All Clear

by Connie Willis

  “No,” she said, frustrated. “I’m not saying that either. No one person or thing won the war. People argue over whether it was Ultra or the evacuation from Dunkirk or Churchill’s leadership or fooling Hitler into thinking we were invading at Calais that won the war, but it wasn’t any one of them. It was all of them and a thousand, a million, other things and people. And not just soldiers and pilots and Wrens, but air-raid wardens and planespotters and debutantes and mathematicians and weekend sailors and vicars.”

  “Doing their bit,” Mr. Dunworthy murmured.

  “Yes. Canteen workers and ambulance drivers and ENSA chorus girls. And historians. You said no one can be in a chaotic system and not affect events. What if your—our—coming to the past added another weapon to the war, a secret weapon like the French Resistance or Fortitude South?”

  “Or Ultra.”

  “Yes,” Polly said. “Like Ultra. Something which operated behind the scenes, and which, combined with everything else, was enough to avert disaster, to tip the balance.”

  “And win the war,” Mr. Dunworthy said softly.

  There was a long silence, and then he said, almost longingly, “But there’s no proof …”

  No, she thought, except that so many lives saved and so many sacrificed— so much courage, kindness, endurance, love—must count for something even in a chaotic system.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t any proof.”

  There was a knock, and Eileen leaned in the door, her red hair windblown and her cheeks rosy. “What are you two doing sitting here in the dark?” she said, and switched on the light. “You look as if you could both do with some tea. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  “No, wait,” Polly said. “Did you find out who the man you saved was?”

  “Yes.” She took off her hat. “The admitting nurse wouldn’t tell me anything, and neither would the matron, so then I hit on the idea of going to the men’s ward and telling the nurse that Mrs. Mallowan had sent me to find out.”

  “Mrs. Mallowan?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  “That’s Agatha Christie’s married name.” She unbuttoned her green coat. “The nurse and I chatted a bit about Murder in the Calais Coach, and I told her about Agatha Christie’s new book, which hasn’t come out yet. It’s all right, Polly, I told her I had an editor friend who’d let me look at it. And as a result, she let me look at the ambulance log.”

  “And the man you saved was—?”

  “There were three people, actually, or at any rate the nurse said she doubted they’d have survived if they hadn’t been brought immediately to hospital. I wrote them down,” Eileen said, taking a sheet of paper out of her handbag and reading from it. “Sergeant Thomas Brantley, Mrs. Jean Cuttle—that was the ambulance driver—and Captain David Westbrook.”

  Mr. Dunworthy made an involuntary sound.

  “Do you know who Captain Westbrook is?” Polly asked him.

  Mr. Dunworthy nodded. “He was killed on D-Day, after single-handedly holding a critical crossroads till reinforcements arrived.”

  For there is nothing lost that may not be found, if sought.

  —EDMUND SPENSER, THE FAERIE QUEENE

  London—Spring 1941

  “SO YOU’RE TELLING ME ALF AND BINNIE ARE WAR HEROES?” Eileen said after Polly and Mr. Dunworthy had explained Polly’s theory to her.

  “Yes,” Polly said. “You were right about their being a secret weapon. Only they’re on our side. Their jumping out in front of you when you were chasing John Bartholomew and delaying you was what was responsible for your being forced into driving the ambulance that night, so that you were able to save Captain Westbrook’s life—”

  “And they delayed the train.”

  “Train?” Polly said.

  “When we came to London. They chased a headmistress out of our compartment, and she tried to have us thrown off the train, and it made us late leaving the station. And later we found out the railway bridge ahead of us had been bombed, and Alf said, ‘It was a good thing we was late.’ ” She looked up at Polly wonderingly. “They saved my life. And the headmistress’s.”

  “And you saved Captain Westbrook’s.”

  “And you two and Mike and I won the war?” Eileen said.

  “Helped to win the war,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Tipped the balance.”

  “But I don’t understand. If they’d lost the war before we came, then how could you have been at VE-Day? There wouldn’t have been a VE-Day, would there?”

