All Clear

by Connie Willis

  She’d expected his face to look as done in, as defeated, as Eileen’s and Mike’s, but it didn’t. It was filled with kindness and concern, like Mr. Humphreys’s.

  She fished sixpence out of her bag, laid it on the desk, folded the picture into quarters, put it in her pocket, and went outside.

  “We need to go,” she said to Mike and Eileen. “We’ll be late for work. And we must take the ambulance back to St. Bart’s.”

  “And get my coat,” Mike said. “And Eileen’s.”

  “I need to take the children home first,” Eileen said. “Alf! Binnie!” she called to them.

  They were still messing about in the ruins, poking at a smoldering timber with sticks and then jumping back as it crumbled into glowing embers.

  “Come along. I’ll take you home.”

  “ ’Ome?” Binnie said. The children looked at each other and then up at her. “We don’t need nobody to take us,” Alf said. “We can get there on our own.”

  “No, the trains to Whitechapel may not be running, and your mother will be worried to death,” Eileen said. “I want to tell her where you’ve been all night and how much help you were.” She started down the steps toward them.

  Alf and Binnie exchanged glances again, then dropped their sticks and tore off down the street, running as fast as they could.

  “Alf! Binnie! Wait!” Eileen called, and took off after them, Polly and Mike in pursuit, but they’d already vanished into the tangle of smoking ruins beyond Paternoster Row.

  “We’ll never catch them in that maze,” Mike said, and Eileen nodded reluctantly.

  “Will they be all right, do you think?” Polly asked.

  “Yes, they’re expert at taking care of themselves,” Eileen said, looking after them and frowning. “But I wonder why—”

  “They were probably afraid if you took them home they’d have to go to school,” Mike said, and when they reached the ambulance, he peered at the petrol gauge and said, “We couldn’t have taken them home anyway. We don’t have enough gas to get to Whitechapel and back. We’ll be lucky if we’ve got enough to get us to St. Bart’s.”

  “If we can find St. Bart’s,” Eileen said. She started the car. “Alf was my navigator, remember?”

  Polly nodded, thinking of all the blocked streets and barricades.

  “I think I can get us there,” Mike said.

  And he did.

  Eileen’s coat was still hanging over the railing where she’d left it, but Mike’s was nowhere to be found, and he refused to ask the staff. “I left without being discharged,” he told them, “and they’re liable to try to put me back in the hospital.”

  “I thought you said you’d scarcely burned your arm at all,” Polly said.

  “I did. It’s nothing. But that doesn’t mean they’ll let me out, and I can’t afford to be stuck in here doing nothing, like I was all those weeks in Orpington. I don’t need a coat.”

  “But it’s winter,” Eileen said. “You’ll catch your death—”

  “I’ll go find it,” Polly said, taking charge. “Eileen, go turn the ambulance in. Mike, wait for us out front.”

  He nodded and limped off toward the door.

  “You don’t suppose they’ll arrest me for stealing the ambulance, do you?” Eileen asked.

  “Considering the blood-covered state of your coat, no. But if they do, I’ll help you escape,” Polly said, and went up to the ward to ask about Mike’s coat.

  The nurse thought it likely they’d had to cut it off him when he was brought in. “You might check in Emergency.”

  It wasn’t there either, or with the matron. Polly went out front to tell Mike. He and Eileen were both there. “You weren’t arrested?” Polly asked Eileen.

  “No, they were extremely nice about it. You didn’t find Mike’s coat?”

  “No, sorry. I’ll have to ask Mrs. Wyvern to get you another. Here.” Polly took off the pumpkin-colored scarf Miss Hibbard had given her. “Take this till we get you a coat.” She wrapped it around his neck as if he were a child, and they set out for the tube station.

  It was open, but the Hammersmith and Jubilee Lines were both out of commission, and the District Line wasn’t running between Cannon Street and Temple.

  “This means there may still be a chance of catching Bartholomew,” Mike said. “If the train he needed to take was destroyed or wasn’t running, he may not have gone back yet. He may still be here in London.”

