All Clear

by Connie Willis

  Bob didn’t have the guidebook. “I thought you had it.”

  “No, I gave it to you, remember? Right before we left the hotel?” she said, but after digging some more, she found it and got it open to the section on Oxford, and he showed her where the museum was and went back to the steps. Just in time to see the business-suited woman disappear up them and inside, which meant the doors must be open. But when he tried them, they were still locked, and there were still no cars pulling in to the car park. And it was beginning to rain.

  He turned his collar up and ducked under the cover of the doorway, and Brenda came scampering up the steps, holding the guidebook open over her head, her husband behind her, saying, “I told you we needed to bring an umbrella.”

  “I can’t get used to how much it rains here, Calvin,” Brenda said. “It said on the sign down by the anti-aircraft gun that it had been in Kensington Gardens. That’s not the same Kensington Gardens where they have the Peter Pan statue, is it?”

  “Yes, it is,” he said.

  “Oh, I want to go there. I love Peter Pan,” she said, and began leafing through the guidebook again. “And to the house where Barrie lived as a child in Scotland.”

  “We’re only here for ten days,” Bob said, “not six months.”

  “Oh, I know, it’s just that there are so many things I’m dying to see. There just isn’t enough time.”

  You’re right, Calvin thought, looking at the door. There isn’t.

  “Is that the museum schedule?” Bob asked, pointing at the brochure he was holding.

  “Yes.” He handed it to him, and he and Brenda pored over it.

  “ ‘The Battle of Britain’ looks good,” she said. “Oh, dear, it doesn’t open till July first. We won’t be here. ‘The Secret That Won the War,’ ” she read aloud. “What’s that one about?”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said impatiently.

  “I believe it’s about Ultra and Bletchley Park,” Calvin said.

  “Ultra?”

  “The secret project to decode the Nazis’ coded messages,” he said.

  “Oh.” Brenda turned to her husband. “I thought you said the American forces were what won the war.”

  Bob had the good grace to look embarrassed.

  “There were all kinds of things that won the war,” Bob said. “Radar and the atom bomb and Hitler’s deciding to invade Russia—”

  “And the evacuation from Dunkirk,” Calvin said, “and the Battle of Britain, and the way Londoners stood up to the Blitz—”

  Brenda beamed at him. “You’re obviously as big a fan of World War Two as my husband is.”

  A fan. Of World War II. “Actually, I’m a journalist,” he said. “I’m here to cover the opening of the Blitz exhibit.”

  “Really?” she said. “Our daughter Stephanie teaches journalism. You’d be perfect for each other. Are you married?”

  “Brenda,” her husband said. “It’s none of our business—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You see?” she said, turning triumphantly to her husband and then back to him. “How old are you? Thirty?”

  “Brenda! This young man is not interested in—”

  “Stephanie’s twenty-six,” she said. “She teaches at—”

  “Let’s go look at the tank,” Bob said, and took her arm.

  “It’s raining—” she began.

  “It’s stopped,” Bob said firmly.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, starting down the steps, and then said to Calvin, “Would you mind taking our picture in front of the tank?”

  She handed him her camera, and he went down with them and took their picture in front of the anti-aircraft gun and the boat. “The Lily Maid,” she said. “It’s not a very warlike name, is it?”

  “They didn’t know they were going into a war,” Bob said impatiently. “Did they, Calvin?”

  No, he thought. They didn’t know they were going into a war.

  We didn’t know where we were going, so we just scribbled little notes and flung them out at stations as we passed.

  —SERGEANT MAJOR MARTIN MCLANE,

  RECALLING HIS ARRIVAL HOME

  FROM DUNKIRK

  Dover—April 1944

  “KANSAS!” COMMANDER HAROLD BAWLED IN ERNEST’S EAR, hugging him and pounding him on the back. “I can’t believe it’s you!” And for the space of perhaps thirty seconds, Ernest wondered if he could convince him he was mistaken—if his two-day stubble and Cornish accent might create just enough doubt that he could look bewildered and say, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve confused me with someone else.”

