Blackout

by Connie Willis

  Jane. Perfect. He pretended to read for a few minutes, then rang the bell excitedly. “What is it?” Fordham asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve remembered who I am.” Mike rang the bell again.

  Sister Carmody came bustling up. “I know who I am,” Mike said, handing her the paper and pointing to the announcement. “I saw the name Jane and it suddenly all came back—how I got to Dunkirk, what I was doing there, how I got injured. I was on the Lady Jane. And I’m not a soldier.”

  “Not a soldier?”

  “No, I’m a war correspondent. I was in Dun—”

  “But if you’re not a soldier, you’re not supposed to—I’ll fetch the doctor.” She hurried off, clutching the Herald.

  She returned almost immediately with the doctor in tow. “I understand your memory is beginning to return,” he said.

  “Has returned. Just like that.” Mike snapped his fingers, hoping to God memories actually did come back that way. “I was reading the Herald,” he said, taking the paper from Sister Carmody and showing them the announcement, “and as soon as I saw the name Jane I remembered everything. I work for an American paper. The Omaha Observer. I’m their London correspondent. I went over to Dunkirk with Commander Harold on his boat, the Lady Jane, to report on the evacuation.” He glanced ruefully at his foot. “I got more of a story than I bargained for.”

  The doctor listened to Mike’s account—bringing the soldiers aboard, the propeller, the Stuka—calmly and impassively. “I told you not to worry,” he said at the end of it. “That your memory would come back.” He turned to Sister Carmody. “Would you tell Matron I need to speak with her, please?”

  She shot Mike a stricken look. “Doctor, could I have a moment?” she asked, and they retreated to the center of the ward for another of those whispered conferences. “…it isn’t his fault,” he heard Sister Carmody say, and “… couldn’t it wait till his foot?… pneumonia…”

  The doctor sounded just as unhappy: “… nothing I can do… regulations…”

  He must have told her again to go get the matron because she crossed her arms belligerently across her chest and shook her veiled head. “… won’t have any part in it… miracle he survived being moved the first time…” and the doctor took off for the double doors with her in pursuit.

  And now, Commander, Mike thought, you’d better show up today.

  He didn’t. A steady stream of visitors—girlfriends, mothers, men in uniform—came that day and the next to sit beside patients’ beds, but no Commander.

  I shouldn’t have jumped the gun, Mike thought, watching Sister Carmody as she shooed visitors out. “Are they going to transfer me to another hospital?” he asked her.

  “You mustn’t worry,” she said. “Try to rest.”

  Which means yes, he thought, and spent the night trying to think of ways to keep that from happening. And imagining all the things that could have happened to his letter. The postmistress had given it to the barmaid to give to the Commander, and she’d stuck it behind the bar and forgotten it. The Commander’d dropped it in the water in the hold. Or lost it among the charts and pilchards on that mess of a table.

  “Still no letter?” Mrs. Ives tsk-tsked when she brought him his Herald Monday morning. “I do hope nothing’s happened,” which set off a whole new fit of worrying. The train carrying the letter had been bombed. Saltram-on-Sea had been bombed. The retrieval team had been bombed—

  This wasn’t doing any good. Mike picked up the Herald and opened it to the crossword. Even trying to figure out ridiculous riddles was better than squirrel-caging.

  One across was “sent to a place where no message can get out.” Ten down was “the calamity one feared has arrived.” Mike flipped back to the front page. “Invasion Thought Imminent,” the headline read. “German buildup along the English Channel indicates—”

  Sister Carmody plucked it out of his hands. “You’ve a visitor,” she said. “A young lady.”

  It’s the retrieval team, he thought, relief washing over him so violently he could hardly hold the comb and mirror the nurse handed him “to tidy up for her” with. He’d been expecting a male historian, but a female made more sense. Nobody would think to question a young woman coming to see a patient. Maybe it’s Merope, he thought hopefully. Thank God Fordham’s down for X-rays again. We won’t have to talk in code.

  The nurse took the mirror and comb from him, helped him into a maroon bathrobe, smoothed his blanket, and went to get his visitor. The doors swung open and a young woman in a green dress and jauntily angled hat came into the ward.

