The Apothecary

Chapter 37

The Wine of Lethe



We took a taxi to my parents’ flat, and I went in alone. I expected them to be furious, but instead they caught me up in their arms, first my father, then my mother, crying and holding on to me as if they would never let go. I started crying, too, just because they were. They didn’t seem to notice that my clothes smelled of seawater and reindeer fat. My father was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t speak right away, a rarity for him.

“We were sick with worry, Janie,” my mother said, wiping tears from her face. “That ridiculous Mrs Parrish said you were staying with someone named Sarah, but the Sarah we found at your school said you’d gone on a boat trip with someone’s uncle. But whose uncle? What boat? The school knew nothing! How could you just go off like that?”

“Benjamin’s father wants to meet tomorrow,” I said. “So we can tell you everything.”

“I’m going to wring that kid’s neck,” my father said.

“He saved my life,” I said. “You’ll understand when they tell you the whole story.”

“When we went to the police, they said you’d been arrested,” my mother said. “They said you’d been released to a teacher and then vanished, and they threatened us with deportation when we couldn’t tell them where you were. But we were asking them! Janie, we’ve just been sick.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m so tired, I couldn’t begin to tell it all. And I really, really want to take a bath.”

They seemed to be afraid I might disappear again if they denied me anything, so they agreed. I understood, as I filled the tub, how truly luxurious it was to have a private bathroom in the flat. I was careful not to kick the drain lever, and I took my first bath—alone, in hot water, without Benjamin and Pip waiting for me to become invisible—in what seemed like a very long time.

When I was out and dry, my parents kissed me good night and said again how terrible it had been, and extracted promises of the whole story, no omissions, in the morning. Then I climbed into bed. My diary was tucked beneath the mattress where I’d left it, and I brought it up to date, from sneaking Benjamin through my window a million years ago to the flight home. I fell asleep with the little red book still in my hand.

The next day was a Saturday, and I woke to yellow sunlight streaming through my window. I stretched my arms and legs, happy to be in a bed, in London, in my parents’ flat: I almost thought the word home, which I never thought I’d use for any place except Los Angeles. My mother made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and they were the best things I’d ever eaten, hot and salty and delicious.

The telephone rang, and it was Benjamin. “My father and I will be in the newsreel cinema at Victoria Station in an hour,” he said. “Can you and your parents come?” He sounded odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how.

“Are you all right?”

“Just tired,” he said. “We didn’t get much sleep. Listen, you know that diary you keep?”

“Yes.”

“Will you bring it? There are some things I want to check against my notebook.”

I should have been suspicious right then. I should have been more wary all along. But I was so glad he was safe and healthy, and I wanted so much to see him and talk about everything we hadn’t gone over yet, that I would have done anything he asked.

There were early daffodils blooming in window boxes as my parents and I walked to the Underground. The weather was brisk and cold, but it was balmy compared to the Arctic, and it was good to be outside on a beautiful day. My parents were eager to hear the apothecary’s story, and were in surprisingly buoyant moods, as if he had already slipped them a potion that produced a happy complacency. They had even started speculating about what the nature of my absence might have been.

“You joined a traveling circus,” my father guessed.

“You joined a band of wandering troubadours,” my mother said.

“You were an elephant tamer?” my father said. “Or a tightrope walker. I can’t decide.”

“Just wait,” I said. “It’s much stranger than any of that.”

At Victoria, we went into the darkened newsreel theater, and I spotted Benjamin and his father sitting with Pip in a back row, in the flickering light of a news story about fighting in Korea. Pip grinned and waved at me, from down the aisle.

“Were you followed?” Benjamin whispered.

“I don’t think so,” I said. My parents and I slid into the seats at the end of the row.

The first newsreel ended, and another began. It wasn’t about a foiled nuclear test in Nova Zembla, but about new ladies’ fashions. The models wore full skirts with tiny belted waists, like Maid Marian had worn when I’d first gone to Riverton Studios such a long time ago. The voice of the newsreader described the remarkable imagination that went into these new skirts and dresses. My parents were getting restless.