  “Yes,” Polly said, “because by 1945, you’d already saved Captain Westbrook’s life and I’d already saved Sir Godfrey—”

  “But you hadn’t done that when you were at VE-Day,” Eileen said, hopelessly confused. “You hadn’t even come to the Blitz yet.”

  “Yes, I had,” Polly said patiently. “I came to the Blitz in 1940, and I went to Trafalgar Square on VE-Day five years later, in 1945.”

  “But what about all those years before any of us came here, before time travel was even invented? The war was lost then, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” Polly said. “It was always won because we had always come. We were always here. We were always a part of it.”

  “The past and the future are both part of a single continuum,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and launched into a long and involved explanation of chaos theory.

  “But I still don’t understand—”

  “Don’t understand what?” Binnie asked, coming in and announcing that from now on she wished to be called Florence—“Like Florence Nightingale”—and become a nurse, which put an end to the conversation.

  But the next morning after Alf and Binnie had gone to school, Eileen brought up the subject again. “So because Mr. Dunworthy ran into the Wren and Mike untangled the propeller and you saved Sir Godfrey, it changed things just enough that we won the war, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Polly said.

  “Then there’s no reason to keep us here,” she said, “and we can go home.”

  “Eileen—”

  “Mr. Dunworthy, you said every historian who’s come here has altered events, and they all went back to Oxford. And after you ran into the Wren, you went back to Oxford. So now that we’ve done what we were supposed to do, they should be able to come and fetch us, shouldn’t they? Or our drops should begin working again.” She looked expectantly from Polly to Mr. Dunworthy and back again. “We need to go check them.”

  “I’ll go to the drop in St. Paul’s this morning,” Mr. Dunworthy promised.

  But after Eileen had elicited a promise that Polly would check her drop on her way to the theater and had left to drive General Flynn, he said to Polly, “She may, of course, be right about the drops—”

  “But if she were, Colin would already be here.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and the fact that he isn’t very likely means our part in this is not over.”

  “I know,” Polly said, thinking of how Major Denewell had told her and the other FANYs the war could still be lost even during that last year.

  “More may be required of us before the end,” Mr. Dunworthy told her.

  Including our lives, Polly thought.

  She had nearly died rescuing Sir Godfrey. The next time she might not make it. Like the countless rescue workers and ARP wardens and firemen who’d died digging people out of the rubble or taking people to shelter or defusing bombs. Or she might simply be killed outright by an HE, as Mike had been, and all the other people who’d died in the Blitz and in hospitals and prison camps and newspaper offices. Casualties of war.

  But still even in death, doing their bit. Like Mike. It was his death that had made her go to the Works Board and volunteer to be an ambulance driver and be assigned to ENSA and save Sir Godfrey.

  “I know there’s a good chance we won’t make it back,” she told Mr. Dunworthy, and as she did, it struck her that that was what soldiers said when they were leaving for the front.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” she said, and meant it. “All that matters is that Si
r Godfrey didn’t die and I’m not responsible for losing the war, and that I can see Miss Laburnum and Doreen and Trot without getting them killed. And if I’m killed, I won’t be the only one to die in World War Two. I’m only sorry I got you into this.”

  “We got each other into it. And we may yet get out.”

  “And if not, we still stopped Hitler in his tracks.” She smiled at him.

  “We did indeed,” he said, and looked suddenly years younger. “And we, like St. Paul’s, are still standing, at least for the moment. Speaking of which, when I go there to check the drop, I intend to ask to be taken on as a volunteer. I have always wanted to serve on the fire watch and help save St. Paul’s—”

  He stopped, an odd look on his face.

  “What is it?” Polly asked. “Are you feeling ill?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s just occurred to me … I think I may already have saved it. The night I came through, I crashed into a stirrup pump, and two of the fire watch came down to investigate and found an incendiary which had burned through the roof. If I hadn’t been there—”

  “They might not have discovered it till too late, and the fire—” Polly said, and stopped as well, thinking of the fire on the desk which she had put out the night they’d been trying to find John Bartholomew.

