Connie Willis - All Clear

The orderly arrived with a wheelchair to take Mary to X-ray. “When you come again, bring my bag,” she told Camberley. “It’s in the ambulance.”

On the way to the X-ray she looked for a telephone box. There was one just outside the ward. Good. And luckily, their beds were just inside the ward’s doors. As soon as she got her bag, she’d sneak out and ring up Croydon and ask them to go check the incident again. But when she got back, Fairchild was crying.

Dread gripped her. “Did they find him?” Mary asked.

Fairchild shook her head, unable to speak for the tears spilling down her cheeks.

“What is it?” Mary asked. Oh, God, it’s Stephen. “What happened?”

“Camberley …,” she said, and broke down.

“What about Camberley? Has something happened to her?”

“No,” she sobbed. “To the ambulance.”

“What ambulance? The one from Brixton?” Oh, God, they’d been transporting the man to hospital, and there’d been another rocket—

“No, our ambulance. Camberley said the V-2 hit it.”

Mary’s first thought was, My bag was in it. Now how will I get the coins to phone Croydon?

And then, That was the second explosion I heard, the fire I saw. It hadn’t been a gas main, after all. It had been the ambulance’s petrol tank blowing up.

If I hadn’t called Paige to leave the stretcher and bring the first-aid kit, she’d have still been in the ambulance when it hit. But if that was the case—

“We’d only just got it,” Fairchild said, sobbing, “and we’ll never be able to get another one.”

“Nonsense,” Mary said. “This is the Major we’re talking about. If anyone can talk HQ out of another ambulance, she can. I don’t suppose you’ve any money with you, have you?”

“Yes,” Fairchild said, wiping at her eyes. “At least, I do if my shoes made it with me to hospital. Mother insists I always carry a half crown in my shoe. She says I might get in a sticky situation and need to telephone.”

“And she was right,” Mary said, hoping the shoes were in the cupboard between their beds.

They were, and so was the half crown. Mary hid it under her pillow and got back into bed, and the next time the nurse left the ward, she tiptoed out to the telephone box. She rang up Brixton.

“We weren’t in Croydon last night,” they told her.

“But I saw—”

“It must have been Bethnal Green’s ambulance you saw.”

No, it wasn’t, Polly thought, but she rang them up. They hadn’t been at the incident either.

She rang up Croydon, and they promised to go recheck the area where the newspaper office had been, “though the rescue crew went over every inch of it,” the FANY said. Mary asked them what other ambulances had been at the incident, and she said, “Norbury,” but Norbury hadn’t transported anyone of that description either, or seen an ambulance from any other post.

“Except yours,” the Norbury FANY said. “It was difficult to miss. Could this man you’re looking for have been military? If he was, he might have been taken to Orpington.”

He’d been wearing civilian clothes, but she rang Orpington and then the morgue there and the one at St. Mark’s to make certain he hadn’t died on the way to hospital.

He hadn’t, which meant he had to have been taken to some other hospital. Unless he was still lying in the wrecked newspaper office.

She rang up Croydon again. “We looked where you told us to,” the FANY who answered assured her, “but there was no one there. He must have been taken to St.

Bart’s or Guy’s Hospital for some reason.”

And those were trunk calls, so she’d have to wait and ring them from the post. At any rate, she needed to get back before the nurse came looking for her. She stood up and opened the door of the telephone box.

Stephen was at the far end of the corridor, in front of the matron’s desk, shouting at the matron, who was attempting to block his way. “You’re not allowed on the floor, sir!” she said. “Visiting hours are over.”

“I don’t bloody care when visiting hours are. I intend to see Lieutenant Fairchild.”

Mary ducked quickly back into the telephone box and pulled the door shut behind her. She sat down, put the receiver to her ear, and turned toward the back wall so Stephen wouldn’t see her as he charged past with the nurse in pursuit.

Stephen wouldn’t see her as he charged past with the nurse in pursuit.

“This is most irregular,” she heard the nurse say, and then the double doors of the ward banged open and shut again. She waited for the sound of Stephen’s being ejected or of the nurse going angrily for help, but she couldn’t hear anything.

She ventured a cautious look out, then crept out and over to the doors to the ward and peeked through the small glass pane. Fairchild was sitting up in bed, looking very young and absolutely radiant. Stephen was sitting on the side of the bed.

Mary glanced back down the corridor and then pushed half the door open a crack so she could hear.

“I only just heard you were here,” Stephen was saying. “A chap I know who’s seeing a FANY in Croydon, Whitt’s his name, told me, and I came as soon as I could. Are you certain you’re all right, Paige?”

“Yes,” she said. “Did they tell you Mary was hurt, too? She has a concussion.”

Oh, don’t mention me, Mary thought, but he said, “Whitt told me. He said it was a miracle you weren’t killed when the V-2 hit.”

“Mary saved my life,” Fairchild said loyally. “If she hadn’t called to me to bring the medical kit, I’d still have been in the ambulance when it hit.”

“Remind me to thank her,” he said, gripping Paige’s hands. “When I think … I might have lost you …”

Mary eased the door silently shut and then stood there, staring wonderingly at it. She’d been so afraid that the reason the net had let her come through and inadvertently muck up their romance was that it had already been star-crossed. That Stephen—or Paige, or both of them—had been killed. It had never occurred to her that it might have been because they had got together in spite of what she’d done.

She should have known she couldn’t have affected events, even if it had seemed for a time that that was what she was doing. She should have known it would all come right in the end.

“And he simply barged in,” a woman’s voice said behind her. A nurse, coming round the corner of the corridor. And if they saw her, they’d take her back in to bed, to Paige and Stephen.

She dove for the telephone box, reaching to pull its door shut, but she needn’t have bothered. The nurse, flanked by the matron and the orderly, marched past without noticing her and pushed open the ward’s double doors.

“You mustn’t worry, darling,” she heard Stephen say. “I’ll see to it that no other rocket ever gets near you, if I have to shoot every last one of them down myself.”

“Officer Lang,” the matron said sternly. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“In a minute,” he said. “Paige, when I heard what had happened, all I could think of was what an idiot I’d been for not realizing how much you mean to me. You know that bit in the Bible about the scales falling from one’s eyes? Well, that was exactly it.”

The doors swung shut, cutting off the rest of what he was saying. Mary pulled the door of the telephone box shut and sat down to wait for Stephen to be escorted out so she could go back to the ward and her bed. Even if historians couldn’t affect events, she wasn’t going to run the risk of coming between them again and somehow mucking things up. Not when things had worked out so well for everyone.

The FANYs would all be delighted, and the Major would change the schedule back to the way it had been. Reed and Grenville would stop being angry with her, the discussion would go back to who had to wear the Yellow Peril and how to get Donald to propose to Maitland, and she could go back to doing what she’d come here to do: observe an ambulance post during the V-1 and V-2 attacks.