The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘I see. Yes. I see,’ I said.

  ‘You can put your case down now,’ she said. ‘You’re there. How was orange-blossom land?’ She was recovering herself, and I saw that the guilt and resentment very probably had as their source the fact that she was drunk.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said, and put down my case. I retraced my steps, and returned with the other, cautiously thinking over the matter.

  ‘Something wrong with the flight?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Delays.’

  ‘Do you want anything to eat?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, now.’

  ‘I brought you a caftan.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ She was looking definitely stoned.

  ‘How many have you had?’ I said.

  ‘Several. How many would you like?’

  ‘I’ll have one, just for now.’

  She got it while I took my coat off. ‘Go and have a wash,’ she said as I did this. ‘You look horrible. Saturnine.’

  I went and had a wash, still working the matter out. A logistical problem had to be worked out.

  The drink was awaiting my return: a whisky with water.

  ‘And stop looking so bloody worried, as well as saturnine,’ she said. ‘You appeared as what I would describe as thunderstruck on arrival.’

  ‘I didn’t know it would be you.’

  ‘Who did you – Oh.’ She became alert. ‘Have you gone and made an assignation?’

  ‘No. You silly cow,’ I said irritably.

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then. Silly cow, eh?’ she seemed?’ rather pleased with this. ‘Go on. Abuse me. Feel free. On the other hand, a scheduled arrival would have presented you with a composed person, respectably seeking a night’s shelter. A proper request, understandable situation. Is how it seemed to me, on giving it thought, which I did, after checking flight times. However … usual balls-up.’ She took an enormous glug at her drink.

  I sat down and took one at mine. We watched each other.

  ‘How was it?’ she said.

  ‘Busy. How was yours?’

  ‘Fucking awful.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So kind. I’d curtsy if I wasn’t sure to fall over. You’d be surprised at how much kindness there is in the world. Do you know what I was doing while you were watching by night? I was wrapping little bloody gifts for about two million old ladies. You wouldn’t credit the number of old ladies they keep alive round there. They all live in these little homes, and they smile like this, and you smile back, and – oh, yes, we had the waits. Have your English studies led to waits?’

  ‘Waits?’

  ‘Carol singers. You’ve got to be extra jolly with them; times have changed, unlike old ladies. “Had to reach down for that one, Charlie, bottom of the barrel, ha-ha, ho-ho –” Ch-rist! And Mama shows you how to do everything, and Papa so affable, and everybody so – bloody – unremittingly – kind.’

  ‘You’re not marrying the family, Caroline.’

  ‘I have special news for you, Igor, Tovarich. I am not marrying any bloody one of them.’

  ‘You just left?’

  ‘In fact, yes. I rang Antonia, and she rang me back.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Not good, eh? I wasn’t there four days,’ she said wonderingly.

  ‘Well, it’s a pity.’

  ‘Isn’t it? How was Connie?’

  ‘Fine. Love, et cetera.’

  ‘Did Mr Meltzer like his cigars?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Did Mr Weisgal like your work?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you like me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A slight pause set in.

  ‘Was the Vava nonsense solved?’ she asked.

  ‘Partially.’

  ‘More letters around?’

  ‘I’ll have to explain later. I’m tired.’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘I will presently. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘For me, too. I’m exhausted. Mentally exhausted.’

  ‘How’s Hopcroft?’ I asked.

  ‘Sparkling. I bought him a new case. He hasn’t got it yet. They’re doing his initials.’

  ‘That was nice, Caroline.’

  ‘I am nice.’

  ‘Were you nice enough to ring my mother?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Without response. An unresponsive family, yours.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’d forgotten. Just in the same moment I remembered. I’d looked in on my father in the last scrambled hours before Israel. He’d told me there was some trouble at their country house, the central heating, the double glazing. They’d gone away for Christmas, too. I remembered him huddled over the electric fire in his Gower Street flat, studying his memoirs. He was stuck somewhere, 1935. A whole weight of things suddenly came back on me, and I finished off my drink rather suddenly.

