Chemistry and Other Stories Read online

‘Liz. Only think about it,’ said Monika. ‘I ask you.’

  ‘It’s a brilliant idea,’ said Sophie. ‘You’d make a perfect team.’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘I’m touched,’ Liz said. ‘I mean, I’m interested. Retirement does seem awfully premature, now that I’m stuck in it.’

  It was only afterwards, after Monika had had cards and flyers printed for OXFORD ODDJOBS, with each of their names embossed – Director Monika Nowacki. Administrator Elizabeth Mitchell – and had delivered the first five hundred by hand, through letter boxes of houses in streets fanning out from their own, that it occurred to Liz that it could have been her daughter’s suggestion that Monika involve Liz in the enterprise. But if so, she reasoned, why not? Monika wouldn’t agree unless she wanted to, that was clear; she was too steely to be coerced to such an end.

  In the early days of the business that summer, Elizabeth Mitchell began to imagine that she was herself a budding entrepreneur. She and Monika cleared out John’s study. Andrew had made a brief inspection of his father’s desk. ‘I don’t want anything,’ he told the wall, and declined to help them. Instead he rummaged amongst the store above the garage, and retrieved archaic camping equipment: a canvas tent, a camp bed, which he fiddled around with on the lawn.

  Liz gave the books to John’s college library, though she wondered how much of a gift it was: history books seemed to pass quickly from favour, superseded by archaeological and other discoveries, by new ways of looking at the past.

  ‘Of course they’re useful, Mum,’ Sophie assured her. ‘They’ll inform future historians about the authors’ own times.’

  The two young women helped Liz clear out other of her late husband’s possessions. Monika emptied the chest of drawers and wardrobe into piles on the floor of the bedroom. Sophie divided the clothes into binbags for either charity shop or refuse, pausing to share memories evoked by a pair of cords, some pink woollen socks. Liz held on to a hat John wore on walks. A particular wide-checked shirt, his smell no longer present in the fabric, she admitted, two years on.

  In the study, now the office of Oxford Oddjobs, Liz presided, taking calls from residents in the roads around her, arranging visits from Monika, hiring Polish labourers. Their system was simple: they charged £12 per hour, whatever the work – gardening, cleaning, building – of which they paid the worker £7. Of the £5 they kept, Liz received £1, Monika £2, and £2 went back into the business. In the beginning they shared office and printing costs, but they earned it back within weeks as people responded to their flyers, or called to say that so and so had recommended them.

  The demand failed to surprise or daunt Monika. She conjured workers from an underworld of Polish migrants. Zsigmund, a highly qualified engineer from Poznań, did gardening. Women of all ages – Ella, Marta, Matylda, Dorota – cleaned the houses of liberal Englishwomen who’d not realised they could afford, or should employ, a cleaner. Kazimierz was a plumber, Stanislaw a carpenter, Radek an electrician, though if needs be any of them could do everything else, it seemed.

  ***

  Monika was a calm dynamo, meeting clients, hiring employees, occasionally, when someone failed to turn up somewhere, cycling over, rolling her sleeves up and getting stuck in. One afternoon she and Liz both rushed round to a garden in Upland Park Road, to tidy the clippings of a long laurel hedge their gardener had abandoned. Seeing the way Monika stuffed the leaves into plastic bags, squeezing ever more in, brought back to Liz the image of her mother, working in their village garden with an energy that was emphatic, without doubt. The two women worked into the evenings. Sophie cooked supper if she was around. She had a new job, as a Youth Outreach Worker, and rushed in and out at odd hours. Andrew kept out of everyone’s way. ‘It’s too complicated here,’ he said. ‘It’s not simple enough,’ he muttered, retiring to the tent on the lawn.

  After lunch one day Liz laid some yellow roses on John’s grave, and took her now only occasional walk around the lake. On the pavement outside two houses were boxes of apples, with signs saying HELP YOURSELF. Few had. The traffic on the big roads grew ever heavier, and so more adept in its effect upon Liz. She felt soothed, useful, included. It was strange, she thought: in all her years at the GP practice, money never crossed the reception desk. Money was numbers on the computer and on printouts; figures in columns that added up or failed to, in budgets that balanced or over- or under-spent, inseparable from those around it. No single sum – even her own wages, which went directly into her bank account – meant anything in itself.

