The Sun Chemist
Page 30
‘You aren’t the seigneur. This isn’t the first night.’
‘We could anticipate,’ I said.
We did, anyway, and Independence Day passed. It had been a long one – rather mixed, on the whole, like Remembrance Day.
2
April, that was. I had a lot of work. May, June, July, and so forth, followed. I was in the history, not the oil, business.
Batatas grew, Finster fermented, Professor and Mrs Wyke returned to America. Connie sent me a cutting from the Jerusalem Post, though I’d already seen it in the Times. It was headed ‘THREE SHARE NOBEL PRIZE FOR HUMAN CELL RESEARCH.’ ‘Stockholm. An American, a Briton and a Belgian yesterday shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for their research on lysosomes. American George Emil Palade, British-born Christian du Duve and Belgian-born Albert Claude shared $124,000 for their work in “creating modern cell biology”; the “disposal of worn-out parts” and “defence against foreign organisms.’”
Well, jolly good. The Jap had been spectacularly dished, as foretold by Ham’s jubilant friend. Ham had been quietly dished by other agencies. Cancer wasn’t on this year. Bully for Palade, du Duve, and Claude, then, and their disposal of worn-out parts and defense against foreign organisms. We all needed help there.
I knocked off volume 15 and attended to volume 16.
Caroline left me during this. There wasn’t much for her to do, anyway, and it seemed to her safer.
Ettie left the service as well, for less complicated reasons. ‘Things were going up.’ She needed a full-time job. The ‘bleeding lockout’ had proved not the peak but the foodthills of problems. Things were getting steadily madder.
Everybody I’d started with had now left me: Hopcroft, Caroline, Ettie. Still, I soldiered on. Friends gathered. The Sassoons turned up from Israel, Michael on a sabbatical to Cambridge. They filled me in on what had been left out by other sources. (There had been other sources: Meyer rang from time to time. So had Marta, once, on her way back to Finland, her sabbatical over. ‘Perhaps we will meet again,’ she said brightly, and we agreed it would be a very fine thing.)
With regard to Ham, the story had been kept up to the end, Patel nobly cooperating. He had been allowed to depart with dignity. He’d harmed the place, of course, might even have harmed millions; still the story hadn’t been designed for his protection. It had been designed to give me some leeway in case the keys hadn’t yet turned up in London and a collaborator was still around on the campus (impossible to check, all at once, if he had told all the truth, or if some sympathetic sick-visitor might yet gather he had been ‘blown’ and rapidly pass on the news). But the keys had arrived before me, and there had been no collaborator.
Vava’s process had been costed out. It was quite workable. Spread out over enough million barrels, it could provide high-grade oil at a dollar or two under the current price. Finster had worked marvels but the ‘unwanted substances’ still proved the headache. A good deal of the cost went into getting rid of them. Trying out the stuff on a commercial scale, it seemed, would at once produce a graceful curve in the price of commercial oil to cope with the threat. It would have to come a good deal under the ‘dollar or two’ to be a workable alternative.
With the carotene converter it would certainly come dramatically under the dollar or two; but they didn’t have a carotene converter. So the chaps in the starch belt might have to wait a bit longer. I took a bus to the embankment one morning and walked for miles through Chelsea and Victoria, watching the sluggish Thames and thinking of the two young men beavering away in the Manchester basement an unimaginable seventy years before. They had found a solution before the world knew it had a problem. There was a Yiddish proverb of Meyer’s that seemed to cover situations like this: ‘Gott shickt die refuah far der makke.’ God sends the remedy before the affliction. Well, maybe. Perhaps the affliction hadn’t shaped up well enough yet. The remedy was around somewhere, though.
I tried to convey some of this to little Miss Margalit, the Pitman expert, who plodded along the embankment with me. But she was an uncomplicated person and she made short work of such nonsense. Problems cropped up. One dealt with them.
She had cropped up, not long after the Sassoons. She had phoned me, strangely enough from the Y.W.C.A. in Great Russell Street. She had come to England for a trip before her military reserve duty. She wondered if I knew of a job for her. I did, of course.
She did an excellent one on volume 16, and since, as she said, there was no sense in paying good money to the Y.W.C.A. if other accommodation was available, she took up residence with me on the seventh floor. She was an economical and efficient body, only extravagant along the lines slightingly alluded to by Caroline as being to my taste in the long ago, and she fitted perfectly into the establishment. The departure of Ettie had been no disaster to her; she wondered why I’d needed anybody at all.
My father didn’t think as highly of her as he had of Caroline, but then she didn’t think much of him, either. Old revolutionary persons weren’t so thin on the ground in her part of the world, and his defection had seemed to her a bit of a frost when I’d explained it. She was fantastically, marvelously ignorant. Every day was a new day. History had stopped two thousand years ago. Because of some events touched on in volumes 15 and 16, it had tended to start again in 1948. Listening to her explaining to my mother passages of everyday interest from the Bible, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t.
For all these reasons I was sorry about her and her martial duties. Still, they were some way off, and meanwhile we finished volume 16. I gave a final flick-through to the neatly typed pages, and paused a moment over one of them, comparing with the original. It was for October, 1933. It was October 2nd.
Was den guten Vava betrifft, er ist unverbesserlich. Er hat mit mir letztens …
As to the good Vava, he is of course incorrigible. He has been working with me lately …
Yes. Translation okay. Footnote key number in the right place, too. I followed it to the bottom of the page.
Vava. Dr Vladimir Kutcholsky: (1894–1962), chemist; a cousin of Mrs W. He collaborated with W. at the Featherstone Laboratory on the protein question.
I studied this for a moment, and after some reflection altered the full stop to a comma, and added ‘and other questions.’ Everything else about the chemistry of 1933 had shaped up pretty well, though.
About the Author
Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire. He left school early and worked as a reporter before serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim and drew comparisons to Graham Greene and John le Carré. It was followed by The Rose of Tibet (1962), A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) and The Chelsea Murders (1978). He has thrice been the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and, in 2001, was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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All rights reserved
© Lionel Davidson 1976
The right of Lionel Davidson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–28703–1