The Sun Chemist (30 page)

I put more distance between myself and the pillars, and began a majestic slow breaststroke. Going full out, it would take only minutes to reach the jetty. I wasn’t going full out, and I wasn’t going to the jetty, either. I headed slowly out into the
moon-stream
, saw the end of the pillars drift past on my left, and began the wide circle that would carry me beyond the jetty to the little beach at the other side I’d spotted the couple making for.

The sea developed more body as it deepened, the unpredictable sinister lurch well remembered. Everything still very near, though. Music was coming off the end of the jetty, and a couple of waiters were having an argument there. They were doing it on an almost empty restaurant balcony, snapping at each other in Hebrew as they scraped leavings off the plates. The floodlighting went off suddenly at the mosque, and I looked round and saw it dying on the walls of the Crusader city, too. Midnight, evidently. The lion-colored walls had turned ashen gray, all of a sudden terribly old and insubstantial in the moonlight. The harbor below came suddenly into its own, good nights ringing out, cars
maneuvering
. One backed and turned, its two fingers of light
swinging
across the water. As they did so, I saw another piece of
flotsam
bobbing in the sparkle by the jetty.

I trod water and watched it. It didn’t do anything, just bobbed there. I kept my eyes on it and changed direction slightly, toward the end of the jetty. It still didn’t do anything. I watched so hard
I could hardly see it, so I altered direction again, toward the shore.

The flotsam altered direction, too.

I thought, Oh, God no, and turned back again and put more steam into the breaststroke. The flotsam did, too. It seemed to be enlarging. All of a sudden there was no strength in my arms as I realized where I was, well out of my depth, floundering, everything suddenly not near but too far, much too far, and no help. Even the waiters had vanished from the balcony. And the flotsam had developed a pair of arms that came suddenly flailing up and down in a fast overarm.

I dropped the breastroke and went into an overarm myself. But I’d never mastered it and couldn’t now, panic rising, water slapping in my face. I took some in, and choked, and knew I had to relax now, take in air, float. But no time for it. He could simply be out to drown me, no violence, just an arm round my shoulders, down, down …

I could hardly keep my shoulders up as it was, everything heavy as lead, shoes heavy as lead. I tried to kick them off, but they couldn’t come, so I threshed on, and saw a waiter
appearing
on the balcony again, and in a last effort raised myself in the, water and shouted at him. But the shout, when it came, came more as a vomit, and he couldn’t have seen the feeble signaling. He paid no attention, anyway, just pitched a bucket of something over the balcony and went back inside and switched the light off.

I saw I wasn’t going to make it to the jetty, impossible to make it, so I plowed heavily round in the water and began trying to thresh back to the pillars. I thought I might just do it, but as I turned he was barely thirty yards away and coming strong. He was fully dressed, jacket, shirt – tie, even. He must have waited till he’d seen me in the water; had watched and waited for me, had seen what I was up to. The clothing didn’t seem to impede him. He came powerfully on, mouth in the shape of an O and water spewing expertly out of it. He got to me long before the pillars, his last stroke more in the nature of a lunge. It caught me a bat on the shoulder, and I went under right away.

I didn’t take in water this time. I’d expected it, even nerved myself for it, but it didn’t diminish the horror as I went down, all my worst fears now on me, the childish, irrational ones – although nothing so irrational about it in the case of one who’d had to be dragged out of it. I’d been told at the time that the thing to fear was the panic itself, which wasn’t a great help then. It was some now.

In a curious way, fully engaged with my own horror, I felt myself detach from it. If this was the worst, I had to accept it – in fact, make the best of it. He could swim better than I, it was obvious. Could he hold his breath better? Could he drown better? I kicked away from him underwater, and came up again, and was in some way behind him, and at once made a grab at his  hair. I grabbed it with one hand, and then the other, actually managed to get both knees up and stuck well into his back.

He lumbered heavily round in the water, so surprised that he tried at first to get his arms up to release himself. He couldn’t do it but he was still trying as we both went under, backward. I’d taken several deep breaths while up on his back, and he was still taking one as we went under. I heard him spluttering, and
concentrated
simply on keeping him under, jackknifing myself over his head, and grimly counting the seconds, one thousand, two thousand …

He fought like a big cat in the water, twisting and writhing, trying to pry my fingers loose from his hair. He couldn’t do it, and he scrabbled at my face, my nose, found my ears, and
practically
yanked them off before I had to let him go. I could feel his clothes fluttering away in the water, but a moment later he was trying to clutch me again.