  “And if my being there did save it, then it may do so again,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying, “even if I can only be at St. Paul’s for two weeks. But you will need to help me persuade them. And convince Eileen.”

  Convincing Eileen proved to be the more difficult of the two. “But it’s dangerous,” she said. “The north transept—”

  “Won’t be bombed till April sixteenth,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I’ll phone in and tell them I’m ill that night.”

  “What about the big raids on May tenth and eleventh? You said the entire city—”

  “St. Paul’s wasn’t hit either of those nights,” he reassured her.

  And it doesn’t matter, Polly wanted to shout at her. He won’t be here. His deadline will already have passed. And the chances are I’ll only have two weeks after that. If she had another task, it almost certainly lay between now and the end of the Blitz. There would be only occasional raids after that, but they’d had far fewer casualties. Which meant her deadline wasn’t the end of 1943. It was May eleventh.

  But she couldn’t tell Eileen that. In the first place, she wouldn’t believe her. And in the second place, the task at hand was to convince her to allow Mr. Dunworthy to join the fire watch. So instead Polly said, “St. Paul’s won’t suffer any more damage till 1944 and the V-1 and V-2 attacks.”

  “But if there won’t be any more damage, then why do you need to be in the fire watch, Mr. Dunworthy?” Eileen persisted.

  “Because I may be the reason there wasn’t damage,” Mr. Dunworthy said, which didn’t help his case.

  “No,” Eileen said firmly. “It’s too dangerous. The incendiaries and the roofs … You might fall.”

  “None of the fire watch was injured or killed in 1941,” Mr. Dunworthy told her, and Polly wondered if that was a lie, if Mr. Dunworthy was hoping to die at St. Paul’s as well as work there.

  “And being in the cathedral will give me opportunities to check the drop when no one’s around,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and Eileen eventually relented, though she insisted on walking him to and from the cathedral every night he was on duty.

  “St. Paul’s may be safe,” she said, “but there’s still the journey there and back again. I have no intention of letting either of you get killed five minutes before the retrieval team arrives.”

  “All right,” he agreed, and let her walk him there every night, except for the seventeenth, when he sent Eileen on an errand and had Polly accompany him instead so Eileen wouldn’t see the damage from the raids the night before.

  “It left a huge crater in the middle of the floor,” he told Polly. “If Eileen sees it, I fear she’ll never let me go on working with the fire watch.”

  “And she’ll see you can’t get to your drop,” Polly said, guessing the real reason.

  “True, I can’t.”

  When they reached St. Paul’s, Mr. Humphreys was delighted to see Polly. “Miss Sebastian, you must be an excellent nurse. Mr. Hobbe looks quite recovered.”

  He insisted on showing them the north transept, or, rather, the mountain of plaster and splintered timbers and broken marble that blocked access to it. “Still, though, the damage could have been worse,” he said.

  Far, far worse, Polly thought, going to the Alhambra that night, thinking of Hitler unvanquished, unstoppable, marauding and murdering his way through England and the rest of the world. And the future.

  But we stopped him, she thought. We won the war.

  “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary,” Tabbitt said. “Did you meet a handsome doctor in hospital?”

  “You’re in awfully good spirits for someone who nearly bought it,” Hattie said.

  The troupe noted her lightness of mood as well. “You’re too cheery by half,” Viv said when she went to the theater for the first pantomime rehearsal.

  “It’s just that I’m so happy to see all of you,” she said. Sir Godfrey and Mrs. Wyvern had not only found another theater—the Regent—for them to stage the pantomime in but had managed to talk Mr. Tabbitt into shifting Polly to matinees for the duration and had bullied the entire troupe to be in the play.

  Miss Laburnum was to be the narrator, Mrs. Brightford Sleeping Beauty’s mother and the Queen, and the rector the King and one-half of the Prince’s horse. Viv was the other half, Nelson was the prince’s dog, and Miss Hibbard was helping with costumes. “We’re happy to see you, too, my dear,” she said.

  “And delighted to see you looking so well after your ordeal,” the rector added.

  “It’s the spring weather,” Miss Laburnum said. “I find the coming of spring always lifts one spirits.”