  ‘Want another?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I’m having one.’ She swallowed hers in an enormous gulp and took both glasses. I looked after her uneasily. Definitely some difficulties ahead.

  ‘To set your mind at rest,’ she said, returning with the glasses, ‘you will be sleeping in your bed.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I will be sleeping in it, too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m certainly not sleeping on the bloody sofa.’

  ‘Well, in that case –’

  ‘And nor are you. It’s an enormous bed. I won’t rape you. You silly cow,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, gobble that off, and let’s get there. I’m dead.’

  In the bedroom she took off her dressing gown and found she didn’t have anything on underneath. With notions of propriety she stumbled about, swearing a little, and unpacked a nightie. I brushed my teeth and got into my pajamas, then into bed.

  ‘Good night,’ she said.

  ‘Good night.’ I switched the light off.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said after a while.

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘No, but damn it, it’s awful. I didn’t mean this at all. I was just feeling rather desperate, and now it’s got worse. Say something like “Good night, Caroline, darling,” and it would be better.’

  ‘Good night, Caroline, darling.’

  ‘You could throw in a hug while you’re at it, just to show you’re not in a raving bloody temper.’

  I threw her one, and also a kiss.

  ‘That’s all right, then. Good night, Igor,’ she said, and tried to throw a quick one in herself as I moved away, and missed.

  Whether from the drink taken or the exhaustion mentioned, she went off to sleep almost immediately. When I woke in the night, I found her still sleeping, quite neatly, on her own side. She wasn’t there in the morning. It was quite late. I heard her in the bathroom.

  I lay quietly listening, and filled my eyes with gray London skies, and heard the buses passing below. A world away, under blue skies, a white house sat, armies were locked, Finster fermented, and part of the carbon cycle was having its shiny wart forced into life. All a long way away, that freewheeling lunacy. But in the gray North other kinds hadn’t stopped. From the bathroom a bump sounded, and an expletive rang. This was the kind that called for immediate attention.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Carry on about carotene,’ Caroline said.

  She was sitting in the caftan. She’d taken a couple of Alka-Seltzers but still looked slightly stunned.

  ‘Are you taking all this in?’ I said.

  ‘Everything is going in. There is nothing I’m not experiencing this morning.’

  ‘Because I couldn’t bear to tell it again.’

  ‘Well, all this energy is going round on a – or, rather, in a – cycle, and if you know how to you can plug in on it with sweet potatoes.’

  ‘Among other things,’ I said.

  ‘Quite. But what is so sweet
about this potato is it grows in useless sorts of places, particularly where millions of poor people are starving away. All you have to have is this bug that eats it, because nobody else will, and it turns it into petrol.’

  ‘Ketones.’

  ‘Exactly. And they’ve cleverly found all this, except it also makes a lot of rubbish that’s hard to get rid of, including – something I’m not clear on – carotene, which at one and the same time is useless but also terribly useful in solving everybody’s problems.’

  ‘Well. Very good,’ I said; which it surprisingly was. She was clumsy this morning, and banging herself, but seemed in good order aloft. ‘I don’t understand the carotene, either, but few people do, if any. The theory seems to be that it’s not so much the carotene as the presence of the carotene.’ This seemed mad even as I said it. ‘Anyway, for what it’s worth, find a suitable catalyst – Do you know about catalysts?’

  ‘They change things.’

  ‘Exactly. Find one of those and it changes this stuff – transforms it, you see; converts it; sort of triggers it, like – well, I don’t know.’

  ‘An atom bomb.’

  ‘Yes. You’re bright this morning.’

  ‘Well, I know about those. I’ve got one of those.’ She was holding her head. ‘They do trigger away.’

  ‘So that where you get the carotene with methyl – or is it ethyl? – this whole transformation scene takes place. All the stuff that you don’t want turns into the stuff that you do want.’

  ‘The Pickles Effect.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s it, is it? Or is there more?’