He caught a leg, but his hand slid down it and he only managed to grasp the shoe, and it came off. I kicked out at him with the other, the right, pretty hard. It was a solid jolt, not apparently on clothing, and we lost contact. I came up gasping. I couldn’t see him, but I saw the pillars and struck out for them. I heard him behind me but I didn’t look round till I’d got there. He was just resting in the water, coughing and panting heavily.

Only a section of the pillars showed above water. There was a foundation below, forming a ledge, which was just as well. I
could barely manage as it was. I got a foot on the ledge and a hand on the fluted marble, and levered myself up. The ledge was slimy, and the marble, too, covered in a kind of fungus; I slid onto it and lay there for a few moments, exhausted. He was swimming slowly toward me when I looked back, so I kneeled wearily up. His face was bleeding. It seemed to be his nose. He came right up to the pillars, and I got to my feet. I said, ‘Keep away.’

He didn’t say anything. He got a foot on the ledge. I said, ‘Ham, I’m telling you!’

He just pulled himself heavily up, so I swung my right foot and kicked him hard in the face. His mouth was open and
hanging
loose and it caught him precisely under the chin. I heard his teeth click, saw his head snap back, then the rest of him, and he toppled back into the water. He floated there awhile, not trying to right himself. I saw him feeling his face. Then he came back again.

I said, ‘Ham – please. Keep away.’

He didn’t say a word.

‘I don’t want to keep doing it,’ I said.

He just pulled himself out again, streaming water. I couldn’t tell if he’d even heard. His face was dazed and bloody and he looked battered and dead beat. But he kept coming, so I waited till he was in position and did it again. He caught the foot in the air, casually, almost irritably, and hung on to it. For a moment we stood and looked at each other in a ludicrous
pas de deux
. Then I jerked the leg away and overbalanced, and he was left with another shoe in his hand and also overbalanced, and we went down together, in opposite directions.

I landed hard on my behind, tried to get up, and went skittering backward on the slippery marble in a series of pacy little skating steps and tumbled off the other end. I tried to clutch the edge of the pillar as I fell, and did, taking it with me, the edge of it, into the water, and went under again.

I was coughing as I came up, and my only thought was not to let him get near me again. Thoroughly exhausted he might be – he undoubtedly was – but brain still ticked there. He learned. He’d only let me kick him once.

I still had the piece of marble in my hand. It was a jagged segment and I could feel the fluted surface; it seemed to weigh a couple of pounds. It had waited here a long time to be of further use.

He hadn’t tumbled into the water himself. I saw him slowly picking himself up, like a mechanical man. He came to the edge of the pillars and looked down at me. There was a strange zombie-like expression on his face. He still hadn’t said a word, and he didn’t now. He just lowered himself slowly and sat on the edge of the pillars and held out his hand to me.

I said, ‘Go away, Ham.’

Blood was pouring from his nose. He kept the hand
outstretched
.

‘I am not coming out, Ham. Go away – please.’

His mouth was opening and shutting. He stepped down from the pillars to the ledge, evidently preparing to join me in the water; so in a panic I gave him a hand, the left one, and kept the other underwater.

There was no particular expression on his face as he pulled me out of the water; he just looked at me in a dazed sort of way. I let him pull me half out before bringing the other hand over in a tremendous haymaker. The thing caught him such a bloody thump on the forehead I actually said aloud, ‘Oh, God, Ham, I’m sorry!’ and put a hand on his shoulder.

The look on his face didn’t change. His eyes didn’t even shut. He just continued bending over, and folded on top of me, and we were both back in the water, and I was under again,
scrambling
and kicking away from him. I still had the stone as I came up and was already wondering – the moment of sympathy undergoing rapid sea change – if I’d hit him hard enough.

He was floating face down, so I backed off and let him float. He continued doing it, and I approached cautiously and tugged him with my left hand and slewed him round. He came round slowly, head still down, so I raised it, stone at the ready, but he was flat out, blood-tinged bubbles on his mouth.

I dropped the stone and turned him on his back. He wasn’t breathing. I dragged him to the pillars and tried to roll him on the shelf, but he wouldn’t stay there, so I got out myself and
propped him in a sitting position till I could scramble onto the pillars and drag him up. His jacket rode up and he was a dead weight and kept slipping down through it, but I got half of him up, and then went down on the shelf and shoved his legs up, and got back and rolled him over on his face.

There was still no breath coming out of him. I pressed down on his back, but in my own exhaustion couldn’t press hard enough, so I stood on him. Something spewed out of his mouth, and I did it again, and kept doing it till water pumped out, and a choking wheeze sounded, and he was evidently breathing.