  “Mike,” Polly protested, “he left two hours—”

  “You two go on to work. If I catch him, I’ll come get you at Townsend Brothers,” Mike said, and took off before they could stop him.

  “Do you think there’s a chance—?” Eileen asked Polly.

  “No,” Polly said, though it took them an hour and a half just to reach Townsend Brothers.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” Miss Snelgrove said. “Neither Doreen nor Sarah can make it in, and the New Year’s sales begin day after tomorrow—good heavens, you’re hurt!” she said to Eileen, and ordered Polly to telephone for an ambulance.

  “It’s not my blood,” Eileen said, looking down at her coat. “I don’t suppose you know of anything which will take out bloodstains?”

  “Benzene,” Miss Snelgrove said promptly, “though it looks as if it’s soaked through.”

  She sent Eileen up to Housewares for a bottle of the cleaning fluid and set Polly to lettering placards for the New Year’s sales while she went to fill in for Sarah.

  Polly spent the rest of the day printing “Special New Year’s Mark-down” and worrying about why Mike didn’t come and about his burned arm and what they were going to do after tomorrow.

  As of January first, they wouldn’t know where and when any of the raids were or what was safe, except for Townsend Brothers and Notting Hill Gate. She assumed Mrs. Rickett’s and Mike’s boardinghouse were, too, though Badri hadn’t said whether the list of allowed addresses was safe for the duration of the Blitz or only till the end of her assignment. But Mr. Dunworthy had been so insistent that she stay in a tube station which hadn’t been hit at all that he was unlikely to have let her stay in a boardinghouse that had been.

  But unlikely wasn’t certain, which meant they’d best spend their nights in Notting Hill Gate—and hope they got there before the raids began.

  Which was impossible with the short winter days. The sirens routinely went before five. And Mike’s job took him all over London, and there were daytime raids to worry about. And UXBs and dangling parachute mines. And the fact that by closing time Mike still hadn’t shown up.

  Where was he? And what if he got blood poisoning in his burned arm? Or caught pneumonia? Though that at least she could do something about, and after work she and Eileen went straight to Notting Hill Gate to speak to Mrs. Wyvern about a coat.

  She wasn’t there. “She and the rector are helping with a fund-raiser for families who’ve been bombed out,” Miss Hibbard told her.

  “Do you know where?” Polly asked. There weren’t any raids tonight, so she could go find her, but she hadn’t told Miss Hibbard the location of the fund-raiser.

  I’ll have to ask Miss Laburnum, Polly thought. “Did she say when she was coming over?”

  “She has a bad cold,” Miss Hibbard said. “I told her she should stay at home. The station’s so drafty and cold.”

  It was, and the emergency staircase was even icier. When Mike finally arrived, Polly and Eileen took off their coats, and the three of them huddled together under them as Mike told them where he’d been, which had apparently been in every tube station in London, with no luck. “I should have gone to St. Paul’s Station as soon as I got to the cathedral,” he said. “If I had—”

  “You still couldn’t have caught him,” Polly said.

  “I’ll figure out a way to get you out of here before your deadline, Polly,” he said fiercely.

  “What about the retrieval team?” Eileen asked. “You still might be able to find them,” and Polly realized that in a
ll the excitement the night before, they hadn’t told her what had happened.

  “I did find them,” Mike said, “but it wasn’t the retrieval team. It was a guy I knew in hospital.”

  Eileen’s face fell. “But they still might come. I could write to Mr. Goode again. And the manor. Or we could check Polly’s drop again. It might be working by now.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “We’ll do all those things. And I’ll figure out a way to get you both out of here. But right now we need to concentrate on staying alive till I do. Where are tomorrow’s raids?”

  “There aren’t any tomorrow either,” she said. “But I’m afraid I have more bad news.” She told them about not knowing about the raids after the first of the year.

  “But Notting Hill Gate’s safe, right?” Mike said. “And Townsend Brothers, so you two are safe during the day.”

