All Clear

by Connie Willis

  You thought the number of fatalities was a discrepancy, she reassured herself, and it turned out it wasn’t. And look at your last assignment. For a few weeks there, you were convinced you’d altered events, but you hadn’t. Everything worked out exactly the same as it would have if you hadn’t been there.

  And this will, too. The doctors say Marjorie’s going to make a full recovery, and it isn’t as if she married her airman or got knocked up. In a few days she’ll be out of hospital and back at Townsend Brothers, just as if nothing had happened. And all I have to do is make certain Mike doesn’t find out what Marjorie said. And that Eileen kept the Hodbins from going on the City of Benares.

  She wondered if she should caution Eileen again not to say anything about that, but she didn’t want her inquiring why. And Eileen wasn’t likely to bring up the subject of the Hodbins to Mike for fear that he’d make her write to them and tell them where she lived. At any rate, the only thing on Eileen’s mind was what had happened at Padgett’s.

  “Mr. Fetters says they were three charwomen,” Eileen said. “They didn’t work at Padgett’s. They worked at Selfridges. He said they must have been on their way to work when the raids began and took shelter in Padgett’s basement.”

  Which meant Mike could also stop worrying about the fatalities being the retrieval team, and so could she. And now all I have to worry about is where the team is. And whether it will show up before my deadline. And about the possibility that Oxford’s been destroyed.

  And about Eileen, who’d been badly shaken by the knowledge that “we could have been in that basement shelter, too.”

  “No, we couldn’t,” Polly had said firmly. “Because I know when and where the raids are, remember?” At any rate till January.

  “You’re right.” Eileen looked reassured. “It was a tremendous comfort yesterday going to Stepney, knowing there weren’t going to be any sirens.”

  Except the one which had sounded at Townsend Brothers. Had that been a discrepancy, too?

  “Oh, and I wanted to ask you,” Eileen said, “Mr. Fetters said Padgett’s is reopening ‘on a limited basis’ next month, and asked me if I was interested in coming back to work there, and I wondered what I should tell him. I mean, we mightn’t be here by then …”

  Or we might.

  “I’ll ask Mike,” Polly said. “I’m going to check on him now and take him a blanket.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “No, there are too many people about. I’ll show you tonight where the drop is. Oh, I nearly forgot. I think I found the airfield Gerald’s at. Was it Boscombe Down?”

  “No,” Eileen said. She looked thoughtful. “Though the B sounds right. I’m sorry …”

  “It’s all right,” Polly said, fighting back disappointment. She’d been so certain that was it. “I’ll go ask Mrs. Rickett if she has an ABC. If she does, you can look through the names while I’m gone.”

  Mrs. Rickett didn’t have one. Miss Laburnum was certain she had one “somewhere” and looked through every drawer and cupboard in her room before she said, “Oh, that’s right, I lent it to my niece when she was visiting from Cheshire.” And then insisted on showing Polly two coconuts she’d managed to scrounge up for the play and relating in detail the time she’d seen Sir Godfrey onstage when she was a girl. It was two o’clock before Polly was able to escape, by which time she was convinced that Mike would be dead from hypothermia.

  He wasn’t, and even though his teeth were chattering, he refused to leave the drop. “There have been contemps in the area all day. It’ll have a much better chance of opening after the raids start tonight.”

  “But it won’t help to have you freeze to death,” she said, and tried to persuade him to let her spell him long enough for him to go to Mrs. Leary’s and eat his supper, but he refused.

  “The more coming and going there is, the greater the chance someone will see us,” he argued.

  “Won’t you at least let me bring you another blanket and something to eat?”

  “No, I’ll be fine. Where are the raids tonight?”

  “The East End, the City, and Islington.”

  “Good. Then there won’t be firemen or rescue workers around here to see the shimmer. Were you able to find out anything about the casualties at Padgett’s?”

  “Yes.” She told him about the three dead charwomen.

  “So it wasn’t the retrieval team. And there wasn’t a discrepancy. Good,” he said, sounding relieved. “What about Phipps’s whereabouts? Were you able to get hold of a railway guide?”

