All Clear

by Connie Willis

  She shook her head. “ ‘If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’ ”

  “Shakespeare!” he said contemptuously. “I have always loathed actors who quote the Bard. ‘Go, get you gone, foul varlet.’ I will not have your death on my hands.”

  “You have it the wrong way round,” she said bitterly. “This is my fault. I did this to you.”

  “I fail to see how, unless you abandoned your air-raid duties with ENSA and enlisted in the Luftwaffe within the last hour. I fear the guilt is mine. I shouldn’t have come to ask you to be in the pantomime,” he said, and then murmured, as if to himself, “I should have told Greenberg yes. I should have gone to Bristol.”

  He closed his eyes in pain. “ ‘We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst.’ ”

  “No, we’re not, “she said. “None of us meant to do any harm.”

  But Sir Godfrey wasn’t listening to her. “What’s that?” he asked, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a sound. “I thought I heard something.”

  “The planes seem to be moving away,” she said, but he shook his head, still with that attentive look. She raised her head, straining to catch the clang of ambulance bells, of voices.

  The raiders’ drone faded away, but she still couldn’t hear anything except a creak as a piece of the wreckage gave way. And the faint hiss of escaping gas.

  And why had she ever thought she stood a chance against the entire space-time continuum? Why had she ever believed she could save Sir Godfrey’s life, could stop history in its blind attempt to correct itself?

  I am so sorry, Sir Godfrey, she thought. I am so sorry, Colin, and she must be crying. Hot drops were splashing onto the back of her hand, onto the compress, onto Sir Godfrey’s already soaked chest.

  “ ‘Boy, why are you crying?’ ” he said, and at any other time that line from the play he most despised would have made her laugh, but not now. Not now.

  “Because I couldn’t save”—her voice broke—“your life.”

  “What?” he said, and his voice regained some of its old strength. “ ‘You lie! Thrice now hast thou plucked me from the jaws of death. And in repayment of that solemn debt, would I save your life now.’ ”

  She no longer knew what play he was quoting from, but it didn’t matter. You can’t save it, she thought. We’re both done for. And she remembered the man looking up at the incendiary halfway up St. Paul’s dome saying, “She’s done for.”

  But it hadn’t been. The fire watch had saved it. And it might look as though they were done for, but she didn’t have to put out twenty-eight incendiaries, didn’t have to keep putting them out night after night. All she had to do was keep Sir Godfrey alive and conscious till help came.

  “We shall never give in,” she murmured, “never surrender,” and bent over the hole to see if she could do something to stop the gas.

  The hiss was louder from the left. She told Sir Godfrey to turn his head to the right and to breathe shallowly, wishing she’d obeyed all those government directives to “carry your gas mask with you at all times,” and tried to pinpoint the source of the gas. It was coming from a narrow gap between two of the seats. If she could block the gap with something …

  All that was left of her costume was the bathing suit. It wouldn’t be enough to fill the space, and at any rate, she didn’t think she could wriggle out of it with only one hand free. And she couldn’t go fetch something. He’d begin bleeding again. But she had to block the space up somehow, and quickly, before the gas rendered him unconscious.

  If it hadn’t already. “Sir Godfrey?”

  “What is it?” His voice was already drowsy, blurred.

  You need to keep him talking, she thought.

  “Sir Godfrey, you asked me which speech I wanted. Do the one from that first night we acted together—Prospero’s speech. ‘Our revels now are ended—’ ” she prompted.

  “My dear, our revels now are ended,” he said.

  “I still want to hear it. ‘These our actors—’ ”

  “ ‘These our actors,’ ” he said, “ ‘as I foretold you, were all spirits …’ ”

  Good, that should keep him going for a bit, she thought, looking about for something to stuff the gap with. The stuffing from a seat would do it, but all of the ones within her reach were intact, with the playbills still lying on them.

  The playbills. Keeping her right hand clamped down on Sir Godfrey’s chest, she shimmied carefully backward and reached behind and around for them with her free hand.

  They weren’t booklets. They were only single sheets. The bloody paper shortage, she thought, wadding them up and pushing them into the space one after the other. She could smell the gas now.

  “ ‘Are melted into air, into thin air,’ ” Sir Godfrey said, “ ‘and like …’ ” His voice trailed off.

  “ ‘And like the baseless fabric,’ ” she prompted, stretching her arm out again, this time in front of her.

  “ ‘And like the baseless fabric of this vision,’ ” Sir Godfrey said. “ ‘The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces …’ ”

  The tips of her fingers touched something wide and flat. A piece of wood, or plaster. She leaned farther forward, stretching her arm out till it hurt, but it wasn’t enough to do more than touch it.

  Of course not, she thought, trying from another angle. This is the correction.

  She felt something shift under her hand. It was a snapped-off piece of one of the openwork chair supports, too small to cover the space even if it were solid. But large enough that it might bring the chunk of wood within reach.

  She jabbed the end awkwardly into the wood, like a fork, and dragged it toward her till it was close enough to grasp. She let go of the support so she could grab the wood and then thought better of it and laid the support on Sir Godfrey’s chest while she picked it up.