  Now cash shivered through her fingers, and the reality of it was thrilling. She made primitive piles of notes and coins. The workers came to the house and she handed them envelopes, which they opened neatly and whose contents they counted slowly. This money meant something to these people. They slept on the floor, three or four to a room, in the estates around Oxford, and sent all they could afford back to the home they couldn’t wait to return to, or else saved it for a new life here.

  Her own salary, too, Liz paid herself in cash and kept in her purse, so that she ceased having to draw on her pension or her savings.

  In October, as the leaves fell from the trees, and the length of days contracted, and the nights grew chilly, Andrew disappeared. No one really noticed at first, so spectral had his presence been around the industrious ambit of the three women’s lives.

  ‘Where’s Andrew?’ one would ask.

  ‘Oh, he must be in the tent,’ another would answer.

  ‘It’s not there.’

  ‘Maybe out on the Meadow.’

  When he’d not been home for two days and nights, Sophie went looking for him. It was a Saturday. She cycled up Woodstock Road and into Upper Wolvercote, down around the Green and over the railway line. She chained her bike to the iron railings and set off across Port Meadow. The smell of smoke: a pale wisp rose from an old bonfire on the allotments. Seagulls wheeled greedily. Were they pausing in the centre of England on their way east or west, from the Irish to the North Sea? Sophie wondered. Or had they become accustomed to a life inland? In the misty distance horses were lazily grazing. One or two joggers, people walking their dogs. No one looked as though they were here of their own free will, somehow, except for a man talking on a mobile phone as he strolled. Plotting, she thought, with his illicit lover, in the wide freedom of the Meadow.

  Sophie climbed the bank and entered Burgess Field, the old dumping ground that had been covered in topsoil and turned into a nature reserve. It was a bare heath but for spinneys and thickets of trees planted here and there, which had grown to twice the height of a woman. After half an hour wandering Sophie saw the khaki tent, in a clump of birch and pine trees. Inside, a sleeping bag, a thick blue blanket, and a Bible. The smell of damp canvas. There was no sign of Andrew but there was no doubt it was his. Attached by white cotton to the top front of the tent was a piece of cardboard on which in black felt-tip were written the words Domine meus me non damnant.

  The women ate carbonara. Liz had bought a Rioja reserve from 1998, with the cash in her purse. The cork was purple-black, impregnated with the wine, and withdrew gracefully from the bottle. Sophie recounted to the others her expedition.

  ‘It means God, or Lord, or My God,’ said Liz. ‘My Lord, do not damnant.’ She pressed her left index finger to her temple, as if to stimulate her memory there. Or perhaps to shoot it for failing her. ‘Condemn me.’

  ‘He didn’t have anything,’ Sophie said. ‘Nothing to cook on. To clean with.’

  ‘Andrew,’ said Monika, with an air of possessive authority. ‘I know him. He will come back when is cold.’ She looked from Liz to Sophie, their doubtful faces. ‘Really cold.’

  That week Liz attended two day-courses run by Oxfordshire Business Enterprise, for people starting up their own small business. On the first, she was given an overview of keeping financial records; preparing a business plan, doing market research and creating a marketing strategy; costing and pricing the company’s services; cash-flow forecasti
ng and profitability; taxation, National Insurance and VAT.

  Liz had always assumed that budding entrepreneurs simply started trading, as she and Monika had done. Seeing what it really took to run a business, she felt the shape of the challenge ahead. ‘We should have thought a lot more before we began,’ she told Monika.

  ‘This what we done,’ said Monika. ‘It was market research already.’

  ‘Well, better late than never.’

  The first course took place at Exeter Hall in Kidlington. The second, two days later, was at the Colin Sanders Innovation Centre in Banbury. There Liz learned in more detail how to administer the finances of a company. Allowable business expenses; efficient paperwork; accounting systems. Keeping track of costs, cashflow, profit.

  Liz drove back to Oxford, her head reeling. She was too old to learn so much. Far too old. But she’d do her best. She was a trier, she had to admit. She’d not give up on it herself. She was halfway home when she realised she’d failed to take advantage of being so close to the village she’d grown up in. Her parents were buried there, and it would have been good to visit their grave. She felt like she’d vaguely betrayed them; had betrayed herself, too.

