‘When do you start?’
‘In five days. Next Monday. And I haven’t done nearly enough work, only it doesn’t go in any more. And at night it all jumbles about – sort of Julius Caesar trying to remember the Lead Chamber Process. Goodness, that’s a nice worm!’
Osmandine nodded. ‘It’s Cuthbert. He’s sort of lost the con. Can’t submerge.’
‘He likes you,’ said Jeremy admiringly. He smiled at Osmandine who smiled back at him and then suddenly Jeremy burst into tears. He had been longing to do this since the age of seven, when it finally dawned on him that the son of Professor Cyril Blakeney F.R.S. and Dr Alice Blakeney D. Litt. was wasting his time if he cried because there was absolutely no one at home to listen to him.
‘Those exams,’ said Osmandine, handing him a box of Mr Greenfield’s Tissues for Men. ‘Useful to you?’
Jeremy said he didn’t know. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, he only knew he was going to fail miserably and bring disgrace and shame on his family, his teachers and himself.
‘Well then, why bother?’ said Osmandine casually. ‘To take them, I mean. Those poor examiners, marking all that stuff. Why don’t you just go off somewhere?’
Jeremy’s tears stopped as if axed. ‘ Run away, do you mean?’
‘Well, why not? As long as you don’t worry anyone. You’ve got to leave a proper message for your parents. And of course you’ve got to find somewhere sensible to go to. I mean, there’s no point in lying around in some gutter being a nuisance to people. Do you have any relatives?’
Jeremy said he had a grandmother. His parents thought she was mad because she talked to her chickens and lived miles from anywhere, but Jeremy liked her.
‘Well, you think about it,’ said Osmandine. ‘And there’s no point in doing any more work if you aren’t going to take the exams, so perhaps you’d be kind enough to go into the park and get some nice wet earth for Cuthbert. That stuff round the bay tree seems a bit acid. Your pills will be ready after lunch.’
Three peaceful and prescriptionless customers followed. But when Mr Kandinsky walked into the shop, Osmandine knew at once that her halcyon interlude was over. Mr Kandinsky looked like a prescription, and a prescription, duly signed by Dr Lee, was exactly what Mr Kandinsky was.
‘They’re some new tablets for my headaches,’ said Mr Kandinsky, looking with black and soulful eyes at Osmandine. He was young and pale and presumably orthodox, for the hard, black hat seemed permanently moored to his head.
‘Ah … yes,’ said Osmandine sighing. On the prescription, everything was as indecipherable as before, nor did John Lee’s signature, as the morning surgery advanced, show any decrease in the signs of criminality, emotional deprivation or early Sanskrit influences.
‘Why does everyone in this town go to Dr Lee?’ asked Osmandine. ‘There must be other doctors.’
Mr Kandinsky said there were, but Dr Lee … ‘There is no gap,’ said Mr Kandinsky. ‘You know, the doctor up there who knows and the patient down there on the floor.’
Osmandine nodded. ‘He does prescribe a lot, though, doesn’t he?’ she went on. ‘I mean, couldn’t you have massage for your head? Let me try,’ she said eagerly, looking at the prescription again. ‘I’m good at massaging people.’
A look of terror, lightly tinged with ecstasy, passed across Mr Kandinsky’s face. Clearly he had read things. ‘ I think I’d better have the prescription,’ he said. ‘ You see, it’s the last time I shall be able to go to Dr Lee. Mama has decided we must change our doctor.’
‘Oh?’
Mr Kandinsky nodded. ‘Dr Lee was not very kind to Mama when she came about her palpitations. It is true Mama had difficulty in sticking to her diet, but she expected a little sympathy. Mama is a widow, you see.’
Osmandine said she was sorry to hear it.
‘Of course Jewish cooking can be a little on the fattening side. And Mama is very fond of sweets.’
‘Yes.’
‘But she has such an unhappy life.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, my father is dead. Some fifteen years ago.’
‘They were happy?’
Mr Kandinsky frowned. He said it was not certain. His father had died of drink. Alcoholism was rare in Jews and it had made him wonder.
‘Do you live alone with your mother?’
Mr Kandinsky nodded. It was his pride, he said, to make up to Mama all she had missed. Only these headaches …
‘Well, look, if you could just give me a little time,’ said Osmandine and explained about Mr Greenfield.
