Connie Willis - All Clear

They weren’t booklets. They were only single sheets. The bloody paper shortage, she thought, wadding them up and pushing them into the space one after the other. She could smell the gas now.

“ ‘Are melted into air, into thin air,’ ” Sir Godfrey said, “ ‘and like …’ ” His voice trailed off.

“ ‘And like the baseless fabric,’ ” she prompted, stretching her arm out again, this time in front of her.

“ ‘And like the baseless fabric of this vision,’ ” Sir Godfrey said. “ ‘The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces …’ ”

The tips of her fingers touched something wide and flat. A piece of wood, or plaster. She leaned farther forward, stretching her arm out till it hurt, but it wasn’t enough to do more than touch it.

Of course not, she thought, trying from another angle. This is the correction.

She felt something shift under her hand. It was a snapped-off piece of one of the openwork chair supports, too small to cover the space even if it were solid. But large enough that it might bring the chunk of wood within reach.

She jabbed the end awkwardly into the wood, like a fork, and dragged it toward her till it was close enough to grasp. She let go of the support so she could grab the wood and then thought better of it and laid the support on Sir Godfrey’s chest while she picked it up.

“ ‘And like this unsubstantial pageant faded,’ ” he murmured, “ ‘leave not a wrack behind.’ ”

She shoved the wood up tight against the space the gas was issuing from. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it should stop most of the gas.

I hope, she thought. When she leaned down to jam it more tightly against the space, she could still smell gas. Which meant they must get out of here.

But at least she had bought them a bit of time. She resumed feeling about the space next to the hole, this time for another chair support or something else metal.

A piece of pipe, sticking out of the debris. The gas line? she wondered. She picked the openwork support up off Sir Godfrey’s chest.

He was still reciting Prospero’s speech. “ ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ ” he said, “ ‘and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ ”

She began banging on the pipe with her free hand as hard as she could. The metal made an unholy racket, loud even over the drone of the planes, which seemed to She began banging on the pipe with her free hand as hard as she could. The metal made an unholy racket, loud even over the drone of the planes, which seemed to be coming round again. In between clangs she shouted, “Help!” and “Inhere!”

“Someone must have heard that,” she said, pausing to rest a moment to make certain she was still pressing down on the compress hard enough. “Don’t you think, Sir Godfrey?”

He didn’t answer.

“Sir Godfrey!” she said urgently.

“Cheer up, my lady. Things …” His voice trailed into silence.

“Sir Godfrey!” she cried, casting desperately around for something, anything, to keep him talking. “You quoted a line about my saving your life. Which play was that?”

“Tell you after the all clear,” he said drowsily.

“No! Now. Which play was it?” She couldn’t reach his shoulder to shake it, didn’t dare move her hand from the compress. “One of Barrie’s?”

“Barrie’s? It was Twelfth Night. A knock on the door and there you were … shipwrecked … the letter …” His voice died away.

“What letter?” she said, even though there was no letter, he was making no sense, but she had to keep him talking. “Who was the letter from, Sir Godfrey?”

“An old friend … we’d played together in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when we were young …”

“Do Oberon’s speech,” she urged him. “ ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows,’ ” but he went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

“He wrote … to offer me the lead in a touring company,” he said after a minute, his voice drowsy and slow again, “… Bath … Bristol … but then you came …”

“And you didn’t go.”

“And leave fair Viola?” he murmured, and then, barely audible, “… you knew all your lines …”

She realized now that, even now—digging him out, trying to stop the blood—she had still harbored a secret hope that this was not part of the continuum’s attempts to correct the damage they’d done, that it was, as he’d said, the Luftwaffe’s fault and not hers. But he was supposed to have gone with the touring company, he was supposed to have left London. He’d stayed because of her.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

The stench of gas was growing stronger. She should see if she could find something else to stuff into the gap, a playbill or a newspaper. There were some in the lending library at Holborn. No, that was too far.

“… killed …,” Sir Godfrey said from a long way away. Her seat must be at the very back of the stalls, but that couldn’t be right, because he was saying, “Viola!

Awake, fair maid! I hear our rescuers at hand.”

“ ‘It is the nightingale,’ ” she murmured. “ ‘We shall sing like two birds i’ the cage—’ ”

“No,” Sir Godfrey said furiously. “It is the lark. The rescue team is coming—”

“They didn’t come in time,” she said, and laid her head on the rubble and composed herself to sleep, though her hand still pressed down firmly on the compress.

“Not in time.”

When I look back over the wartime years I cannot help feeling that time is an inadequate and ever capricious measure of their duration.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL,

9 NOVEMBER 1944

Imperial War Museum, London—7 May 1995

“WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING HERE, CONNOR?” THE woman said. He couldn’t see more than her outline in the pitch-darkness of the blackout exhibit, but it must be the fortyish-something woman whom he’d seen unloading things from her car and then going into the museum when he first arrived, though she was far too young to be Merope.

And Merope wouldn’t have called you Connor, he thought, so this woman’s clearly mistaken you for someone else. “I’m afraid you’ve—” he began, but she was plunging eagerly on.

“I saw you going into the exhibit, and I thought, that has to be Connor Cross.”

Oh, God, he thought. It’s Ann. “I’m sorry, you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said firmly, thanking God the room was dark. “I’m not—”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. “Ann Perry? We met at the British Library years ago. We were both doing research on British Intelligence in World War II. It was in 1976, just after they’d released all the classified documents. You were looking for an agent who’d rescued downed fliers—I don’t remember his name, Commander Something—”

Commander Harold.

“And I was researching the false articles they’d put in the newspapers to convince Hitler the invasion was going to be at Calais,” she said.

And you showed me an announcement in the Croydon Clarion Call in May 1944, he thought, which read, “Mr. and Mrs. James Townsend of Upper Notting announced the engagement of their daughter Polly to Flight Officer Colin Templer of the 21st Airborne Division, currently stationed in Kent. A late June wedding is planned.”

It’s because of you that I found Michael Davies, he thought, that I’m here looking for someone who worked with Polly.

But he couldn’t say that. “I—” he began, but she was still talking.

“I designed this exhibition for the museum,” she said, putting her arm in his. “I came this morning to make certain there weren’t any last-minute muck-ups, and I’m so glad I did. It gives me the chance to tell you that you were responsible for my deciding to specialize in the history of World War Two,” she went on, leading him along the white arrows toward the exit curtain. “I had the most awful crush on you, but you were completely oblivious.”