The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘That’s it, you see. Nearest estimate – donkey’s years.’

  ‘Well, as work it could have had interest only around the time it was done – not even ten years later. Dyestuffs had moved on. All that work was finished.’

  ‘Totally. Stone cold. Dead as a doornail.’

  ‘But if he was annoyed at not getting the books back, doesn’t that imply that he knew they were around? Which presumably was after Weizmann was famous. Not make sense?’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Hopcroft blurted, ‘if the thing makes such splendid sense, and there’s suffering humanity, and the world economy, and geniuses in Israel, wouldn’t you say a chap was entitled to a bit of help – say a small team of assistants, well-muscled?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Hopcroft. Who is to connect Pickles with anything? Nobody could. And it wouldn’t help them if they did. The thing is meaningless in itself.’

  ‘Yes, well, that might be,’ Hopcroft said, ‘and I’d be just as reasonable if I were you. But I’m not. I’m me, the one they are following. I mean, I can’t help it. I felt it again today, coming in.’

  ‘Not people following you again, Hopcroft!’

  ‘All right, laugh. So would I, loud and long, I assure you – hee-hee, ha-ha. Only I’ve also worked this thing out, quite painstakingly, and it by no means fails to make sense, the idea of being followed. They followed me that day, didn’t they? I’d picked Caroline up, and off we popped to the Public Record Office. They couldn’t have known I was going there. I’d been buzzing around Gray’s Inn the previous day. So they followed me from here, because they know I work here, to the P.R.O., and from there to Olga’s, and when I came out they boffed me. That is the point that keeps recurring, you see. Follow Hopcroft.’

  ‘Well, damn it –’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know. I assure you!’ Hopcroft said. ‘I have had ample time to think over every angle of this, which is one of the effects of a good boff. I can see it your way. The thing is a piece of tremendous nonsense. Chap’s frightened of his own shadow. A little trundle round Bradford-on-Avon – what is there to it? Particularly as everyone knows all the papers are in Israel. No more to be found. It’s all dropped now. Except it isn’t, is it? There are more papers to be found, and we are trying to find them.’

  ‘Yes, but they can’t possibly –’

  ‘So that looking at it from their point of view, whoever they happen to be – which is another point, you see. I am a chap who likes to know. Part of my nature. Very worrying not to know who these other chaps are, particularly if they are inclined to give one a boff from time to time. So, viewing it from their position, I should take into account that old Hopcroft might still be at it, snuffling around in his usual pertinacious manner, whatever might have been put about to the contrary. I mean, I would definitely think that. Either the question is of importance or it isn’t. If it is, no stone unturned, et cetera, and Hopcroft is definitely the horse to watch.’

  ‘All right. I respect your view. But, laying that on one side, what’s your reading of Pickles?’

  It was now quite obvious that he had one. He really was very good at this. The lively and practical curiosity that had taken him to Gray’s Inn was a useful illustration of it.

  I was not wrong. He’d pondered the information I’d brought from Israel. It seemed to him that if Pickles had got his doctorate in 1908, he would have had his own pupils soon after, and that what one needed was a list of these pupils. The period was remote, but if records were still available for Weizmann’s pupils they ought to be for Pickles’s.

  He thought that a period of ten years from Pickles’s doctorate would be a practical one, which gave one a frame of 1908–18. In the latter part of this period, Weizmann was already well known in scientific circles, which narrowed the frame still further, because he agreed that after that point Pickles was unlikely to have parted with the books.

  ‘You feel someone does have this stuff?’ I said.

  ‘I do, really. Yes. I do.’

  ‘How about a drink, Hopcroft?’

  Hopcroft looked at me nervously.

  ‘You wouldn’t take advantage of a chap. I mean, I’ve spoken freely.’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

  *

  Hopcroft went to Manchester on a Sunday, when he thought he wouldn’t be so keenly watched. He didn’t want to go from home, in case anyone was watching there. He and I spent the morning together, strolling and keeping our eyes open. He picked up a taxi in busy Trafalgar Square, which took him to one that Caroline had been holding for him at Marylebone. This one took him to Euston, with his train ticket in his pocket and only minutes to spare before the train left.