Mr Kandinsky was very concerned. He said she must not hurry, he would call in the evening before she closed the shop. He couldn’t come earlier in any case because his mother had organised a little tea-party for him to meet some nice Jewish girls. Emboldened by the look in her eyes, Mr Kandinsky added that he did not at all mind marrying a Jewish girl, he expected to marry a Jewish girl but why did she have to be nice?
Osmandine’s last prescription that morning was a small, fat man with kind blue eyes. His name was Mr Beesley and he suffered from his ‘nerves’.
‘From Dr Lee,’ said Osmandine, holding out her hand for the prescription. It was not really a question but Mr Beesley answered it.
‘Oh, yes. I wouldn’t go to anyone else. Mind you, that man’s going to have a breakdown if he goes on like that. It was losing the little girl, of course. He was really nuts about that kid.’
‘Oh. Did she … die?’
‘No, no, that witless wife of his took her when she went. He could have got her back, I reckon, but he wouldn’t play tug-of-war for the child’s sake. Now about these tranquillisers…’
At one o’clock Osmandine shut up the shop, dampened Cuthbert, helped herself to two liquorice sticks and a lump of horehound candy and went into the dispensary with her prescriptions.
First she opened some of Mr Greenfield’s bottles, smelled them, and closed them again. Then she dug about in his wooden drawers and found, eventually, what seemed to be an old-fashioned pill-making machine, a thing for stuffing cachets and – hidden behind an old pharmacopoeia – a silver tablet maker. ‘For it is clear,’ said Osmandine, furrowed up over the instructions, ‘that a pill is not a tablet. Nor is a tablet a cachet. And as for a pessary…’
Frowning with concentration, sucking deeply on her liquorice stick, Osmandine got to work.
At two o’clock she opened the shop again. Jeremy was the first to return. He looked quite different, his hair blown by the wind, his cheeks pink.
‘Here’s some earth for Cuthbert,’ he said. ‘And I’ve rung my grandmother. She says the same as you. Not to bother with the old exams if I don’t want to. She says I can come right away. Only maybe my parents will fetch me back?’
Osmandine leant over the counter. ‘ Tell you what,’ she said. ‘Just tell me where your parents live and I’ll sort of explain things to them. I promise I won’t upset them and I promise they won’t fetch you back.’
‘Would you? Oh, God, you are…’ Words failed Jeremy. ‘They’re Professor and Dr Blakeney, 15 Osmore Gardens.’
‘Fine! Now just forget about everything. Have you got enough money?’
Jeremy nodded.
‘Great. Well, here are your sleeping pills.’
‘Goodness!’ said Jeremy, impressed. .’ They’re … sort of unusual looking, aren’t they? I like the way they’re all… a bit different. I mean, mostly pills are so dull.’
It was in the lull after Jeremy’s departure that Osmandine rang Interflora and ordered a dozen red roses to be sent to an address in Oversea. Her instructions were clear, her voice crisp and her soul untroubled, for though she liked truth she liked kindness even more.
Mr Beesley was the next one of her ‘prescriptions’ to return.
‘They’re not like the last ones I had,’ he said doubtfully, peering at his bottle which seemed to be inhabited by a litter of premature baby mice.
‘It’s because they’re hand-made,’ said O
smandine earnestly. ‘Dr Lee wanted you to have something very special. Have you spoken to your mother-in-law?’
Mr Beesley’s round face lit up. ‘I have. And you were quite right. She’s been missing the country like anything. But, you won’t believe it, she thought she had to go on staying with us because she was helping us financially. Well, she has been. I mean, no one can say she’s mean even if she does say: “ Is it a nice cackle fruit for breakfast?” every morning of her life. So we’ve worked out this plan…’
A peaceful hour followed and then Mrs Berryman returned. She was flushed and excited-looking and accepted her livid, oozing capsules with scarcely a second glance. ‘You know I told you about my boy, Phillip? Well, just now there was a ring at the door and then this huge bunch of flowers. Red roses. From my Phillip, For my birthday.’
‘How lovely! I’m so glad.’
‘So I’m going right back now to write him a long letter. And I don’t care what his father says, a son’s a son and his wife is welcome in my house. I’ll send it to his college, but they’ll know where he is.’
