Connie Willis - All Clear

And there was no reason at all for her to feel so … bereft. It was ridiculous. She should be overjoyed. It must be some sort of delayed reaction to shock, like Paige’s being so upset over the ambulance. There was certainly no reason to cry. He was a lovely boy, and that crooked smile of his was admittedly devastating, but it could never have worked out. He had died before she was born.

“But not in the war,” she murmured, and then, thinking of the nine months and the thousands of V-1s and V-2s still to come, “I hope.”

Whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL,

26 May 1940

London—Winter 1941

THE VICAR ONLY HAD A FORTY-EIGHT-HOUR LEAVE, SO THEY held Mike’s memorial service the next afternoon. The troupe attended, and Mrs. Willett. She didn’t bring Theodore, who had a cold. He was staying with her neighbor.

Mrs. Leary came, and Mike’s editor and Miss Snelgrove and two men, awkward and stiff in black suits, who for one heart-jarring moment Polly thought might, against all odds, be the retrieval team, but who turned out to be two firemen whom Mike had rescued on the night of the twenty-ninth. They told Polly and Eileen that Mike had warned them when a wall was about to fall on them and saved their lives, and they were sorry that they hadn’t been there to save his.

Alf and Binnie came, too, bearing a bouquet of browning lilies Polly was convinced they’d stolen off someone’s grave. “We seen when it was. In the papers,”

Binnie said, looking around St. Paul’s in awe.

“Coo, this church is fancy!” Alf said. “There’s lots of nice things in ’ere.”

“Yes, and anyone who tries to steal one of them goes straight to the bad place,” Eileen said, sounding almost like her old self for the first time since Mike had died.

With the vicar’s arrival, she had abandoned her vigil at the foot of the escalator and had agreed to a memorial service. And when Miss Laburnum told her she simply couldn’t wear her green coat to it, she’d let Miss Laburnum lend her a much-too-large black coat.

Too willingly, Polly’d thought. Eileen was still quiet and withdrawn, and Polly feared she’d gone from denial to despair, though it was difficult not to, with Mike and Mr. Simms dead, and the gentle vicar going off to war. Eileen was right. He was almost certain to be killed.

Polly had wanted her to face reality, but now she was afraid that that reality might crush her, and she was glad to see some of her spirit return as she took charge of the Hodbins. “You must sit still and be absolutely quiet,” Eileen told them.

“We know,” Alf said, offended. “When—ow!” he wailed, and his voice echoed through the vast spaces of the cathedral. Mr. Humphreys came scurrying down the south aisle toward them.

“Binnie kicked me!”

“Kicking’s not allowed in church,” Mr. Goode said calmly.

“And neither is hitting each other with floral offerings,” Eileen said, extracting the lilies from them and handing them to the vicar.

She steered Alf and Binnie through the gate and into the chapel, told them to sit down and stay put, and then took Polly by the arm and led her out into the south aisle. “Alf and Binnie said you found them and told them about Mike.”

“Yes,” Polly said, afraid Eileen would consider that somehow a betrayal. “I thought they might be a comfort—”

“Where did you find them? In Whitechapel?”

“No, I didn’t know where they lived, so I looked in the tube stations.”

Eileen nodded as if that had confirmed something.

“We’re about to begin the service,” the vicar said, coming out.

“Yes, of course,” Eileen said.

They went back in, and Eileen sat down between Alf and Binnie, telling them they had to be quiet, and showing them the correct place in the prayer book, and Polly felt reassured all over again.

But after the service began, sitting there looking like a child in her too-large coat, Eileen got the odd, withdrawn look again, as if she were somewhere else altogether.

But we’re not, Polly thought, listening to the litany. We’re here in 1941 and Mike is dead. It seemed impossible that they were at his funeral—and it was his funeral, whether there was a body or not. No wonder Eileen had refused to believe it. It couldn’t possibly be true.

And not only had he died here, far from home, but he wasn’t even being laid to rest under his own name. It was Mike Davis, an American war correspondent from Omaha, Nebraska, who’d died, not historian Michael Davies, who had come to the past to study heroism and died there, abandoned, shipwrecked, trying to rescue his companions.

Polly had asked Mr. Goode to do the eulogy, remembering his sermon that day in Backbury. He spoke of Mike and his bravery at Dunkirk and then said, “We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings—”

And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought.

“—and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances”—here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs—“and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a soldier, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith.

“But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, though hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do ‘our bit.’ For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long.

“So it is with heaven,” the vicar said. “By our deeds here on earth, in this world so far from the one we long for, we make heaven possible. We not only live in the hope of heaven but, by each doing our bit, we bring it to pass.”

Mike did his bit, Polly thought. He did everything he could do to save us. Like Mr. Dunworthy. Like Colin.

Because sitting there watching the vicar, she was absolutely convinced that Colin had searched desperately for her, had turned Oxford and the lab upside down, trying to find out what had gone wrong, trying to come up with a plan to get them out.

She could see him demanding action, trying drop site after drop site for one which would open, scouring historical records and newspapers and books on time She could see him demanding action, trying drop site after drop site for one which would open, scouring historical records and newspapers and books on time travel, searching for clues to what had happened, refusing to give up. And if he had failed, if he had died before he was able to get them out, it wasn’t his fault any more than it was Mike’s. They had tried. They had done their bit.

As soon as the service was over, Mr. Humphreys dragged the vicar off to look at Captain Faulknor’s memorial, and Eileen hustled Alf and Binnie out of the chapel, leaving Polly to thank everyone for coming and to listen to their condolences.

“We must trust in God’s goodness,” Miss Hibbard said, patting her hand.

Mrs. Wyvern patted it, too. “God never sends us more than we can bear.”

“Everything which happens is part of God’s plan,” the rector intoned.