He was still unconscious and in the most terrible mess. Blood was coming from his head as well as his nose, and mixing with the vomit and sea water he was spewing up. I didn’t know what else to do for him, but he was alive at least, so I slid him out of the pool of vomit and laid him with his head over the edge of the pillars so that he couldn’t choke in any further vomit.

I waited awhile, regaining my strength. There was no point in walking ashore along the pillars; apart from the slipperiness, they led only to the little sand beach, and beyond were cobbles again. The quickest way to the jetty was the sea way; so I
lowered
myself wearily once more into the warm water and slowly swam there, keeping to the shallows.

When I got to the jetty, I was too enfeebled to drag myself up the high wall, so, even beyond swearing now, I continued round to the little beach at the other side, and floundered ashore. My legs were as weak as a kitten’s, but I got on the jetty with them and lurched along it in my streaming underpants and looked for the people. They’d all gone. There was just a spark of life in one of the galleries. A neon sign over it said ‘
GALERIE DELILAH
,’ but even this went out as I approached, and so did a little light inside. The door opened and a small man with a big mustache and a valise came out. He looked at me a bit sharply as he turned to lock up.

I said, ‘The police.’

‘Eh?’

I could hardly speak. I could hardly even stand. I said, ‘I’ve been attacked. There’s someone down there.’

He couldn’t at first understand my English, but when he got
the idea – it turned out to be not an exact idea – he opened the door in a flash, shuttled me inside, locked it again, and reached for the phone, almost in the same movement. In about half a second he was telling the phone that there were terrorists on the beach, and in response to a quick gabble from it, we moved into an inner room, with the door also locked, and the lights off.

He didn’t have any water in the inner room, and he wouldn’t unlock the door again, but there was an opened bottle of warm lemonade; so we sat and drank lemonade, Delilah and I, while we waited.

It was a strange gray day, Independence Day. I felt strange and gray myself. I’d been booked on the 11 a.m. flight, which meant a hurried departure, but I went to see him first. He was up on a lot of pillows with an enormous bandage round his head. He didn’t turn away from the wall as I entered the room. I thought for a moment he was dozing, but then noticed his eyes slowly blinking.

I said awkwardly, ‘Well, Ham.’

‘Of course, I’ll have my name withdrawn,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry about my superhuman strength.’

‘It’s all I can do. I’ll withdraw from everything.’ He was still looking at the wall.

‘You’ll have to think that over,’ I said.

‘I’ve done that.’

He had. They had sedated him but he hadn’t remained sedated. He had been talking all night. Marie-Louise’s eyes had been red as she showed me in.

I said, ‘You know what has been decided, Ham. You know all about that, don’t you?’

‘It seemed to me a moral obligation. I did what I could. And I am the chief sufferer.’

This seemed such an excessively cool remark, taking one thing with another, that I wondered if it was actually meant for me, and looked round to see if anyone else had slipped in. But there were only the two of us. ‘I expect that will remain a matter of view,’ I said.

‘All I wanted was your goddam view,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted. A life was at stake.’

‘That
was
my view,’ I said.

He slowly shook his head, wincing. ‘I’ll have to explain it when we meet again.’

‘We won’t.’

‘Igor –’

‘All I want is to see you’ve got it right. Stick to the story, Ham. Maybe some of your harm can be undone.’

He was blinking slowly at me. ‘That is a goddam harsh
remark
,’ he said. ‘If you understand anything, it really is.’

Perhaps it was; it was certainly, in its latter reaches, somewhat. overripe. However, I couldn’t think of anything better to say, and all of a sudden didn’t want to say anything more to him, so I just nodded and said, ‘Get better,’ and went.

Marie-Louise was outside. It was hard to tell if she’d been listening. It was hard to tell what this rare couple got up to. Her face had been closed in but composed enough when she’d let me in. It seemed to fall apart now. There was something so helpless about the blind and froglike look there that I unwisely put an arm round her, and she collapsed instantly against me in a gale of weeping.

I patted the warm and heaving shoulders for a while, and heard Ze’ev give a peep on the horn outside.

‘Marie-Louise, I’ve really got to go.’

‘I know.’ She dragged herself away, and made some repairs with a damp ball of hanky. She blew her nose in it. ‘Would it be treacherous to say I didn’t know?’ she said.

‘I’m not good on the finer points of treachery.’

‘For your information, I didn’t.’

‘No reproaches, then.’

‘What about Rod?’ she said.

‘I’m not good on the finer points of treachery.’

‘I’m sorry, too.’

‘Keep him to the story, Marie-Louise.’

The story wasn’t doing so badly outside. ‘That was certainly a brave thing he did,’ Ze’ev said. ‘How is he?’

