All Clear

by Connie Willis

  “Oh, no, I’ve lost sight of her,” Paige said, scanning the sea of people. “Which way did Reardon go? I can’t see her anywhere. She—there she is! And there’s Talbot.” She began waving wildly. “Talbot! Reardon!”

  “I don’t imagine they can hear you,” she said, but amazingly, they were plowing determinedly through the crowd and up the steps toward them.

  “Fairchild, Douglas, thank goodness,” Reardon said when she reached them. “I thought I’d never see you again!”

  Talbot nodded. “It’s bedlam out there,” she said cheerfully. “Have any of you seen Parrish and Maitland? I got separated from them. They were over by the bonfire.”

  They all obediently looked in that direction, although there was no hope of recognizing anyone with the fire behind them like that. “I don’t see them anywhere,” Talbot said. “Wait—Fairchild, isn’t that your true love?”

  “It can’t be,” Paige said, looking where Talbot was pointing. “He’s in France. He … oh, Douglas, look!” Paige grabbed her arm. “It’s Stephen! Stephen! I was afraid he wouldn’t get here in time, and he’d miss all this. Oh, Mary, I’m so glad he’s here!”

  So am I, she thought. It was wonderful seeing him without the fear and strain that had been in his face when Paige was in hospital, without the fatigue and concentration he’d had when he’d been tipping V-1s every day. He looked years younger than the last time she’d seen him.

  But he’s still too old for me, she thought regretfully, though it wouldn’t matter if she were a FANY and not an historian. She still couldn’t have him. He hadn’t found Paige in the crowd yet, but he was clearly looking for her, and when he did, he’d only have eyes for her.

  I’m still glad I get to see him one last time, she thought, watching him work his way cheerfully through the jostling crowd, looking for Paige, his dark hair …

  “He doesn’t see us!” Paige wailed. “Wave, Mary!”

  She waved along with the others, and shouted, and Parrish emitted an ear-splitting whistle, which would have made her titled parents shudder but did the trick. He looked up, saw Paige, grinned that devastatingly crooked smile of his, and started straight for them.

  “Oh, good,” Talbot said. “He’s seen—good God! Is that the Major?”

  Talbot pointed three-quarters of the way across the square, beyond the bonfire, but they all spotted her instantly. And worse, she’d spotted them. “This is all your fault, Fairchild,” Talbot said. “If we hadn’t been waving at Stephen, she’d never have seen us.”

  “What do you think she’s doing here?” Reardon asked apprehensively.

  “If I know her,” Parrish said, “she’s probably come to tell us we’re all on report.”

  “Or to send us to Edgware for sticking plaster,” Paige said.

  “Should we start a pool on it?” Reardon asked.

  Talbot laughed. “Oh, I’m going to miss all of you.”

  “We’ll see each other again,” Paige said confidently. “You’re all invited to my wedding. Douglas is going to be my maid of honor, aren’t you, Mary?”

  I can’t, she thought.

  “Only if you promise not to make me wear the Yellow Peril,” she said lightly.

  “I knew I was glad the war was over,” Parrish said. “It means I’ll never have to wear the Yellow Peril again.”

  “Or drive the Octopus,” Talbot said.

  Or be afraid you’re going to be killed any moment. Or dig body parts and dead children out of the rubble again, Mary said silently and thought of the man in the wrecked newspaper office in Croydon. After she’d got out of hospital, she’d telephoned St. Bart’s and Guy’s Hospital and then every ambulance unit within forty miles, but she hadn’t found any trace of him. He must not have been as badly injured as she’d thought, though that seemed impossible.

  I hope he made it, she thought. I hope he’s here tonight to see this.

  “Oh, no,” Talbot said. “The Major’s coming this way!”

  “Do you think she’ll make us go home?” Reardon said.

  No, just me, Mary thought. With the Major here, it was a perfect time to go back to the post, leave her a note saying, “My mother’s very ill. Must go,” and then head for the drop.