  “ ‘And like this unsubstantial pageant faded,’ ” he murmured, “ ‘leave not a wrack behind.’ ”

  She shoved the wood up tight against the space the gas was issuing from. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it should stop most of the gas.

  I hope, she thought. When she leaned down to jam it more tightly against the space, she could still smell gas. Which meant they must get out of here.

  But at least she had bought them a bit of time. She resumed feeling about the space next to the hole, this time for another chair support or something else metal.

  A piece of pipe, sticking out of the debris. The gas line? she wondered. She picked the openwork support up off Sir Godfrey’s chest.

  He was still reciting Prospero’s speech. “ ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ ” he said, “ ‘and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ ”

  She began banging on the pipe with her free hand as hard as she could. The metal made an unholy racket, loud even over the drone of the planes, which seemed to be coming round again. In between clangs she shouted, “Help!” and “Inhere!”

  “Someone must have heard that,” she said, pausing to rest a moment to make certain she was still pressing down on the compress hard enough. “Don’t you think, Sir Godfrey?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Sir Godfrey!” she said urgently.

  “Cheer up, my lady. Things …” His voice trailed into silence.

  “Sir Godfrey!” she cried, casting desperately around for something, anything, to keep him talking. “You quoted a line about my saving your life. Which play was that?”

  “Tell you after the all clear,” he said drowsily.

  “No! Now. Which play was it?” She couldn’t reach his shoulder to shake it, didn’t dare move her hand from the compress. “One of Barrie’s?”

  “Barrie’s? It was Twelfth Night. A knock on the door and there you were … shipwrecked … the letter …” His voice died away.

  “What letter?” she said, even though there was no letter, he was making no sense, but she had to keep him talking. “Who was the letter from, Sir Godfrey?�
��

  “An old friend … we’d played together in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when we were young …”

  “Do Oberon’s speech,” she urged him. “ ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows,’ ” but he went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “He wrote … to offer me the lead in a touring company,” he said after a minute, his voice drowsy and slow again, “… Bath … Bristol … but then you came …”

  “And you didn’t go.”

  “And leave fair Viola?” he murmured, and then, barely audible, “… you knew all your lines …”

  She realized now that, even now—digging him out, trying to stop the blood—she had still harbored a secret hope that this was not part of the continuum’s attempts to correct the damage they’d done, that it was, as he’d said, the Luftwaffe’s fault and not hers. But he was supposed to have gone with the touring company, he was supposed to have left London. He’d stayed because of her.

  “I am so sorry,” she said.

  The stench of gas was growing stronger. She should see if she could find something else to stuff into the gap, a playbill or a newspaper. There were some in the lending library at Holborn. No, that was too far.

  “… killed …,” Sir Godfrey said from a long way away. Her seat must be at the very back of the stalls, but that couldn’t be right, because he was saying, “Viola! Awake, fair maid! I hear our rescuers at hand.”

  “ ‘It is the nightingale,’ ” she murmured. “ ‘We shall sing like two birds i’ the cage—’ ”

  “No,” Sir Godfrey said furiously. “It is the lark. The rescue team is coming—”

  “They didn’t come in time,” she said, and laid her head on the rubble and composed herself to sleep, though her hand still pressed down firmly on the compress. “Not in time.”

  When I look back over the wartime years I cannot help feeling that time is an inadequate and ever capricious measure of their duration.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL,

  9 NOVEMBER 1944

  Imperial War Museum, London—7 May 1995

  “WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING HERE, CONNOR?” THE woman said. He couldn’t see more than her outline in the pitch-darkness of the blackout exhibit, but it must be the fortyish-something woman whom he’d seen unloading things from her car and then going into the museum when he first arrived, though she was far too young to be Merope.

  And Merope wouldn’t have called you Connor, he thought, so this woman’s clearly mistaken you for someone else. “I’m afraid you’ve—” he began, but she was plunging eagerly on.

  “I saw you going into the exhibit, and I thought, that has to be Connor Cross.”

  Oh, God, he thought. It’s Ann. “I’m sorry, you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said firmly, thanking God the room was dark. “I’m not—”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. “Ann Perry? We met at the British Library years ago. We were both doing research on British Intelligence in World War II. It was in 1976, just after they’d released all the classified documents. You were looking for an agent who’d rescued downed fliers—I don’t remember his name, Commander Something—”

  Commander Harold.

  “And I was researching the false articles they’d put in the newspapers to convince Hitler the invasion was going to be at Calais,” she said.

  And you showed me an announcement in the Croydon Clarion Call in May 1944, he thought, which read, “Mr. and Mrs. James Townsend of Upper Notting announced the engagement of their daughter Polly to Flight Officer Colin Templer of the 21st Airborne Division, currently stationed in Kent. A late June wedding is planned.”

  It’s because of you that I found Michael Davies, he thought, that I’m here looking for someone who worked with Polly.

  But he couldn’t say that. “I—” he began, but she was still talking.

