The Apothecary Read online

  “Janie, please,” my mother said. “This is a great chance that Olivia’s giving us. We don’t have a choice.”

  “I don’t have a choice. You had a choice, and you got on that list!”

  “We didn’t choose to be on the list,” my father said.

  “So how’d you get on it?”

  “By believing in freedom of speech. By having faith in the First Amendment!”

  The waiter came and slid our plates in front of us. “Flannel cakes for the little lady,” he said.

  I gave him a weak smile.

  My father stared at my stack of pancakes, with the pat of real butter melting on top. “That’s what you ordered for dinner?”

  “She can have whatever she wants,” my mother said.

  I glared at my father in defiance, but when I took a forkful of my last thin, golden, delicious Musso and Frank’s flannel cakes for a long time—maybe forever—they tasted like sawdust, and I made a face. My father couldn’t resist the joke.

  “You look like you’re eating real flannel,” he said, smiling. “Pyjamas with syrup.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “Look, kiddo,” he said. “If we can’t laugh together, we’re not going to make it through this thing.”

  I swallowed the sawdust. “Don’t call me kiddo,” I said.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Apothecary

  It’s safe to say I was not graceful about the move to London. I was no witty, patient, adaptable Jane Austen. And if I was anything like Katharine Hepburn, it was in the scenes where she’s being a giant pest. I cried in the taxi all the way to the airport, past the churning oil rigs on La Cienega. I cried on the first aeroplane I’d ever been on, which should have been exciting, and was exciting—all those tiny buildings below—but I wasn’t going to give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that I was enjoying it.

  At Heathrow Airport in London, there was a framed picture of the brand-new Queen Elizabeth II on the wall.

  “She’s not that much older than you are,” my mother said. “And she’s been through a war, and her father’s dead, and now she has to be queen, poor thing.”

  “See?” my father said. “Your life could be worse.”

  I looked at the picture of the young queen. We had escaped ahead of the US marshals, locking up the house and packing only the things we could carry. My parents were going to be writing for the BBC under fake names—fake names, when my mother wouldn’t even put yellow food colouring in margarine! We were living like criminals or spies. Although I was angry, standing there looking at the plucky young queen’s portrait, I allowed myself to think that my mother was right, and it might be an adventure.

  But February in London crushed those hopes. We took a taxi through streets that were still bomb-scarred and desolate, seven years after the war’s end, to a tiny third-floor flat on St. George’s Street in Primrose Hill. Across the street was a haberdasher—my father said he was like a tailor—standing outside his shop with his hands behind his back and a look on his face as if no one would ever come in.

  Our new landlady, Mrs Parrish, took off her apron and patted a wild cloud of hair to show us around. She said the gas water heater over the kitchen sink was broken, and we would have to heat pots of water on the stove.

  The kitchen was along one side of the living room, no bigger than a closet, and could be closed away just like a closet. The rooms were freezing and the walls seemed damp. The brown wallpaper was water-stained near the ceiling.

  We must have looked dismayed, because the distracted Mrs Parrish suddenly focused on us. She was not going to let some spoiled Americans fail to appreciate their good fortune. “You’re lucky to get the place, you know,” she said.

  “Of course,” my mother said quickly. “We’re very grateful.”

  “People are queuing up for a flat like this, with its own lavatory, and separate bedrooms, and a working telephone line. But the BBC asked to hold it, specially.” It was clear that we did not deserve such a bounty, when her countrymen, who had lost so much, were still going without private bathrooms.

  “We’re very grateful,” my mother repeated.

  “Do you have your ration cards for the marketing?”

  “Not yet,” my mother said.

  “You’ll need those,” the landlady said. “And you’ll find that the butcher sells out first thing in the morning, ration cards or no.” She lowered her voice. “I can sell you some eggs, if you like. They’re hard to get, but I know someone with hens.”

  “That would be very nice.”

  Mrs Parrish showed us where to put penny coins into the gas heater in the wall, to make it work. We didn’t have any English pennies, but said we would get some.

  “Mark you,” she said, brushing dust from the heater off her hands, “it doesn’t do much. Apart from eat up pennies. You’ll want your hot water bottles for the beds.”

  “We don’t have hot water bottles,” my mother said.