  “Not yet, but I’ll look at the one at Townsend Brothers tomorrow, and I should be able to find out some more airfields at Notting Hill Gate tonight,” she said, thinking of her troupe mates Lila and Viv. “Is there anything else you want us to do?”

  “Yes, buy some newspapers for us to use for our personal ads. And keep pumping Eileen about what else Gerald said. You haven’t figured out what his joke about getting her driving authorization meant, have you?”

  “No. The only thing I’ve been able to think of is that RAF pilots carried their papers in a waterproof wallet in case they had to ditch in the Channel, but the wallet wasn’t red, and I don’t see what—”

  “But at least that tells us we’re on the right track about his being at an airfield,” he said. “You’d better go. When are the sirens supposed to go tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” She explained about having left before Colin got the siren data to her. “The raids begin at 7:50. Here, take my coat. I can borrow one for tonight,” she said, draping it over his knees. “And if it begins to rain again, go home. Don’t try to be a hero.”

  “I won’t,” he promised, and she hurried back to the boardinghouse, got Eileen, took her to Notting Hill Gate, then sent her off to Holborn to see if the lending library had an ABC.

  “If they don’t,” she said, “borrow some newspapers.” She told Eileen about Mike’s ideas of using personal ads to tell the retrieval team where they were.

  “I know where we can find examples of the right kind of ads,” Eileen said eagerly. “A Murder Is Announced.”

  “What?” Polly said.

  “It’s a mystery novel. By Agatha Christie. It’s full of personal ads … Oh, no, that won’t work,” she said glumly.

  “Why not? The library at Holborn has several Agatha Christie novels, and if they don’t have it there, I’m certain one of the bookshops in Charing Cross Road—”

  “No, they won’t. It wasn’t written till after the war.” She cheered up. “But I think there’s one in The Dawson Pedigree that we could use.” She started toward the Central Line.

  “Wait,” Polly said. “You need to be back before half past ten. That’s when the trains stop.”

  “Yes, Fairy Godmother,” Eileen said. “Any other instructions?”

  “Yes. Keep a close watch on your belongings. There’s a band of urchins at Holborn who pick people’s pockets.”

  “Of course. It’s my fate to be surrounded by horrible children no matter where I go. But at least it’s not the Hodbins,” she said, and went off to catch her train. Polly went out to the District Line platform, where the troupe was rehearsing, to talk to Lila and Viv.

  They weren’t there. “They went to a dance,” Miss Laburnum reported.

  “On a Sunday night?” the rector said, shocked.

  “It’s an American USO dance,” Miss Laburnum explained. “I don’t know what Sir Godfrey will say when he gets here. He so wanted to rehearse the shipwreck scene.”

  What Sir Godfrey said, when he arrived a moment later, was, “ ‘False varlets! How all occasions do inform against me. They hath outvillained villainy!’ Their foul perfidy leaves us no choice but to rehearse the rescue scene. We shall begin at the point at which the castaways have heard the ship’s gun and have all rushed down to the beach.”

  Polly and Sir Godfrey were the only ones in that scene, which meant she had no chance to look through Sir Godfrey’s Times for more ai
rfields. And after rehearsal was over, when she asked Mrs. Brightford if she knew the names of any, Sir Godfrey said dryly, “Does this mean that you, too, will be abandoning us to ‘foot it featly here and there,’ Lady Mary?”

  “No,” she said, hoping Holborn had had an ABC.

  “It didn’t,” Eileen reported on her return. “And it only had two newspapers. The librarian said children keep taking them for the scrap-paper drive. But she had heaps of Agatha Christies.

  “Look,” she said excitedly when they reached the emergency staircase, showing Polly a paperback book. “Murder in the Calais Coach!”

  “Is that the one you thought had a personal ad in it?”

  “No, that’s not by Agatha Christie, it’s by Dorothy Sayers. At least I think that’s what it was in. It might have been in Murder Must Advertise instead, and at any rate, the library didn’t have either one. But”—she produced another paperback—“it did have The ABC Murders.”

