Oxford Time Travel 1 - Blackout

by Connie Willis

  “No, it’s only… I didn’t think we were doing Mary Rose.”

  “We’re not. We’re doing The Admirable Crichton. You are playing Lady Mary.”

  Sir Godfrey said, “Barrie was inordinately fond of the name Mary.”

  “Oh,” Polly said. “I’m not certain I should be given such a large part, with my mother and everything. If I were to have to leave suddenly…”

  “Miss Laburnum can act as your understudy,” Sir Godfrey said. “Go on, Mrs. Wyvern.”

  Mrs. Wyvern read the rest of the cast list. “Sir Godfrey has also kindly agreed to direct. The play is about Lord Loam, his three daughters, and their fiancés. They and their servants are shipwrecked—”

  Shipwrecked, Polly thought. How appropriate.

  “—on a desert island. And the only person among them with any survival skills at all is their butler, Crichton, so he becomes their leader. And then, when they’ve resigned themselves to remaining on the island forever, they’re rescued—”

  Resigning myself’s not an option, Polly thought. I can’t afford to sit here and wait for rescue. If I’m not off the island when my deadline arrives…

  But there was nothing to do but sit and wait for the retrieval team to come. Or for her drop to open. If the problem was a divergence point, then the drop might not have been damaged, and its failure to open was only temporary. If so, the retrieval team might not have come because it wasn’t necessary. She could go home on her own.

  So when the all clear went the next morning, Polly stayed behind, saying she wanted to learn her lines. She gave them half an hour to get home and then went to the drop.

  Workmen had begun clearing the site, so the passage was even more visible from Lampden Road, but there was no one about. The passage and the well looked just as they had the night she’d waited there except for a heavy coat of plaster dust, no doubt churned up by the work going on outside. There weren’t any footprints in the dust, so none of the men clearing the site had discovered the passage, which was lucky, but there weren’t any footprints on the steps leading down to the drop either, or any other sign that the team had come through the drop.

  Polly sat down on the steps to wait, staring at the peeling black door and thinking about The Light of the World. And about Marjorie. It seemed so unlike her to have left when she’d promised to cover for Polly. And without telling anyone. But perhaps she’d been afraid if she told people, they’d attempt to talk her out of it—or say she’d lost her nerve and was running away—so she’d waited till Polly was gone and the store was especially busy to slip away.

  If Merope had been in Backbury, you’d have disappeared just as precipitiously, Polly told herself. As you will now if your drop opens.

  But it didn’t. It didn’t open the next morning either, or that night. Which meant either the divergence point was still occurring, or her drop had been damaged after all. But even if it had and the retrieval team had to come through somewhere else, they might still come here looking for clues to her whereabouts.

  She scribbled her name and “Townsend Brothers” on a scrap of paper, folded it, and wedged it half under the peeling black door and, after work the next day, ran up to Alterations and stole a piece of French chalk.

  It rained that night, preventing her from going back to the drop, so she went to Holborn and, on the pretext of borrowing an Agatha Christie mystery from the lending library, told the frizzy-haired librarian all about the acting troupe and The Admirable Crichton, mentioning her own name twice and Notting Hill Gate three times. “I work at Townsend Brothers in the stockings department during the day,” she said, “so acting makes a nice change. You must come see our play. We’re on the northbound District Line platform.”

  She did the same thing at work the next day on her lunch and tea breaks. After work she wrote her address and Mrs. Rickett’s phone number on the back of her sales receipt book and, although it was still misting slightly, went to the drop.

  She’d forgotten about the men clearing the site. She had to crouch in the same alley in which she’d hidden from the warden till the last workman left before scrambling over what was left of the mound of rubble to the passage.

  The only footprints were the ones she’d made last time, and her note was still there. Polly retrieved it and took out the piece of chalk she’d stolen, then stood there a moment, looking at the door, deciding what message to leave. She couldn’t write what she wanted—“Help! I’m stranded in 1940. Come get me.” Just because the workmen hadn’t found the passage yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t.