  But it was too late. The Commander had already seen the look on his face when he’d realized this was the Lady Jane. And now what the hell was he going to do? If the Commander told Lady Bracknell …

  He suddenly remembered Bracknell saying, “Algernon specifically requested you for this delivery.” Tensing already knows I know the Commander, he thought. That’s why he sent me. But how had he known that? And what was the Commander—

  “What are you doing here, Kansas?” Commander Harold was saying.

  “What am I doing here? What are you doing here? I thought the Lady Jane had been sunk at Dunkirk—”

  “Sunk?” he bellowed, outraged. “The Lady Jane?”

  Jesus, the sailor up on deck will hear him, he thought. “Shouldn’t we—” he cautioned, pointing at the hatch.

  “You’re right, lad,” the Commander said, and waded over to the hatch, reached up, and pulled the trapdoor shut. “You should know nothing can sink the Lady Jane, not even a Nazi U-boat.”

  “But then what happened? Where’s Jonathan?” he said, almost afraid to ask. “Did he make it back?”

  “Make it back?” the Commander bellowed, surprised. “Why, you saw him up there on deck not five minutes ago.” He tipped the hatch open and shouted, “Jonathan! Get down here!”

  “Aye, aye, Captain Doolittle,” a man’s voice said, and the sailor came down the ladder, still carrying the wrench and saying reprovingly, “Grandfather, you’re not supposed to call me Jonathan. My name’s Alfred—” He stopped when he saw Ernest, looking uneasily at him. His hand tightened on the wrench.

  This can’t possibly be Jonathan, Ernest thought, staring at the tall, broad-shouldered sailor. He’s a grown man.

  “Sorry, Captain Doolittle,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

  “Stop that Captain Doolittle nonsense,” the Commander said. “Can’t you see who this is? It’s Mike Davis!”

  He may not even remember me, Ernest thought. It’s been four years.

  “You know,” the Commander prompted. “Kansas!”

  “Oh, my goodness!” Jonathan exclaimed, shifting the wrench to his other fist so he could shake hands. “Mr. Davis!” He was beaming. “This is wonderful!”

  “Wonderful” was the word, all right. They were alive. His unfouling the propeller hadn’t got them killed. Especially Jonathan—the Commander had known what he was getting into when he took off for Dunkirk, but Jonathan hadn’t. He’d been just a kid.

  Though he wasn’t any longer. “I can’t believe it!” he was saying, pumping Ernest’s hand vigorously. “I’m so glad you’re here. I never thanked you for saving our lives. Without you, we’d be at the bottom of Dunkirk harbor. And you nearly got killed yourself, trying to—” He stopped short and looked down at the water Ernest was standing in. “I mean, your foot and everything. I thought they were going to have to cut it off.”

  So did I, he thought.

  “We’d never have made it without you,” Jonathan said. “I should have recognized you, but you look so different!”

  “I look different? Look at you! You’re all grown up!”

  “Having German torpedo boats on your tail ages you rather quickly. But what are you doing here?”

  “That’s the sa
me question I’ve been asking your grandfather. I’d heard you didn’t make it back to Dover after your second trip to Dunkirk.”

  “We didn’t,” the Commander said. “We were commandeered.”

  “They needed us to go to Ostende to take off an intelligence officer they couldn’t afford to let the Germans get hold of,” Jonathan explained. “So they offloaded our passengers onto the Grayhoe, and we went to Belgium instead.”

  “And when we got him back to Ramsgate, they asked us if we’d do a few other jobs for Intelligence, like—”

  “Grandfather,” Jonathan said warningly. “That’s classified. I’m not certain we’re allowed to—”

  “Bah! We can tell him. Can’t we, Kansas?”

  “Not Kansas,” he said. “These days it’s Ernest Worthing.”

  “What’d I tell you, Jonathan? And I’ll wager he’s got even more secrets than we do, haven’t you, Kansas?”

  “Yes,” he said. Most of which I can’t tell even you.

  “All right, we told you what we’ve been up to since Dunkirk,” the Commander said. “Now you tell us what you’ve been doing these last four years.”

