All Clear

by Connie Willis

  “But it has all come right in the end,” Mr. Humphreys said, and there was a whoosh and a boom over by the bonfire. Pigeons wheeled frantically up over the square.

  “I think I’d best go look for Alf and Binnie,” she said. Before they kill someone.

  “And I’d best get to St. Paul’s,” he said, and in his best verger manner, “We’re having a service of thanksgiving tomorrow. I do hope you and your children will come.”

  “We will,” she promised. If Alf’s not at the Old Bailey.

  Mr. Humphreys pushed off through the crowd toward the Strand, and she started for the National Gallery, guided by further booms, an outraged “You hooligan!” and a shower of sparks. A harried-looking mother with three little girls, all eating ice creams, went by. A conga line snaked past her, kicking.

  She waited for it to pass, craning her neck, looking for the flare of fireworks, for Binnie’s blonde head. “Alf!” she called. “Binnie!” She would never find them in this crowd.

  “Were these what you were looking for, madam?” a man’s voice said behind her, and she turned to find an Army chaplain with both children in tow, one hand on Binnie’s shoulder and the other firmly gripping Alf’s collar.

  “Look who we found!” Alf said happily. “The vicar!”

  He had a two-day stubble of beard and looked exhausted. His chaplain’s uniform was covered in mud, and he was terribly thin.

  “Mr. Goode,” Eileen said, unable to take in the fact that he was here and well and safe. “What are you doing here?”

  “The war’s over,” Alf said.

  “They flew us over this afternoon,” the vicar said. “Thank you for your letters. I wouldn’t have made it through without them.”

  And I wouldn’t have made it through without yours, she thought.

  “Aren’t you going to tell him welcome home?” Binnie prompted.

  “Welcome home,” Eileen said softly.

  “What sort of welcome’s that?” Binnie hooted, and Alf said, “Ain’t you gonna kiss him or nothin’? The war’s over!”

  “Alf!” Eileen said reprovingly. “Mr. Goode—”

  “No, he’s right. Kissing’s definitely in order,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her.

  “I told you,” Binnie said to Alf.

  “I didn’t think I had a hope of finding you in this crush,” the vicar said after he’d released her, “and then I spotted Guy Fawkes here.” He gave Alf’s shoulder a shake. “Though it’s a miracle I recognized either of them, they’ve changed so much. Alf’s a foot taller, and Binnie’s nearly grown.”

  “Do you want to come with us?” Alf asked him. “We’re goin’ to Piccadilly Circus.”

  “We are not,” Binnie said. “Mum said we’re goin’ to supper.”

  “I think you’ll find they haven’t changed all that much,” Eileen said dryly.

  “Good. I got through many a bad period by thinking of the time they painted blackout stripes on Farmer Brown’s cattle.”

  “Remember the time you came to the station and helped Mum get Theodore on the train?” Binnie asked.

  “I do,” Eileen said. She looked at the vicar. “You came to rescue me just in the nick of time.”

  “If we don’t go to Piccadilly Circus now,” Alf whined, “they’ll have turned off the lights!”

  “How about supper in Piccadilly Circus?” the vicar said.

  “Are you certain you want to go with us?” Eileen asked him. He looked ready to drop. “Perhaps Mr. Goode would like to go home and get some rest.”

  “And miss VE-Day?” He smiled at Eileen. “Absolutely not.”

  “This ain’t the real VE-Day,” Alf said. “The real one’s tomorrow.”

  “Then we’ll have to do that, as well,” the vicar said, and took Eileen’s arm. “What all’s happening tomorrow, do you know?”

  Continued rationing, she thought, and such serious food shortages the Americans will have to send us care packages, and then Hiroshima and the Cold War and the oil wars and Denver and pinpoint bombs and the Pandemic. And the Beatles and time travel and colonies on the Moon. And nearly fifty more Agatha Christie novels.

  Alf tugged at her sleeve. “The vicar said, ‘What’s ’appenin’ tomorrow?’ ” he shouted over the cheering crowd.