  Instead, she chalked, “For a good time, ring Polly,” and Mrs. Rickett’s telephone number on the door, and down in the corner—where it would only be noticed by someone expressly looking for it—the barred-circle symbol of the Underground and “Notting Hill Gate.” She went out into the passage, drew an arrow on the barrel nearest the steps, then squatted down and wrote on the side facing the wall, “Polly Sebastian, Townsend Brothers,” and the address of the boardinghouse, and then sat down on the steps and waited a full hour, just in case the drop was operational now.

  It apparently wasn’t. She gave it ten more minutes and then went out to the alley, rubbed out her footprints, sprinkled plaster dust over the floor, and scrawled “Sebastian Was Here” on the warehouse wall above “London kan take it,” and went to Notting Hill Gate.

  Miss Laburnum met her at the top of the escalator. “Did the young woman find you?” she asked.

  Polly’s heart began to thud. “What young woman?”

  “She didn’t tell me her name. She said she’d come from Townsend Brothers. What do you think, white lace for Lady Mary in act one, and then blue for the shipwrecked scenes? I always think blue shows up nicely onstage—”

  “Where did she go?” Polly said, looking around at the crowd. “The young woman?”

  “Oh, dear, I don’t know. She… oh, there she is.”

  It was Doreen. She was red-faced and out of breath. “Oh, Polly,” she gasped, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It’s Marjorie. Her landlady telephoned Miss Snelgrove just after you left—Marjorie wasn’t in Bath after all.”

  “What do you mean?” Polly demanded. “Where was she?”

  “In Jermyn Street,” Doreen said, and burst into tears. “When it was bombed.”

  Danger: Land Mines

  —NOTICE ON ENGLISH BEACH, 1940

  War Emergency Hospital—September 1940

  HARDY STOOD THERE BY MIKE’S BED, BEAMING AT HIM. “You’ve got five hundred and nineteen lives saved to your credit,” he said, a grin on his freckled face. “That’s a war record to be proud of.”

  If I didn’t lose the war, Mike thought sickly. If one of those men it’s my fault were saved didn’t alter some critical event at El Alamein or D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge and change the course of the war. And it was ridiculous to think they hadn’t. The continuum might be able to cancel out one or two changes, but there was no way it could make up for 519 soldiers—no, 520, counting Hardy—being rescued who weren’t supposed to have been.

  “I didn’t mean to tire you out,” Hardy said uncertainly. “I only thought you might want cheering up. Can I do anything for you—?”

  You’ve already done more than enough, Mike wanted to snap at him, but it wasn’t Hardy’s fault. He’d been trying to do the right thing when he went back to Dunkirk. He’d had no way of knowing what the consequences would be.

  “I should let you get some rest,” Hardy said, but that was impossible. Mike had to get out of here. He had to get back to the drop and warn Oxford about what he’d done. If it wasn’t already too late, and that was why the retrieval team wasn’t here—because he’d lost the war and they didn’t exist.

  But Hardy had said he’d thought he was dead. Maybe when the retrieval team couldn’t find any trace of him, they’d concluded that, too. Or maybe they were still looking for him in London.

  And even if it was too late, he had to try. Which meant getting out of this d
amned hospital. But how? He couldn’t just sneak out. For one thing, he hadn’t mastered getting down stairs yet, and even if he could, he wouldn’t get two blocks in a bathrobe and slippers. Besides, he didn’t have any papers. Or money. At the very least, he had to have train fare to Dover and bus fare from there to Saltram-on-Sea. And shoes.

  And he had to convince the doctors to let him out of here, which meant he had to be walking better than he was now. Mike waited till after Hardy’d gone and the night nurse had made her rounds, then got up and practiced hobbling the length of the ward for the rest of the night, and then showed the doctor his progress.

  “Astonishing,” his doctor said, impressed. “You’ve made a much faster recovery than I thought possible. We should be able to operate immediately.”

  “Operate?”

  “Yes. To repair the tendon damage. We couldn’t till your original wound had healed.”

  “No,” Mike said. “No operation. I want to be discharged.”

