Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

Then I asked her whether she had gotten the brandy.

She looked down at her open-toed shoes and muttered unhappily, “I thought you’d forgotten all about that.”

I made up some story about the watch taking turns buying a bottle, and she seemed less unhappy, but I am not convinced she will not use this trip to Bath as an excuse to do nothing. I will have to leave St. Paul’s and buy it myself, and I don’t dare leave Langby alone in the church. I made her promise to bring the brandy today before she leaves. But she is still not back, and the sirens have already gone.

November 26—No Enola, and she said their train left at noon. I suppose I should be grateful that at least she is safely out of London. Maybe in Bath she will be able to get over her cold.

Tonight one of the ARP girls breezed in to borrow half our cots and tell us about a mess over in the East End where a surface shelter was hit. Four dead, twelve wounded. “At least it wasn’t one of the tube shelters!” she said. “Then you’d see a real mess, wouldn’t you?”

November 30— I dreamed I took the cat to St. John’s Wood. “Is this a rescue mission?” Dunworthy said.

“No, sir,” I said proudly. “I know what I was supposed to find in my practicum. The perfect survivor. Tough and resourceful and selfish. This is the only one I could find. I had to kill Langby, you know, to keep him from burning down St. Paul’s. Enola’s brother has gone to Bath, and the others will never make it. Enola wears open-toed shoes in the winter and sleeps in the tubes and puts her hair up on metal pins so it will curl. She cannot possibly survive the Blitz.”

Dunworthy said, “Perhaps you should have rescued her instead. What did you say her name was?”

“Kivrin,” I said, and woke up cold and shivering.

December 5 —I dreamed Langby had the pinpoint bomb. He carried it under his arm like a brown-paper parcel, coming out of St. Paul’s Station and up Ludgate Hill to the west doors.

“This is not fair,” I said, barring his way with my arm. “There is no fire watch on duty.”

He clutched the bomb to his chest like a pillow. “That is your fault,” he said, and before I could get to my stirrup pump and bucket, he tossed it in the door.

The pinpoint was not even invented until the end of the twentieth century, and it was another ten years before the dispossessed communists got hold of it and turned it into something that could be carried under your arm. A parcel that could blow a quarter-mile of the City into oblivion. Thank God that is one dream that cannot come true.

It was a sunlit morning in the dream, and this morning when I came off watch the sun was shining for the first time in weeks. I went down to the crypt and then came up again, making the rounds of the roofs twice more, then of the steps and the grounds and all the treacherous alleyways between where an incendiary could be missed. I felt better after that, but when I got to sleep I dreamed again, this time of fire and Langby watching it, smiling.

December 15 —I found the cat this morning. Heavy raids last night, but most of them over toward Canning Town and nothing on the roofs to speak of. Nevertheless the cat was quite dead. I found him lying on the steps this morning when I made my own private rounds. Concussion. There was not a mark on him anywhere except the white blackout patch on his throat, but when I picked him up, he was all jelly under the skin.

I could not think what to do with him. I thought for one mad moment of asking Matthews if I could bury him in the crypt. Honorable death in war or something. Trafalgar, Waterloo, London, died in battle. I ended by wrapping him in my muffler and taking him down Ludgate Hill to a building that had been bombed out and burying him in the rubble. It will do no good. The rubble will be no protection from dogs or rats, and I shall never get another muffler. I have gone through nearly all of Uncle’s money.

I should not be sitting here. I haven’t checked the alleyways or the rest of the steps, and there might be a dud or a delayed incendiary or something that I missed.

When I came here, I thought of myself as the noble rescuer, the savior of the past. I am not doing very well at the job. At least Enola is out of it. I wish there were some way I could send St. Paul’s to Bath for safekeeping. There were hardly any raids last night. Bence-Jones said cats can survive anything. What if he was coming to get me, to show me the way home? All the bombs were over Canning Town.

December 16 —Enola has been back a week. Seeing her, standing on the west steps where I found the cat, sleeping in Marble Arch and not safe at all, was more than I could absorb. “I thought you were in Bath,” I said stupidly.

“My aunt said she’d take Tom but not me as well. She’s got a houseful of evacuated children, and what a noisy lot. Where is your muffler?” she said. “It’s dreadful cold up here on the hill.”

“I…” I said, unable to answer, “I lost it.”

“You’ll never get another one,” she said. “They’re going to start rationing clothes. And wool, too. You’ll never get another one like that.”

“I know,” I said, blinking at her.

“Good things just thrown away,” she said. “It’s absolutely criminal, that’s what it is.”

I don’t think I said anything to that, just turned and walked away with my head down, looking for bombs and dead animals.

December 20 —Langby isn’t a Nazi. He’s a communist. I can hardly write this. A communist.

One of the chars found The Worker wedged behind a pillar and brought it down to the crypt as we were coming off the first watch.

“Bloody communists,” Bence-Jones said. “Helping Hitler, they are. Talking against the king, stirring up trouble in the shelters. Traitors, that’s what they are.”

“They love England same as you,” the char said.

“They don’t love nobody but themselves, bloody selfish lot. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they were ringing Hitler up on the telephone,” Bence-Jones said. “ ’Ello, Adolf, here’s where to drop the bombs.”

The kettle on the gas ring whistled. The char stood up and poured the hot water into a chipped teapot, then sat back down. “Just because they speak their minds don’t mean they’d burn down old St. Paul’s, does it now?”

“Of course not,” Langby said, coming down the stairs. He sat down and pulled off his boots, stretching his feet in their wool socks. “Who wouldn’t burn down St. Paul’s?”

“The communists,” Bence-Jones said, looking straight at him, and I wondered if he suspected Langby, too.

Langby never batted an eye. “I wouldn’t worry about them if I were you,” he said. “It’s the jerries that are doing their bloody best to burn her down tonight. Six incendiaries so far, and one almost went into that great hole over the choir.” He held out his cup to the char, and she poured him a cup of tea.

I wanted to kill him, smashing him to dust and rubble on the floor of the crypt while Bence-Jones and the char looked on in helpless surprise, shouting warnings to them and the rest of the watch. “Do you know what the communists did?” I wanted to shout. “Do you? We have to stop him.” I even stood up and started toward him as he sat with his feet stretched out before him and his asbestos coat still over his shoulders.

And then the thought of the Gallery drenched in gold, the communist coming out of the tube station with the package so casually under his arm, made me sick with the same staggering vertigo of guilt and helplessness, and I sat back down on the edge of my cot and tried to think what to do.

They do not realize the danger. Even Bence-Jones, for all his talk of traitors, thinks they are capable only of talking against the king. They do not know, cannot know, what the communists will become. Stalin is an ally. Communists mean Russia. They have never heard of the USSR or Karinsky or the New Russia or any of the things that will make “communist” into a synonym for “monster.” They will never know it. By the time the communists become what they became, there will be no fire watch. Only I know what it means to hear the name “communist” uttered here, so carelessly, in St. Paul’s.