‘Bearing up.’

‘No other news yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll get the bastard.’ He asked me a good deal about the bastard on the way to the airport. It was the mysterious bastard from whom Ham had saved me.

London was strange and gray, too. I’d mainly dozed on the plane and hadn’t taken the meal. I felt empty as I got out of the cab in Gower Street.

My father was coughing over one of his cigarettes and he looked up in surprise as I let myself in. ‘Hello, my boy, what’s this?’ he said.

‘How are you, Father?’

‘Not so bad. I’ve been trying to phone you. You seem to have been out a lot lately.’

‘Yes. How’s Mama?’

‘She has a cold again. They started taking the windows out since the weather improved. They’ll get it right by next winter.  Have some tea.’

‘Thanks.’

He went into the kitchen and attended to the tea and I went into the bedroom and attended to the wardrobe. I examined the back of it for a minute or two. There were two grooves in the dust now. Only one before. That was all that there was in the dust. Ah, well. Not a lot to show for what had gone on. It had gone on quickly. Barely twenty-four hours since I’d sat and read Verochka’s lament. Only Sunday that I’d got the Southern
strawberry
fluff in my lap. I remembered Ham walking back up the path before the Presidential tea party. He’d had the keys copied by then. The one to the House had been numbered and tagged, so he’d known which one to keep. He hadn’t known which of the others was my father’s, so he had sent the lot. With holidays in between, mail irregular, they couldn’t have arrived before
yesterday
at the earliest. Perhaps they hadn’t arrived until today.

‘Igor?’ My father had come into the bedroom. ‘What are you doing here? Are you tired?’

‘No. I only wondered if something of mine was here. It isn’t,’ I said sadly. I’d opened the wardrobe and now closed it. ‘You look tired yourself, Father. Are you getting out enough lately?’

‘I was never a fresh-air fanatic. Yes, I was out today. I gave a lecture, had lunch with the publisher afterwards. Do you know, I think I’m finished with that damned thing, my boy.’

‘Well, that’s marvelous,’ I said. ‘And did you manage to get out yesterday?’ 

‘Yesterday, not. I stayed in yesterday. I did the finishing. It was only a matter of looking over a few things. But it’s over now. I really think it is,’ he said with satisfaction.

This morning, then. While I’d dozed in the sky, and my father haggled with his publisher, and Ham had looked at the wall, another hand had scribed another groove in the dust. Only a few hours in it, really …

I absorbed it, during tea. It was quite an animated tea, my father unusually gay. He hadn’t haggled with the publisher. He didn’t even know the terms. Definitely an act of expiation, then.

*

It wasn’t till I let myself in at Russell Square that I realized there was nobody to tell. She was away with Willie the wine merchant. I stood with my bag and looked round the place. It had a rather forlorn and suspended look. I’d lost track of the various bodies who’d helped liven it up in the past. I’d have to get back on the track. No time like the present, in these matters. Still, I felt like a bath at present. I put my bag down and went in the bathroom and ran it. A few minutes later, I lay prone in it, hot water trickling, and thought over the situation.

I thought of the day I’d walked into this room and found Caroline where I now was, hot water also trickling. She hadn’t been able to hear me above the noise of the water. I’d been saying it was funny Hopcroft hadn’t called.

That had been – when? – the latter half of December. Only four months ago? A lot had surely been packed into four mondis. The British three-day week had come and gone (the bleeding lockout prophesied by Ettie in that bygone era?). So had a British government, and several other governments. Scene-shifting on a large scale had gone on all over the planet’s hoary old surface. I seemed to have done a bit of it myself. I felt flat as hell suddenly, and got up and poured myself a drink and took it back to the bath.

The scenery seemed to be in place now for a new kind of entertainment, an
Arabian Nights
one. The customers weren’t exactly lapping it up, though they’d accommodated fast enough to the topsy-turvy new logic. Yet an alternative production had been waiting – perhaps still was – in the wings: less fanciful,
more humdrum, definitely still in need of a final touch to bring it to the peak of perfection. A spot of new blood among the performers couldn’t come amiss, either. Not all the old troupe, shuffling in the wings, had even known what they were performing in.

I got out of the bath and got another drink and got back in and thought over the old troupe: Chaimchik and Pickles, Vava and Olga, Kaplan and old Nancy, to name but a few, with a special guest appearance by the young man from Africa. I had another couple while thinking them over, then I pulled the plug and got out. I didn’t feel like dressing. I got into a bathrobe instead and padded down the corridor to pour another. I was putting a bit of ice in, at the fridge, when the latchkey turned, and a few seconds later Caroline was in the doorway.