  Which was not quite the same as an ABC. But, as Eileen said, it was full of place-names, which might help her remember. Eileen had also retrieved a wadded-up edition of the Daily Mirror from a dustbin.

  She handed it to Polly, and Polly began looking through it for the names of airfields and any references to the afternoon raid. There was nothing about bombing—which was a relief—but nothing about a false alarm either, or an aeroplane crash.

  There was a story about the Battle of Britain, which said the RAF’s efforts had “changed the course of the war,” and which listed several airfields.

  “Bicester?” Polly asked.

  “No.”

  “Broadwell?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t Greenham Common or Grove or Bickmarsh either. “Have you had any luck remembering what else Gerald said?” Polly asked her.

  “Nothing useful. I remember Linna was speaking on the phone to someone who was angry that the lab had changed the order of their French Revolution assignments.”

  Let’s hope they’re not trapped there like we are here, Polly thought. They might end up being guillotined.

  “I feel so stupid, not being able to remember,” Eileen said.

  “You had no way of knowing it was important,” Polly reassured her. “We’ll find the name of the airfield tomorrow when I buy the ABC.”

  “Or your drop might have opened,” Eileen said, cheering up. “And Mike will be waiting for us outside the station so we can all go through together.” But when the all clear went at five, he wasn’t there or at Mrs. Rickett’s.

  “He very likely went back to Mrs. Leary’s to sleep when the raids ended,” Polly said.

  “Should we go to the drop to check?” Eileen asked.

  “No, there are too many people about in the morning. And we need to get you a ration book before I go to work, so you can begin eating at Mrs. Rickett’s.”

  But applying for a new ration book required an identity card, which had also been in Eileen’s handbag, and since she’d been living in Stepney, she couldn’t apply for a new one at the local council office. She had to go to the one nearest to where she’d been living.

  “Which is where?” Polly asked the clerk at the Kensington council office.

  “In Bethnal Green.”

  “Bethnal Green?”

  “Yes,” the clerk said, and told them the address.

  “Are there raids in Bethnal Green today?” Eileen whispered as they left the counter.

  “No,” Polly said.

  “But you looked so—”

  “I thought it might be where Gerald had said he was going. It begins with a B and has two words.”

  “No, I’m almost certain the second word began with a P.”

  Polly sent Eileen off and hurried to work and up to the book department, but the railway guide was no longer there. “A man from the Ministry of War came in last week and took it,” Ethel said.

  “How all occasions do inform against us,” Polly thought. “Would you have a railway map, then?”

  “No, he confiscated those as well. To keep them from falling into German hands. You know, in case of invasion. Though if they’ve got as far as Oxford Street, I shouldn’t think they’d need maps, would you?”

  “No,” Polly said, but that wasn’t what worried her. What worried her was that the Ministry of War had come in last week. What did they know that had made them think invasion was coming now? Hitler had called off Operation Sea Lion at the end of September and postponed the invasion till spring.

  What if he didn’t? Polly thought. What if this is a discrepancy?

  It could be a disastrous one. By spring he’d decided to abandon the invasion altogether so he could concentrate on attacking Russia. If instead he invaded now …

  “Are you all right?” Ethel asked her.

  “Yes. If you haven’t any railway maps, what about an ordinary map of England?” she asked.

  “No, he took those as well. I take it someone in your family’s a planespotter?”

  “Yes,” Polly said, latching on to the explanation. “He’s twelve.”

  “My little brother spends all his time scanning the skies for Heinkels and Stukas.”

  “So does my nephew,” Polly said, and worked the conversation around to airfields. She got several more names from her and another one on her lunch break, though none had two words of which the second began with a P.

  But when she returned to her counter, there was good news. Miss Snelgrove had told Doreen that Marjorie was being released from hospital and would be coming back to Townsend Brothers soon. Which meant this was just like her other assignment—it had looked like she’d altered events, but in the end things had worked out. She should have had more faith in time-travel theory and in the complexity of a chaotic system.

  And she should have remembered her history lessons. The code for the D-Day invasion had been broken by the Nazis, which could have been catastrophic for the Allies—but when the wireless operator had shown Field Marshal Rundstedt the Verlaine poem, he’d ignored it. “I hardly think the Allies will announce the invasion over the wireless,” he’d said.