  “I can understand your wanting to get back in the war,” the doctor said, “but you need to understand that without further operations, there’s very little chance you’ll regain the full use of your foot. You’re risking the possibility of being crippled for life.”

  And I’m risking a hell of a lot more than that if I stay here, Mike thought, and spent the next several days trying to convince the doctor to discharge him and practically going crazy with waiting. It didn’t help that there were sirens and the ever closer sound of bombs every night, and that Bevins kept sobbing, “It’s the invasion. You must get out immediately.”

  I’m trying, Mike thought, stuffing his pillow over his head.

  “Hitler’s coming!” Bevins shrieked. “He’ll be here any moment!” and it was hard to see how he wouldn’t. According to the papers, the Luftwaffe was hammering London every night. The Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, Marble Arch Underground station, and Buckingham Palace had all been hit, and thousands of people had already been killed.

  “It’s dreadful,” Mrs. Ives said when she brought him the Herald, whose headline read, “Nightly Raids Show No Signs of Letting Up—Londoners’ Resolve Unwavering.” “My neighbor was bombed out last night and—”

  “How do I go about getting new identity papers?” Mike interrupted. “Mine were destroyed at Dunkirk, and I don’t know what happened to my clothes.”

  “The Assistance Board is in charge of those things, I believe,” she said, and the next morning a young woman showed up at his bedside with a notebook and dozens of questions he didn’t know the answer to, from his passport number to his shoe size.

  “It’s changed recently,” he said. “Especially the right foot.”

  She ignored that. “When was your passport issued?”

  “All my papers were arranged for by my editor at my newspaper,” he said, hoping she’d assume things were done differently in the States.

  “What is your editor’s name?”

  “James Dunworthy. But he’s not there anymore. He’s on assignment in Egypt.”

  “And the name of your paper?”

  “The Omaha Observer,” he said, thinking, They’ll check and find there’s no such newspaper, no such passport, and I’ll find myself in the Tower of London with all the other enemy agents. But when she came back that afternoon, she had an emergency identity card, ration book, and a press pass.

  “You need to fill up this form and send it and a photograph to the U.S. embassy in London to get a new passport,” she said. “I’m afraid it may take several months. The war, you know.”

  Bless the war, he thought.

  “Until then, here is your temporary passport and visa.” She handed them to him. “I’ve left clothing for you with the matron.”

  And bless you.

  “Have you given any thought to where you’ll be going after you’re discharged?” she asked.

  He hadn’t thought of anything else. He needed to get back to Saltram-on-Sea and the drop, but he had to get there without any of the locals spotting him, especially Daphne. He couldn’t risk her getting more attached to him. She might turn down a date with the man she was supposed to marry, or feel jilted when he left and swear off reporters. Or Americans. Hundreds of English women had married American soldiers. Daphne might well have been one of them. And he’d already done enough damage as it was. He needed to get out of here without doing any more.

  He’d have to go to Dover and then take the bus down to Saltram-on-Sea and hope that the driver would be willing to let him out above the beach. And that he could manage the path down to the drop.

  “I thought I’d go to Dover,” he told the Assistance Board woman. “I have a reporter friend there I can stay with,” and the next morning she brought him a train ticket to Dover, a chit for lodging, and a five-pound note “to assist you till you get settled. Is there anything else you need?”

  “My hospital discharge papers,” he said, and she truly was a miracle worker—the doctor signed them that afternoon. Mike promptly rang for Sister Gabriel and asked for his clothes.

  “Not till Matron countersigns your papers,” she said.

  “When will that be?” he asked. Today was Wednesday and, as he knew from bitter experience, the bus to Saltram-on-Sea only ran on Tuesdays and Fridays—so he had to get there by Friday.

  “I’m not certain. Tomorrow, perhaps. You needn’t act so glad to leave us.”

  Sister Carmody was more sympathetic. “I know what it’s like to want to get back into the war and be forced to wait. I put in for duty in a field hospital months ago,” she said, and promised to talk to Matron.

