinguished lady professor were at ticklish matter to set before the Chancellor. I heard a chair scrape next door and had a distinct impression of Patel thinking away in there, which suddenly decided me. I was waiting for a call from Caroline, but I picked up the phone and told them to put it through to Mr Weisgal’s house, and went there.

  He was looking rather glum, which had become familiar. He had the daily list of those who had visited the archives. Only bona-fide researchers were on it (though anybody could go), and none had looked up 1933.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what you expected,’ I said.

  ‘Give him time. He’ll try.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’d do in his spot. People behave strangely.’

  ‘True,’ I said, pouring myself a drop of his Scotch, and after some hesitation told him of other behavior.

  A rather stony look crossed his face at mention of the Weizmann House, but he didn’t ask what we were doing there. He didn’t ask anything at all.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Meyer,’ I said awkwardly.

  ‘The man’s a scandalmonger. Who asks him to go walking at night? People are human beings.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said, very relieved at his reaction.

  ‘So what is it – an oil engineer,’ he said mildly. He jotted himself a note and looked at it. ‘Did you arrange to see her again?’

  ‘Tonight, in fact, but that’s –’

  The phone rang. It was Caroline, from London, a good deal more cheerful. She’d put together the last of the pages. She had also managed to salvage almost half of my notes. Since this left over half missing, it didn’t seem so cheering to me. However, she gave me one or two items of information. ‘You should get everything by Thursday. I hurried,’ she said. ‘I’m going off for a few days.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘To a château or two on the Loire.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yes, I expected this pent interest. You’ll never guess who rang, of course.’

  Châteaux on the Loire spelled Willie the wine merchant.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘There’s nothing here that can’t wait now, so I thought what the hell. A little inspection of the vintage … Is it all right?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘As I bloody thought … Burrowing away, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And missing me – a bit?’

  ‘I miss you a lot, darling. I think of you.’

  ‘I’ll spit out the vintage and think of you, then. You would like me to call again, wouldn’t you, even though the letters are away?’

  ‘Of course. I want to hear you, darling.’

  ‘All right, darling,’ she said more warmly. ‘I will reverse the charge.’

  Meyer was looking at me, mouth a bit open, as I put the phone down. He studied his notes again.

  ‘What’s to be done?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll think it over. Carry on with your own affairs.’ He gave me another stony look. ‘Casanova.’

  *

  Affairs weren’t very lively that night. A pall of Remembrance-eve gloom hung over the place. Connie had invited us to a sober meal at Bat Yam. Ham picked Marta up
first. The thing had been arranged before Patel’s revelations, and as if to overcompensate, Marie-Louise sat in the front while I shared the back seat with Marta. I didn’t know what to say to her. Perversely she began asking a series of probing questions about the discovery in the archives.

  ‘I suppose they’ll have improved the process since,’ she said.

  ‘Well, obviously.’

  ‘But it would have been enough to go on, if you hadn’t found the other papers?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Is the carotene thing so very important?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘What luck you’ve got the originals in London.’

  To me, every word she uttered was an absolute proof of innocence, but from a slight stiffening of backs in the front it was painfully obvious that it wasn’t so evident to all. Maddeningly, she wouldn’t leave it alone.

  ‘I don’t understand how a letter as important as this could be overlooked, if he gives the whole process in it.’

  ‘It wasn’t overlooked. It’s a known letter. I’m using it. It’s just that the P.S. on it was never transferred to the carbon copy.’

  ‘Do you work only with carbons?’

  ‘No, I check with the originals if political points seem involved.’

  ‘And they weren’t here. It was just an ordinary little letter.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So now you’ll be able to use the whole thing.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know if –’

  ‘But you’ll have taken copies of the P.S., naturally?’

  ‘Isn’t this the turnoff for Bat Yam?’ Ham said, rather too loudly.

  Marie-Louise switched the conversation, and we got there, and were greeted, and had our sober meal. It was very sober. Connie seemed to have been forewarned, and there wasn’t much to drink, which made Ham restless.

  Connie had managed at the last moment to get me a ticket for the Independence-eve concert the following night at Caesarea; a party was going from Rehovot. As a special effort after the punishing war, Menuhin, Barenboim, and Stern were appearing, with Zubin Mehta leading the Israeli Philharmonic and pitched choirs. The local Caesarea magnate, Foka Hirsch, whose party I’d been to at Christmas, was making his own special effort by throwing another party afterward, and we were going to that, too.

  There was some discussion about this. Ham asked me to look in and have a drink at six-thirty before setting off, and I said I’d probably be around and about by then.

  ‘You’re surely not working all tomorrow?’ Connie said.

  ‘No. I’m tired with it. I’ll knock off early.’

  We knocked off early that night, too, everyone a bit under par with the general gloom. The streets had been silent all evening.

  Marie-Louise sat with Marta going back.

  5

  There was no Patel again at breakfast. He was either keeping me under observation or simply fasting. Well, damn him; I had my own breakfast, picked up a packet of sandwiches for lunch, and set off to the House. I left the bike in the shrubbery beyond the grave, crossed the lawn, and went up the three flights of steps.

  I gave Chaimchik’s bronze head a brief nod as I let myself in, and locked the door behind me. There was a fusty air about the place. With all the half-days and holidays, I’d had it to myself for days. I was beginning to dislike Verochka’s dream house. There seemed something different about it today; some slight change in atmosphere that I couldn’t quite place.

  The curtains were still drawn in Chaimchik’s room. I’d worked till dark the previous day. I opened them a slit. The sun was piercingly bright, too bright for the dim dead world awaiting disinterment here. Ah, well. Back to bloody 1933.

