The Apothecary (4 page)
“Remember to do these translations of Horace,” Mr Danby called, over the noise of books and papers and talk. “For tomorrow!”
I looked at the two Latin sentences he had written on the blackboard, one long and one short, both incomprehensible. I gathered my things slowly, putting off my next trial.
“Miss Scott,” Mr Danby said as the last students filed out. “I take it you don’t feel comfortable with Latin.”
“I’ve never studied it before,” I said, clutching my books as a shield.
Mr Danby looked at the blackboard and read, “
Vivendi
recte qui prorogat horam, Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis.
‘He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out’. ”
I tried to sort the Latin words into anything like that meaning. I was nervous, but Mr Danby reminded me of some of my parents’ friends, the ones who talked to me as if I was a full-fledged person and not just a child. Somehow I summoned the courage to ask him, “What’s a rustic?”
“In this case it’s a fool, who won’t cross the river until the water is gone.”
“And the second one?”
“
Decipimur specie rectie
,” he said. “ ‘We are deceived by the appearance of right.’ You see why I put the two together.”
I hazarded a guess, encouraged by his assumption that I
did
see. “Because you can’t always know what it means to live rightly?”
“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “They taught you something in the wilds of California. How are you finding St Beden’s?”
I tried to think of something nice, or at least neutral, to say. “My mother said moving here would be like living in a Jane Austen novel, but it isn’t really.”
“But your story couldn’t be Austen, with an American heroine,” he said.
I couldn’t help smiling at him. “That’s what
I
said!”
“More of a Henry James novel,” he said. “The American girl abroad. Are you an Isabel Archer or a Daisy Miller?”
I blushed, but told the truth. “I don’t know. I haven’t read any Henry James novels.”
“You will soon enough,” he said. “But you wouldn’t want to be Isabel or Daisy. They come to bad ends, those girls.
Confide tibi
, Miss Scott. Far better to be who you are.”
That conversation with Mr Danby was the high point of the morning. I was lost in history—they were studying medieval battles and kings I’d never heard of—and in math, which was a confusing sort of geometry and which they bafflingly called “maths.” At lunch, I stood with my tray full of unappetising food, surveying the lunchroom. It wasn’t easy to be who you were, if you were the awkward new girl at a strange school. At the end of one of the long, old-fashioned tables, Sergei Shiskin was sitting alone. He was the only student I knew by name who’d been somewhat nice, so I sat at the other end of his empty table and we nodded to each other with the recognition of outcasts. I wondered why I hadn’t just sat right
across
from him, but it was too late for that.
Sarah Pennington sashayed past, and I tried to come up with a smile for her.
“At the Bolshevik table, are we?” she asked. Her gang of girls—none as pretty as she was, of course—followed her, giggling.
I knew Bolsheviks were Russian Communists, and I looked at my tray to keep my composure, but that was no help. The meat looked like it had been boiled. There was a small piece of rationed grey bread, with no butter, and not even any oleomargarine. I was pushing the potatoes around with my fork when a startlingly loud, long alarm went off.
“Bomb drill!” one of the lunch ladies called, coming along the long tables. “Under the tables, please!”
It was
Duck and Cover
, English-style. Sergei and I both got under the long table, and everyone in the lunchroom pushed back their benches and did the same.
Everyone, that is, except one boy. He was at the next table over, and he sat calmly where he was, eating his lunch. From my place on the floor, I could see the lunch lady in her white uniform approach.
“Mr Burrows,” she said. “Get under the table, please.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t.”
His eyes were serious and intent, and his hair didn’t flop limply over his eyes like so many of the boys’ hair did, but grew back from his forehead in sandy waves, leaving his face exposed and defiant. The knot of his tie was pushed off to the side, as if it got in his way.
“Do you want an engraved invitation?” the lunch lady asked, with her hands on her hips.
“It’s idiotic,” he said. “I won’t do it.”
“I’m sure you were wetting your nappies out in the country during the Blitz,” the woman said. “But some of us were in London, and a bomb drill is
not
a time to play at rebellion.”
The sandy-haired boy leaned towards her, across the lunch table. “I wasn’t in the country,” he said. “I was here. And we both know that these tables would have done
nothing
against those bombs—not the V-1, not the V-2, not even the smaller ones dropped by planes.”
The lunch lady frowned. “I’ll be forced to give you a demerit, Benjamin.”
“But this isn’t even a V-2 we’re talking about,” he said. “This is an atom bomb. When it comes, not even the basement shelters will save us. We’ll all be incinerated, the whole city. Our flesh will burn, then we’ll turn to ash.”
The woman had lost the colour in her face, but her voice still had its commanding ring. “Two demerits!”
