All Clear

by Connie Willis

  He grabbed her arms and pulled her around to face him. “No. You’re not going anywhere till you’ve told me the truth. It isn’t just the coat. It’s something else. What?”

  “Nothing,” she said, flailing about for some excuse. “It’s only that I’m worried that Denys’s drop might not open. Gerald’s didn’t, and the buildup to D-Day may be a divergence point. It was terribly important that Hitler not find out when and where they were invading, and—”

  “You’re lying,” he said. “When did you come through?”

  “When did I … The fourteenth of September. I was supposed to come through on the tenth, but there was slippage, and I ended up coming through—”

  “Not to the Blitz. To your V-1 assignment.”

  You can still do this, Polly thought. You can still pull it out. “I told you, the V-1s began on June thirteenth.”

  “That isn’t what I asked you.”

  “I didn’t make it to Dulwich till after the first rockets hit. I’d intended to be there on the eleventh, and I’d started for Dulwich from Oxford on the eighth of June, two days after D-Day,” she chattered, “but it took me forever to get there. The invasion made travel simply imposs—”

  “That isn’t what I asked you either. I asked you what day you came through the net. And don’t tell me June eighth.” He looked at her, waiting, and it was no use. He’d worked it out on his own.

  She took a deep breath. “December twenty-ninth, 1943.”

  Mike closed his eyes, and his hands tightened on her arms, gripping them so hard he hurt her.

  “I couldn’t just show up at Dulwich,” she said, trying to make him understand. “I had to arrange to be transferred there, and that meant spending time in a unit in Oxford first. Major Denewell knew virtually everyone in the FANYs. I’d never have got away with lying about my experience.”

  “Like you’ve gotten away with lying to me all these weeks?” he said angrily. “You’ve known all along that Denys Atherton came through after your deadline. That even if we found him, it wouldn’t be in time to do any good.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I wanted—”

  “Wanted to what?” He shook her. “To spare me?”

  Yes. I didn’t want to put you through what I’ve been going through since the night we found each other and I realized your drops wouldn’t open either. I didn’t want you to look the way you’re looking now, the way I felt when I found out, like someone who’s just heard a death sentence pronounced.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated helplessly.

  “What else are you sparing me from?” he said furiously. “How many other assignments were you here on that you haven’t told me about? Were you here in 1942, too? Or the summer of ’41? Or next week maybe?” He gripped her arms so hard she cried out with the pain. “Was I there in Trafalgar Square with Eileen?”

  “No. I told you—”

  “Was I? Missing an arm or a leg, and you decided you wanted to spare me that, too?”

  “No,” Polly said tearfully. “I only saw Eileen.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Hullo!” Eileen called up from below. “Mike? Polly?”

  Polly clutched at Mike’s arm. “Don’t tell her,” she whispered. “Please. She’ll … please, don’t tell her.”

  “What happened to you two?” Eileen said, running up the stairs to them. She was carrying a sandwich and a bottle of orange squash. “I thought you said you were coming.”

  Mike looked at Polly, then said, “We were talking.”

  “About the raids,” Polly said quickly. “We’re trying to fill in the gaps in the list we made. You said Trafalgar Square was hit sometime during the winter. Do you know which month?”

  “No,” Eileen said, sitting down on the steps and unwrapping her sandwich. “Do either of you want a bite?”

  Mike didn’t answer, but Eileen didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong. She was preoccupied with the subject of Alf and Binnie. “I do hope they got home all right the other day.”

  “I thought you said they could take care of themselves,” Polly said, trying to make her tone light.

  “They can. But I couldn’t shake them all night, and then, when I said I was going to take them home, they vanished, and I’ve been wondering why.”

  “Because they were afraid you’d discover the thermometers and stethoscopes they’d stolen from St. Bart’s,” Mike suggested.

  Eileen didn’t even hear him. “They were both so grubby,” she said thoughtfully.

  Polly wondered what that had to do with Alf and Binnie’s running wild in Blackfriars, but whatever the connection was, she was grateful Eileen’s mind was on that and not on them, or she’d have surely noticed how shaken Mike looked.