  She was as good as her word. She was back in less than an hour with the package of clothes the Assistance Board had left. “You’re being discharged today,” she said. The package contained a brown tweed suit, white shirt, tie, cuff links, socks, underwear, wool overcoat, fedora, and shoes that were unbelievably painful to get onto his bad foot, let alone walk in.

  They’ll never let me out of here when they see me trying to hobble in these, Mike thought, and if the hospital hadn’t had a policy of taking departing patients downstairs in a wheelchair and putting them into a taxi, they wouldn’t have. As it was, Sister Carmody handed him a pair of crutches at the last moment. “Doctor’s orders,” she said. “He wants you to keep the weight off your foot as much as possible. And here’s something for the train,” she added, giving him a brown paper parcel. “From all of us. Do write and let us know how you’re doing.”

  “I will,” he lied, and told the taxi driver to take him to Victoria Station. On the way there, he opened the package. It was a book of crossword puzzles.

  He took the first train to Dover he could get and, as soon as he arrived, found a pawnbroker and hocked the cuff links and overcoat for four pounds. He would have sold the crutches, too, but they had come in handy, getting him a seat in the packed-solid train. Hopefully, they’d also persuade the bus driver to let him out at the beach.

  If he could find out where to catch the bus from. Nobody seemed to know, not even the stationmaster. Or the pawnbroker. He tried to think who would. The hotels should. He knew where they were, thanks to that map of Dover he’d memorized all those months ago in Oxford, but they were all too far from the pawnbroker’s to walk to with his bad foot. He hailed a taxi, wrestled his crutches into it, and got into the backseat. “Where to, mate?” the cabbie asked.

  “The Imperial Hotel,” Mike said. “No, wait.” The cabbie would know where the bus went from. “I need to catch the bus to Saltram-on-Sea.”

  “There’s no bus that goes there. Hasn’t been since June. The coast’s off-limits.”

  “Off-limits?”

  “Because of the invasion. It’s a restricted area. No civilians allowed, unless you live there or you have a pass.”

  Oh, Christ. “I’m a war correspondent,” he said, pulling out his press pass. “How much would you charge to take me to Saltram-on-Sea?”

  “Can’t, mate. I haven’t got the petrol coupons t
o go all that way, and even if I did, that coast road’s full of rocks. I’ve got to make these tires last the war.”

  “Then where can I hire a car?”

  The cabbie thought a moment and then said, “I know a garage that might have one,” and drove him there.

  The garage didn’t have any cars. They suggested “Noonan’s, just up the street.” It was considerably farther than that. By the time Mike reached it, he was really glad he hadn’t sold his crutches.

  The garageman wasn’t there. “You’ll find ’im at the pub,” a grease-covered boy of ten told him, but that was easier said than done. The pub was as crammed as the boat coming back from Dunkirk. There was no way to get through the crush on his crutches. Mike left them at the door and hobbled into the mass of workmen, soldiers, and fishermen. They were all arguing about the invasion. “It’ll ’appen this week,” a stout man with a red nose said.

  “No, not till they’ve softened up London a bit more,” his friend said. “It won’t be for at least another fortnight.”

  The man next to him nodded. “They’ll send in spies first to get the lay of the land.”

  Which one of these was the garage owner? “Excuse me,” Mike said. “I’m looking for the man who owns the garage next door. I need to hire a car.”

  “A car?” the stout man said. “’Aven’t you ’eard there’s a war on?”

  “What do you want to hire a car for?” his friend asked.

  “I need to drive down to Saltram-on-Sea.”

  “To do what?” he said suspiciously, and his friend asked, narrowing his eyes, “Where are you from?”

  Oh, Christ, they thought he was a spy. “The States,” he said.

  “A Yank?” the man snorted. “When are you lot going to get in the war?”

  And a tiny, timid-looking man in a bowler hat said belligerently, “What the bloody hell are you waiting for?”

  “If you could just point out the garage owner—”

  “’E’s over there, at the bar,” the stout man said, pointing. “’Arry! This Yank wants to talk to you about hirin’ a car.”