The Apothecary Page 0,56

it’s there,” I said.

“I hope you’re right,” the apothecary said, and went on. “Over time, as travel and correspondence became easier, we began to seek out people in other countries who were engaged in a similar study. The work has always been accelerated by wartime, when the offences to the human body are increased. When new and innovative ways are found to hurt, we find new and innovative ways to combat injury and pain. And there have, of course, been offshoots of the practice, and discoveries that have nothing to do with medicine. Temporary alterations.”

“Like becoming birds,” Pip said.

“Precisely,” the apothecary said. “Tell me who this boy is again?”

“We were locked up in Turnbull together,” Benjamin said. “He helped us escape. He’s a friend.”

“Then I owe you my thanks.”

Pip nodded. “Go on with the story.”

“When you were very small, Benjamin, the war began,” he said. “Children were sent to the countryside by the thousands, with labels tied around their necks. You were too young to go alone. Some mothers went, of course, but your mother helped me in my work. She didn’t want to leave, and I—well, I didn’t know what I would do without you both. And for a long time, nothing happened. We were given an infant’s gas mask for you, and your mother carried the horrible thing everywhere, but we never had to use it.

“Then the Blitz began, and the bombs came every night. Hundreds of German planes carrying hundreds of tons of explosives and incendiary bombs. We finally decided that you couldn’t stay in London, that your mother had to take you out of the city. We were making the arrangements for both of you to leave when a bomb fell one night, unexploded, in the middle of Regent’s Park Road.”

The apothecary paused and looked at his hands.

“Your mother had nursing skills and worked for the Women’s Voluntary Service. She was out after the air raid was over, helping to see who was hurt, when the bomb suddenly went off and threw her against a wall. Her neck was broken, and she was killed instantly.”

There was a silence under the mulberry tree that seemed to fill my ears and take away all sounds.

“People were putting out fires,” he said. “And I was sitting there in the street, in the chaos, with my dead wife in my arms. I’ve never known so much pain. I was struck by the senselessness of the bombing. And the fear. And all those young men dying in France and Italy and Greece and Africa and Germany, for victory—I was in a kind of nightmare, in those years. A kind of shock.

“Then the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end the war in the Pacific. And there was great celebration and relief. It seemed—monumental. Such enormous power the Americans had. I had known, from my correspondence with other scientists, that the nuclear experiments were happening, but I was not prepared for the bomb. The first thing I remember thinking is that the unbearable pain I had felt when your mother died was spread over those two Japanese cities, hundreds of thousands of times over, in two horrific clouds. All over the whole country, really.”

Jin Lo had started to weep silently, and the apothecary turned to look at her. I thought she was remembering the Japanese soldiers in China, and I tried to think how to explain that to the apothecary. She seemed to read my mind.

“I am fine,” she said, and she wiped her eyes. “Tell story.”

“There was so much anger and grief and outrage and loss,” the apothecary said. “And now there was this terrible bomb with which angry people could simply wipe each other out. I had this small boy, you see, being raised in the grief and the rubble, and I couldn’t imagine letting him grow up with such fear. It wasn’t a world that deserved to have such an awful bomb.”

He paused. “So I began to work,” he said. “I knew in a general way what the atomic scientists were doing, and I knew how to rearrange atoms, and manipulate them, to make one thing into another. It was my father’s work, and his father’s. And as I worked, there were rumours spreading. The Soviets were making their own bomb, and the Americans were building bigger ones. Both countries were arming themselves with weapons that could destroy the world. People said that as long as they both had such terrible weapons, no one would ever use