‘Which leaves,’ said Osmandine to Cuthbert, ‘the question of Mr Kandinsky. You know, Cuthbert, I think Mr Kandinsky ought to emigrate to Israel. Did you notice his hands – sort of square-tipped and practical? I’m sure he’d be happy in a kibbutz. Mama could follow later and go and live with a cousin in Tel Aviv. There’s sure to be a cousin in Tel Aviv. If only I can convince him that emigrating is a duty…’
At five-thirty, Osmandine shut up the shop and went to visit Mr Greenfield. He had had his operation and she was allowed only a minute in which she told him that everything was fine. After which she went to see Professor and Dr Blakeney.
‘Are you trying to tell me that you encouraged Jeremy to run away to his grandmother?’ said Dr Blakeney.
Osmandine said she had not just encouraged him to run away, she had practically forced him to do it. A boy of fourteen with a bottle of sleeping tablets before a major exam was something she wouldn’t care to take responsibility for. ‘I am speaking,’ said Osmandine grandly, ‘as a pharmacist.’
At the door, however, she took pity on the frustrated academic pair. ‘Actually,’ she said on her way out, ‘ it would be wise to have everything ready for Monday; his pens, pencils, exam cards and so on. Because I think he’ll probably come back and take the silly things. Once he knows it doesn’t matter.’
Osmandine was right. On the following Monday Jeremy came back, said he supposed he might as well have a go and came out of his first exam saying that as a matter of fact the questions were just the ones his teachers had said they would get. But by this time, though she did not know it, fate was closing in on Osmandine. What proved to be her undoing was the rather special two-way relationship which existed between Dr Lee and his patients.
It was a while before Mrs Berryman, bustling round in a delightful tizzy owing to the sudden visit of her son, Phillip, with his wife and baby, noticed that Dr Lee’s marvellous new tablets had quite cleared up her stomach clunks. When she did, however, she did not fail to ring up Dr Lee and thank him.
Then Mr Beesley, whose mother-in-law was house hunting, wrote a note of gratitude for the pills which had cured his ‘ tension’ and a girl called Helen Arbuttle, on whose failing love life Osmandine had laid a healing hand, told him that his prescription had at last cured her dizzy spells.
But it was Mr Kandinsky who provided the coup de grâce. En route for the Israeli Embassy in London, he had called at the surgery and actually brought the miracle pills which had cured his frightful and incessant headaches.
So that Osmandine, chatting up Cuthbert during an unaccustomed lull in business, found the shop door violently opened, the bell sent jangling – and an irate and limping figure striding towards the counter.
‘Would you mind telling me,’ said Dr Lee furiously, holding out a small, round box, ‘what these are supposed to be?’
Osmandine peered with interest at the tiny, misshapen objects. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘ that those are Mr Kandinsky’s headache pills.’
‘I know they’re Mr Kandinsky’s headache pills,’ yelled Dr Lee. ‘What I want to know is, what’s in them? Because I’m darned certain it isn’t what I prescribed. Don’t you realise you’re breaking the law dispensing dangerous drugs without—’
‘But I didn’t!’
‘What do you mean, you didn’t? I’ve been trying to get on top of Mr Kandinsky’s headaches for ten years. Whatever you used must have been dynamite. What is it?’
Osmandine frowned. ‘I’m almost sure it’s icing sugar and rose water. Or was that Jeremy? No, Jeremy’s were peppermint essence and cornflour. And Mrs Berryman had powdered liquorice and coffee extract in hers. So I think Mr Kandinsky’s must have been—’
Dr Lee sat down. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you’d be kind enough to fill me in?’
‘It’s your fault,’ said Osmandine, looking into his eyes. ‘You prescribe so. They’re like snow in a Russian ballet, your prescriptions. Can’t you find out what’s really wrong and help people?’
Dr Lee’s mouth curled into its accustomed lines of self-disgust. ‘I’m hardly in a position to offer instant advice to others. So I prescribe.’
He was interrupted by the shop bell. But the men who strode in were not customers. Two smooth-looking men in trendy suits and behind them, looking uncomfortable, a uniformed policeman.