  I shouldn’t have told him, she thought, even if he had already guessed the truth. I should have lied and said I went through in May or April.

  He looked so desperate, so … driven. And on their way home after the all clear, he pulled Polly aside to say, “I’ll think of some way to get you out of here before your deadline. Both of you. I promise.”

  The next night he met her outside Townsend Brothers after work. “Tell me about the buildup to D-Day,” he said.

  “The buildup? But—”

  “We don’t know for sure that Denys Atherton came through in March. Mr. Dunworthy may have rescheduled his drop.”

  Or canceled it, she thought. Or his drop wouldn’t open, like Gerald Phipps’s, and he wasn’t able to come through.

  “Or Atherton may have had to come through early like you did,” Mike said, “so he could be in place when the invasion buildup started.”

  She shook her head. “That wouldn’t have been necessary. There were hundreds of thousands of soldiers pouring into the camps. He wouldn’t have been noticed at all.”

  “Pouring in where?” he persisted. “Where was the buildup?”

  “Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton. But it covered the entire southwestern half of England,” she said, and then was sorry. She shouldn’t have made finding him sound so difficult. She didn’t want Mike to decide it was hopeless and do something rash like go to Eileen’s drop, riflery range or no riflery range. Or to Saltram-on-Sea to blow up the gun emplacement on his drop.

  But he didn’t speak of doing either. And the next night when he told them he’d thought of a plan, it involved nothing more than taking turns checking Polly’s drop and composing additional personal ads to be put in the newspapers.

  “But we already did that,” Eileen said, “and no one answered.”

  “These aren’t messages to the retrieval team,” Mike said. “They’re messages to Oxford.”

  “But how can we send messages to the future unless we find another historian?” Eileen asked. “We don’t know where Mr. Bartholomew’s drop is.”

  “We send them the same way we sent the messages to the retrieval team. Remember those messages you told us about, Polly, that British Intelligence put in the newspapers to fool Hitler into thinking the invasion was coming at Calais instead of Normandy?”

  “The wedding announcements and letters to the editor?”

  “Yes. And there’s the Verlaine message and the other coded messages they sent out over the BBC to the French Resistance.”

  “But those messages weren’t to the future,” Polly said.

  “No, but they made it to the future. After World War II, historians went through all the newspapers and all the radio recordings and telegrams of the time, looking for clues to what had happened, and they found the Fortitude South and BBC messages.”

  “But they were looking through the 1944 newspapers,” Polly said. “Why would they look for messages in 1941 newspapers?”

  “Because we’re in 1941. They’ll be trying to find out where we are,” he said, “and we’re going to tell them.”

  It won’t work, Polly thought. If they were looking for messages, they’d already have found the ones the three of us sent to the retrieval team, and
they’d have been in Trafalgar Square or at the Peter Pan statue.

  And if they weren’t looking, if Mike was counting on some random historian stumbling across their messages, that historian wouldn’t understand it. Unless it read, “Mr. Dunworthy: Trapped in 1941. Need transport home. Polly, Mike, and Eileen,” there was no guarantee the historian would even recognize it as a message.

  And that was if the message managed to survive till 2060. Fleet Street would be bombed several times before the end of the war, and countless more records had been destroyed by the pinpoint bomb which had destroyed St. Paul’s and during the Pandemic. A message in the personal column of the Evening Express had as much chance of reaching Mr. Dunworthy as a message in a bottle, and Mike surely knew that. Polly wondered if he was simply having them do this to keep her and Eileen from realizing there was nothing they could do.

  But no matter what the reason, he no longer had the driven, desperate look he’d had when Polly’d told him. And if Mike was waiting in St. Paul’s—“Meet me in the south aisle by The Light of the World”—or at Hyde Park Corner, he wasn’t off in Backbury or Saltram-on-Sea getting shot. So Polly diligently wrote, “R.T. Sorry I couldn’t come last Saturday. Leave canceled. Meet me in Paddington Station, Track 6, at two, M.D.” and “Gold ring, lost in Oxford Street, inscribed ‘Time knoweth no bounds.’ Reward. Contact M. Davies, 9 Beresford Court, Kensington.”

