Chemistry and Other Stories Read online

  The Wolski Park was only ten minutes away. She was following one of the paths through the beechwood when she was stopped dead by a sound that turned her innards to liquid: the gut-deep roar of a lion. Liz scurried back to Andrew’s home, an old woman running. He was awake, dressed in shorts and trainers.

  ‘It must have escaped,’ Liz gasped, the fear still trembling out of her. ‘You have to tell them, quick.’

  Her son laughed. ‘Escaped from where?’ he said. ‘Kraków Zoo is in the middle of the wood. I’m off for my run. Think about what you’d like to do this afternoon.’

  They took a boat trip on the Wisła. Other days they visited the Wieliczka salt mine, the Ojcowski Park. Andrew was not too proud to let his mother pay. He drove the hire car. They passed occasional cemeteries, every stone and marble grave festooned with flowers. ‘This is how it is,’ Liz said, ‘when families live and die where they were born. Like your grandparents. In England we abandon the dead now, don’t we?’

  Andrew blanched, suggesting he thought she was getting at him, for his departure from the living.

  ‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I just mean it’s impressive when the dead are honoured like this. Don’t you think? They remain present.’

  ‘Mum,’ Andrew said. ‘A hundred years ago four million Poles left this country.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Well, America, mostly. All over. And they’re leaving again.’

  Unless he’d stopped seeing them while Liz was there Andrew seemed to have no friends. He took off for a solitary run, came back clutching his T-shirt, his slender torso – filling out a little now, in his late twenties – covered in sweat. He’d shower, before taking Liz out. His life was a lonely passage, it seemed, from one European city to another, in which he made no friends and left, she presumed, no trace. She did not enquire about romance. She never had; neither had Andrew ever volunteered information. A phrase, The Virgin Traveller, came into her head. Perhaps it was the title of some story she’d read.

  In the Polish bathroom, the toilet was shaped to collect the occupant’s evacuations in a dry bowl, there for all the world to inspect: when the lever was pulled to empty the cistern the contents were flushed down and off around the S bend. A disgusting design, Liz thought. She had to force herself to keep her gaze averted while operating the flush.

  On Sunday morning, the day Liz was to fly home, she came in from the orchard with a bowl of pears, plums and blackberries, and found Andrew already dressed.

  ‘You’re up early,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to church.’ Andrew looked away from her as he spoke.

  Now this was unexpected. Liz sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I had no idea,’ she said. ‘Well, you know, I think … ’ Her openness amused her. ‘I think I’ll join you.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’m going to the monastery at Srebrna Góra. The church in the wood, with the towers.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ Liz said. ‘I’ll just come to the Mass if I may.’

  Andrew reached to the cupboard for bowls. ‘Women are only allowed in the church on certain feast days. Today isn’t one of them.’

  ‘Oh,’ Liz said. ‘I see. Well, fine. I’ll just walk, as I was planning to.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Mum,’ Andrew said. ‘Come on. You and Dad have always been against religion.’

  ‘Your father more than me,’ Liz said. ‘And if you—’

  ‘There is a painting in the church you’d like, though, in a side chapel. It’s of Jesus being baptised.’ Andrew laughed, a shy person’s stifled chuckle. ‘In the Vistula.’

  Liz stoned the plums, cut up pears. They spooned yoghurt on the fruit and added pungent dark honey from the Tatra Mountains.

  ‘The first time I visited the monastery,’ Andrew said, ‘I had no money with me. When I left, this monk stopped me and gave me an apple.’

  Liz bit into a sour blackberry. She’d been here a week and with the daily walk and this holiday diet, felt healthier than she had in years.

  ‘It’s an order of hermits,’ Andrew went on. ‘Behind the church are stone cottages. The monks’ cells.’

  ‘What do they do all day?’

  ‘They tend the vegetable gardens, gather fruit, make wooden tools.’ Andrew took a mouthful of fruit and yoghurt, less chewed than tasted it, and swallowed. ‘Mostly they stay in their cells. Reciting prayers, studying scripture. They used to wear hairshirts and whip themselves.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Andrew frowned. ‘To mortify the flesh, of course.’