The apothecary must have been satisfied that there was nothing in the newsreels about us, because he stood. “Let’s go to the refreshment counter,” he whispered.

The theater was on a sort of mezzanine above the train station, and the tables were empty at that hour, and hidden from the crowds below.

“Thank you for helping us escape on the dock,” I said to Pip.

“I shouldn’t’ve—I missed ev’rything!”

“Did the policemen catch you?”

“Course not. Fat old coppers.”

“This is our friend Pip,” I told my parents. “Dad, you already know Mr Burrows, the apothecary. And this is my mom, Marjorie Scott.”

“I’m so pleased you’ve come,” the apothecary said. “I owe you both an explanation.”

“You bet you do,” my father said.

“Please, sit down. Pip, will you fetch some glasses?”

We took a table, and my mother unwrapped her scarf, her face alert for lies. My father, too, surveyed the apothecary with scepticism and curiosity, deciding how trustworthy he was. I felt protective of him, and hoped he would live up to my parents’ standards. Benjamin looked healthier than he had the day before. His freckles had gotten back some of their colour.

“First, a toast,” the apothecary said. He uncorked a bottle of champagne and poured the golden, fizzy liquid into the small glasses Pip brought. “I think it will be all right if the children have a sip today. We have so many reasons to be grateful.”

He lifted his glass in a toast, and we all drank. The champagne was cold and tangy, and the bubbles tickled my nose.

The apothecary watched us. Finally, he said, in a deliberate tone, “We traveled by sea to an island in the archipelago of Nova Zembla.”

“To where?” my father said.

“It’s in Russia,” I said.

“In Russia?”

“I have been concerned for some time,” the apothecary said, “about our current race to develop catastrophic weapons. So I had been working on a way to contain an atomic bomb after it had been detonated. The Soviet Union was testing a new weapon in Nova Zembla, providing an ideal opportunity for our own test. I didn’t know when we would have another chance.”

I glanced at my parents, who looked like they were listening to someone speaking another language. I wasn’t sure his meaning was sinking in. Or maybe they just thought he was insane. In a way, I thought he was insane, to tell them so much. It was a clear security risk. But I had told the apothecary that I wanted to tell them everything, and he seemed to have taken me at my word.

My father turned to me. “Is that really where you were, Janie?”

I nodded.

“Janie and Benjamin helped me escape capture in London,” the apothecary said. “They wanted to go to Nova Zembla, but I refused to take them. In the end, they stowed away on the boat, over my objections. I have to say I was grateful for their help. But I can’t imagine the anguish it must have caused you to have your daughter missing for so long. I offer my heartfelt apologies. Please, have some more champagne.”

“Wait, back up,” my father said, holding up his hands. “Did you say you wanted to contain an atomic bomb after it had been detonated?”

“To control its impact,” the apothecary said. “Immediately after detonation.”

“Are you working for the British government?” my mother asked.

The apothecary shook his head. “Our Security Service has a bit of a problem with spies, I’m afraid. And nations with atomic weapons, or with the intention to possess them, have their own interests in mind. Their power lies in the fear the bomb creates. If there were no fear, there would be no power. Those nations, including our own, would want to prevent the use and knowledge of any antidote to the bomb.”

“So you’re saying—it worked?” my father said.

“It did. And now that we’ve proven that it’s possible, we can improve our methods, in league with scientists in other countries doing similar work. If a bomb is ever used, as the unimaginably destructive force that it is, we will try to be ready.”

“Wait—wait,” my father said. “I’m sorry to keep backtracking. But I’m trying to follow you. How did you get to Nova Zembla?”

“We took a boat until we reached Russian waters and were stopped by a Soviet patrol,” the apothecary said. “Then we flew.”

“In a plane?”

“As birds.”

I cringed a little. I knew my parents weren’t going to believe that.

“As birds?”

“Yes.”

My father turned to me, expecting me to tell him the actual truth.

“It’s spectacular,” I said. “You’d love it. I was a robin.”

My father blinked.

The apothecary said, “And now Benjamin and I are going away.”

I whirled on him. “Wait—what?”