  It wasn’t Merope. It was a brunette with swept-up hair, rouged cheeks, and very red lipstick. With her open-toed shoes and short-skirted dress, she looked just like the other wives and girlfriends who’d visited, but she was definitely one of the retrieval team. She was carrying a cardboard box with a string handle that had to be a gas mask, and, in spite of all the historical accounts describing the contemps carrying them, he hadn’t seen a single one since he got here.

  I hope it doesn’t attract attention, he thought, but the only kind of attention she was getting was whistles as she proceeded through the ward. “Oh, please say it’s me you’ve come to visit!” the soldier three beds up from Mike called to her as she walked past his bed, and she paused, looking back over her shoulder to smile flirtatiously at him.

  It’s the barmaid, Mike thought. He hadn’t recognized her with her hair up and all that makeup. It’s Doris or Dierdre or whatever the hell her name is. Not the retrieval team. And she must have seen the disappointment in his face, because her own face fell.

  “Dad said I shouldn’t come, that I should write you a letter, but I thought…” Her voice faltered.

  “No, no,” Mike said, trying to look pleased to see her. And to remember her name. Deborah? No, it had an “e” at the end. “I’m glad you came, Dierdre.”

  She looked even more disappointed. “Daphne.”

  “Daphne. Sorry, I’ve been kind of fuzzy since the—”

  She looked immediately sympathetic. “Oh, of course. The nurse told me about the shock making you lose your memory and how you’ve only just got it back, and how badly injured you were, your foot… how is…?” she stammered, glancing at the outline of his foot under the covers and then away. “You said in your letter you’d had surgery on it. Were they able to—?” she began, and then stopped, biting her lip.

  “My foot’s healing well. The bandages are supposed to come off next week.”

  “Oh, good.” She thrust the cardboard box at him. “I brought you some grapes. I wanted to bake you a cake, but it’s so difficult to get sugar and butter, what with the rationing—”

  “Grapes are just what the doctor ordered. Thanks. And thank you for coming such a long way to see me,” he said, trying to figure out a way to bring the conversation around to asking her if anyone had come into the pub inquiring about him. “Did you come by bus?”

  “No, Mr. Powney took me to Dover, and I took the train from there,” she said, taking off her gloves and laying them across her lap.

  Mr. Powney. So he’d finally shown up.

  “I couldn’t come before because of the pub being busy on the weekend. Dad wanted me to write, but I didn’t like to, you being injured and all.” She picked up her gloves again and twisted them. “I thought it would be better to tell you in person.”

  The retrieval team had been there. What story had they told her? That they were looking for him because he was AWOL? Was that why the Commander hadn’t told them where he was? “Tell me what?” he asked.

  “About the Commander and his grandson Jonathan,” she said, twisting the gloves in her hands.

  “What about them? Daphne?”

  She looked down at the tortured gloves. “They were killed, you see. At Dunkirk.”

  We cannot tell when they will try and come. We cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1940

  London—21 September 1
940

  POLLY LOOKED PAST MARJORIE AT THE SPIRE OF ST. Martin-in-the-Fields. Beyond it lay Charing Cross. And Trafalgar Square. You’re wrong, she thought. It won’t come out right in the end. Not for me. Another siren, to the south, began to wail, and then another, their sound filling the dark street where they sat on the steps.

  “There’s the siren,” Marjorie said unnecessarily. “We shouldn’t stay here.”

  I can’t do anything else, Polly thought. My drop’s broken, and the retrieval team didn’t come.

  “The bombers will be here any minute. Can you walk, do you think, Polly?” Marjorie asked, and when she didn’t answer, “Shall I try to find someone to help?”

  And expose them to the dangers of the raid that would begin in a few minutes? Polly was already endangering Marjorie, who was selflessly trying to help her. And the bomb that had destroyed St. George’s wasn’t the last one that would be dropped. There would be more parachute mines and HEs and deadly shrapnel tonight. And the next night. And the next.