  *

  He was away for almost a week, and again he didn’t keep in touch. He discovered that Professor Burckhardt, previous source of the university information, had retired, but Hopcroft had gone direct to the sources, anyway. He had checked all the records of Owens College from 1908 and had noted the name of everyone with whom Pickles had worked. He had followed up these names, and in contacts with university staff and relatives had finally discovered to whom Pickles had given the lab books. He had given them to an undergraduate called John Hobhouse Bottomley. He had this name written on a piece of paper, together with a number.

  ‘Well, damn it, you’re a hero, Hopcroft. Really. Is that his phone number?’

  ‘No, it’s his war grave number.’

  John Hobhouse Bottomley had been killed on April 22, 1915, in the second battle of Ypres. He had been a volunteer, aged twenty.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s … Who got his effects?’

  A young woman called Nancy Greatorex had got them – at least his diaries and notebooks. His parents had tried to get them back. Miss Greatorex had refused.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hopcroft said.

  ‘You mean she’s dead?’

  ‘Not under that name. Not in this country.’

  ‘Did she marry?’

  ‘Again, no record, if so.’

  ‘You mean, she’s still around?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hopcroft said mulishly.

  ‘Hopcroft – you’ve gone so far –’

  ‘I just can’t go any farther,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I’m absolutely knackered.’ He was certainly looking it. ‘You’d be surprised how everybody jumps on to Weizmann up there. I mean, get anywhere near the subject, and they know. It’s uncanny. I – well, I’m sorry. You may say it’s nerves, but –’

  ‘Hopcroft, I know money wouldn’t influence you, and we haven’t much farther to go, but if it would help –’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, and that’s it. There’s only a few more months, after all, and you can’t say I haven’t done my bit. It was a good effort, though I say it. And I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I did actually get this splendid offer some time back, from the Churchill papers, and they still want me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I would have slogged on. It’s interesting, and useful, but I can’t take any more of this, and I doubt if you’ve got a right to ask me – I mean, knowing how I feel on the boffing question. I’m sorry to be saying this,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘Well, no, I understand,’ I said drearily, and wondered what the devil was to be done now.

  ‘Of course, I’ll write every scrap of everything I’ve found. You’ll be in exactly the same position.’

  ‘There’s no replacing you, Hopcroft.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice of you to say so. I mean, crikey,’ Hopcroft said.

  True enough, though: no replacing that good horse. I was next to useless at it myself, so I racked my brains; but it still took time before I hit on the obvious solution.

  Chapter Eleven

  The world-wide recession was well into its stride by this time as the shortage of oil and the high price of it began to work its wonders. The roaring inflation had brought about a sort of incomprehending global pandemonium – much in keeping with Islamic fantasy, with its empha
sis on the mutability of things and delight in mischievous imps, and beggars become kings, and worlds turned topsy-turvy.

  With ornate arabesques, the oil suppliers had decreed which countries might overflow with oil, and which not, according to the language of love; and on the high seas rerouted tankers described even fancier arabesques as the oil companies translated the message into other languages. In the end, everybody spoke the same language, and nobody overflowed, and everybody was cut, but those with the least money were cut the most.

  The price of the stuff was now a hundred times what it cost to produce, and those transformed by impishness to kings had become very kingish, almost spurning trade. As an earlier member of the troupe, similarly lit up, had put it:

  I wonder often what the Vintners buy

  One half so precious as the stuff they sell.

