All Clear

by Connie Willis

  “I feel so guilty,” Camberley said, “knowing I should be the one who was in that ambulance instead of Fairchild. It’s my fault—”

  No, it isn’t, Mary thought. It’s mine.

  “It was so lucky you were on the far side of the incident when the V-2 hit,” she said.

  I was tying off the man’s leg, she thought. “Did he make it?” she asked, and when Camberley looked blankly at her, she said, “The man we were working on. With the severed foot.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t bring him in. I’ll ask the nurse.” But the nurse said the only other patients who’d been admitted the night before were a woman and her two little boys.

  “He may have been taken to some other hospital,” Camberley said, and promised to ring up Croydon and ask.

  But she didn’t return, and when Talbot came during visiting hours with flowers and grapes, she said, “Camberley said to tell you the man you asked about wasn’t taken to St. Francis’s, and that Croydon said the only person they transported was Fairchild. But Camberley said he must be somewhere because she checked with the mortuary van, which was there, and the only person they’d transported had died instantly.”

  The man we found who’d been cut in half, Mary thought. “Tell her to ring up Brixton and ask them if they transported him,” she said. “They had an ambulance there.”

  Talbot looked over at Fairchild. She still hadn’t come out of the ether, though now she looked like she was only sleeping, and her color was better. She looked even younger and more childlike than usual.

  “What about Flight Officer Lang?” Talbot asked. “Shall I ring him up and tell him what happened?”

  “Not till after I’ve been discharged,” Mary said.

  Talbot nodded approvingly. “When will they let you go home, do you think?”

  “This afternoon, I should imagine.”

  And then I’ll go look for the missing man myself, Mary thought. But the doctor refused to let her go due to her possibly having a concussion, and when she attempted to explain about the man to her nurse, the nurse told her to “try to rest.” Which was impossible when there was a chance that no one had transported him, that they’d missed him in the darkness and he was still lying there in the rubble.

  She wished she’d asked Talbot to bring her her bag. If she had some money she could ring up Brixton herself. If the nurses would let her anywhere near a telephone. Thus far they wouldn’t even let her out of bed. They’d even reprimanded her for walking the two feet over to Fairchild’s bed when she woke and called for her.

  “I’m so glad you’re all right,” she’d said groggily, clutching Mary’s hand. “I was so afraid—”

  “So was I,” Mary had said, “but the doctors say we’re both going to be perfectly fine, though a bit banged up.”

  And it’s a good thing I’m going to be here through VE-Day, she thought. If I went back to Oxford looking like this, Mr. Dunworthy would never let me go to the Blitz.

  Camberley came late that afternoon as Mary was about to be taken up for X-rays, on her way home from a run. “Did you ring up Brixton?” Mary asked.

  “Yes,” Camberley said, “but they said they weren’t at the incident. Might the ambulance have been from Bromley?”

  “I suppose so.” She could have misread the name in the flickering firelight.

  “Or might he have been examined and discharged?” Camberley asked, but the hospital wouldn’t even discharge her, and she only had a few cuts and bruises.

  “No,” she said, “he was much too badly injured. Did you check the morgue here and at St. Francis’s? He might have died on the way to hospital, and that’s why they don’t show him as being admitted.”

  “I’ll check,” Camberley said, and hesitated. “Are you certain you saw him last night? You were rather badly concussed. You might have been muddled—”

  “I wasn’t muddled. He—”

  “You were muddled about Brixton’s being there. You might have got someone you administered first aid to at some other incident confused with—”

  “No, I saw him, too,” Fairchild said from the other bed, and Mary could have kissed her. “That’s who I was fetching the medical kit for.”

  The orderly arrived with a wheelchair to take Mary to X-ray. “When you come again, bring my bag,” she told Camberley. “It’s in the ambulance.”

  On the way to the X-ray she looked for a telephone box. There was one just outside the ward. Good. And luckily, their beds were just inside the ward’s doors. As soon as she got her bag, she’d sneak out and ring up Croydon and ask them to go check the incident again. But when she got back, Fairchild was crying.

  Dread gripped her. “Did they find him?” Mary asked.

  Fairchild shook her head, unable to speak for the tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “What is it?” Mary asked. Oh, God, it’s Stephen. “What happened?”

  “Camberley …,” she said, and broke down.

  “What about Camberley? Has something happened to her?”

  “No,” she sobbed. “To the ambulance.”

  “What ambulance? The one from Brixton?” Oh, God, they’d been transporting the man to hospital, and there’d been another rocket—

  “No, our ambulance. Camberley said the V-2 hit it.”

  Mary’s first thought was, My bag was in it. Now how will I get the coins to phone Croydon?

  And then, That was the second explosion I heard, the fire I saw. It hadn’t been a gas main, after all. It had been the ambulance’s petrol tank blowing up.

  If I hadn’t called Paige to leave the stretcher and bring the first-aid kit, she’d have still been in the ambulance when it hit. But if that was the case—

  “We’d only just got it,” Fairchild said, sobbing, “and we’ll never be able to get another one.”