  “I have no idea,” Eileen said, and smiled up at the vicar.

  Well, come on. Let’s see if there’s still a war going on.

  —GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON,

  6 July 1944

  London—19 April 1941

  COLIN WANTED TO TAKE THE TUBE TO ST. PAUL’S, BUT POLLY, remembering the guard who’d prevented her from leaving during a raid, said, “We can’t risk getting trapped in the station. We need to walk there.”

  “Is there a chance we can find a taxi?” Colin asked.

  “In this? I doubt it. Where did you say the raids are tonight?”

  “Over the docks,” he said, looking down the street, trying to work out which way to go.

  She watched him as he stood there against the backdrop of fires and searchlights, intent on finding a way to get them to St. Paul’s. Like Stephen Lang, trying to think of a way to bring V-1s down. He looked so much like Stephen. Was that because their jobs had required the same determination and resourcefulness? Or might Stephen and Paige Fairchild have been two of his—what would they have been?—great-grandparents?

  “Since most of the bombing will be near the Thames,” Colin said, “I think the best plan is to take the Strand to Fleet Street.”

  Mr. Dunworthy shook his head. “It’s too easy to get lost in the maze of streets in the City.”

  “He’s right,” Polly said, remembering the night they’d tried to find Mr. Bartholomew.

  “The Embankment’s the most direct route,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  “But that’s where the bombing is,” Polly objected.

  “No, he’s right,” Colin said. “The majority of the bombs were east of Tower Bridge, and most of the raids occurred after midnight. So we need to hurry.”

  “And we need to be as quiet as we can,” Polly said. “We don’t want a warden to catch us and drag us into a shelter.”

  “You forget, I’m a warden,” Colin said, tapping his helmet. “If he—or she—stops us, I’ll simply tell them that I’m taking you somewhere safe. Which, as a matter of fact, I am.”

  He led the way, supporting Mr. Dunworthy and keeping close to the buildings. It had rained. The pavement shone with wetness, and, even though there were still clouds, the sky directly overhead was clear. In the wake of the searchlights, she could see stars.

  As they neared Trafalgar Square, Colin said, “I hope it’s less crowded than the last time I was here.”

  “You came to VE-Day to find me?”

  He nodded. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to find you because I hadn’t found you, but at that point I was willing to try anything. And I wanted to see you.”

  “And did you?” she asked, thinking of Colin somewhere in that celebrating crowd, searching for her.

  “No, some wretched child tossed a firecracker at me and nearly blew my foot off. But it wasn’t a total loss. I got kissed by a large number of pretty girls.” He grinned his crooked grin at her.

  “Ah, not quite as crowded, I see,” he said as they came into the deserted square. The fountains had been shut off, and the lions slumbered in the gray and silver silence. Even the pigeons were asleep.

  Sleeping Beauty’s palace, Polly thought, and its spell seemed to fall on them. They passed silently through the square and down to the Strand, moving like wraiths through the darkened, deserted streets.

  They ran into several diversion barricades and had to go around, till Polly was thoroughly lost, but Colin seemed to know exactly which way to go. Twice, at crossings, he took Polly’s arm to keep her from pitching off the curb, and once, on an uneven brick pavement, he took her hand. Otherwise he didn’t touch her, though even in the blackest lanes when she couldn’t see him at all, she was sharply awar
e of his presence.

  It grew lighter as they neared the Thames. The searchlights were blunted against the overcast sky, and the fires from the docks stained the clouds pink, and they were able to see their way more easily. The diversions had forced them farther west than their original plan. The twin spires of Westminster Abbey lay directly ahead of them, and beyond the Abbey, the tower of Big Ben.

  “It’s half past eleven,” Colin said as they went down the steps to the Embankment. “We need to hurry,” and they set off quickly along the walled walk, following the curve of the river.

  The air should have smelled of mud and fish, but it didn’t. It was cool and clean and smelled of rain. And once, lilacs. They walked quickly, silently, past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge and Cleopatra’s Needle. I’m seeing all this for the last time, Polly thought.