  She was sorry she hadn’t got to see Maitland or Sutcliffe-Hythe or Reed one last time—she had grown amazingly attached to all the FANYs over the last year. But she was only experiencing what every person here in Trafalgar Square would be in the next few days and weeks. This wasn’t only an end to the war. It would be the end to who knew how many friendships, romances, careers. All sorts of partings, all sorts of goodbyes.

  And if she was going, she needed to do it now, before the trains stopped for the night. And before the Major and Stephen got here. Stephen had nearly reached the foot of the steps. She gave him one last regretful glance and then looked at the other girls. Their eyes were still on the Major, on whose head an air-raid warden had just plunked a Nelson-style tricorn hat.

  “Do you think we’d better flee while we can?” Parrish asked.

  “No, it will only make it worse when she does catch us,” Talbot said.

  “Perhaps she’s come to celebrate with us,” Reardon said.

  “Does she look like she’s celebrating?” Talbot asked.

  She didn’t, despite the festive tricorn. I’ll miss you, too, Major, Mary thought, and leaned toward Paige, who was still calling and waving to Stephen, and kissed her on the cheek. Paige didn’t even notice.

  Mary edged slowly away from her and then turned, squeezed quickly along the porch to the steps, and down the same way she’d come up, taking her cap off and keeping her head down in case Paige realized she was gone and began looking for her.

  If she did, Paige would hopefully assume she’d tried to get down to Stephen and been carried away by the crowd. Which could be true, she thought, reaching the front of the steps.

  She set out at an angle across the square in the direction of Charing Cross. Halfway across, she caught a current that swept her in the direction she wanted to go and let it carry her. It looked like it might even deliver her neatly at the entrance to the tube station.

  With time to spare, she thought, stopping at the edge of the square to look at her watch.

  The little man in the bowler was still in exactly the same place. “Three cheers for Patton!” he shouted, but the “Hip, hip, hurrahs” were drowned out by the approaching beats of the conga line. She pushed through the crowd toward the Underground station. Hopefully, it would be less jammed than when they’d come. Certainly none of these people showed any sign of going home any time soon, and once the train got past Holborn, it should be—

  “Come on, ducks!” a burly merchant marine shouted in her ear. He grabbed her around the waist, thrust her into the conga line ahead of him, and forced her hands onto the waist of the soldier in front of her.

  “No! I haven’t time for this!” she cried, but it was no use. The marine had an iron grip on her waist, and when she tried to plant her feet firmly on the ground and refuse to go, he simply picked her up and held her out before him.

  She was carried remorselessly back into Trafalgar Square and across it by the snaking “dunh duh dunh duh”-ing dancers. They were heading straight back to the National Gallery. “You don’t understand!” she shouted. “I’ve got to get to the Underground station! I must—”

  “Here then, let her go. That’s a good chap,” a man’s voice said, and she felt herself grabbed by the waist and plucked neatly out of the conga line. The marine and the rest of the line danced past her and away.

  “Thank you,” she said, turning to look at her rescuer, but before she got a good look at his face—she scarcely had time to register the fact that he was a soldier and that he was wearing a clerical collar—there was a loud explosion over by the fountain.

  “Sorry, I believe I know who did that,” he said, and strode off through the crowd, presumably to rescue someone else.

  “Thank you again, whoever you ar
e,” Mary said, and set off for the tube station again, this time keeping to the very edge of the square and the street.

  The little man in the bowler was still standing outside leading cheers. “Three cheers for Dowding!” he shouted.

  He’s going to run out of heroes to cheer, she thought, squeezing past him to the entrance, but she was wrong. As she ran down the stairs, she heard him shout, “Three cheers for the firespotters! Three cheers for the ARP! Three cheers for all of us! Hip hip hurrah!”

  Father, we thought we should never see you again.

  —SIR J. M. BARRIE, THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON

  London—Winter 1941

  THEY LASTED LESS THAN A FORTNIGHT AT MRS. RICKETT’S, even though Alf and Binnie had proved quite adept at keeping their parrot out of sight—and earshot—of the landlady. Mrs. Bascombe was a quick study, and it only took Alf a day to teach her not to do her air-raid imitations except when the actual sirens were going and not to screech, “ ’Itler’s a bloody bastard!” at anyone who came near her cage.