  On Sunday morning, after the clocks had gone back, Liz set off from the house on foot. She walked to Port Meadow and across to Burgess Field, then followed Sophie’s directions. There was a mild drizzle, of the kind you were less aware of falling than of finding, tiny droplets, on your clothes, and on your skin. With the leaves turning, and dropping from the trees, it took Liz a while to see the khaki tent even after she’d found its location. She made the steps towards it with trepidation, uncertain what she would find. There was something wild about it here, like a fairy tale, as if it might turn out to be the home not of her son but of some man of the woods he’d been transformed into.

  She called out, ‘Andrew?’ as she approached. There was no answer. She stood outside the tent, and spoke his name again. ‘Andrew?’

  No reply came, but she heard a sound from inside, a shuffling of blankets or clothes. Emboldened, Liz lifted the tent flap. There was Andrew, in his sleeping bag. He covered his head with his hands like a teenager, as if she’d thrown open the curtains on a sunny morning, and made a grunting objection. She saw a black Bible, and recognised a red torch she kept in her bedside table.

  ‘I’ve brought you croissants, Andrew. And I’ve a Thermos of coffee. Will you join me for Sunday breakfast?’

  Liz leaned in out of the wet. The smell was teenage, too: unwashed maleness, and old canvas. She figured she’d rather put up with the soft rain than the hostile odour. ‘I’ll wait out here,’ she said.

  They sat outside, Liz on the blue blanket. Andrew had unzipped his sleeping bag and wrapped it around himself like a thick cloak. He ate three croissants, stuffing one after the other into his mouth, chewing arduously. The coffee he forgot until it was cold, then he downed it in one.

  ‘Will you come back home?’ Liz asked. ‘We worry about you outside.’

  Andrew wiped his hand across his mouth. He was unshaven, and dark-eyed, and gazed at the damp ground as he spoke. ‘It’s good here.’

  ‘I’d so like to see you warm,’ she said.

  Andrew laughed, a kind of bitter, dismissive laugh that seemed to suggest that warmth was the most trivial, even decadent, of human needs. ‘It’s better without people.’

  ‘What’s better, Andrew?’ she asked.

  ‘To live alone with God,’ he said. ‘And for God alone.’

  When she saw that he was not prepared to come home with her, Liz said, ‘I’ve got more food here I’ll leave with you.’

  ‘I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth,’ Andrew said. ‘And every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.’ He raised his head and indicated with staccato nods various directions. ‘Apple trees,’ he said. ‘Hazelnuts. And mushrooms.’ He laughed to himself again. ‘I know where they are.’

  Liz took the bag from her rucksack, and when she placed it by the tent Andrew did not object. She was sure he did not wish her to embrace him; she only took one of his hands in hers, and squeezed it, before she left.

  November was miserable, but the last weekend of the month the clouds lifted and the sun came out to shine weakly on the grey city. On Saturday Sophie took food and spare clothes to Andrew; she and her mother alternating biweekly visits. Monika indulged them. ‘He will come,’ she insisted. ‘When is really, really cold.’

  Liz remembered the roofs of the houses in Kraków: metal plates stood up from various points across them. Andrew had explained to her that every winter snow built up thickly on the roofs. The plates were there to break the snow up as it melted. Otherwise a huge slab might slide off the roof and bury someone stood below. Monika, Liz feared, might have a more demanding definition of cold than most.

  On Sunday morning, as the three women ate breakfast together, plain croissants and pains au chocolat from Taylors, Monika put down her teacup and said, ‘Enough.’ The others waited for her to expand. ‘I work every day for twelve weeks now. No. Thirteen. Today I take holiday. You know, Liz, what I like to do?’

  Liz shook her head, and shrugged expectantly.

  ‘Your village,’ Monika said. ‘Your parents. I like to see. Shall we go? Maybe Sophie come also.’

  Sophie frowned regret. ‘I said I’d see Joe today,’ she said. ‘The playwright? He’s writing this play, I said I’d read through it with him. Shame. I’ve not been there in years.’