  I’ve been trying to get two of my fellow historians out of this century and back home, he thought. I’ve been writing letters to the editor and personal ads and funeral notices with coded messages in them to people who haven’t been born yet. And I’ve been trying to find Denys Atherton, who is somewhere in the staging area for the invasion, so he can tell Oxford where Polly and Eileen are and pull them out before Polly’s deadline, which passed four months ago.

  “I’ve been delivering parcels,” he said, and when the Commander frowned, he smiled and said, “I’m Seaman Higgins. Captain Pickering said as how you were hiring on a crew.”

  “I knew it,” the Commander said jubilantly. “I told Jonathan that Tensing’d put you to work.”

  “You’re not supposed to call Colonel Tensing that,” Jonathan said. “You’re supposed to call him Algernon.”

  “That’s only when there might be German spies about.” The Commander turned to Ernest. “All these made-up names—Captain Doolittle, First Mate Alfred—a lot of nonsense. Wanted me to be Capitaine Myriel,” he said, pronouncing it “Cap-ee-tayne Meeryell.” “And what the hell good will that do? If the jerries catch us, they’ll know in two minutes we’re not Frenchies. Instead of worrying over names, I told ’em, you should be seeing to it we don’t get caught.” He turned to Jonathan. “And Kansas here knows his name’s Tensing. He was in hospital with him. Weren’t you, Kansas?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to make sense of all this. He’d assumed they’d met Tensing in connection with the assignments they’d done for British Intelligence and that they’d mentioned him to Tensing, but if they’d known him while he was in hospital …

  “How did you meet him?” he asked.

  “He was the officer we had to fetch at Ostende,” the Commander said.

  “He was badly injured,” Jonathan said. “He’d been shot in the spine.”

  “And you told him about me when you were bringing him back?”

  “He wasn’t in any shape to be told anything,” the Commander said. “Unconscious the whole way.”

  “We didn’t think he was going to make it,” Jonathan said.

  “And then eight months later up he pops, nearly as good as new and looking for you. Said he’d been in hospital with you and somebody’d told him we’d brought you back from Dunkirk. Said he’d seen you in some town near Oxford and then lost you again and did we know where you were and what could we tell him about you. Mainly, could you be trusted?”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “We told him we didn’t know where you were,” Jonathan said, “but that he should ask in Saltram-on-Sea.”

  He knew the rest of it, how Tensing and Ferguson had gone there and given Daphne the address he’d thought was the retrieval team’s. He’d wondered how they’d traced him to Daphne, but he’d always assumed one of the nurses at the hospital had mentioned she’d come to see him.

  “It looks like he found you,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes, he found me.” Or rather, I found him, I went to the address in Edgebourne Daphine gave me, expecting to find the retrieval team, and there he was. Scared the bejesus out of me. I thought he was going to arrest me as a spy, but he didn’t. He offered me a job. Which I turned down till I found out that Polly’s deadline was two months before Denys Atherton got here.

  “What else did you tell Tensing?” he asked.

  “What do you think we told him?” the Commander said. “That you were as brave as they come, that you’d saved our lives and the life of every soldier on the Lady Jane when you unfouled that propeller. And I told him he’d be a blasted fool not to recruit you, in spite of you being a Yank.”

  That day in Edgebourne, Tensing had said, “You come highly recommended,” and he’d assumed Tensing had talked to Hardy, but it had been the Commander and Jonathan.

  If it hadn’t been for them, Tensing wouldn’t have found him after losing him at Bletchley. He wouldn’t have offered him a job and the possibility of finding Atherton and of telling him where Polly and Eileen were. He wouldn’t be working on Fortitude South. And if they hadn’t rescued Tensing, would there even have been a Fortitude South? And they couldn’t have rescued Tensing if he hadn’t unfouled the propeller.

  “Tensing recruited you?” Jonathan was asking, as excited as when he’d been fourteen, and Ernest was suddenly reminded of Colin Templer. “You’re a spy?”