  Which was a sound question, for there was nothing so precious as the new stuff they were selling, and they couldn’t begin to spend the billions they said it was worth. It was as if by cosmic freak they now controlled all the air in the world, and it was hardly worth their while to let others breathe. Those with money to pay could choke a little easier, but it was hard luck on the beggar lands, among whom they had previously been counted, for the most they could offer in the way of help was to lend their old friends the money, at special rates, to buy at the new prices. They couldn’t let them have it at the old prices, because this would place too great a temptation on old friends to get into the act themselves. They advised them, and they advised everybody, not to squander the stuff, because it was obviously much too precious to squander.

  The imp had been let out of the bottle, and mischief was abroad.

  But other bottles, other imps.

  *

  Kaplan had come to England with his parents at the age of sixteen in 1906. His father had been a well-to-do textile merchant in Russia. Weizmann had been invited down to dinner within a couple of months of their arrival in Manchester, and he became at once for young Kaplan a lifelong interest. Weizmann had then been a bachelor. His left hand was in a glove at the time, the result of a recent accident in the laboratory, and he had worn a rather threadbare but elegant suit with a waistcoat that had an unusual number of buttons.

  Kaplan had recalled all this in perfect detail when he’d told me about it sixty-seven years later. I’d met him the previous year, when Julian Meltzer, to whom he had been writing, had kindly unloaded him on to me. He was a spry eighty-three; a little hunchback with a curly old-fashioned bowler and an expression of Mr Punch. He had traveled to London for the express purpose of examining the young man who had been given the grave responsibility of handling Weizmann’s papers of the 1930s, and also to have a good chat in Russian. He remembered Wiezmann’s Russian well, and all his little nuances in it; this had caused him to query certain points in the English translation, and it had caused me to send him copies of the Russian originals.

  For the communications that now began with Kaplan, some elaboration was required.

  *

  Hopcroft’s fears, when I thought seriously about them, seemed by no means out-of-the-way. It was almost a certainty that he had been watched, and only due to Olga’s erratic arrangements that he had been attacked at the wrong time. The burglaries at Wimbledon and Swiss Cottage had soon followed, although not soon enough; all the same, there had been intelligence behind them.

  His reasoning that the operation wouldn’t so soon be called off seemed also correct. Either Rehovot had the papers or it hadn’t. If it hadn’t there were good grounds for continuing to watch my flat. If it had, there were less obvious but still good grounds. For a variety of reasons, Rehovot might engage in a correspondence about the papers. It seemed to me that I had better do something about this; so I destroyed everything relating to Vava and Pickles, and asked Rehovot not to write to me about them any more.

  Kaplan was another matter. It seemed best not to put anything in writing to him, either. But I did send him off a first long letter of explanation.

  I told him Rehovot had heard of the existence of some lab books done by Weizmann with Pickles, and I explained about Bottomley and Miss Greatorex. I urged the need for discretion on the grounds of conflicting claims for the books (which was true enough). I said that Rehovot, to complete its records, would be happy to purchase them, or to give whatever recognition seemed appropriate if sentiment proved an obstacle. And I asked him not to write back but to ring.

  To my astonishment and delight, within twenty-four hours he did – almost stammering with excitement. He said that he recalled Pickles perfectly. He had met him first at a picnic in 1907, with Weizmann and Verochka and some other people. He remembered that Verochka had been pregnant at the time. They had all gone back to the Weizmanns’ house in Birchfield Road for supper – which Weizmann had bought on the way back: fish and chips.

  He had known several other members of the Pickles family, in a long life of local affairs, and he also had a distant recollection of the Bottomleys, but he couldn’t think why. He thought they had been an unfortunate family. But he would certainly find out, and immediately.

  This was very cheering, and he was as good as his word. A few days later he rang with a complete rundown on Bottomley’s short-lived romance with Nancy Greatorex. The couple had met in Blackpool in August, 1914, and had become informally engaged before Botttomley had volunteered in February, 1915. She had lived in Bolton but had been studying at a teacher-training college in Manchester. He had been shipped out to France and killed almost immediately in April of the same year. They had known each other barely nine months.