  On Friday Mike asked her again whether she was sure he hadn’t been in Trafalgar Square with Eileen. “Did you look at the people standing around her?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There was a teenaged girl in a white dress and a sailor …” She frowned, trying to remember. “And two elderly ladies. Why?”

  “Because even if you and I had both been killed, she still wouldn’t have been there alone. She’d have been there with the shopgirls from Townsend Brothers or something, and the fact that she wasn’t proves she was there on another assignment.”

  No, it didn’t, but if he believed that, he was less likely to do something rash.

  “The elderly ladies weren’t Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard, were they?” he asked. “Or Miss Snelgrove?”

  “No,” Polly said and didn’t mention that she had scarcely glanced at them, or that at that point she hadn’t met them yet.

  On Saturday the eleventh, Townsend Brothers had to be evacuated again due to a gas leak in Duke Street, and Mr. Witherill sent half the staff—including Polly—home. Eileen wasn’t there, and before she could go to see if Mike was at Mrs. Leary’s, Miss Laburnum waylaid her to look through plays for dramatic readings the troupe could do.

  “Scenes with only a few parts,” she instructed Polly, “so it won’t matter if not all the troupe is there.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been gone the last few nights,” Polly said. “I promise I’ll come this evening.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t referring to you,” Miss Laburnum said. “I meant Mr. Simms. He’s volunteered to be a firespotter, and Lila and Viv scarcely ever come. They’re always off to service club dances.”

  “They’re not going to one tonight, are they?” Polly asked anxiously. The big raids which had hit Bank and Liverpool Street stations were tonight.

  “I do hope not,” Miss Laburnum said. “We’re reading a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we’ll need them for Mustardseed and Peaseblossom.”

  Neither Mike nor Eileen was back when the sirens went, or at Notting Hill Gate when Polly got there. Before they’d left the night before, she’d reminded them to take shelter the moment they heard the sirens and not to board any train that would go through Bank or Liverpool Street Station, which meant they might be some time getting here.

  She left a note for them in the staircase and went out to the platform. Lila and Viv, thankfully, were there, and so was everyone else except Mr. Simms, who was on duty, and Mrs. Rickett, whom Mr. Dorming reported was convinced the weather was too bad for raids. “She may be right,” he said. “It looks as though it might snow.”

  That won’t stop the Luftwaffe tonight, Polly thought.

  The troupe did Titania and Bottom’s scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the rector recited the Lord Admiral’s song from H.M.S. Pinafore, and Polly and Sir Godfrey did a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, raising their voices over the screech and thud of what sounded like hundreds of bombs.

  Polly kept expecting Eileen and Mike to come at any moment, but they didn’t. Mrs. Rickett did, looking annoyed at having been wrong about the raids. “Did Miss O’Reilly come home after I left for here?” Polly asked her.

  “No, she hasn’t been there since this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?”

  She nodded. “She told me she wouldn’t be in to dinner and to give you this.”

  She handed Polly an envelope. Inside was a scrawled note from Eileen: “Dear Polly, Worried about Alf and Binnie. They said Bank was one of the stations they’re often in. Have gone to make certain they’re not there. Eileen.”

  Gone to make certain they’re not there? Polly thought, horrified. On the night Bank Station was bombed?

  She grabbed up her coat and began putting it on. “Where are you going?” Sir Godfrey asked.

  “To find Miss O’Reilly.”

  “But it’s nearly eleven,” Miss Laburnum said. “The trains will have already stopped for the night.”

  “She’ll surely have gone to a shelter when the raids began,” the rector said.

  That’s just the problem, Polly thought. She’s gone to a shelter which is going to be bombed.

  But Eileen knew it was going to be bombed. She’d find Alf and Binnie and get them out of there immediately. If they didn’t refuse to go. They’d delayed her on the twenty-ninth. What if they delayed her tonight and kept her from leaving the station?

  “I’m certain nothing will happen to your friend,” the rector said reassuringly.