  ‘That’s it. Doesn’t it seem strange enough?’ She considered a moment. ‘It will do. It will seem stranger, that is. Everything seems strange now. You do. Your face is quite abnormal. Your teeth flash when you trigger away, did you realize?’

  ‘No.’ I looked at her. The face that had seemed so unmemorable was really quite memorable; slightly lopsided and pale like a slice of moon, and of lunar humor; eyes a bit flat and dead at the moment, but evidently in good working order.

  ‘Oh, God. Are you going to say something pissy about my face?’

  ‘A bit hung over. Nothing terrible.’

  ‘Some leftover of Dracula’s.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t really …’ The chubbier and altogether merrier face of Sheik Yamani caught my eye, in the newspaper on which the percolator was resting. Seraphic as ever, he was somewhere else, still hilariously regretting. A wave of something suddenly hit me. The incredible series of events that had brought this son of the sands, like an imp from a bottle, from desert wastes to the ingenious cities of the West was surely more and not less fantastic than anything in Chaimchik’s memo.

  Yet the intuitive man had foreseen it, had clearly vizualized the situation at a time when, as Meyer said, ‘their asses were hanging out.’ He had worked out the alternative, scientifically, logically, and left time to work its madness for the necessary emergency.

  I had the strangest feeling that I was reading the thing in a history of the period: ‘The grave economic crises of the seventies, and the reliance of the industrialized nations on a stable source of …’

  I shook my head sharply.

  ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ Caroline said.

  Her flat eyes were still gazing at me, narrowed with pain.

  ‘It can all happen, Caroline!’

  ‘Any bloody thing can happen. But just don’t do that again. You didn’t bring an orange, did you?’

  ‘I did, actually. Well, mandarins.’ Connie had plucked them, leaves attached, while I bade Marta farewell not many hours ago. They were still buried in my bag.

  ‘Oh, well, my God, mandarins! How I need a mandarin!’

  I got her one, and she sniffed the leaves, and popped the peel, and crooned over it, holding it in both hands, like a holy chalice.

  *

  I saw Kammermann at four, a tiny corpse-like figure of over ninety. It scarcely seemed worth shunting him to Switzerland. Still, he’d always hung on, had Kammermann, a close and cautious man, which had been his value to Chaimchik as a confidant. He’d hung on to his upper story, too, rather remarkably, and remembered quite a lot. But the only real interest in him was his papers.

  I managed to win cautious assent to Rehovot having them ‘in due time.’ But he wouldn’t actually sign anything to say so. Still, as a parting look confirmed, the time couldn’t be long delayed, so I left Brown’s not dissatisfied. The papers were from the early thirties, and therefore my papers; not a wasted journey, like his. Except could his journey be said to be wasted if on the way he’d met me? There was a random quality to life that it was tempting to see as its chief quality, unless one bumped into men like Chaimchik. Would a speeded-up version of his life not show the random events forming a pattern, if one were in a pattern-making mood?

  2

  ‘How long has Antonia got your flat?’

  ‘Till Monday.’ It was now Friday night, and we were having a meal out. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because my father’s is only round the corner. Nobody in it.’

  ‘I’d bloody freeze there, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘I was thinking I could do it.’

  ‘Ah, my leprosy. I see.’

  ‘I was thinking of old Ettie.’

  ‘Well, bugger old Ettie. Oh. Compromising me, you mean!’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Why is it, I wonder, that I am surrounded by such gallant chaps? I scarcely slept with Willie, you know.’

  ‘No good?’

  ‘Well. He had trauma on the few occasions. I wonder what it is about me?’ she said curiously.

  ‘Perhaps he thought you were too nice.’

  ‘Too nice for what? And what can you mean about Ettie? She won’t turn up till Monday. What is it about everything? I never seem to find out. There’s Antonia having a wild time with practically – Well, I wouldn’t like that. But I’m normal. Aren’t I?’

  ‘Your chaps seem bent on marriage.’