  “Nonsense,” Mary said. “This is the Major we’re talking about. If anyone can talk HQ out of another ambulance, she can. I don’t suppose you’ve any money with you, have you?”

  “Yes,” Fairchild said, wiping at her eyes. “At least, I do if my shoes made it with me to hospital. Mother insists I always carry a half crown in my shoe. She says I might get in a sticky situation and need to telephone.”

  “And she was right,” Mary said, hoping the shoes were in the cupboard between their beds.

  They were, and so was the half crown. Mary hid it under her pillow and got back into bed, and the next time the nurse left the ward, she tiptoed out to the telephone box. She rang up Brixton.

  “We weren’t in Croydon last night,” they told her.

  “But I saw—”

  “It must have been Bethnal Green’s ambulance you saw.”

  No, it wasn’t, Polly thought, but she rang them up. They hadn’t been at the incident either.

  She rang up Croydon, and they promised to go recheck the area where the newspaper office had been, “though the rescue crew went over every inch of it,” the FANY said. Mary asked them what other ambulances had been at the incident, and she said, “Norbury,” but Norbury hadn’t transported anyone of that description either, or seen an ambulance from any other post.

  “Except yours,” the Norbury FANY said. “It was difficult to miss. Could this man you’re looking for have been military? If he was, he might have been taken to Orpington.”

  He’d been wearing civilian clothes, but she rang Orpington and then the morgue there and the one at St. Mark’s to make certain he hadn’t died on the way to hospital.

  He hadn’t, which meant he had to have been taken to some other hospital. Unless he was still lying in the wrecked newspaper office.

  She rang up Croydon again. “We looked where you told us to,” the FANY who answered assured her, “but there was no one there. He must have been taken to St. Bart’s or Guy’s Hospital for some reason.”

  And those were trunk calls, so she’d have to wait and ring them from the post. At any rate, she needed to get back before the nurse came looking for her. She stoo
d up and opened the door of the telephone box.

  Stephen was at the far end of the corridor, in front of the matron’s desk, shouting at the matron, who was attempting to block his way. “You’re not allowed on the floor, sir!” she said. “Visiting hours are over.”

  “I don’t bloody care when visiting hours are. I intend to see Lieutenant Fairchild.”

  Mary ducked quickly back into the telephone box and pulled the door shut behind her. She sat down, put the receiver to her ear, and turned toward the back wall so Stephen wouldn’t see her as he charged past with the nurse in pursuit.

  “This is most irregular,” she heard the nurse say, and then the double doors of the ward banged open and shut again. She waited for the sound of Stephen’s being ejected or of the nurse going angrily for help, but she couldn’t hear anything.

  She ventured a cautious look out, then crept out and over to the doors to the ward and peeked through the small glass pane. Fairchild was sitting up in bed, looking very young and absolutely radiant. Stephen was sitting on the side of the bed.

  Mary glanced back down the corridor and then pushed half the door open a crack so she could hear.

  “I only just heard you were here,” Stephen was saying. “A chap I know who’s seeing a FANY in Croydon, Whitt’s his name, told me, and I came as soon as I could. Are you certain you’re all right, Paige?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Did they tell you Mary was hurt, too? She has a concussion.”

  Oh, don’t mention me, Mary thought, but he said, “Whitt told me. He said it was a miracle you weren’t killed when the V-2 hit.”

  “Mary saved my life,” Fairchild said loyally. “If she hadn’t called to me to bring the medical kit, I’d still have been in the ambulance when it hit.”

  “Remind me to thank her,” he said, gripping Paige’s hands. “When I think … I might have lost you …”

  Mary eased the door silently shut and then stood there, staring wonderingly at it. She’d been so afraid that the reason the net had let her come through and inadvertently muck up their romance was that it had already been star-crossed. That Stephen—or Paige, or both of them—had been killed. It had never occurred to her that it might have been because they had got together in spite of what she’d done.

  She should have known she couldn’t have affected events, even if it had seemed for a time that that was what she was doing. She should have known it would all come right in the end.

  “And he simply barged in,” a woman’s voice said behind her. A nurse, coming round the corner of the corridor. And if they saw her, they’d take her back in to bed, to Paige and Stephen.

  She dove for the telephone box, reaching to pull its door shut, but she needn’t have bothered. The nurse, flanked by the matron and the orderly, marched past without noticing her and pushed open the ward’s double doors.

  “You mustn’t worry, darling,” she heard Stephen say. “I’ll see to it that no other rocket ever gets near you, if I have to shoot every last one of them down myself.”

  “Officer Lang,” the matron said sternly. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “In a minute,” he said. “Paige, when I heard what had happened, all I could think of was what an idiot I’d been for not realizing how much you mean to me. You know that bit in the Bible about the scales falling from one’s eyes? Well, that was exactly it.”