  And Marjorie and Miss Snelgrove and the old man who sat me down on the curb at St. George’s are in as much trouble as I am. The only difference is that they don’t know the date of their deaths. The least she could do was not get them killed for trying to help. “No,” she said, forcing her voice to sound steady, “I’m all right.” She got up from the steps. “I can make it to Charing Cross. Which way is it?”

  But when Marjorie pointed down the darkened street and said, “That way. We can cut through Trafalgar Square,” she had to clench her fists and hold them tightly at her sides to keep from grabbing Marjorie’s arm for support.

  You can do this, she told herself, willing her legs to support her. You saw it before, on the way to St. Paul’s. But she hadn’t known then that she was trapped here.

  You have to do it.

  It won’t look anything like it did that night.

  She needn’t have worried, it was too dark to see anything. The lions, the fountains, the Nelson Monument were only outlines in the blackness. But Polly kept her eyes carefully fixed ahead, concentrating on reaching the station, finding a token in her handbag, getting on the descending escalator.

  Charing Cross didn’t look as it had that night either, filled with celebrating people. It looked like every other tube station Polly’d been in since she got here, jammed with passengers and shelterers and running children.

  And it was safe. It had been hit on September tenth, but wouldn’t be hit again till the twenty-ninth of December. And on the noisy, crowded platform, conversation would be impossible. She wouldn’t have to answer Marjorie’s questions, to keep up the pretense that she was all right.

  But Marjorie didn’t look for an unoccupied space where they could sit. She didn’t even spare a glance for the shelterers. She went straight down to the Northern Line and toward the northbound tunnel. “Where are you going?” Polly asked.

  “Bloomsbury,” Marjorie said, pushing her way through the tunnel. “That’s where I live.”

  “Bloomsbury?” There were raids over Bloomsbury tonight. But the sirens had already gone. The guard wouldn’t let them out of the station when they got there. “Which is your station?” Polly asked, praying it wasn’t one of the ones that had been hit.

  “Russell Square.”

  The streets bordering Russell Square had been pummeled with bombs in September, and the square had been hit by a V-1 in 1944, but the station itself wouldn’t be hit till the terrorist attacks of 2006. They’d be safe there.

  But when they reached it, the gates hadn’t been pulled across. “Oh, good, Russell Square’s siren hasn’t gone yet. They don’t close the gates till then,” Marjorie said, and started outside. “I’m glad. I promised Miss Snelgrove I’d give you supper, and one can’t get so much as a cup of tea here.”

  “Oh, but I don’t want to—”

  “I told you, you’re not imposing. In fact, you may well have saved me.”

  “Saved you? How?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when we reach my boardinghouse. Come along. I’m starving.” She took Polly’s arm and struck off down the darkened street.

  As they walked, Polly tried to remember what parts of Bloomsbury had been hit on the twenty-first. Bedford Place had been almost completely destroyed in September and October, and so had Guildford Street and Woburn Place. The British Museum had been hit three times in September, but except for the first time, on the seventeenth, the specific dates hadn’t been on Colin’s list. And a Luftwaffe dive-bomber had crashed in Gordon Square, but she didn’t know the date of that either.

  Marjorie led Polly down a series of winding streets, stopped in front of a door, knocked, and then used her latchkey. “Hullo?” she called, opening the door. “Mrs. Armentrude?” She listened a moment. “Oh, good, they’ve all gone to St. Pancras. She leaves early to get a good space. We’ll have the house to ourselves.”

  “Don’t you go to St. Pancras?”

  “No,” she said, leading the way up a flight of carpeted stairs. “There’s a gun in Tavistock Square that goes all night long so that it’s impossible to get any sleep.”

  Which meant this wasn’t near Tavistock Square.

  “So which shelter do you go to?”

  “I don’t.” They went up another carpeted flight and then an uncarpeted one and down a dark corridor. “I stay here.”

  “There’s a shelter here, then?” Polly asked hopefully.