  Kaplan had learned this from Bottomley’s youngest sister, a Mrs Mellish, the only surviving member of the family. And he had been quite right about the family’s misfortunes. Three sons had fallen in the Great War, and the father had gassed himself. Mrs Mellish could barely remember Nancy Greatorex (she had been a child of eight when John – or jack, as he was known in the family – had been killed); but she could recall her sense of awe that Jack’s sweetheart was going to be a teacher.

  Jack had been the apple of the family’s eye, a clever boy who had kept winning scholarships. He had been something of a favorite with Pickles. She remembered the tremendous occasion when Dr and Mrs Pickles had once come to tea; she hadn’t been able to open her mouth with staring at him, and he had given her sixpence. She didn’t know anything about lab books, but she recalled a dramatic family occasion when everyone had helped Mrs Bottomley compose a letter ‘from a broken-hearted mother’ to the Greatorex family in Bolton to try to persuade Nancy to return Jack’s papers (diaries and poetry, she thought), which was considered proper, particularly as she had never ‘worn his ring.’ She didn’t know what had happened to Nancy, except that she had become a teacher and had taught in Manchester.

  ‘But don’t you worry about any of that,’ Kaplan told me vigorously. ‘I shall be on to her. I’ve got a line out to the educational authorities now.’

  He was having a perfectly marvelous time, only too delighted that he could still be of service to the shade of Weizmann.

  ‘Do you think that she’s still – still around, Mr Kaplan?’ I asked hesitantly. He had told me she had been nineteen at the time of her understanding with Bottomley, which would make her now a rising seventy-eight. But I’d just remembered that he was eighty-three himself.

  ‘Still around – why ever not?’ he said.

  There was a pronounced Lancashire flavor to his Russian, which we were talking, and a certain lip-smacking as he savored, again his translation of English plebeian nuance: she had never ‘worn his ring.’

  ‘I shall turn that young woman up. Never fear,’ he said.

  2

  It was March by this time, and Meyer had taken to ringing me up every weekend for encouraging talks on the state of the batatas (cuttings taken weeks before and all growing vigorously). There was scarcely a stable government left in the world. Prices were going up so fast my mother came anxiously to town to do som
e shopping. On the infrequent occasions when she did this, she stayed overnight at Gower Street. Caroline hadn’t met her yet, so I took her to tea there.

  My father was coughing over one of his black-tipped cigarettes as I unlocked the door of his little flat (he had always scrupulously refused to accept a key to mine), and he was sitting rather close to the small electric fire. ‘What – already teatime? Then everything stops,’ he said, and took his cigarette out of his mouth and kissed me. Then he kissed Caroline.

  He had a silk muffler tucked into his dressing gown. With his ruddy broad cheeks and sparse slicked-back hair he did indeed look the distinguished butcher of repute. A desk lamp was burning over his typescript.

  ‘How goes the work?’ Caroline said, smiling at him.

  ‘It goes.’ He didn’t want to discuss it.

  I said, ‘Where is Mama?’

  ‘Resting. You can get her up now.’

  ‘Darling, in here,’ my mother called at the same moment.

  I went into the bedroom and found her lying under the covers. She was fully dressed, with her fur coat on. ‘Come and kiss me. This hideous little place is an icebox,’ she said.

  We had a minute or two of her own heating and glazing problems while she stroked my face and smoothed my hair. She was his second wife, still in her middle-fifties, much younger than he, a member of his old secretariat, a great beauty in her day. She was still very striking, classical center-parting, olive skin, luminous eyes. Even before her devotion to the rabbi, she had shown signs of becoming rather holy.

  They were enormously different in temperament: despite her dramatic appearance, she was the passive and conservative body, while he, despite his, which was solid and stocky and wrapped in a baleful irony, was the romantic. He was a product of a romantic period, as he’d told me. He wasn’t so much irritated by my mother’s new interest in her religion as wryly amused. He knew his Bible well (from pre-Revolutionary school days), and she didn’t (from post-Revolutionary ones), and he derived much satisfaction from easily confounding her.