  None of Caroline’s material had turned up yet, and assembling the missing footnotes, not knowing which were missing, had proved such a hideous as well as baffling bore I’d been tempted once or twice to drop it, in the hope that Patel was right and the stuff would turn up. I was glad I hadn’t now. With the information supplied by Caroline I had a pretty fair idea of what was needed, and had luckily laid hands on it; so I assembled my materials and buckled to once more.

  I’d worked for an hour or two before the sense of unease brought me to a total halt. What the devil? Something was different. The massive Remembrance Day silence, perhaps? It was unpleasant, almost palpable, in the empty House; yet it didn’t seem exactly that. Had someone been in – a security guard, perhaps – and made some slight change I’d subconsciously registered? Time for a cup of coffee, anyway. I thought I’d go below to have one and check at the same time.

  I went down the marble staircase, whistling to keep my spirits up, and put the kettle on in the kitchen. Back door locked; kitchen and morning-room windows locked. I went and checked the other rooms. Library, salon, dining room – all in order and keys turned in locks. The front door was as I’d left it. I stood there for a while, looking round the hall to see what could have disturbed me. The limed oak gleamed coldly back, everything else in place. The feeling was still strong, though, as strong as the day I’d gone into the room with the Christmas tree in it in Stockholm. But that had been an anticipatory feeling.

  I had a sharp urge to leave it for the day. But tomorrow was Independence Day, and no one was coming in the day after, either … The sudden blast of a whistle sent me almost full length under the hall table. I collected myself, went and turned the kettle off, took the coffee upstairs, and returned doggedly to work.

  *

  Sir Montague Burton,

  64, Kent Road,

  Harrogate, Yorks.

  My dear Sir Montague,

  You may know that our friend Israel Sieff has been building an Institute at Rehovot in memory of his boy Daniel. Last year when we were in Palestine, the foundation stone was laid on a little sandhill …

  He was drumming up funds; and there was a missing footnote here from material gathered years later, 1950s. I went through to Connie’s room and lugged the boxes back with me.

  I worked on, with a break for sandwiches, till sometime after four when I stopped with a headache. Desk, floor, and bed were well scattered with files. It was early to knock off yet, so I shifted the files off the bed and stretched out there, with the notion that I’d put in another hour and sign off at six. I knew I wouldn’t sleep, but the next thing was that bells were jangling, and I started up in alarm to find the room in semidarkness and all the phones ringing.

  I chased them about the House until they stopped, and looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was half past six. I’d slept a couple of hours. It was probably Ham, anyway; time for the promised drink. So I returned to Chaimchik’s room and switched on the desk lamp and began repacking papers. His death certificate fell out and I popped it back in again. In the last hour of work I’d drifted a bit – Hopcroft’s old complaint – to pore reminiscently over the old lion’s last winters of discontent. They had certainly been very bleak, all his triumphs well behind, the historic achievements over, and only the last bitter dregs left.

  There were plenty of those, however. As a last kick, he had done some prodigious things: had swung American policy in a complete volte-face in favor of the establishment of the new State, had won for it the Negev and a loan of a hundred million dollars. While he’d done it, the new young lions had wisely let him get on with it and had played themselves in at home. By the time he rumbled what was going on and was homeward bound himself, he was too late: they had elected him President, stripped him of all political power, and made him, as he savagely said, ‘the prisoner of Rehovot.’

  Here were all his last rages, to the ‘government of upstarts,’ of ‘provincials’: that they must surely have some use for his knowledge of affairs, his international reputation. But they hadn’t; nor for the ‘consultative capacity’ he more humbly pleaded with them to use before arriving at decisions. To keep him quiet, Ben-Gurion sent the Cabinet secretary once a week to read him the list of decisions already reached. And so it passed for him, until the
clock stopped at six, and the lifelong flow of papers stopped, too. His papers, anyway. After the death certificate came other papers, funeral arrangements, copies of the letters of tribute and condolence.

  I stuffed them away in handfuls, came on other papers, and paused. Verochka’s papers. I’d never seen them in order; only the ones I’d asked for. Here they were, following his death.

  Time was ticking on, and I knew I should be going, but I sat down and looked at them, all the same.

  She’d been stunned, evidently, for weeks: piles of unanswered letters, invitations. She’d accepted an invitation eventually, a memorial meeting in America (Chaimchik still, from his grassy plot, drumming up the funds). And here was her diary entry as she’d left.

  What an ordeal to leave Ohaimchik in his grave alone. I cannot get used to it. I have already developed a double personality: the Verochka of the old days, proud and happy with her dearest one, and another who is lonely, desolate and forlorn. These two should never be allowed to meet.

  But alas, they did. Not long after returning from the trip, she was going through the files and meeting herself when young (Verochka, Verunya, Verusenka, darling and joy), and also, in later boxes of correspondence, some other young. Life had kept a couple of things back for her, too; at about the time that I was seven.

  I was musing over this when a door gently blew to below, evidently from a draught. I wondered idly where the draught came from, since no doors or windows were open, when another thought occurred. If no doors were open, how could they blow to?

  Odd. A moment later, it got odder still, and without knowing why I switched the desk lamp off and sat there, absolutely still, except for something throbbing in my throat, perhaps my heart, which seemed to have leaped there, because someone was moving below.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There were footsteps, evidently a man’s, rather slow and cautious. He was walking about the hall. I heard a door tried, and the scrape of a key in the lock; then it was-relocked and another door tried.