  “I designed this exhibition for the museum,” she said, putting her arm in his. “I came this morning to make certain there weren’t any last-minute muck-ups, and I’m so glad I did. It gives me the chance to tell you that you were responsible for my deciding to specialize in the history of World War Two,” she went on, leading him along the white arrows toward the exit curtain. “I had the most awful crush on you, but you were completely oblivious.”

  No, I wasn’t.

  “I was convinced you must already have a girlfriend—”

  I did.

  “—or that you had some sort of tragic secret.” She pushed the curtain aside, and the light beyond spilled into the room where they were standing, revealing the chopped-off bonnet of a bus with shuttered headlamps. And Ann.

  She was as pretty as ever, even though it had been nineteen years, but he couldn’t say that either.

  “And I was determined to find out what your secret was—” She smiled up at him and then stopped, appalled, and jerked her hand away from his arm. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she said, blushing. “I thought you were someone I knew. You must think me a complete fool.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I’ve done the same thing myself.”

  “It’s only that you look exactly like …,” she said, frowning bewilderedly at him. “You’re certain you’re not Connor Cross? No, of course you’re not. Nineteen years ago you’d have been, what, six years old?”

  “Eight,” he said. But it hadn’t been nineteen years ago. It had been five, and they’d both been twenty-two. He extended his hand. “Calvin Knight. I’m a reporter for Time Out. I’m here to write an article on the exhibit.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Knight,” she said, turning pink again. “You haven’t a much older brother who looks just like you, have you? Or an uncle?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Or a portrait of yourself stashed away somewhere, like Dorian Gray?”

  “No. You designed this blackout exhibit?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “Yes, the entire Blitz exhibition, actually,” and he was afraid she’d offer to give him a tour, but she said, “I’d show you round, but I have a meeting at the British Museum. I’m doing an intelligence-war exhibit for them in August, which you’d be interested in, about Fortitude South and the deception campaign—” She stopped, looking embarrassed all over again. “No, you wouldn’t. I am so sorry. I keep forgetting you’re not Connor. You look exactly like him.”

  “I’m sure it will be a very interesting exhibit. I’ll certainly come,” he lied. He couldn’t run the risk of running into her again. Ann had been a very bright girl. He might not be able to fool her twice.

  “You’re very kind,” she said. “I hope my idiotic behavior won’t influence your review of the Blitz exhibit.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Good. Again, I am sorry,” she apologized, and hurried off before he could say anything, which was probably just as well—though he wished there was some way he could thank her for having given him the clue he’d spent the five previous years looking for. And for producing this exhibit so he could, hopefully, find the next one.

  Which he needed to get on with. But he stood there in the dark for several minutes, looking at nothing, remembering those long months spent in the reading room searching for some clue as to where Michael Davies and Merope were, for some hope that Polly wasn’t dead. Ann had talked to him, asked him about his research, commiserated with him over the clumsy microfilm readers and the faulty heaters. She’d brought him sandwiches and contraband cups of tea and cheered him up, especially after he’d found the notice of an unidentified man who’d been killed by an HE on September 10, the day Mr. Dunworthy had attempted to go through to.

  That had been a black day, and Ann, seeing him sitting there, staring blindly at the microfilm screen, had insisted he come out with her for supper and “a stiff drink” and then had held his head when he vomited in the pub’s loo. I couldn’t have done it without you, he called silently after her.

  And you still haven’t done it, he thought. You still haven’t found Polly, or anyone who knew her, and it’s alr
eady half past ten. And Cynthia Camberley and the rest were probably already halfway through the exhibit by now.

  He hurried into the next room. There were sandbags piled along the walls, a door with an air-raid shelter symbol on it, and next to it a mannequin in an ARP helmet and coveralls holding a stirrup pump. The muffled sounds of sirens and bombs came from inside the shut door. The other three walls of the room were lined with display cases. Camberley was looking at one filled with ration books and wartime recipes. “Do you remember those dreadful powdered eggs?” she was asking the woman in the flowered hat.

  “Yes, and Spam. I haven’t been able to look at a tin since.”

  He went over to them, pretending to look at the display. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a loaf of moldy-looking gray bread.

  “Lord Woolton’s National Wheatmeal Bread,” Camberley said, making a face. “It tasted of ashes. It’s my personal opinion that Hitler was behind the recipe.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” he asked, pulling out his notebook. He introduced himself, then asked them their impressions of the exhibit and what they’d done in the war.

  “I drove an ambulance,” Camberley said.

  It was difficult to imagine her being tall enough to see over the steering wheel. “In the Blitz?” he asked.

  “No, during the V-rocket attacks. I was stationed at Dulwich.”

  Dulwich. That was near Croydon, which meant she might have known Polly, but that was no help. He needed someone who’d known her later, or rather, earlier, after she went to the Blitz. “Did you drive an ambulance as well?” he asked Herbaceous Border, whose name tag read “Margaret Fortis.”

  “No, nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. I spent the Blitz cutting sandwiches and pouring tea. I worked in a WVS canteen in one of the Underground shelters,” she explained. “They’re supposed to have a replica here.” She looked vaguely about.

  “Which station?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager. If it was the one Polly had used as a shelter, there was a chance she might have known her.

  “Marble Arch,” she said.