Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

A communist. I should have known. I should have known.

December 22 —Double watches again. I have not had any sleep and I am getting very unsteady on my feet. I nearly pitched into the chasm this morning, only saved myself by dropping to my knees. My endorphin levels are fluctuating wildly, and I know I must get some sleep soon or I will become one of Langby’s walking dead, but I am afraid to leave him alone on the roofs, alone in the church with his communist party leader, alone anywhere. I have taken to watching him when he sleeps.

If I could just get hold of an artificial, I think I could induce a trance in spite of my poor condition. But I cannot even go out to a pub. Langby is on the roofs constantly, waiting for his chance. When Enola comes again, I must convince her to get the brandy for me. There are only a few days left.

December 28—Enola came this morning while I was on the west porch, picking up the Christmas tree. It has been knocked over three nights running by concussion. I righted the tree and was bending down to pick up the scattered tinsel when Enola appeared suddenly out of the fog like some cheerful saint. She stooped quickly and kissed me on the cheek. Then she straightened up, her nose red from her perennial cold, and handed me a box wrapped in colored paper.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. “Go on, then, open it. It’s a gift.”

My reflexes are almost totally gone. I knew the box was far too shallow for a bottle of brandy. Nevertheless, I believed she had remembered, had brought me my salvation. “You darling,” I said, and tore it open.

It was a muffler. Gray wool. I stared at it for fully half a minute without realizing what it was. “Where’s the brandy?” I said.

She looked shocked. Her nose got redder and her eyes started to blur. “You need this more. You haven’t any clothing coupons and you have to be outside all the time. It’s been so dreadful cold.”

“I needed the brandy,” I said angrily.

“I was only trying to be kind,” she started, and I cut her off.

“Kind?” I said. “I asked you for brandy. I don’t recall ever saying I needed a muffler.” I shoved it back at her and began untangling a string of colored lights that had shattered when the tree fell.

She got that same holy martyr look Kivrin is so wonderful at. “I worry about you all the time up here,” she said in a rush. “They’re trying for St. Paul’s, you know. And it’s so close to the river. I didn’t think you should be drinking. I… it’s a crime when they’re trying so hard to kill us all that you won’t take care of yourself. It’s like you’re in it with them. I worry someday I’ll come up to St. Paul’s and you won’t be here.”

“Well, and what exactly am I supposed to do with a muffler? Hold it over my head when they drop the bombs?”

She turned and ran, disappearing into the gray fog before she had gone down two steps. I started after her, still holding the string of broken lights, tripped over it, and fell almost all the way to the bottom of the steps.

Langby picked me up. “You’re off watches,” he said grimly.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I can. I don’t want any walking dead on the roofs with me.”

I let him lead me down here to the crypt, make me a cup of tea, put me to bed, all very solicitous. No indication that this is what he has been waiting for. I will lie here till the sirens go. Once I am on the roofs he will not be able to send me back without seeming suspicious. Do you know what he said before he left, asbestos coat and rubber boots, the dedicated fire watcher? “I want you to get some sleep.” As if I could sleep with Langby on the roofs. I would be burned alive.

December 30— The sirens woke me yesterday, and old Bence-Jones said, “That should have done you some good. You’ve slept the clock round.”

“What day is it?” I said, going for my boots.

“The twenty-ninth,” he said, and as I dived for the door, “No need to hurry. They’re late tonight. Maybe they won’t come at all. That’d be a blessing, that would. The tide’s out.”

I stopped by the door to the stairs, holding on to the cool stone. “Is St. Paul’s all right?”

“She’s still standing,” he said. “Have a bad dream?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the bad dreams of all the past weeks—the dead cat in my arms in St. John’s Wood, Langby with his parcel and his Worker under his arm, the fire watch stone garishly lit by Christ’s lantern. Then I remembered I had not dreamed at all. I had slept the kind of sleep I had prayed for, the kind of sleep that would help me remember.

Then I remembered. Not St. Paul’s, burned to the ground by the communists. A headline from the dailies. “Marble Arch hit. Eighteen killed by blast.” The date was not clear except for the year. 1940. There were exactly two more days left in 1940. I grabbed my coat and muffler and ran up the stairs and across the marble floor.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Langby shouted to me. I couldn’t see him.

“I have to save Enola,” I said, and my voice echoed in the dark sanctuary. “They’re going to bomb Marble Arch.”

“You can’t leave now,” he shouted after me, standing where the fire watch stone would be. “The tide’s out. You dirty…”

I didn’t hear the rest of it. I had already flung myself down the steps and into a taxi. It took almost all the money I had, the money I had so carefully hoarded for the trip back to St. John’s Wood. Shelling started while we were still in Oxford Street, and the driver refused to go any farther. He let me out into pitch-blackness, and I saw I would never make it in time.

Blast. Enola crumpled on the stairway down to the Tube, her open-toed shoes still on her feet, not a mark on her. And when I try to lift her, jelly under the skin. I would have to wrap her in the muffler she gave me, because I was too late. I had gone back a hundred years to be too late to save her.

I ran the last blocks, guided by the gun emplacement that had to be in Hyde Park, and skidded down the steps into Marble Arch. The woman in the ticket booth took my last shilling for a ticket to St. Paul’s Station. I stuck it in my pocket and raced toward the stairs.

“No running,” she said placidly. “To your left, please.” The door to the right was blocked off by wooden barricades, the metal gates beyond pulled to and chained. The board with names on it for the stations was X-ed with tape, and a new sign that read ALL TRAINS was nailed to the barricade, pointing left.

Enola was not on the stopped escalators or sitting against the wall in the hallway. I came to the first stairway and could not get through. A family had set out, just where I wanted to step, a communal tea of bread and butter, a little pot of jam sealed with waxed paper, and a kettle on a ring like the one Langby and I had rescued out of the rubble, all of it spread on a cloth embroidered at the corners with flowers. I stood staring down at the layered tea, spread like a waterfall down the steps.

“I… Marble Arch…” I said. Another twenty killed by flying tiles. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“We’ve as much right as anyone,” the man said belligerently, “and who are you to tell us to move on?”

A woman lifting saucers out of a cardboard box looked up at me, frightened. The kettle began to whistle.

“It’s you that should move on,” the man said. “Go on, then.” He stood off to one side so I could pass. I edged past the embroidered cloth apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for someone. On the platform.”

“You’ll never find her in there, mate,” the man said, thumbing in that direction. I hurried past him, nearly stepping on the tea cloth, and rounded the corner into hell.