  “No,” Eileen said. “My supervisor told me today they plan to let all the Christmas help go as soon as the New Year’s sales are over.”

  “And we have another problem,” Polly said. “Sometime—I don’t know when—Eileen and I are going to be conscripted.”

  “Conscripted?” Mike said. “Into the Army?”

  “Not necessarily, but into some sort of national service. The ATS or the land girls or working in a war-industry factory. It’s the National Service Act. All British civilians between the ages of twenty and thirty must sign up.”

  “Can’t you get a deferment from Townsend Brothers or something?” Mike asked.

  “No,” Polly said. “And if we don’t volunteer before it goes into effect, we run the risk of being assigned somewhere outside of London.”

  “Which means we’d better find a way out of here fast,” Mike said, frowning.

  “Don’t you know when any of the raids are, Polly?” Eileen asked nervously.

  “Some of them,” Polly said. “And some nights the Luftwaffe attacked other cities.”

  “And they can’t attack when the weather’s bad,” Mike said, “which should help for the next couple of months. And the Blitz ends in May, right?”

  “Yes, May eleventh,” Polly said. But between now and then nearly twenty thousand civilians will be killed.

  “So all we have to do is get through the next four and a half months,” Mike said, “and then we’re safe till Denys Atherton gets here.”

  Safe, Polly thought.

  “And that’s a worst-case scenario. We’re bound to figure out a way to get home before—” He stopped. “What is it, Polly? Why are you looking like that?”

  “Nothing. What is that dreadful odor?”

  “My coat,” Eileen confessed. “I’m afraid I used a bit too much benzene on it to get the blood out.”

  “A bit?” Mike said, laughing, but the fumes grew so overpowering they had to abandon the staircase and go sleep in the station, which was no warmer.

  “We must get Mike a coat,” Eileen said on the way to work the next morning. “Perhaps there’ll be one marked down that we can buy.”

  But they had no time to look amid the preparations for the New Year’s sales and then the sales themselves, which people flocked to in spite of the wretched weather. The next few days there was bone-chilling fog and almost constant sleet.

  “But that’s good, isn’t it?” Eileen asked as they hurried to Oxford Circus after work. “It means there won’t be any raids.”

  It also meant that getting Mike a coat was more urgent than ever and that the benzene was increasingly overpowering when Eileen’s coat got wet. “Miss Snelgrove said the odor would fade,” Eileen said, “but it doesn’t seem to, does it?”

  “No,” Polly said. It was a good thing there was a ban on smoking in the shelters. A stray flicked match and they’d both go up in flames.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said about our having to volunteer,” Eileen said as they got on the train. “Perhaps I could volunteer to be an ambulance driver at St. Bart’s. When I took the ambulance back, Dr. Cross said if I hadn’t got those passengers to hospital when I did, they’d have died.”

  “What passengers?”

  Eileen told her about the unconscious ambulance driver and the Army lieutenant. Thank goodness Mike isn’t here to hear this, Polly thought. The last thing he needed was to begin worrying all over again about the possibility of their having altered the course of the war.

  We couldn’t have, she told herself. We won the war. And the twenty-ninth went just like it was supposed to. But after Mike and Eileen were asleep, she stole away to look at a discarded newspaper and make certain.

  The Guildhall had burned just as it had in the historical records, and so had St. Bride’s and St. Mary-le-Bow. But All Hallows by the Tower had burned, too. She’d thought it had been only partially destroyed. And the Evening Standard said the Germans had dropped fifteen thousand incendiaries instead of eleven thousand.

  But those could easily be errors in reporting, she thought, crawling back under Eileen’s reeking coat. We won the war. Eileen and I were both there on VE-Day.

  But the discrepancies haunted her all the next day, and on her lunch break she bought the Herald and the Daily Mail to check and then went up to the book department to tell Eileen not to say anything to Mike about her possibly driving an ambulance for St. Bart’s. “Or about what Dr. Cross said. He’d think driving an ambulance was too dangerous.”

  “That’s true,” Eileen said absently, much more concerned with getting Mike a coat.