  ‘Yes. No, but why?’

  Andrew stopped, a spoonful of yoghurt midway to his mouth, and looked at somewhere around his mother’s shoulder. If he wore spectacles, she thought, he’d be peering over them. A slight shake of the head, suggesting the difficulty of something somehow too simple, too obvious, to explain.

  ‘They aspire to a life,’ he said, ‘of moral perfection.’

  While Andrew celebrated his Catholic Mass, Liz took her final walk of the holiday, and came across a cemetery, the first seen not from a car but on foot. Bright red, yellow flowers on almost every grave. A generosity of commemoration; the departed not yet lost. She entered the graveyard, began reading the names and dates and looking at the photos embossed on many headstones, when suddenly she saw it. First the flowers on one grave, then on another. Although alone, Liz felt acute embarrassment, for the rubbish she’d spouted at her son in the hired car. Had Andrew known, and sat there at the wheel, saying nothing to contradict her? Surely he had. Liz looked around the cemetery, the flowers not so brightly coloured now, she realised. Many, in fact, if you peered closer, were old, faded, perishing. But all were made of plastic. A convenient way, she considered, to pretend to remember, but actually to forget.

  That afternoon Liz flew home. She retrieved her Fiat from the medium-stay car park at Luton airport and drove back to Oxford. The sky was a muted blue, almost grey. She let herself into the house, called out John’s name, waited for a reply. None came. In college, probably. Despite the fact that his diary was open by the phone, with the words L back scrawled upon today’s page, it wasn’t surprising that he’d not left a note. She was no longer hurt by such oversights.

  At least there was food in the fridge, and bread not yet stale in the cupboard. Liz made herself a ham and cucumber sandwich, and ate it opening her post: gardening and clothing catalogues; bank, Visa, utilities information. She watered the geraniums, neglected this one dry week. Only then did she bump her luggage trolley up the stairs and wheel it into the bedroom. There she found John, dressed in his flannel pyjamas, spreadeagled upon the carpet as if he’d been clumsily dropped there. He’d been dead – according to the pathologist’s subsequent report – for some thirty-six hours, felled by a massive coronary the previous morning.

  ***

  The funeral, in the college chapel, was as secular as the chaplain could allow, but still ludicrously religious, Liz decided, for an atheist. But he would have wanted it in the academic if not ecclesiastical cloisters, his peers in gloomy attendance. Andrew remained in Poland: he’d just spent a week with his mother, he reasoned, his father would not miss him, and he had nothing to say to his sister. Sophie came up from Brighton and stood in goth black beside Liz, sobbing into a handkerchief, blowing her nose.

  Obituaries appeared in three broadsheet newspapers, and in academic periodicals in the weeks thereafter, detailing a notable career. He was only sixty-two when he died but his important work was all done. Most of them closed with the words, He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and their son and daughter. Liz experienced a peculiar feeling with each one she read, almost as if she suffered some sort of hallucination, for the obituaries were inversions of John’s life as it was known by those closest to him. If Liz were to write it, it would be about their courtship, wedding and honeymoon; their children; holidays, gardens, meals; particular evenings at the Oxford Playhouse or Sheldonian; certain fr
iendships. At the end she might put, she thought, He is survived by ‘The Life of a Sixteenth-Century English Yeoman’, and eight other books.

  ***

  She buried him in Wolvercote Cemetery, and once a week widened by a hundred yards the circuit of her constitutional to replace the flowers at his headstone. She and John had been companions who did not intrude upon each other’s interior lives, but his unexpected death knocked her sideways. She lost her footing, did not really know who or where or why she was, for two, three months. She returned to work, she survived, but inside she was reeling. And then one day she realised that she’d stopped spinning, and landed not on the floor but on her own feet, somehow. ‘There you are,’ she said to herself, since there was no one else to say it to. ‘You recover. There it is.’

  That winter Liz planted a Victoria plum tree in the garden. She was unsure whether it was to commemorate her husband or a statement of intent to herself, a commitment to a diet of fresh fruit and yoghurt and honey.