  Mr. Dunworthy halted for a moment to look at the House of Commons, which would be gutted in May, and she wondered if he felt the same way. She had worried the long journey would be too much for him, but he showed no signs of tiring, though he still leaned on Colin’s arm, so she was concerned when Colin said, “We need to stop for a moment,” and led Mr. Dunworthy over to an iron bench set against the Embankment’s wall.

  “I can go on,” Mr. Dunworthy protested.

  Colin shook his head. “You sit down, too, Polly. Before we go through, I need to tell you something.”

  And she knew that look. She had seen it before—on Miss Laburnum’s face the night Mike died, on Mr. Dunworthy’s when he told her he’d destroyed the future.

  You’ll only be able to get one of us out, she thought. Or you won’t be able to go with us. She stood behind the bench, bracing herself.

  “I didn’t save you by myself,” Colin said. “I had help. From Michael Davies.”

  “One of the messages he put in the paper got through,” Polly said.

  “Yes. It was a message he wrote in 1944—”

  “1944?” Polly said. “But—”

  “He wrote it while working with British Intelligence on Fortitude South. He wasn’t killed that night in Houndsditch. He faked his death so he could try to find Denys Atherton and get word to Oxford.”

  Mike’s not dead. But that’s good news, she thought, and looked over at Mr. Dunworthy, but the expression on his face was the same as on Colin’s. Whatever the bad news was, Colin had already told him, and she thought suddenly of them standing there in the theater’s aisle when she came back from changing her clothes, and of Eileen’s wiping away tears.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “It was a newspaper engagement notice.” He smiled wryly. “Announcing the engagement of Polly Townsend to Flight Officer Colin Templer. Davies’s job was writing false newspaper articles and personal ads and letters to the editor for the local newspapers, but some of them were also coded messages to us.”

  Eileen was right, she thought. There were things going on behind the scenes that we knew nothing about.

  “So I began looking for other messages,” Colin said. He told them about finding out everything he could about Fortitude South, discovering what name Davies had been using and where he’d been stationed.

  “And you went through to get him,” Polly said. “But you weren’t in time.”

  He nodded. “We tried, but we couldn’t get the drop to open till after—” He didn’t finish what he’d been going to say. “We were too late to save him,” he said instead.

  But, as on that day in the pub with Mr. Dunworthy, that wasn’t all. There was still bad news to come.

  And then she knew what it was. Had on some level always known. “He was killed by a V-1,” she said, and didn’t need to see Colin’s face to confirm it. “In a newspaper office in Croydon.”

  “Yes.”

  “I should have stayed with him,” she murmured. “I shouldn’t have gone off to help Paige. If I’d stayed with him, I could have—”

  Colin shook his head. “Even we couldn’t save him. He was too badly injured. But the tourniquets you tied kept him alive long enough to tell us that you’d still been alive when he left in January of 1941 and that Eileen was with you.”

  So Colin had gone to find Eileen after the war, and she’d told him where they were. Mike had got them out, just as he’d promised he would. But at what a cost!

  “I should have known it was him,” she said.

  Colin shook his head. “He was doing his best to keep you from finding out. His one thought was rescuing you. And if you hadn’t gone, I couldn’t have got him out of there and back to Oxford.”

  You were the person in the ambulance from Brixton, Polly thought, looking at Colin. There was nothing of the impetuous, impossible boy she’d known in the man standing in front of her now, and nothing of the careless, charming Stephen Lang.

  Colin sacrificed himself, too, she thought despairingly. How much of his youth, how many years, had he given up to come and find her, to fetch her home? I am so sorry. So sorry.

  “Michael insisted on telling me everything he knew about where you were before he’d let me take him through to Oxford,” Colin said. “He was afraid once he got to hospital, he wouldn’t have the chance. He would have been so glad to know he got you out.” He smiled at her. “And if I’m going to do that, we’d better go.”