  “Try the apothecary,” the landlady said. “Around the corner, on Regent’s Park. He’ll have pennies, too.”

  And she left us alone.

  My mother started investigating the closet kitchen, and my father and I put on every warm thing we had, which wasn’t much, to go find the apothecary, which my father said was like a pharmacy. The sky over St. George’s Street was grey, and the buildings were grey, and people wore grey. It sounds like a cliché, but it was true. Going from Los Angeles to London in 1952 was like leaving a Technicolor movie and walking into a black-and-white one.

  Around the corner on Regent’s Park Road, just as the landlady said, we came to a shopfront with two bay windows full of glass bottles. A painted sign over one window said APOTHECARY, and one over the other window said ESTABLISHED 1871. My father pushed the paned glass door open and held it for me. The shop had a strange smell, musty and herbal and metallic all at once. Behind the counter was a wall of jars. A balding man on a wheeled ladder, halfway up the wall, pulled a jar down. He seemed not to have noticed us, but then he spoke. “I’ll just be a moment,” he said.

  He carefully climbed down the ladder with the jar in one hand, set it on the counter, and looked up at us, ready for our needs. He had wire-rimmed glasses and the air of someone who didn’t rush things, who paid close attention to each particular task before moving on to the next.

  “We’re looking for three hot water bottles,” my father told him.

  “Of course.”

  “And how about some chocolate bars?”

  The apothecary shook his head. “We have them sometimes. Not often, since the war.”

  “Since the war?” my father said, and I could see him calculating: twelve years without a steady supply of chocolate. He looked a little faint. I wondered if he could get a prescription for chocolate from a doctor. Then I could have some, too.

  “Come back again,” the apothecary said, seeing his dismay. “We may have some soon.”

  “Okay,” my father said. “We’d better get some aspirin, too.” I could tell he was embarrassed by his undisguised need for candy, and he always made jokes when he was embarrassed. I could feel one coming. “And how about something for my daughter, to cure homesickness?”

  “Dad,” I said.

  The apothecary looked at me. “You’re American?”

  I nodded.

  “And you’ve moved here to a cold flat with cold bedrooms that need hot water bottles?”

  I nodded again, and the apothecary guided the ladder along the back wall on its metal wheels.

  “I was joking,” my father said.

  “But you are homesick?” the apothecary asked, over his shoulder.

  “Well—yes,” I said.

  He climbed the ladder and chose two jars, tucking one beneath his arm to climb down. At the counter, he unscrewed the lids and measured two different powders, one yellow and one brown, into a small glass jar. “The brown is aspen, the yellow is honeysuckle,” he said. To my father, he said, “Neither will hurt her.” To
me, he said, “Put about a dram of each—do you know how much a dram is? About a teaspoon of each in a glass of water. It won’t take effect right away, but it might make you feel better. And it might not. People have different constitutions.”

  “We really don’t—” my father said.

  “It’s free of charge,” the apothecary said. “It’s for the young lady.” Then he rang up the hot water bottles and the bottle of aspirin.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’ll want some pennies, too, for the wall heater,” he said, handing me our change in a fistful of big brown coins that clinked, rather than jingled, into my hand.

  CHAPTER 3

  St Beden’s School

  The next morning, I swallowed my aspen and honeysuckle, over my mother’s halfhearted objections, to prepare myself for my first day at St Beden’s School. Showing up at a new school is never easy, especially in the middle of the year, when friendships are already established, and hierarchies understood. In England, all of that was heightened to a terrifying degree. St Beden’s was a grammar school, and to get in you had to pass a test. Most kids failed the test and went to something called a “secondary modern school,” which wasn’t as good, and where the kids were just biding their time before they could get jobs. So the students who got in to the grammar schools thought—rightly—that they were on top of the pile.

  The school was in a stone building with arches and turrets that seemed very old to me but wasn’t old at all, in English terms. It was built in 1880, so it was practically brand-new. It had dark-panelled walls inside, and paintings of old men in elaborate neckties, and somehow it had escaped bomb damage. Two teachers walking down the hall wore black academic gowns, and they looked ominous and forbidding, like giant bats. The students all wore dark blue uniforms with white shirts—jackets and ties for the boys, and pleated skirts for the girls. I didn’t have a uniform yet, and wore my bright green Hepburn trousers and a yellow jumper, which looked normal in LA, but here looked clownishly out of place. I might as well have carried a giant sign saying I DON’T BELONG.