  The following June Andrew telephoned. ‘I thought I’d come and visit,’ he said.

  ‘But that’d be marvellous.’

  ‘In July.’

  ‘Next month.’

  ‘The week after next.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘I’ll bring a friend,’ he said. There was a pause, as Liz waited for him to say more. The silence lengthened.

  ‘Give me the dates,’ Liz said. ‘Everything’ll be ready.’

  Andrew refused to be met, either at the airport or the coach station in Gloucester Green. A taxi brought him and his friend to the house. Liz rushed out to greet him. He’d cut his hair and shaved his beard, and looked – and felt in his mother’s embrace – a little thinner than a year before. He stepped back. Liz turned to his companion.

  ‘This is Monika, Mum. Monika: Elizabeth.’

  The girl was blonde, slender, as tall as Liz, and strikingly pretty.

  ‘Please, call me Liz. Everyone does.’

  ‘Liz,’ the girl said, as they shook hands. ‘I am so happy to meet you.’

  As they brought their luggage into the house Liz said to Andrew, ‘I didn’t know which room. Or rooms.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said, heading straight upstairs as if he’d only left home last week. ‘We’ll sort it out.’

  They came back down ten minutes later and laid out on the kitchen table presents for her. ‘That honey you liked,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Bottle bilberries,’ Monika said. ‘This typical Polish fruit. And sausage is from my home region, in east of Poland, smoked, taken from young pig, Liz.’

  ‘I had to bring you a packet of pierogi, Mum,’ said Andrew. ‘And a jar of bigos.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have, really,’ Liz told them. She didn’t say that the Co-op had started stocking Polish food on a stack of shelves; nor indeed that the pungent honey tasted different here. Too sharp, astringent. The jar she’d brought home a year before stood largely untouched in the cupboard.

  Andrew took Monika off on sightseeing excursions, of historic Oxford entwined with his personal history.

  ‘I like this Parks,’ Monika told Liz. ‘Where Andy climb in over railings.’

  ‘Did you, Andrew? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘He show me tree he climb in night. When he is fifteen. Or fourteen.’ Monika half-closed her eyes and began to swoon. Her face was perfectly proportioned. Her almond-shaped eyes and wide cheekbones gave her a kind of exaggerated, almost parodic, beauty. ‘He like to sway in top, in moonlight,’ she said. ‘Is very nice, this Parks. Very nice.’

  Monika slept in Sophie’s room. Liz heard no movement along the corridor at night. The nature of their relationship was unclear. Andrew went off running, alone. Liz had taken the week off work, and Monika would find her in the sitting room, the kitchen.

  ‘Please. I help,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I was just thinking about supper.’

  Monika looked disappointed. ‘Liz, I not like to do nothing. Please, give me job.’

  Liz had been planning to redecorate the dining room. She’d already bought the paint, a cobalt-blue emulsion and some cream gloss, from the paint shop in Kidlington. Before she knew what was happening they had all the chairs up on the dining-room table, covered in dust sheets, and newspapers on the floor around the walls. Pictures were taken down, leaving the negative proof of their existence behind.

  Monika was on a stepladder, cleaning the ceiling with sugar soap, while Liz sanded the picture rail, when they heard the front door. ‘We’re in here,’ Liz called out.

  Pages from the Independent ripped and curled up as Andrew opened the dining-room door. He stood there, his chest bare, clutching his sweaty T-shirt, appraising the situation. Then he smiled.

  ‘The devil makes work,’ Andrew said, gazing at the dust-covered mound in the middle of the room. ‘Beat the devil.’

  Monika applied herself with gusto. After the preparation, the next morning she found an old broom handle in the garage, rammed it into the handle of the roller, and painted the ceiling and walls. She attacked the physical work, Liz thought, like a man. Or like an Englishwoman, perhaps, of fifty years ago. As she worked, she talked, telling Liz how she and Andrew met.

  ‘He is doing working for company I work for, stag parties in Kraków. You know stag parties, Liz?’

  ‘Well, yes. I imagine they’re much the same everywhere.’