  “The cellar,” Marjorie said, opening the door onto a room exactly like Polly’s except for an enamel stand with a gas ring, a worn chintz-covered chair with a pair of stockings draped over the back, and a shelf with several tins, boxes, and a loaf of bread on it. Apparently Mrs. Armentrude wasn’t as strict as Mrs. Rickett. Oh, God, Mrs. Rickett was dead. And so was Miss Laburnum. And—

  “Though I don’t know but what our cellar’s more dangerous than the bombs.” Marjorie pulled the blackout curtain across the single window and then switched on the lamp by the bed. “I nearly broke my neck two nights ago running down the stairs when the sirens went.” She picked up the kettle. “Now sit down. I’ll be back in a trice.”

  She disappeared down the corridor. Polly went over to the window and peeked out between the blackout curtains, hoping the light from the searchlights would let her see if they were near the British Museum, or the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which had also been hit in the autumn, but the searchlights hadn’t switched on yet.

  She could hear Marjorie returning. She let the curtain fall and stepped hastily away from the window. When Marjorie came in with the kettle, she asked, “Is this Bedford Place?”

  “No,” Marjorie said, setting the kettle on the gas ring.

  It could still be Guildford Street or Woburn Place, though, but at the moment Polly couldn’t think of any reason she could give for pressing Marjorie further.

  “Sit down,” Marjorie said, striking a match and lighting the gas under the kettle and getting a teapot and a tin of tea down from the shelf. “The tea will be ready in no time,” she said, as casually as if they weren’t in the middle of Bloomsbury, in a house that might very well be bombed tonight.

  And she had to survive not only tonight, but tomorrow night and all the other nights of the Blitz—the twenty-ninth of December and the eleventh of January and the tenth of May. She felt the panic welling up. “Marjorie,” she said to stop it from washing over her, “at the station you said my coming here had saved you. From what?”

  “From doing something I knew I shouldn’t,” Marjorie said, smiling wryly. “This RAF pilot I know—hang on.” She switched off the light, opened the curtains, retrieved a bottle of milk and a small piece of cheese from the windowsill, pulled the curtains across, and switched the lamp back on again. “He’s been after me to go out dancing with him, and I’d told him I’d meet him tonight—”

  And if she’d met him, I wouldn’t be here and in danger of being bombed. “You can still go,” Polly said. And I can go back to Russell Square—


  “No, I’m glad you kept me from going. I should never have said yes in the first place. I mean, he’s a pilot. They’re all terribly fast. Brenda, that’s the girl I used to share with, says they’re only after one thing, and she’s right. Lucille in Kitchenwares went out with a rear gunner, and he was all over her.” Marjorie reached up on the shelf for two teacups. “He refused to take no for an answer, and Lucille had to—”

  There was a high-pitched whistle, and Polly looked over at the kettle, thinking it had come to a boil, but it was a siren. “That tears it,” Marjorie said disgustedly. “The Germans don’t even let us have our tea.” She switched off the gas ring and the lamp. “They’re coming sooner every night, have you noticed? Only think what it will be like by Christmas. Last year was bad enough, and we only had the blackout to deal with—dark by half past three in the afternoon.”

  And I’ll still be here, Polly thought. And when New Year’s comes, I won’t even know when and where the raids are.

  “Come along,” Marjorie was saying. “I’ll show you our ‘safe and comfortable shelter accommodations.’” She led the way back downstairs, across the kitchen, and down to the cellar.

  She hadn’t been exaggerating about its dangerousness. The steps were perilously steep and one was broken, and the beams in the low-ceilinged cellar looked as if they might give way at the mere sound of a bomb, let alone a direct hit. It should be on Mr. Dunworthy’s forbidden list.

  St. George’s hadn’t been on his list. Why not?

  Because you were supposed to be staying in a tube shelter, she told herself. But St. George’s hadn’t been on Colin’s list either.

  An anti-aircraft gun began pounding away at the droning planes, both of them as loud and as close as they’d sounded when she sat in the drop, waiting for it to open and unaware that the retrieval team should already have been there, that Miss Laburnum and the little girls were already dead.

  And Sir Godfrey, who’d saved her life that first night when she’d gone over to look at Mr. Simms’s newspaper, who’d said, “‘If we no more meet until we meet in heaven—’”