  And there were hundreds of examples like that scattered throughout history. “All’s well that ends well,” Polly thought, quoting Shakespeare and Sir Godfrey, and focused on quizzing Sarah Steinberg, whose brother was in the RAF, about airfields.

  By the end of the day, she’d obtained a dozen names. She tried them out on Eileen when she came back from Bethnal Green, with no luck. Eileen hadn’t been able to get an identity card either. “The clerk in Bethnal Green told me I had to go to the National Registration office, but it isn’t open on Monday.”

  “It’s probably just as well,” Polly said. “Mrs. Rickett serves trench pie on Monday night.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No one knows. Mr. Dorming’s convinced she makes it out of rats.”

  “It can’t possibly be that bad,” Eileen said. “And at any rate, I don’t care. I can bear anything now that I’ve found you and Mike. I’d be willing to eat sawdust.”

  “That would be Mrs. Rickett’s victory loaf, which we have on Thursdays,” Polly said. She tried to give Eileen some money for lunch, but she refused it.

  “We’ll need all our money for our train fare to the airfield,” Eileen said, and went off to see if Selfridges had an ABC.

  It didn’t. And neither did the Daily Herald’s office. When Polly got off work, Eileen and Mike were both waiting for her outside the staff entrance, and they reported no luck in finding one.

  And no luck with the drop. “I stayed there till two,” Mike said, “and nary a shimmer of a shimmer.”

  He’d spent the rest of the afternoon at the Herald, going through July and August editions for airfield names. As soon as they got to Notting Hill Gate and the emergency staircase—which was colder than ever—he tried them on Eileen. “Bedford?”

  “No,” Eileen said. “I’m convinced it was two words.”

  “Beachy Head?”

  “That sounds
a bit like it … no.”

  “She thinks the second word begins with a P,” Polly said.

  He checked his list. “Bentley Priory?”

  Eileen frowned. “No … it wasn’t Priory. It was Paddock or Place or …” She frowned, attempting to remember.

  He checked the list again. “No Ps,” he said. “How about Biggin Hill?”

  Eileen hesitated. “Perhaps … I’m not certain … I’m so sorry. I thought I’d know it when I heard it, but now I’ve heard so many … I’m not certain …”

  “It would be a logical choice,” Mike said. “It was in the thick of the Battle of Britain.”

  “So was Beachy Head,” Polly said. “And Bentley Priory. And that’s the one nearest Oxford. Perhaps we should try that first.”

  “But it’s not just an airfield, it’s the RAF command center,” Mike said, “which means security will be tighter. Biggin Hill’s closest. I say we try that first and then the other two. Now, what about messages we can send? Did you tell Eileen my idea, Polly?”

  “Yes,” she said, and to prevent Eileen from launching into an account of mystery novels which hadn’t been written yet, she continued, “How’s this for an ad? ‘Historian seeks situation involving travel. Available immediately’?”

  “Great,” Mike said, scribbling it down. “And we can do variations of your ‘Meet me in Trafalgar Square or Kensington Gardens or the British Museum.’ ”

  “There are lots of notices looking for soldiers who were at Dunkirk,” Eileen mused. “What about ‘Anyone having information regarding the whereabouts of Michael Davies, last seen at Dunkirk, contact E. O’Reilly,’ and Mrs. Rickett’s address?”

  Mike wrote their suggestions down. “What about crosswords?” He pointed at the Herald’s puzzle. “I could compose one with our names in the clues, like ‘This bird wants a cracker.’ Or ‘What an Italian tower might say if asked its name?’ ”

  “Absolutely not,” Polly said.

  “Because they’re bad puns?”

  “No, because a crossword nearly derailed D-Day.”

  “How?”

  “Two weeks before the invasion, five of the top-top-secret code words appeared in the Daily Herald’s crossword puzzle: ‘Overlord,’ ‘mulberry,’ ‘Utah,’ ‘sword,’ and I forget the other one. The military was convinced the Germans had tumbled to the invasion and was ready to call the entire invasion off.”