“It isn’t safe for us here,” he said. “We have a train in . . .” He checked his watch. “Four minutes.”

“But you can’t just leave!”

“Listen, Janie,” Benjamin said. He sat forward in his chair and caught my hands, turning me to face him. “We have to go. If you thought about it, you’d know. None of us is safe. The thing you drank, that champagne, will take a little time, but it’s going to make you forget everything that happened in the last three weeks.”

“Forget?”

“You better be bloody joking,” Pip said.

“You’ve drugged us?” my father said.

“Davis,” my mother said. “Please.”

“You’ll still be able to get through your days,” the apothecary said. “But everything about the last few weeks will be erased. My shop, Benjamin, the trip to Nova Zembla—all of that will be gone.”

“He drugged us, Marjorie!” my father said. He stalked away from the table in a fury, the way he did when he needed to cool off, and my mother went after him, to calm him down.

I said, “Benjamin, you can’t do this! Those memories are mine! I saved your life! More than once!”

“I did too!” Pip said.

“I know,” Benjamin said. “But there’s no other way. It would be best if you gave me your diary now.”

I shook my head. “No. I promise not to show it to anyone.”

“I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“But I need to remember you!”

“Please, Janie.”

His eyes were pleading, and I took the little book from my pocket and handed it over.

He looked at its red cover. “I hope it says that you fancy me,” he said. “And that wasn’t just the Smell of Truth talking.”

I was too furious to answer—it was so obvious how I felt about him, and we had been through so much since the Smell of Truth. I felt my eyes fill with tears. “Where will you go? How do you know you’ll be safe?”

“Whole cities could be wiped out if there’s a war,” he said. “We have a responsibility to protect them.”

“So let me go with you!”

“You have to stay here with your parents.” He took both my hands and looked down at them. “Listen, Janie, do you remember that night on the bow of Anniken?”

“Yes,” I said. Tears were running down my face now, and I let them.

“I don’t think any potion could erase that,” he said. “Not for me. I hope you’ll remember that part.”

A loose strand of hair had fallen across my face, and Benjamin tucked it behind my ear. He smiled. “American hair,” he said.

Then he leaned forward, and I could feel the warmth of his breath and smell his clean, soapy skin. I wondered where he had slept and bathed, but then his lips touched mine and I felt a steady current of electricity running through my whole body. I knew I would never forget that feeling, as long as I lived.

Then a vaguely familiar, silkily snide voice above us said, “Hello, Jane.”

We both looked up, and it was Detective Montclair, the wispy-haired policeman who had arrested us at school. He was standing on the other side of the low iron railing that ran around the refreshment counter’s tables. His partner O’Nan stood beside him.

The apothecary stood to greet them, extending a glass across the railing. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Will you join us for some champagne? I’ll open another bottle.”

I remembered how Detective Montclair had reminded me of a cobra, swaying slightly, waiting to strike. “You’re under arrest for treason, Mr Burrows,” he said. “I’d advise you to come quietly. Mr and Mrs Scott, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, too.”

“Why?” my father said. “What for?”

“Colluding with traitors?” the detective said. “Falsely reporting your daughter missing? Criminal mischief? The question is whether to send you back to the United States to face questions about your Communist friends, or to lock you up here.”

“I can explain everything,” the apothecary said. “Officer, please join us for a drink.”

Officer O’Nan shook his head, but I thought he looked longingly at the bottle.

A train was announced over the loudspeaker. While everyone paused to listen, Benjamin sprang from his seat and vaulted over the low metal railing, running for the stairs that led down from the mezzanine. The policemen ran after him. The apothecary dashed away through the other tables.

Pip and I looked at each other. My memory of the exact connection we had to the apothecary was starting to grow hazy.

“What’s going on?” my mother said.

“We have to help them get away,” Pip said.

My mind cleared again, and I remembered that Benjamin had been saying good-bye. Everything in me protested, but I knew Pip was right. We left my parents and sprinted down the stairs, taking them three at a time.