  “It’s supposed to snow tonight,” she said, and an hour later she came down to report that she’d persuaded her supervisor to let her leave an hour early to go to the Assistance Board. She asked what size coat Mike wore and said, “I’ll try to get you a hat as well, Polly. Tell Mrs. Rickett I won’t be in to supper. And you needn’t wait for me. I’ll meet you at Notting Hill Gate. Have you a rehearsal tonight?”

  “I’m not certain,” Polly said. “The troupe’s still arguing over what play to do next.”

  And when she arrived, she found them discussing whether to do another play at all, given the fact that the intermittency of the raids and the winter weather were causing people to stay at home instead of using the shelter.

  Including some of the troupe. Miss Laburnum was still recovering from her cold, and neither Sir Godfrey nor Mr. Simms was there. “We can’t put on a play without a cast,” Mr. Dorming grumbled. “Or an audience.”

  “But if we did, that would encourage people to come to Notting Hill Gate,” the rector said. “We’d be doing our bit to help keep the populace safe.”

  “Perhaps instead of a play, we could give a series of dramatic readings,” Miss Hibbard suggested. “That way we wouldn’t need everyone to be here.”

  While they discussed possible ones to do, Polly was able to sneak away to the emergency staircase to see if Eileen was there yet. Halfway there she ran into Mike, who’d apparently just arrived. His hair and the pumpkin-orange scarf were wet, and he looked half frozen. Polly was glad Eileen had gone to get him a coat.

  She told him where Eileen had gone. “She said she’d meet us here, but I don’t know if she’s arrived yet. I was just going to check the staircase.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “You check the canteen, and I’ll meet you back at the escalator.”

  Eileen wasn’t in the queue for the canteen. Polly went back down to the District Line to wait, standing in the southbound archway so she could spot Eileen and Mike but still duck back into the tunnel if any of the troupe descended the escalator. She didn’t want to get dragged off to the platform to discuss the merits of reading scenes from The Little Minister versus The Importance of Being Earnest.

  But Mr. Simms was the only one she saw come down. He was carrying his dog, Nelson—who was afraid of the slatted escalator treads—in his arms.

  There weren’t nearly as many people in the station as usual, and most of the ones who were there were carrying umbrellas, not bedrolls and picnic baskets. The rest of the shelterers must have decided,
as Mr. Dorming had said, to take their chances that with the inclement weather there wouldn’t be a raid. She hoped they were right.

  And that Eileen would be here soon. I hate not knowing when and where the bombs are going to fall, she thought.

  Mike came back. “Eileen’s still not here?”

  “No. Did you hear planes on your way to the station?”

  “No.” He looked up the escalator. “Where did she say she was going for the …? Here she is.”

  He pointed up at the top of the escalator and two men who’d just stepped on, and behind them, only her red hair visible, Eileen. Mike waved at her. “It looks like she was successful.”

  Polly caught a glimpse of a gray tweed overcoat over Eileen’s arm and a woman’s dark blue hat in her other hand. Mike waved again.

  Eileen saw them. She waved back with the blue hat.

  Polly put her hand to her mouth.

  “Looks like she was able to get a new coat, too,” Mike said.

  Yes, Polly thought sickly, watching Eileen push past the two men and hurry down the moving steps toward them. She was wearing a bright green coat, and there was no mistaking it.

  It was the coat she had been wearing in Trafalgar Square on VE-Day.

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  —T. S. ELIOT, FOUR QUARTETS

  Croydon—October 1944

  MARY ROLLED DOWN THE WINDOW OF THE AMBULANCE and leaned out, straining to hear. She was certain she’d heard the rattling putt-putt of a V-1.

  “A flying bomb?” Fairchild said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Shh,” Mary ordered, but she couldn’t hear anything either. Could it have been another motorcycle or—?

  An enormous boom shook the parked ambulance.

  “Oh, my God,” Fairchild said. “That was nearly on top of us.” She leaned forward to turn the ignition and start the ambulance’s bells. “You don’t think it hit the ambulance post, do you?”