  He’s right, Polly thought. You’re forgetting about VE-Day. You saw her there in her green coat, which means she can’t have been killed at Bank Station.

  But Mike hadn’t been there on VE-Day. What if he’d gone with her? “Did Mr. Davis come to the boardinghouse this afternoon?” she asked Mrs. Rickett. “Did you show him this note?”

  Mrs. Rickett drew herself up angrily. “I most certainly did not. I haven’t even seen your Mr. Davis today. I am not in the habit of handing over my boarders’ mail to their gentleman friends.”

  “No, of course not,” Polly said hastily. “It’s only that I’m so worried. They should both have been here hours ago, and the raids are so bad tonight.”

  “There’s nothing you can do till morning,” Mr. Dorming said.

  Nothing except worry, Polly thought, listening to the crumping bombs and wishing she knew when Bank Street had been hit and what else had been bombed. And where Mike was. What if he’d spotted Eileen as she was leaving Mrs. Rickett’s and followed her? And then lost her in the crowd at Bank and didn’t realize she’d taken Alf and Binnie to another station? What if he was still at Bank looking for her?

  You don’t know that he followed her, she thought. He could very well have gone to check your drop. Or to Fleet Street to deliver an ad and couldn’t get back. He’d been late last night because he’d been working on a story. He’s very likely in the cellar of the Herald and Eileen’s at a tube shelter which wasn’t hit, trying to prevent Alf and Binnie from picking other shelterers’ pockets, and the best thing you can do is get some sleep.

  But the bombs kept waking her, and she crept off twice to see if either of them had come back to the emergency staircase.

  The all clear went at half past five. “But they’ll have to wait till the trains start,” the rector said.

  “I know,” Polly said, and gave them half an hour extra, in case the first trains were too crowded to squeeze onto, but they still didn’t come.

  “They may have gone home and assumed they’d meet you there, Miss Sebastian,” Miss Laburnum said, folding up her blanket.

&nb
sp; “I thought of that, but I’m afraid if I leave—”

  “You’ll miss them,” Miss Laburnum said. “I quite understand. You stay here, and if Miss O’Reilly’s at home, I’ll tell her where you are. And I’ll stop at Mrs. Leary’s on the way and tell her to tell Mr. Davis.”

  “I’ll be here for at least another hour,” Mrs. Brightford said, pointing at her still-sleeping girls, “so if you want to go look for her, I can have her wait here till you return.”

  “Thank you!” Polly said gratefully, and ran out to each of the platforms to see which lines weren’t running, and then stationed herself at the foot of the District level escalator so she’d be able to spot Eileen and Mike no matter which way they came in from, searching the crowd anxiously for an orange scarf or a green coat.

  There was Eileen, emerging from the northbound tunnel. “Eileen!” Polly called, and ran over to her. “Thank goodness!” She looked past her into the tunnel. “Is Mike with you?”

  “Mike? No, he told me yesterday morning he had to work last night. Isn’t he here?”

  “No, but the Central Line’s down. Damage on the line. He probably couldn’t get back. I was afraid he might have gone to Liverpool Street or Bank looking for you.”

  “Alf and Binnie weren’t in Bank. They were at Embankment, but the only way I could be sure of keeping them there was to stay with them. I couldn’t very well tell them”—she lowered her voice—“that Bank and Liverpool Street were going to be hit, and you know Alf and Binnie. If I’d forbidden them to go there without giving them a reason, they’d have gone there immediately to see why. And besides, I needed to find out something.”

  Exactly how many crimes they’ve committed? Polly said silently, looking up at the people coming down the escalator. Miss Laburnum should have got to Mrs. Leary’s by now and told Mike. If he was there.

  “I’ve been thinking about how Alf and Binnie ran away the other morning when I said I’d take them home,” Eileen said. “And how the day I borrowed the map from them, they wouldn’t let me in.”

  More and more people were coming down the escalator, shelterers with their bedrolls under their arms, making the trek back to the East End, and factory workers on the early shift, but there was still no sign of Mike.