When we reached the tracks, I saw Benjamin pulling his father up into the door of a train that was starting to move. The two policemen were gaining on them. Pip ran ahead and darted between the policemen’s legs, grabbing their ankles, and they all went down in a sprawl.

I dodged around the fallen men and leaped onto the car behind Benjamin’s as the train started to pick up speed. My foot slipped and I clung to the door handle, my feet hanging free over the platform for a few long, dizzy-making seconds. Then I recovered and pulled myself up.

I looked back and saw the policemen on the platform struggling up after their collision with Pip, but then my mother buttonholed them, brushing off their coats, asking if they were all right. She had a hand on Officer O’Nan’s chest, and I could tell she was keeping him from getting up, while pretending to help him. Through my gathering fog I thought how brave and smart she was. Pip was still tangled in the policemen’s legs and loudly complaining. My father leaped onto the train beside me.

The train was full of passengers stowing their bags and finding their seats, and my father and I made our way through them, dodging bodies. When I reached the passageway between our car and the next, Benjamin was crouched on the other side, pouring a liquid out of a vial. There was a strange smoke coming up from the rattling floor, over the couplings between the two train cars, but it wasn’t the orange smoke Jin Lo had used to get us out of the bunker. It was pale grey, with wisps of yellow, and had a sulphurous smell.

“Benjamin!” I said.

He looked up, and his eyes were sad. He stood and pocketed the vial. “We can’t get arrested, Janie,” he said. “You understand, right?”

“Pip stopped the police,” I said. “They aren’t on the train!”

“We can’t take the chance.”

“Just let me go with you!” I was about to step over the grey-yellow smoke, but my father caught my arm and I looked down. The floor was dissolving between our car and Benjamin’s as the metal corroded and started to fall away. The sulphur smell became stronger, and the smoke thicker in the air. I could see the exposed coupling between the two trains, until that started to crumble, too.

“Wait!” I said, not knowing if I was talking to Benjamin or to the floor. It was impossible to take my eyes off the melting of everything that kept the two cars attached. Soon a single cable was all that was left, and finally it corroded and snapped. The front of the train seemed to leap free of its burden, and Benjamin was racing away.

“No!” I said, reaching out, in an agony of regret. My father put his arm around me.

“I’m sorry I put Janie in danger, Mr Scott!” Benjamin called. “But she won’t be, now. She’ll be safe!”

Then the disappearing train was swallowed up in a pea-soup fog, which had settled over the city out of nowhere. The last I saw of Benjamin was a flash of his sandy hair in the doorway of the car.

Our part of the train had come to a noisy stop, engineless and helpless. My father and I climbed down and pushed past the confused people milling about on the platform. Someone said the engineer had stopped the train on the tracks ahead, but I knew that Benjamin and his father would have vanished already into the suspiciously sudden fog. There was no point going after them. We walked back almost a mile along the tracks, through the confused crowds and over the awkward stones between the ties.

The strange champagne we had drunk was making its stealthy way to our brains, carried by its innocent-seeming bubbles—as I would later discover all champagne does—and our memories were fading fast. My father seemed to grasp at the questions that occurred to him in flashes. “Did that boy’s father say you became birds?”

“I think so,” I said.

“What did he mean by that?”

“I’m not sure. I remember flying, sort of. And there was a skylark.” I thought hard about the skylark. “That seems important. But everything around it is too hard to remember.”

When we got back to the station, my mother was waiting for us on the platform.

“I feel so strange,” she said. “And I know I should know why I feel so strange, but it keeps escaping me.”

We found Pip sitting at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the newsreel theater, with Detective Montclair and Officer O’Nan. The apothecary’s two bottles of champagne were on the step between his feet. I had just enough of my memory left to recognise them.

“I’m just having a drink with these two ducks an’ geese,” Pip said. “Seemed a good idea at the time, but now I haven’t got the foggiest why.”

The three of them had polished off the second bottle, and the detective, all his snakelike cunning and his threats of deportation vanished, stood to shake my father’s hand.

“How do you do,” he said. “I’m Detective Charles Montclair of Scotland Yard. I don’t believe we’ve met.”