The Apothecary (35 page)
“How do you do,” he said. “I’m Detective Charles Montclair of Scotland Yard. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
M
y life, as it began in Victoria Station that day, was very strange. The memory loss of those of us who drank the champagne was precise and focused: The last three weeks were simply gone. My parents and I were able to make it back to our flat on St. George’s Street—my father seemed to know that we needed to get there quickly, and he pulled my mother and me through the streets by the hand—but we had to rebuild our lives from the clues that we found there.
My parents still knew that they had a job working for Olivia Wolff, and they could find Riverton Studios, but they had completely lost the thread of the storyline they’d been working on, and had to face Olivia’s bafflement and impatience with no explanation. Olivia thought the trauma of my disappearance had made them black out the memories. But they weren’t traumatised, because they didn’t remember that I’d disappeared, and neither did I. Our landlady, Mrs Parrish, was sheepish and apologetic around my parents, and sharply disapproving of me, for no apparent reason.
I had a uniform and books from St Beden’s, so I went to school there and followed the written class schedule I found tucked in my notebook. The pretty blonde girl who sat in front of me in Latin asked how the boat trip had gone. I looked around to the empty desk behind me, thinking she was talking to someone else.
“With Benjamin,” she prompted.
“Who’s that?”
Sarah stared at me. “Oh,
no
!” she said. “It happened to you, too!”
“What did?”
“You and Pip, you both forgot everything.”
“Who’s Pip?” I asked.
The awkward young Latin teacher, Miss Walsh, asked us please to stop talking unless we had something to say to the whole class. Sarah rolled her eyes and passed me back a note:
I miss Mr Danby!
Who’s Mr Danby?
I wrote.
Sarah read the note and I watched her braid swing as she shook her head slightly. There was something about that braid, and about the slope of her neck beneath it, that seemed important, but I couldn’t think why. She scribbled a response and passed it back.
You have to come to lunch with me.
Sarah’s friends made room for me at their table, which took the anxiety off going to a lunchroom I’d never seen before. The girls were silly, but I liked Sarah’s boyfriend, Pip, at once. He was shorter than Sarah, with wide eyes like some animal I couldn’t think of, and a quick smile. He was new to St Beden’s, too, having transferred from the East End.
“I showed up at my old school,” he said, “and they said I had some kind of scholarship here. It’s like I got hit over the head or something, and three weeks is gone.”
“Three weeks
are
gone,” Sarah said.
Pip grinned. “She wants me to talk all posh,” he said. “But you’ll like it here. I’m in chess club, which I learned when this bloke Timothy comes up and gives me half a crown out o’ the blue. You should join.”
“I’m not very good at chess.”
“Perfect!” Pip said. “Then we’ll play for money.”
Again I felt a little electrical charge in my brain, as if my synapses were trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what it was.
“There was this Russian bloke who was president of the chess club, they say,” Pip went on. “But he moved to America, so now I’m president. I think I’ll move to America one day. You’re from there, right? Is it grand?”
I said it was—but that London was, too.
When Sarah found out my parents were writing a TV show about Robin Hood, she wanted to go see the studio, so I took Pip and her to Riverton after school, on the train.
My parents were just happy to see I was making friends— any friends—but Olivia Wolff fell in love with Pip, with his enormous eyes and his acrobat’s grace. “Where did you
find
him?” she said.
Olivia took a cab that night to the East End to see Pip’s parents, who didn’t have a telephone, so she could cast him as the youngest member of the Merry Men. Pip loved the job and the money and the attention. When the show aired, people started recognising him in the street, and I thought it must have been the first time in Sarah’s life that she didn’t get all the attention of people walking by, just for being beautiful. I guessed it would be good for her, if she could stand it.
I joined chess club, and Pip was a patient teacher. He showed me how to think three or four moves ahead instead of leaping headlong into the moment. Slowly I became a passable opponent.
Sergei Shiskin, the club’s ex-president, sent a short letter from Sarasota, Florida, with a blurry photograph of a man with a beard and a woman in a headscarf standing on a pretty beach with two teenage children: a tall, solidly built boy and a pale, fragile-looking girl. It was hard to see their faces, but they seemed to be smiling, squinting in the Florida sunlight. The letter said Sergei was fine and liked his new school. At the end, it said,
PS Tell Janie and Benjamin I said thank you,
please. I don’t have the address.