She said, startled, ‘Igor?’

‘Hello.’

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

I had a distinct sense of
déjà
vu
. Surely all this had happened before.

‘You’re supposed to be in Israel,’ she said.

Just as she said it, I realized it
had
happened before, but in reverse order. She had been the one getting the drink after the bath before; I had been the one appearing unexpectedly with my bag in the doorway.

‘How was the vintage?’ I said.

‘All right.’ She was staring closely at me.

‘Am I looking unusually saturnine?’

‘Unusually pissed, I’d have said.’

She was looking different herself. I tried to think whether this was because of the condition in me she had referred to or whether it was because she was looking different. She was certainly calm – unusual after jaunts with Willie. There must have been more going for him than she’d thought.

‘Is something wrong?’ she said.

‘Have a drink. Then you can stop interrogating me.’

We had the drinks in the living room.

I told her presently.

It didn’t seem to me as complicated as the carbon cycle.
Perhaps
my condition made it complicated. Or perhaps the meeting of minds with Willie had rendered her less quick on the uptake this time. It took her a long time to make the connection between tar sand and cancer, and cancer and my trip to the Crusader lady’s kitchen.

*

It had taken Ham a long time, too, to make all the right
connections
years before. He had been in charge of the tar-sand project for the oil company with which he had been a senior research chemist. There had been several proposals for the
exploitation
of the Athabasca sands, so all previous work on tars had been investigated. This included Weizmann’s, from the still earlier dyestuffs era, whose derivatives of coal tar had apparently merited special scrutiny.

Ham had duplicated these experiments himself, and it had been his successful isolation of cancer cells (produced in mice by some of the derivatives) that had caused him to switch
disciplines
, to biology, subsequently immunology. A bit later, with the aid of a research grant, he had left the oil company to embark on a purely academic career.

As Michael Sassoon had told me, his work had been plodding, and he had plodded steadily on, producing a stream of useful but unspectacular papers, until toward the end of the 1960s he had suddenly produced a massive and quite spectacular one. It was a reinterpretation of all he had done, but with additional material unpublished from his earlier experiments. For the first time he was able to produce a sizeable chunk of jigsaw, with a strong hint of what the overall pattern was likely to be.

This major breakthrough won him immediate acclaim, several gold medals, and an excellent position in line for the Nobel Prize. Since then he’d moved steadily up the line, to the point when he was hotly tipped to get it this year. Except that, as was now apparent, the work hadn’t all been his.

It hadn’t sounded specially lurid when he’d maundered on about it last night, and it didn’t now. An old colleague had phoned him one day, the senior research chemist (a junior one in the old days) of the oil company he had worked for. He said he had something of interest.

The company had long ago dropped work on the Athabasca sands, but proposed legislation to limit exhaust emissions from automobiles had made them review the work on tar again. One team, headed by a young computer expert, had worked on the ‘medical’ aspects.

This young man had spent weeks collating the last sixty years’ work in the field, and had then fed it to the computer. The computer had come back with, among other things, something very like Ham’s latest findings. He had been tickled by this and had fed these findings, too, into the computer, together with some wild flights of his own, until the game had got out of hand and it had been dropped.

The colleague had phoned because he had just read another paper of Ham’s; it uncannily bore out the computer’s predictions. He had read it, coincidentally, on reading that the young
computer
man had died in India.

When reading the computer print-outs (by this time some years old), Ham had said he felt as if he’d been ‘punched in the gut.’ The computer had been not only well up to the mark on his as yet unwritten work but also indicated where he had gone wrong in it.

‘Goddam it, I would have got it right. This happened to me fifty times. There are no easy answers. You have to struggle to all the dead ends. It’s a part of the process.’

Whether it was or not, he hadn’t had to struggle to these particular dead ends. The computer man, coming freshly to the problem and reading only what the computer told him, had been able to ask the machine some astute questions. The replies gave a wide survey, including many things that Ham had
disregarded
.

Ham had asked if he could have the work, and his
ex-colleague
had let him. It had only been a computer game, of no use to the company. However, it had provided the basis for the spectacular paper – and without acknowledgment, an omission made simple by the anonymity of scientific parlance (‘it was observed that,’ ‘subsequent investigation showed that’); and his live colleague had kept silent.

This lapse, if it was a lapse (for, after all, the young man had
known little of cancer, and relations with the computer had been somewhat incestuous, Ham’s own work having gone in it, and the results making sense only to him), had affected Ham badly. It had inclined him in the direction of the booze, with the
uneasier
effect of putting him in the debt of the former colleague.