  Liz cruised up the A4260 rather than join the M40. She bought flowers from a filling station, a bouquet of white and pink carnations. Monika switched on the radio, searched for channels, settled for one featuring pop music. The presenter got very excited about each ditty he played. The lyrics were all as inane as those of the songs of Liz’s distant memory. Never gonna leave you, baby, this one’s gonna last forever. She wondered whether there’d been a brief period of complexity, ingenuity, in the story of popular song, that coincided with her son’s youth.

  ‘I wonder if it’s time,’ Liz ventured, ‘for us to do something.’

  ‘About Andy,’ Monika said without hesitation. ‘You mean doctor.’

  ‘He may need to be brought in,’ Liz said. ‘For his own safety.’

  She could just register Monika nod beside her. They drove on without speaking. A car overtook her, beeping its horn and cutting in aggressively. Presumably she’d annoyed the other driver by how slow she’d been drifting north.

  The village was little changed. Houses built of dark brown stone, a small estate of brick bungalows. Liz showed Monika the cottage she’d been brought up in. ‘There was a shop there,’ she said, pointing across the stream that ran beside the road. ‘And that used to be a post office.’

  There was hardly anyone around. On a Sunday morning fifty years ago most everyone would have been in church, and any moment now would come stuttering into the autumn morning, spreading out through the village, bringing it back to life. Today, though, the church was empty, its front door locked. The inhabitants of the village remained inside their quiet houses or had left already, in pursuit of leisure opportunities in the world around. Shopping, football, fishing, golf, car boot sales …

  After some minutes’ uncertain searching, Liz found the headstone, towards the corner of the graveyard, close to the thorn hedge. Her memory had shifted it, nearer to the church. For some further minutes, until her brain had recalibrated the scene, its location felt uncannily wrong.

  Victor Mitchell, 1915–1989

  and Phyllis Mitchell, 1919–1992

  One is closer to God in the garden

  Than anywhere else on earth

  Liz laid the flowers on the grey stone. She’d had the sentiment inscribed in deference to her mother. When John had made fun of it, she’d cringed, feeling much as he did. Now, it seemed less superstitious than a statement of modest fact. There were no other mourners in the graveyard. A number of standing crosses, she noticed,
had been brought down upon their graves, as if by a great storm. She felt Monika beside her take hold of her arm.

  ‘Liz,’ she said. ‘Have I told you? My parents, I do not know, they are alive or they are dead?’

  Reaching her free hand across her body, Liz took Monika’s arm.

  ‘It is long story,’ Monika said. ‘My father. When I leave, to go to Kraków, he say, “You go now, never come back.” My mother is crying, my sister. What life is for me there? My brother walk with me but father pull him back. He shout after me again, “Never.” I don’t turn round.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She felt Monika shrug beside her. ‘It is this, what it is.’

  The two women, their arms entwined, stared at the headstone together, as if there was revealed here a deep familial connection between them.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Liz said. ‘Lately. And now I’m sure. When I die, I’d like to be buried here. Not with John, in Oxford, but here, with my parents. Is that awful?’

  Monika didn’t say anything.

  ‘It feels as I get older that I’m drawing closer to them all the time,’ Liz said. ‘It’s terribly strange.’

  Monika squeezed Liz’s arm. ‘I will remember,’ she said. ‘Only please: not yet. Okay? First, you must help me make business.’

  Liz laughed weakly. ‘I shall do my best.’

  ‘We make super business,’ Monika said, turning from the grave. ‘Businesswomen of Year. I can see awards on shelf in summer house.’

  ‘South of England, Best New Company. You can make a speech, Monika.’

  They walked between headstones, from the grass to the gravelled path.

  ‘Liz. Maybe we employ another person in office soon. What do you think?’

  ‘To concentrate on the accounts?’

  ‘Yes. And maybe is time for advertising. In newspaper. But which one?’

  At that moment the bell in the church tower rang, activated by a timed mechanism, the first of twelve doleful chimes. Liz registered them briefly, a sound that was more like a memory than a present reality, before returning her attention to Monika beside her. The pair strolled out of the graveyard, towards the car, scheming and teasing the future, turning from mortality back to this world, and hope of the life to come.