But the boy, Benjamin Burrows, was making a speech now, for the benefit of the whole lunchroom. He had a thrilling, defiant voice to go with his thrilling, defiant face. “That is, of course,” he said, “assuming we’re lucky enough to be near the point of impact. For the children in the country, it will be slower. And much, much more painful.”
“Stop!” she said.
A short bell rang to signal the end of the drill, and people climbed out from under the tables, but I stayed where I was. I wanted to watch Benjamin Burrows a little longer without being seen. I was terrified by what he’d said, but moved by his defiance. I tried to sort out whether it was the terror or the excitement that was making my heart beat inside my rib cage at such an unexpected pace.
I
was supposed to take the Underground to Riverton Studios in Hammersmith after school, to see my parents at work.
Robin Hood
wasn’t on the air yet, but they had built a whole Sherwood Forest in a cavernous, warehouse-like soundstage, and they wanted me to see it. I was walking home to drop my books off, in an ambivalent drizzle, thinking about orange trees and avocados, when I passed the apothecary’s shop on Regent’s Park. Through the window, I saw a familiar sandy head of hair. I stopped to watch through the glare on the glass. Benjamin Burrows was shaking his head angrily and saying something to the kind apothecary.
I pushed the door open just enough to slip in, and stepped behind a row of shelves as if browsing for toothpaste. There was no bell on the door, and Benjamin and the apothecary were too occupied with their argument to notice me. Benjamin wore a leather satchel, like a messenger bag, slung on a long strap across his chest. He didn’t wear a wool cap like most of the other St Beden’s boys did.
“I don’t see why it matters,” he was saying. “Mrs Pratt’s just a nutter who likes being sick.”
“The delivery is still late,” the apothecary said.
“I had
things
to do.”
“You had things to do here.”
“Poxy things,” Benjamin muttered.
“We still have this shop,” the apothecary said, “through war and through difficult times, because we take care of our customers. Your great-grandfather did it, and your grandfather did it, and people trust us to do it now.”
“But you
wanted
to be an apothecary, like them,” Benjamin said. “I don’t want to!”
The apothecary paused. “When I was your age, I didn’t want to be one, either.”
“Well, you should’ve got out while you could!” Benjamin said. His anger, which had seemed so fitting against the lunch lady, seemed petulant against his father. If I’d had to guess, in the lunchroom, what Benjamin Burrows’s father might be like, I would never have picked the quiet, methodical apothecary. Benjamin snatched the paper bag off the counter and stormed out the door without seeing me.
I tried to slip out behind a row of shelves, too, without being noticed, but the apothecary said, “Good afternoon. It’s the girl with the homesickness, isn’t it? Did the powder help?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking about home on my way here. About orange trees. And blue sky.”
The apothecary looked out at the drizzle. “It would be strange not to think about orange trees and blue sky on a day like today,” he said. “No matter what powder you took.”
“And my new school is pretty awful,” I said.
The apothecary laughed. “The man who develops a tincture against the awful new school will win the Nobel Prize. It would be far more useful than the cure for the common cold.”
I smiled. “When you have the tincture, will you give me some?”
“You’ll be the first.”
There was an awkward pause.
“I fear you overheard my argument with my son,” he said.
“A little bit.”
“He’s a very bright, very talented young man, and he would be a fine apothecary, but he has no interest in it.”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
The apothecary nodded. His mind seemed to be elsewhere, so I said good-bye and slipped out the door.
I dropped my books at the flat and set out for Riverton. My father had left elaborate directions to the studio. But as soon as I was in the street, I had the feeling, once again, of being watched. I knew it couldn’t be the marshals—they had no jurisdiction in England. I turned and saw nothing, just the cabs and cars and people walking home.
I ran down the steps of the bomb-battered Underground, weaving around the slow old people with their bags, and hid behind a pillar to see who came down after me. There were housewives and students, and men leaving work early, and then there was Benjamin Burrows, with his incorrigible hair and his bright, curious eyes. I stepped back behind the pillar.
I watched Benjamin look around. He stood on the platform, facing away from me, as if disappointed and unsure what to do next, so I left my hiding place and tapped him on the shoulder.
He turned, startled. Then he smiled as if I’d won a game we’d been playing. “Very good,” he said.
“Why are you following me?”
“Because you interest me.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d expected. I’d never interested a boy before, at least not that I knew of. There were boys in Los Angeles who had been my friends, or the children of my parents’ friends, but I’d never crossed into the land of
interest
.
“I saw you at school,” he said. “Why’d you come to London in the middle of the term?”
“None of your business.”
“Are your parents in the CIA?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question,” he said. “Are they spies?”
“No! They’re writers. They’re working for the BBC.”
“That’s a good cover for spying. Are they journalists?”