  The school secretary, whose tight grey curls reminded me of a sheep, gave me my class schedule. As a ninth-grader, I was to be in what they called the third form, but it wasn’t anything like freshman year at Hollywood High. My first class was Latin.

  “But I don’t know any Latin,” I said. “I can’t join the class in the middle of the term.”

  “Everyone in third form takes Latin here,” the secretary said. “You’ll be fine.”

  Then she called to a startlingly beautiful girl walking past in the hall.

  “Miss Pennington,” she said. “Please show Miss Jane Scott to your Latin class. She’s new, from California.”

  The beautiful girl stopped in the door of the office and looked down at my green trousers, then lingered on my scuffed canvas shoes. She looked up at my face with a bright smile in which I could detect mockery, but I was sure the secretary couldn’t.

  There are Sarah Penningtons in the United States—you probably know one. I’m sure they exist in France and Thailand and Venezuela. My Sarah Pennington, at St Beden’s, was a near-perfect specimen of her kind. She had no adolescent awkwardness or shyness about her. She had clear, rosy skin, and wide blue eyes, and a long blonde braid down her back. She seemed to glow with the perfect health that money can sometimes bestow. She certainly hadn’t been subject to wartime rationing. That she was rich, and that her money had survived the war, was clear even in a uniform. The fabric of her skirt seemed to move with her, while the other girls’ skirts hung stiffly against their legs. It’s possible that no one had ever denied Sarah Pennington anything: that her wealth and loveliness had ensured that she never needed to ask, or aspire, or even hope, before the thing she wanted was there. The look on her face was one of calm assurance that the world would always be so.

  I walked with her down the hall, feeling hopelessly inadequate.

  “Our Latin teacher is Mr Danby,” she said. “He’s terribly demanding, but he’s so dreamy. He was a hero in the war.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a pilot in the RAF, and shot down all sorts of planes before he was captured in Germany. He was a prisoner of war for two years. After the war, he became a teacher, and he teaches as if he’s still flying missions. If his students don’t learn Latin, he thinks he’s failed. Some people hate it, but I think it’s lovely.”

  I sneaked a sideways look at her. She spoke in a strange, artificial, grown-up way, and I wondered if she was imitating some English actress. She didn’t talk like a fourteen-year-old.

  Mr Danby’s class had already started when we got there. I was prepared not to like him, just because Sarah Pennington did, but he was undeniably appealing. He was young, with green eyes and long lashes and soft brown hair that curled at his temples. He wore an academic gown that was disarmingly rumpled, as if he had left it in a heap on a chair and sat on it. He was talking to the class, and he seemed exasperated.

  “The city we live in was once Londinium,” he was saying. “The capital of the Roman Province of Britannia. Latin was spoken here in the street, in the fish market. It is the language of Virgil, of Seneca, of Horace. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you be able to recite a little!”

  The students—some amused, some frightened—glanced to us in the doorway, as a possible distraction. Mr Danby turned, too.

  “Ah, Miss Pennington,” he said. “You’re just in time for my rant.”

  “We have a new student,” Sarah said. “This is Jane Scott. From California.” It was startling, in front of all those faces, to hear my name announced so formally. No one ever called me Jane. And she made the state sound faintly ridiculous, as if perhaps I had made it up.

  “Janie,” I muttered, feeling the heat in my face.

  Mr Danby said, “Thank you, Miss Pennington.”

  Sarah beamed at him and sashayed in to take her seat.

  The class was seated in alphabetical order, which meant that I was seated right behind Sarah Pennington. A large boy named Sergei Shiskin, with dark hair flopping across his eyes, had to move back one desk to make room for me.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “It’s all right,” the boy whispered back. “I don’t get called on, in the back.” He spoke with a Russian accent, and I imagined that a Russian kid would have an even worse time at the school than an American.

  Mr Danby called up students one at a time to recite long passages in Latin, and I felt as if I were standing on a beach in heavy surf: Each student’s recitation crashed over me like a wave of words, then withdrew again, leaving nothing I could understand.

  Finally the bell rang and the class was over, and the students sprang to their feet.

  “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.