  But she was, unfortunately, also quick to pick up whatever she happened to overhear and to repeat it in a dead-on imitation of their voices—which explained how Alf and Binnie had been able to keep the masquerade of their mother’s still being alive going for so long.

  But that skill also led to Mrs. Rickett’s hearing what she thought was Binnie saying, “What is this swill? It tastes bloody awful,” and using her key to get in, expecting to find, as she told Eileen, cooking going on in the room. And finding herself instead face-to-face with the beady-eyed Mrs. Bascombe.

  “Not to worry,” the parrot had said in a spot-on imitation of Alf’s voice. “We’ll ’ide ’er. The old witch’ll never find out,” and all five of them had found themselves out of a place to live and forced to take up residence in Notting Hill Gate Station for the next two nights.

  Polly told the station guard that Mrs. Bascombe was a prop in the troupe’s new play, and Sir Godfrey, coming in behind them, exclaimed, “Good God! Don’t tell me they’ve decided to do Treasure Island!”

  And when Miss Laburnum saw it, she said, “Oh, it would be perfect for Peter Pan!”

  “It’s not staying,” Polly said, and asked if anyone knew of a vacant flat. No one did, and Polly wasn’t able to find anything in the “To Let” ads in the Times Sir Godfrey lent her.

  “There’s ’eaps of ’ouses nobody lives in ’cause the people what lived in ’em are dead,” Binnie suggested.

  “We know how to get into ’em,” Alf said.

  “We are not breaking into dead people’s houses.”

  “Not all of ’em are dead,” Binnie protested. “Some of ’em are just empty.”

  “We are not breaking into any houses.”

  “Wait, that gives me an idea,” Eileen said. “I remember one of Lady Caroline’s friends telling her they were having difficulty finding someone to stay in their London house and look after it, and the situation’s probably worse now, with the bombing.”

  She turned to the To Hire column. “Listen to this. ‘Wanted, live-in caretaker.’ The address is in Bloomsbury.”

  Eileen went to see the estate agent listed in the ad the next day and came back to Townsend Brothers jubilant. “When I told him we had two children and a parrot—”

  “You told him?” Polly said.

  “Yes, and he said, ‘I’ve had four of the houses in my charge blitzed in the past month. Two children and their pet can scarcely do more damage than that.’ ”

  I wouldn’t say that, Polly thought. These are the Hodbins.

  “The house is in Millwright Lane,” Eileen said. “Is that a safe address?”

  Polly didn’t know whether the list of addresses had been good to the end of the Blitz or only through December, but at least it wasn’t near the British Museum or in Bedford Square. And she thought most of the attacks in Bloomsbury had been in the autumn.

  But it was still London. “I think we should take Alf and Binnie to the country,” she told Eileen. “You researched the statistics on children who stayed in London. You know they’d be much safer there.”

  “But that means you’d have to leave Townsend Brothers. How would the retrieval team find us?”

  The retrieval team’s not coming, Polly thought.

  “We could put messages in the newspapers like the ones we put in before,” she said. “Telling them where we’d gone.”

  “No, the best lead they have is Oxford Street.”

  “We could go to Backbury, then. Or I could stay here and you go—I’m the one with the deadline. And then if the retrieval team comes, I can tell them where you are.”

  “No, there’s twice the chance of finding us with two of us. We’re not splitting up. We’re staying here,” she said, and the next day she told Polly she’d spoken to the estate agent and taken the position.

  “But what about your National Service?” Polly objected.

  “When I tell them about my caretaking job and about the Hodbins, they’ll have to give me something here.”

  Polly hoped she was wrong, that they’d assign her to something safely out of London, but they didn’t. They gave her a job with the ATS, driving military officers.

  Which is safer than working on an anti-aircraft gun crew, Polly thought. Or in a munitions factory. Factories were frequently targeted by the Luftwaffe.

  And the house they moved into was near Russell Square, which was safe. But the house next door had been reduced to rubble and the one across from it had had its roof smashed in. “That means ours won’t be hit,” Alf said.

  Binnie nodded wisely. “Bombs never ’it the same spot twice.”