‘My name is Ware,’ said the older and smoother of the two, addressing himself to Osmandine. ‘This is my partner, Mr Nicholson. We represent the new pharmacy in Station Road. And we are here because we have reason to believe that you have practised a serious fraud on a member of the public.’
‘No,’ said Osmandine. But she moved closer to Cuthbert and also, it so happened, to Dr Lee.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Ware unpleasantly. ‘You see, one of our customers came into the shop yesterday and asked for tablets like these.’ He held out a box containing two rapidly disintegrating brownish blobs. ‘Apparently you dispensed these for a friend of hers from a prescription of Dr Lee’s. Her friend seemed to have found them highly beneficial for her rheumatic pains.’
Osmandine’s brow cleared. ‘Oh, yes, Miss Frinton. Well, you see, she had this sister whom she really loved and then the sister died and—’
‘I’m afraid Miss Frinton’s life history does not concern us,’ interrupted Mr Ware. ‘What does concern us is that on analysis these tablets were found to contain rice flour, suet and vanilla essence! In other words, you have been tampering with the prescription of a registered medical practitioner and as such are liable to prosecution under—’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said a quiet voice beside her, and Osmandine suddenly realised why, in spite of his impossible forehead, his Italian cars and his limp, the people of Oversea flocked to his surgery. ‘You refer to a prescription of mine. It so happens that rice flour, suet and … er, vanilla essence were exactly what I prescribed for Miss Frinton.’
The two men stared and the constable, relieved, stepped back a pace.
‘You are perhaps not aware,’ Dr Lee went on smoothly, ‘of the immense strides made lately in the treatment of rheumatic diseases. I need only quote the work of Zwimmerman and Finkelstein on the catalytic action of vanilla on intracellular respiration. And of course the recent findings of Pringle and Pepper…’
‘Why did you do it?’ said Osmandine when the men had shuffled out.
Dr Lee moved forward to tell her, caught sight of his reflection in a bottle of cough syrup – and recoiled.
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘you must get a proper locum for Mr Greenfield. At once.’
‘Yes,’ said Osmandine. ‘I know. Anyway, I must get back. I am,’ she said experimentally, ‘in mourning for my life.’
And as she looked at Dr Lee, grounded like a storm-tossed kestrel between the sponge-bags and the after-shave, she thought it was probably true. But she had long since understood that love and suffering are one, and pushing Cuthbert to one side
she went forward bravely to her fate.
THE BRIDES OF TULA
I SUPPOSE for everybody there is a country of the heart, a place where it all comes together: devotion and delight, intensity and awareness – the feeling of being the kind of person one was meant to be.
For the lucky ones it comes with marriage and parenthood: a sunlit pleasance, well-weeded, guarded from trespassers and those we trespass against. For others it is a dark place, a night country of station waiting-rooms, hotel bedrooms and the torture of the silent telephone, Some, I suppose, never find it – Brooke’s ‘wanderers in the middle mist’ – or cannot reach it, lost in a thicket of words like ‘honour’ and ‘duty’, which no one any longer understands, but which fasten themselves, nonetheless, like barbed wire round the spirit.
But what if there are two countries? What if there is no bridge?
I was twenty when I married John and straight away I knew it was going to be all right. Oh, it was rough sometimes on the surface; he was on a research grant at a west country university, working on animal behaviour, and when Vanessa was born and then Daniel two years later we were very hard up. But all through the sex-and-money rows, the battles to adjust my manic sociability with his need for solitude, we were all right, our roots steadily twisting together down beneath it all. John was gentle and considerate, yet in no way soft. He supported me, encouraged my work (I was just starting as a freelance writer) and laughed at me. As for our children – ah, glory, there were never children like ours!
We lived in a flat in a shabby terrace of Georgian houses that faced south over the city. There was a wisteria snaking from the basement to support the narrow balcony where I sat on summer afternoons telling stories to my blonde and giggly daughter, my dreamy, green-eyed son. We had friends too, real ones who allowed us to walk in and out of their lives and whose dramas and crises became our own.
A good life, you see. No excuses for what happened. No alibi.
We had been married nearly seven years when a great-uncle of mine died and left me five hundred pounds. That September John had a conference in Vienna. My widowed mother was always glad to take the children, so I went abroad by myself and I went – I never thought of any other place – to Russia.