  The doors swung shut, cutting off the rest of what he was saying. Mary pulled the door of the telephone box shut and sat down to wait for Stephen to be escorted out so she could go back to the ward and her bed. Even if historians couldn’t affect events, she wasn’t going to run the risk of coming between them again and somehow mucking things up. Not when things had worked out so well for everyone.

  The FANYs would all be delighted, and the Major would change the schedule back to the way it had been. Reed and Grenville would stop being angry with her, the discussion would go back to who had to wear the Yellow Peril and how to get Donald to propose to Maitland, and she could go back to doing what she’d come here to do: observe an ambulance post during the V-1 and V-2 attacks.

  And there was no reason at all for her to feel so … bereft. It was ridiculous. She should be overjoyed. It must be some sort of delayed reaction to shock, like Paige’s being so upset over the ambulance. There was certainly no reason to cry. He was a lovely boy, and that crooked smile of his was admittedly devastating, but it could never have worked out. He had died before she was born.

  “But not in the war,” she murmured, and then, thinking of the nine months and the thousands of V-1s and V-2s still to come, “I hope.”

  Whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL,

  26 May 1940

  London—Winter 1941

  THE VICAR ONLY HAD A FORTY-EIGHT-HOUR LEAVE, SO THEY held Mike’s memorial service the next afternoon. The troupe attended, and Mrs. Willett. She didn’t bring Theodore, who had a cold. He was staying with her neighbor.

  Mrs. Leary came, and Mike’s editor and Miss Snelgrove and two men, awkward and stiff in black suits, who for one heart-jarring moment Polly thought might, against all odds, be the retrieval team, but who turned out to be two firemen whom Mike had rescued on the night of the twenty-ninth. They told Polly and Eileen that Mike had warned them when a wall was about to fall on them and saved their lives, and they were sorry that they hadn’t been there to save his.

  Alf and Binnie came, too, bearing a bouquet of browning lilies Polly was convinced they’d stolen off someone’s grave. “We seen when it was. In the papers,” Binnie said, looking around St. Paul’s in awe.

  “Coo, this church is fancy!” Alf said. “There’s lots of nice things in ’ere.”

  “Yes, and anyone who tries to steal one of them goes straight to the bad place,” Eileen said, sounding almost like her old self for the first time since Mike had died.

  With the vicar’s arrival, she had abandoned her vigil at the foot of the escalator and had agreed to a memorial service. And when Miss Laburnum told her she simply couldn’t wear her green coat to it, she’d let Miss Laburnum lend her a much-too-large black coat.

  Too willingly, Polly’d thought. Eileen was still quiet and withdrawn, and Polly feared she’d gone from denial to despair, though it was difficult not to, with Mike and Mr. Simms dead, and the gentle vicar going off to war. Eileen was right. He was almost certain to be killed.

  Polly had wanted her to face reality, but now she was afraid that that reality might crush her, and she was glad to see some of her spirit return as she took charge of the Hodbins. “You must sit still and be absolutely quiet,” Eileen told them.

  “We know,” Alf said, offended. “When—ow!” he wailed, and his voice echoed through the vast spaces of the cathedral. Mr. Humphreys came scurrying down the south aisle toward them.

  “Binnie kicked me!”

  “Kicking’s not allowed in church,” Mr. Goode said calmly.

  “And neither is hitting each other with floral offerings,” Eileen said, extracting the lilies from them and handing them to the vicar.

  She steered Alf and Binnie through the gate and into the chapel, told them to sit down and stay put, and then took Polly by the arm and led her out into the south aisle. “Alf and Binnie said you found them and told them about Mike.”

  “Yes,” Polly said, afraid Eileen would consider that somehow a betrayal. “I thought they might be a comfort—”

  “Where did you find them? In Whitechapel?”

  “No, I didn’t know where they lived, so I looked in the tube stations.”

  Eileen nodded as if that had confirmed something.

  “We’re about to begin the service,” the vicar said, coming out.

  “Yes, of course,” Eileen said.

  They went back in, and Eileen sat down between Alf and Binnie, telling them they had to be quiet, and showing them the correct place in the prayer book, and Polly felt reassured all over again.

 
But after the service began, sitting there looking like a child in her too-large coat, Eileen got the odd, withdrawn look again, as if she were somewhere else altogether.

  But we’re not, Polly thought, listening to the litany. We’re here in 1941 and Mike is dead. It seemed impossible that they were at his funeral—and it was his funeral, whether there was a body or not. No wonder Eileen had refused to believe it. It couldn’t possibly be true.

  And not only had he died here, far from home, but he wasn’t even being laid to rest under his own name. It was Mike Davis, an American war correspondent from Omaha, Nebraska, who’d died, not historian Michael Davies, who had come to the past to study heroism and died there, abandoned, shipwrecked, trying to rescue his companions.

  Polly had asked Mr. Goode to do the eulogy, remembering his sermon that day in Backbury. He spoke of Mike and his bravery at Dunkirk and then said, “We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings—”

  And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought.

  “—and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances”—here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs—“and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a soldier, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith.

  “But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, though hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do ‘our bit.’ For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long.