  “I say it’s a man,” Viv said.

  “Well, whatever it is, it suits you,” Mrs. Brightford said. “You look positively radiant.”

  But when she went backstage with Sir Godfrey, he said, “What is this fey mood which has come now upon you? Such moods are dangerous. Are you certain you’re fully recovered from your exertions on my behalf? Perhaps we should postpone the play.”

  “No, better not,” she said and, when he looked up alertly, “I only meant the theater may not be available for an additional week. And ENSA may be sending me to the provinces in May. Not to Bristol,” she added hastily. “There’s no need to postpone. I’m all right.”

  Which was true. She was only sorry she wouldn’t get to see Colin again, and anguished over what his failure to rescue her and Mr. Dunworthy would do to him.

  It wasn’t your fault, she wished she could tell him. I know you would have come to rescue me if you could.

  Sir Godfrey was looking worriedly at her. “Simply because you’ve cheated Death once,” he said, “doesn’t mean he will not try again. I could not bear to lose you.”

  “Only because you’d have to find another principal boy,” she said, smiling.

  And she seemed to have allayed his fears because he became his old tyrannical directing self again, bellowing at everyone and shouting orders at Mr. Dorming, who’d been recruited into painting sets. Mrs. Brightford’s three little girls had been enlisted, too, and, by the time rehearsals began—and over Polly’s protests—Alf and Binnie.

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Polly said when Mrs. Wyvern suggested it.

  “It’s an excellent idea,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “The pantomime is being given to benefit the orphans of the East End. What could be better than having actual children from the East End in it? They can be in the christening scene.”

  “We’re fairies,” Binnie told Mr. Dunworthy proudly.

  “I ain’t,” Alf said. “Girls are fairies. I’m a goblin. And a bramblebush. First Bramblebush.”

  “Liar,” Binnie said. “All the bramblebushes are the
same. I’m goin’ to wear a beautiful glittery dress and wings.”

  If Sir Godfrey doesn’t throttle you first, Polly thought, which seemed highly likely. They teased Nelson, trod in paint, bounced on Sleeping Beauty’s bed, and hit each other with the fairies’ wands and the prop swords.

  “Those swords were borrowed from the Royal Shakespeare!” Sir Godfrey bellowed at them. “The next miscreant I catch with one will be strung up by his heels.”

  Which had no effect on them at all. Polly had to talk Eileen into coming to rehearsals with her to keep them from destroying the theater, and Mrs. Wyvern promptly latched on to her and made her prompter.

  “At least when the retrieval team comes, we’ll all be in one place,” Eileen said cheerfully.

  She’d refused to give up hope, even though it was obvious by this time that no one had been able to get through. “The bombing of St. Paul’s must be a divergence point,” she said, “and the retrieval team can’t come through till it’s past.”

  Nothing happened on the sixteenth or the seventeenth. On the eighteenth, Eileen said, “With us not in Oxford Street anymore and Mrs. Rickett’s house gone and the vicar not in Backbury, they’ve no way to find us. We need to go to Townsend Brothers and give them our new address. Do you think I should write to Lieutenant Heffernan at the riflery school at the manor?”

  It doesn’t matter, Polly thought. If they were able to come, they’d have done it long before this. They know Mr. Dunworthy’s deadline is the first of May. And the weather was supposed to be clear for the next three nights. Perfect bombing weather.

  “I’ll write to the manor tonight when we get home,” Eileen said. “Perhaps they moved the riflery range, and we can go to Backbury and use my drop.”

  It won’t open either, Polly thought, and wished she could tell Eileen, You mustn’t blame yourself that we weren’t able to get out in time. It’s not your fault.

  But Eileen would only say, “They’ll get us out. You’ll see. At this very moment, there are all sorts of things happening, all sorts of people working to rescue us,” and Polly didn’t think she could bear it. So instead, after Eileen left to walk Mr. Dunworthy to St. Paul’s, she wrote what she had wanted to say in a note and added a list of the dates, times, and locations of every V-1 and V-2 in her implant.