  ‘No, Liz. Please, Polish man not like this. This stag parties for English man, come to Kraków for weekend.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ Liz murmured. She recalled an item on the radio: Brits abroad. Though wasn’t that in Latvia, or Estonia?

  ‘They come to drink, and do crazy thing like white water rafting, and then to drink some more.’

  ‘You organise these trips?’

  ‘I am escort,’ Monika said. ‘They have to have Polish girl with them, to take them from one pub to the other.’ She laughed. ‘I must pretend to like to drink, Liz.’ She struck a pose, halfway between a shrug and a dance move, clutching the roller like a hoofer her cane. ‘Party girl!’

  ‘Did Andrew write the company’s literature?’ Liz asked. She was putting off applying the oil paint, with its chemical fumes; she’d always loved the chalky smell of emulsion.

  ‘Andy do our website, very good English. He will show you on computer. Demand from English stags double. No. More. Double double, Liz. We are too popular. We have to hire more girls, and now Andy work for our company.’

  ‘Andrew goes round the bars?’

  Monika burst out laughing again. ‘Liz. Please. Andy is monk. He is like those hermits he like to visit. I never see him drink more than one beer. Never. But some times, when stag party is too stupid, it’s good to have English man. To take them to consulate, or explain them in the hospital.’

  The women stood side by side, admiring the work they’d done. Monika was sweating. Liz could smell the meat she’d eaten today or yesterday, the kabanos or the smoked ham. ‘I know!’ Liz said. ‘Let’s take a picnic to the river.’

  They drove out to Farmoor. The water was warm, and all three of them swam. Andrew dived in from a willow branch that hung out from the bank, but Monika only dipped her toes in and made a girlish shriek of pantomime displeasure at the cold. Andrew floated over and splashed her, and Monika drew her upper body into a protective hunch. Liz couldn’t quite interpret the strange little performance: it seemed as if, after her hard work, Monika felt she needed to realign herself towards Andrew with feminine coquetry. But it was odd, there was something overcompensating in it, and Liz was glad when Andrew grabbed Monika and she let him pull her into the water. Unclothed the girl was not so slight as Liz had thought her, was loose-limbed, athletic, a powerful swimmer. Liz watched her swim off upriver.

  Liz paddled about, came out and quickly changed, unhappily conscious of the ageing cellulite at the back of her thighs, the puckered flesh at her knees. She set food out on the rug. Bread and hams and cheeses, salad, fruit, wine.
Andrew and Monika emerged from the river like a merman and his nymph, drops of water on their skin. Liz was struck by an idea she’d never allowed herself to entertain: that Andrew might not just survive, but even be happy. Was that possible? With this lovely, shallow young woman, with her energy and play and reproachful Slavic beauty. The thought, the idea of her son’s happiness, made Liz shiver.

  That evening Monika said, ‘Andy. You show Liz website.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No way.’

  ‘I tell her,’ Monika insisted. ‘She want. You must.’

  The three of them gathered around the large flatscreen monitor, Andrew and Monika pulling chairs, hemming Liz in. Monika brought forth images and information with her dextrous clicking of the mouse.

  Kalashnikov shooting and five-a-side football weekend, Liz read.

  ‘Also Zorbing,’ said Monika. ‘English man like this very much.’

  Roll the stag down a hill strapped inside a large plastic ball. Laugh like crazy to drown out his screams of anguish and nausea. Sounds like fun? It sure is!

  At the side of the screen appeared pretty young women, the evening escorts. ‘There is Marta. This is Katarzyna. Look. Here is me.’

  Yes, there was Monika. In a short black dress, surrounded by red-faced overweight men in tight T-shirts.

  ‘Liz. Look. This one we just start one month ago.’

  Mafia-style kidnapping. The best man arranges for the stag to be kidnapped. We provide three authentic hit men. We guarantee: the stag will be terrified.

  ‘Very popular,’ Monika said. ‘Liz. Last week Jakub ill, guess what? Andy is Mafia hit man.’

  Liz turned to her son, who grinned in an embarrassed way, and said nothing.