  ‘Well, that’s true. But why should it put people off having a try? I mean, they have. I’m not vestal. Wrong ones, though, in general – either terrible drips or gallants.’

  ‘Perhaps your definitions are too strict. All gallants, all drips? Nothing in between?’

  ‘You mean my beady and selective eye puts them off?’

  I groaned inwardly. ‘Oh, look, Caroline –’

  ‘Yes, I know, all right. It’s a bloody bore, isn’t it? Well, if you want to go to your father’s, you can.’

  ‘Not if you’d feel insulted. But it’s odd sleeping with a girl without having relations. And our relations are terribly good already,’ I added quickly,’ and individual and rare, and it would be a crime to spoil all that for something not so individual or rare, which it would – however madly desirable the notion certainly is, ‘I said, to keep her end up.’ And you know I’m a bit of a trifler in that direction – you’ve pointed it out.’

  ‘Hmm. Well. I do see that,’ she said reflectively, and had a sip of wine. ‘It isn’t that you’ve got another occupant lined up for trifling with, is it, in one or other of these beds?’

  ‘I’ve told you not.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. I only want to lie out in one. On the other hand, I’m not going to chase you out of yours. I could go to a hotel, I suppose, if it came to the point.’

  This seemed a reasonable point to get to, but I said, ‘Don’t be silly, Caroline.’

  ‘All right. Well, subdue the beast and keep us rare and individual. I’ll have to do something about Willie, damn it. That wasn’t good. He’ll be ringing up Antonia – perhaps my parents. I’d better phone him, and also get off a fast letter.’

  ‘Do you want to do all that now?’

  ‘No. What I wouldn’t mind doing now is watching a picture. I feel like slouching somewhere and not thinking too hard.’

  We went and slouched at the pictures and returned to Russell Square and I pensively opened the door.
>
  ‘It’s a bit late for ringing people up, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘It is a bit.’

  ‘Oh, well. Beddy-byes. Are you coming?’

  ‘Shortly.’

  ‘Oh, look, you’ll make me feel most hideously self-conscious. Don’t skulk about somewhere while I’m getting undressed. You’ve seen as much of my physique as is possible without instruments. If we’re going to keep it free and easy …’

  ‘All right.’

  We went into the bedroom and undressed.

  ‘No books here,’ she said chattily. ‘Don’t you read in bed?’

  ‘Not much. Ettie removes them.’

  ‘Strange. I keep piles … Do you have a bath at night?’ she asked from the bathroom.

  ‘No. Do I seem to need one?’

  ‘Simple interest.’

  We smoked a cigarette, sitting up in bed, and she gnawed a nail and worried about Willie. ‘It is bloody awful, isn’t it? I feel terrible.’

  ‘Well, it’s done now.’

  ‘He’ll feel such an idiot. And he’s a nice bloke. He really is. I got the whole boiling at once, Christmas and everything. Just wasn’t for me. Gosh, it’s ghastly, isn’t it? I wasn’t there four days. I hadn’t even arrived, last week at this time. What were you doing last week, this time?’

  What had I been doing, last week at this time? Friday night. I had commenced my long Sabbath. I’d patrolled the haunted House with Old Taylor. About now, I’d been sitting by the kerosene stove in Chaimchik’s room, feeling the indentations in the notebooks and poring over little Miss Margalit’s transcript … CROMER-LE-POYTH, LE-ROY-PARMA, COONE FIRTH. Only a week ago?

  She quietly listened as I told her.

  ‘Can’t you wangle me a trip next time.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘All right. I’m going down now. Good night.’

  ‘Good night.’ I put the light off.

  ‘You can fling in a quick cuddle.’

  I flung one in.

  ‘Also one of your lighter kisses, accompanied by a “Good night, Caroline, darling.”’

  ‘Not too drunk to remember?’

  ‘Oh, no. I threw you a light one, too, I recall. Lips smacked air.’ She smacked them again. ‘You can have them now,’ she said, and placed them on my cheek. She placed them quite lightly, but she left them there, and presently made small movements with them.