  She nodded wearily. Colin helped Mr. Dunworthy get slowly to his feet, and they set off again, following the rose-colored river, guided by the drone of planes and the crump of bombs and the deadly, starry sparkle of incendiaries, till they came at last to Ludgate Hill. And there above them at the end of the street stood St. Paul’s, silver against the dark sky, the ruins all around it hidden by the darkness or transformed to enchanted gardens.

  “It’s beautiful,” Colin breathed. “When I came here in the seventies, it was totally hidden by concrete buildings and car parks.”

  “The seventies?”

  “1976, actually,” he said. “The year they declassified the Fortitude South papers. I’d been here earlier—I mean, later—earlier and later—in the eighties. We couldn’t get anything before 1960 to open or anything after 1995, when we could have gone online, so I had to do it the hard way. I came here to search the newspaper archives and the war records for clues to what might have happened.”

  Colin, who had wanted to go to the Crusades, spending—how long—in reading rooms and libraries and dusty newspaper morgues?

  “And you found the engagement announcement,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  “Yes. I also found your death notice. And Polly’s.”

  “Mine?” Polly said. “But I checked the Times and the Herald. It wasn’t—”

  “It was in the Daily Express. It said you’d been killed at St. George’s, Kensington.”

  How must Colin have felt, reading that, all alone and eighty years from home? And how many years had he sat there in archives, hunched over volumes of yellowing newspapers, over a microfilm reader?

  “But you didn’t stop looking,” Polly said.

  “No. I refused to believe it.”

  Like Eileen, Polly thought.

  “I had a bit more trouble hanging on to the belief that you were alive after Michael Davies told me you and Eileen were at Mrs. Rickett’s, and it turned out it had been bombed.” He smiled at her.

  “But you didn’t stop looking.”

  “No, and you weren’t dead. And neither was Mr. Dunworthy. At least for the moment. But the sooner I get you both back to Oxford, the better I’ll feel. Let’s go,” he said, and hurried them toward St. Paul’s.

  Halfway there Mr. Dunworthy stopped and stood there on the pavement, his head down.

  Oh, no, Polly thought. Not now, not this close. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I ran into her here,” Mr. Dunworthy said, pointing down at the pavement. “The Wren.”

  “Lieutenant Wendy Armitage,” Colin said. “Currently working at Bletchley Park. One of Dilly’s girls. She helped crack Ultra’s naval code. Come along. It’s nearly midnight.”<
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  They hurried on up the hill. “We need to go in the north door,” Colin said, and started across the courtyard.

  Mr. Dunworthy pulled him back. “The watch’ll see you. They’re still up on the roofs. This way,” he whispered, and led the way around the perimeter of the courtyard, keeping to the shadows, till they were even with the porch.

  “We still have to cross that open space,” Colin whispered, pointing to the thirty feet between them and the steps.

  “We wait for the next bomber,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “They’ll look up at the sky, and we can make a dash for it. Here comes a bomber.” And he was right, Colin and Polly both instinctively looked up at the drone of its engines.

  “Now,” Mr. Dunworthy said, his voice scarcely audible above the Dornier’s roar, and started off across the open space.

  Colin grabbed Polly’s hand, and they shot across it after him and up the steps, past the star-shaped burn mark where the incendiary had been, past the place where she and Mike and Eileen had sat on the morning of the thirtieth, up to the porch she had darted across that first day when the rescue squad was defusing the UXB, and under the porch’s concealing shadows to the north door. He pulled the heavy handle.

  It wouldn’t open. “It’s locked,” Colin said. “What about the Great West Door?”

  “It’s only open on important occasions,” Mr. Dunworthy said, as if this wasn’t the most important occasion of his life.

  “The side door to the Crypt should be unlocked,” Colin said, and started back toward the steps.

  “No, wait,” Polly said. “Some of the fire watch may be down there. We need to try the south door first.” She ran lightly along the porch and yanked on the handle. It wouldn’t open either. But it was only stuck, as it had been on the night of the twenty-ninth. When Colin gripped the handle, too, the door opened easily. “Mr. Dunworthy,” he whispered, beckoning, and pushed him and then Polly through into the dark vestibule.