Connie Willis - All Clear

Were they next? Or would it be Private Hardy or Alf and Binnie or Sir Godfrey? Or Mrs. Sentry, or the FANYs at Woolwich and Croydon whom Polly had wangled supplies from, or the little boy who’d shhed her at the pantomime? Or the strangers who had the misfortune of being next to them in Townsend Brothers or the tube station or Trafalgar Square when the continuum—flailing, sparking, melting down like an incendiary and burning through space and time—killed her or Mr.

Dunworthy or Eileen?

She thought suddenly of Ethel in the book department at Townsend Brothers who had been killed by shrapnel. Had Polly killed her by talking to her about ABCs and planespotting?

She sat there in the cellar all night, till Alf opened the door and shouted, “Polly’s down ’ere!”

She went upstairs. Eileen was cooking breakfast, and Binnie was setting the table. “What was you doin’ down there?” Alf asked. “I didn’t hear no raid.”

“I was thinking,” Polly said.

“Thinkin’!” he hooted.

“Hush,” Eileen said, and to Polly, “You mustn’t worry. Mr. Hobbe’s going to be all right. His fever’s down.”

She sent the children to their room to get dressed. “You didn’t get taken on as an air-raid warden, did you? Or with a rescue crew? Things were so muddled last night, I forgot to ask.”

Muddled.

“No,” she said.

“Are you going to try again today?” Eileen asked.

You don’t understand, Polly thought. I’m the last person anyone would want on a rescue squad, pulling people out of the rubble, administering first aid.

She thought suddenly of the man in Croydon whose legs she’d tourniqueted. She’d been afraid he’d died, but what if he should have died there in the rubble, and her saving him had only doomed him to a worse, lingering death in hospital? And what if the tying of that tourniquet had been the act that had tipped the balance and brought about all their downfalls?

No, it couldn’t have been because her drop had still opened, had still let her go back to Oxford and come through again to finish the deed. But it might have helped, might have jostled the china ever closer to the edge.

“I mean, you’ve seen with Mr. Dunworthy how deadly being out on the streets at night is,” Eileen was saying. “Working as a warden is far too dangerous.”

“You’re right, it is. I’m not going to do it.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Eileen said, and flung her arms around Polly. “I’ve been so worried! Now, sit down and have a cup of tea, and I’ll take Mr. Dun—Mr.

Hobbe—his.”

Polly obeyed.

Eileen was gone several minutes. When she came back out, she whispered, “I asked him about the Alhambra, and he said it wasn’t hit, that only two theaters were damaged during the Blitz, and neither one was during a performance.”

I’m going to have to tell her, Polly thought despairingly. But not yet. I can’t bear it. And Alf and Binnie had come back into the kitchen and were arguing over who got to feed the parrot. “Mind the gap, Binnie!” it squawked.

“My name’s not Binnie,” Binnie said. “It’s Vera. Like Vera Lynn.”

Alf, his mouth full, said, “I thought it was Rapunzel.”

“Rapunzel was a noddlehead,” Binnie said. She held out a bit of bread to the parrot. “Say, ‘Mind the gap, Vera.’ ”

We’ll have to send them away, Polly thought. It’s the only way to keep them safe. They’ll have to be evacuated, and it was almost funny.

“Why’d Rapunzel just sit there in that tower?” Binnie asked. “Whyn’t she cut off ’er ’air and climb down it? That’s what I’d do. I wouldn’t stay in any old tower.”

In the bustle of clearing the table, gathering the children’s lessons up, and retying Binnie’s hair ribbon, Polly had no chance to speak to Eileen alone.

“Alf, pull your socks up,” Eileen said, putting on her coat. “Binnie, stop that. Polly, can you go fetch the meat and eggs for Mr. Hobbe?” She handed her the order the doctor had written out. “And see if the butcher has a soup bone so we can make some broth.”

Polly promised to do that and to go fetch Mr. Dunworthy’s things from where he was staying. She dressed, did the washing up, and then, when she couldn’t put it off any longer, went in to see Mr. Dunworthy. He looked even frailer in the gray morning light. The skin over his cheekbones and at his temples was nearly translucent, but for the first time since she’d found him, he didn’t look like he had more bad news to tell her. “You look a bit better,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“I should be asking you that,” he said.

She smiled wryly. “I’m still standing.”

“Like St. Paul’s.”

Exactly like St. Paul’s—battered, damaged, and looking out on a landscape of devastation.

“I had something else to say last night,” he said. “We don’t know for certain that the war was lost. There’s a possibility that the continuum may succeed in undoing the damage we’ve incurred.”

“Though it will have to kill us to do it,” she said.

But it was still better than the alternative. And her dying to stop Hitler from winning the war was no different from what tens of thousands of British soldiers and civilians had done, and they’d had no guarantee that they’d be successful either.

But at least they hadn’t had to worry about endangering everyone else in the foxhole or the shelter by their mere presence. “What about the others?” she asked him.

“The contemps we’ve interacted with?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Those factors that protected the continuum for so long—the ability to absorb and diminish and cancel out effects—may be factors in the correction as well.”

Translation: It might only have to kill a few of them.

“If we separate ourselves from them and don’t have any more contact, is there a chance that will keep them from being killed?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. Perhaps.” But there was not much hope in his voice. “It’s impossible to know how far the damage has spread and if alterations have already occurred that must be counteracted.”

Were Alf and Binnie supposed to have gone on the City of Benares and drowned? Or died along with their mother near Piccadilly Circus? And was Marjorie supposed to have died in the rubble and Private Hardy at Dunkirk and Stephen Lang on the way to London from Hendon Airfield? Or would Mrs. Hodbin have torn up the letter, Private Hardy have been picked up by another boat, the others have survived and gone on to do exactly what they did do? There was no possible way to tell.

But if we haven’t altered their lives already, Polly thought, then perhaps our staying away from them from now on can protect them from being caught within our deadly blast radius. Thank goodness we’re not at Mrs. Rickett’s anymore and not staying at Notting Hill Gate. And now that she was at ENSA, she had a perfect excuse for quitting Sir Godfrey’s troupe. She went and got the ration coupons and then the eggs and a quarter pound of beef, but no soup bone. The butcher hadn’t any. She had to settle for bouillon cubes.

She took them home, made Mr. Dunworthy a soft-boiled egg, and then set out again to fetch his things from a dreary, chill room in the only part of Carter Lane which hadn’t burned on the twenty-ninth. She’d intended to go tell Mr. Humphreys that she’d got Mr. Hobbe safely home, but now she didn’t dare risk it. He had been nothing but kind to her. He didn’t deserve …

She stopped short on the pavement. That was what Mr. Dunworthy had started to say last night when he’d refused to go to St. Bart’s, that the nurses had been very kind to him and that they didn’t deserve to die for it.

She debated giving a message for Mr. Humphreys to the volunteer at the desk, but she wasn’t even sure she had any business being in St. Paul’s. Yet she didn’t want Mr. Humphreys tracking Mr. Dunworthy down out of concern. She settled for giving a note addressed to Mr. Humphreys to a woman going inside and asking her to give it to the verger. And what if even that moment-long encounter was enough to require a correction? Or her conversation with Hattie when she went to the Alhambra that afternoon?