  “Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid,” Ernest said. “When I’m not delivering parcels I spend most of my time at a desk. And speaking of parcels, I’d better deliver the one I brought and get going.”

  He reached for his duffel bag, but the Commander stopped him. “You can’t go yet, not without telling us what all’s happened to you since we saw you last.”

  I faked amnesia, nearly killed Alan Turing, got knocked unconscious by a collapsing wall, faked my own death, and met the Queen.

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “We got plenty of time.” The Commander pulled out a chair for him. “Sit down. You can’t go out in that gale. You want some coffee? Some stew?”

  He remembered the Commander’s stew. “Coffee, thanks.” He sat down. There were things he needed to find out, too.

  The Commander sloshed over to the coffeepot. “Jonathan, see if you can find that brandy we were saving for V-Day,” he said. He fished a mug out of the litter of opened cans and charts on the table, poured coffee into it, and handed it to Ernest.

  The mug didn’t look like it had been washed since the last time he’d been on the Lady Jane. Ernest sipped cautiously at it. I should have had the stew, he thought.

  “Here it is,” Jonathan said, bringing the brandy over.

  “Are you sure you want to open that?” Ernest asked. “Won’t it be bad luck to drink it before the war’s over?”

  “It’s as good as won already,” the Commander said, “or it will be a month from now, isn’t that right, Kansas?”

  And here was the perfect place for his propaganda, the perfect chance to say the invasion couldn’t happen till July twentieth at the earliest and mention FUSAG and Patton and Calais. Better than perfect. If they got captured by the Germans and were interrogated, they could help corroborate Intelligence’s deception efforts.

  But they’d saved his life as much as he’d saved theirs. He owed them the truth, and since he couldn’t tell them who he really was, he could at least tell the truth about this. “That’s right,” he said. “Only we need the Germans to think it’s mid-July.”

  The Commander nodded. “So Rommel won’t bring his tanks up. And you need him to think it’s Calais for the same reason.” And at Ernest’s look of surprise, “The last two weeks we’ve been minesweeping in Calais harbor to convince them that’s where the invasion’s coming. You think it’ll fool them, Kansas?”

  “If it doesn’t, we won�
��t win this war.”

  “Then we’d better see to it that it does. Hold out your mug.” He added a dollop of brandy to Ernest’s coffee and to Jonathan’s and then poured himself a mugful and sat down. “Now, then,” he said. “Tell us what you’ve been up to.”

  “You first,” Ernest said, and leaned back, sipping his coffee—which even the brandy couldn’t improve—as they told him about their adventures. They’d spirited Jewish refugees and pilots who’d been shot down across the Channel to England and delivered supplies and coded messages to the French Resistance.

  And he knew he should be worried that what they’d done—what he’d done when he unfouled that propeller and kept them from getting hit by that Stuka—had altered events. He’d been afraid of that ever since Private Hardy. But oddly, he wasn’t worried.

  He’d thought he’d got the Commander and Jonathan killed, and he hadn’t. Which meant maybe other things he’d feared weren’t true either. Maybe it wasn’t true that he’d been unable to find Denys Atherton and get Polly and Eileen out before Polly’s deadline. Maybe it wasn’t true that something he’d done that night in Dunkirk—saving Hardy’s life or hauling that dog up over the side—had lost the war. If the Commander and Jonathan were alive, then anything was possible.

  Or maybe it was just his relief at not being a murderer. Or the brandy.

  “These last four months we’ve been helping map the beaches in Normandy,” the Commander said casually.

  Mapping the beaches. Jesus, an incredibly dangerous job. And, if they were caught, one that could undo everything Fortitude South had worked so hard to accomplish the last few months.

  “Your turn,” the Commander was saying. “What have you been doing? How long were you in hospital?”

  “Nearly four months,” he said. “I tried to get in touch with you. That’s why I thought you were dead. After I wrote you, Daphne—”

  “Our Daphne, from the Crown and Anchor?”

  “Yes. She came to tell me you hadn’t made it back from Dunkirk. Have you sent them word you’re alive?”

  Jonathan shook his head.