The Sun Chemist (2 page)

‘Who?’

‘Hopcroft. A research assistant. He’ll be phoning me. It’s raining here, he probably can’t get through.’

‘What?’

Altogether too much to explain here to a man who’d just instantly got through from Israel. I saw his brows beetling: white brows, white mane, great squashed nose, tanned Red Indian face. He was seventy-nine and looked sixty, Hollywood
tycoonish
: Meyer Weisgal, idolater of Chaimchik, raiser of his Institute, guardian of the name.

‘Everything’s perfectly okay, Meyer. The problem is, Vava’s daughter is in the process of moving. She’s a pediatrician at University College Hospital and she’s just left her husband and taken a flat in Swiss Cottage. There was some question whether the papers were there, you see, or at Wimbledon, where she lived with her husband.’

‘Where?’

‘Wimbledon. It’s a place.’

‘Sure. I know it. They play tennis there. Wimbledon.’

‘That’s it. Exactly.’

‘You have the goddam papers or you don’t?’

‘Give Connie my love,’ Caroline said from the doorway. She was in a towel.

‘So I’ll be seeing you, Meyer,’ I said. ‘And Caroline would like to give Connie her love.’

‘Listen, Igor – bring that stuff, you hear? Connie, take this.’

‘Igor.’

‘Hello, Connie. Caroline sends her love. She’s here.’

‘Did she get engaged yet?’

‘I don’t think yet. Connie, what is this tremendous nonsense with Vava?’

‘Oh, it’s very involved. Do you have a batch of other queries with you?’

‘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 what 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.

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.’