“Does he mean me?” I asked Timothy, the spotty boy who had given me the letter to read.
“Sure,” Timothy said. “You’re Janie.”
“But I don’t know him.”
“Course you do! You were on the science team together!”
“What science team? There is no science team.”
Eventually our friends got used to the irritating amnesia. It was just a thing about Pip and me, like the fact that I was from California and Pip was from the East End: We’d both lost the same three weeks of our lives.
Some British agents in suits came to question my family, but we had nothing to tell them. They asked about Mr Danby, and I said I thought he’d been the Latin teacher at my school, but I had never met him, and now we had Miss Walsh. They also asked about an apothecary named Marcus Burrows and his son, Benjamin, who was my age. We knew there was a boarded-up apothecary shop around the corner, but that was all.
The Cold War carried on, and the Americans and the Soviets kept working on their nuclear weapons. There were rumours that England was about to stage a test in Australia. We still had bomb drills at school, but when the loud alarm bell went off and people started climbing under tables and desks, I didn’t feel afraid—though of course I didn’t know why.
Exactly a year after I returned to St Beden’s, I got a package in the mail, with no return address and with a strange postmark that I didn’t recognise. I took it into my room and tore off the brown paper. Inside was a small red diary.
I opened the book and recognised my own handwriting, but I didn’t remember writing the words. I flipped through the pages, reading a February entry about how furious I was at my stupid parents for dragging me to London. Then I read one about my miserable first day at St Beden’s, and how the only good part was meeting a boy named Benjamin Burrows who wanted to be a spy. One entry was interrupted when Benjamin climbed the tree outside my bedroom, because his father was missing and he had nowhere else to go.
Memories started coming back in bits and pieces. Something made me stop reading and flip to the blank pages at the end.
There was a note on one of those pages, and it wasn’t in my handwriting. It seemed to have been written carefully, with thought, and it said:
Dear Janie,
It should be safe now for you to have this. I’ve read it every day. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t think you would have minded, before. Reading it is how I kept you with me. I’m sending it back now to help you understand why we had to go away, and to tell you that I’ll come back. It might be another year, it might be more, I don’t know. But start working on your chess. I’ll expect a good opening.
Love, B.
It was a rare sunny day at the beginning of spring, and the tree that Benjamin had climbed to get to my window was bursting with green buds. I
had
a good chess opening, and I sat with the diary on my lap, feeling like I might spill over with a helpless, giddy laughter, and with a sad and serious ache underneath. I hadn’t understood the strange feelings I’d been having all year, but now I did. And I knew without question that Benjamin was out there somewhere with his father, looking out for us, risking his life to keep the world safe.
And that I would see him again.
I’m indebted to my friends Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin for the existence of this book, for bringing Janie and Benjamin and the mysterious apothecary to me, and for trusting me with the beginnings of a story they cared deeply about. They described what they had imagined as a movie, let me run with it, and talked through the convolutions with me as it changed. In the process I discovered two new worlds: wintry Cold War London, and the incredibly welcoming world of Penguin children’s publishing, and it’s been a life-changing adventure.
In writing the book, I drew on David Kynaston’s
Austerity Britain
1945-1951
, the exhibition
The Children’s War
at The Imperial War Museum in London, and Lyn Smith’s
Young Voices: British Children
Remember the Second World War
.
The Adventures of Robin Hood
was an early television program produced by Hannah Weinstein, who moved to London in the early 1950s and hired blacklisted U.S. writers to write scripts under pseudonyms. I have taken liberties with the real details of the show, as I have with the historical figure of the physicist Andrei Sakharov.
The real Chelsea Physic Garden in London is, in fact, a magical place, growing medicinal plants from all over the world. There really is a mulberry tree in the centre with draping branches under which you can hide. Whether the garden grows herbs that can make you tell the truth or become a bird, I’m not sure, but I think it’s important to allow for the possibilities.