  Polly knew from experience that that wasn’t true, but she didn’t contradict them. Nowhere in London was safe, but at least this wasn’t the East End, which continued to be hammered; the house had a sturdy-looking cellar; and even Eileen’s and her own cooking was better than Mrs. Rickett’s, “though I’m beginning to sympathize with her,” Eileen said after a week. “How exactly does one produce meals for a family of four with one pound of meat and eight eggs a week?”

  “We can get you some birds to cook,” Binnie said. “There’s lots of pigeons here.”

  “And squirrels,” Alf said, brandishing his slingshot.

  It really is too bad we can’t smuggle them into Nazi Germany to drive Hitler to distraction instead of us, Polly thought, though on the whole things were going better than she’d expected. The children were going to school, the deserted houses meant there were scarcely any neighbors for Alf and Binnie to annoy, and Eileen seemed much more cheerful.

  “I’ve been thinking about Dunkirk,” she said. “Mike said the soldiers sitting waiting on the beaches thought no one was coming for them and they’d be captured by the Germans. But they didn’t know about the launches and rowboats and ferries which were being rounded up to come fetch them. And the soldiers wading ashore on D-Day didn’t know about all the things going on behind the scenes, like the deception campaign—what did you call it?”

  “Fortitude.”

  “Fortitude,” Eileen said, “or about all the things the French Resistance was doing, or Ultra. And it may be the same with us. There may be all sorts of things going on we don’t know about. Mr. Dunworthy may be working on a plan to get us out this very minute. Or he may already be on his way here.”

  But this is time travel, Polly thought, despairing of ever making her understand. If they were coming, they’d already be here.

  “We mustn’t give up hope,” Eileen said. “Dunkirk worked out all right in the end.”

  “Never give up,” Alf said behind them, and they both jumped.

  Oh, no, Polly thought. How much did he hear? But when she turned around, it was only the parrot.

  “I’m sorry,” Eileen said. “I told Alf and Binnie to teach her something patriotic to say instead of ‘Hitler’s a bloody bastard.’ ”

  “Loose lips sink ships,” Mrs. Bascombe squawked.

  “Well, she’s certainly r
ight about that,” Polly said. “We need to watch what we say with the children here.”

  “Donate your scrap metal,” the parrot croaked. “Dig for victory. Do your bit.”

  Eileen was certainly doing her bit by taking in Alf and Binnie. She deserved some sort of medal. But everyone they knew was doing theirs, too—the vicar, and Mr. Dorming, who’d taken on Mr. Simms’s job as a firespotter, and Doreen, who’d given her notice at Townsend Brothers and signed up for the ATA.

  “I’m going to be an Atta Girl and fly a Tiger Moth,” she said proudly.

  Her departure for the ATA and Sarah Steinberg’s—she was going to do her National Service as an RAF plotter—left the third floor terribly shorthanded, and Miss Snelgrove told Polly that Townsend Brothers was applying for an Employer Hardship Exemption for her so she could remain in her job.

  Eileen was overjoyed. “I’ve been ever so worried about how the retrieval team would find you after you left to do your National Service.”

  “I told Miss Snelgrove no,” Polly said. “I’m going to try to get assigned to a rescue squad.”

  “A rescue squad?” Eileen said. “But why?”

  Because I have a deadline, and if I simply sit here waiting for it, I’ll go mad. And I keep thinking of Marjorie, lying there in that rubble with no one coming to dig her out. I know exactly how that feels. I can’t bear to think of anyone else going through that. And if Colin was here—if he was the one who was trapped—that’s what he would do.

  She didn’t say any of that to Eileen. She said, “If they don’t get the waiver, I’ll almost certainly be assigned to somewhere outside of London. I need to sign up now.”

  “But a rescue squad,” Eileen said. “It’s so dangerous. Couldn’t you drive an ambulance instead? That’s what you did before, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I can’t risk it. I might be assigned to a unit with one of the FANYs I knew and create a paradox. And rescue work’s not that dangerous. We don’t go to the incident till after the bomb falls. And you heard Binnie. Bombs never fall in the same place twice.”