The Sun Chemist Read Free

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 mustbe 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