Connie Willis - All Clear

“I’ll find them, I promise,” Colin said, and put his arms around him.

Good, he thought. I won’t have to die alone.

“Why the bloody hell doesn’t the drop open?” Colin said angrily.

“It’s broken. We’re all trapped here in the Blitz.”

“Stay with me, Davies. We’ll be there any second. We’ll get you to hospital, and they’ll get you all fixed up, they’ll get you a new leg, and I’ll go fetch Eileen and Polly. They’ll be there before you come out of surgery. They’ll be so glad to see you. You’re a hero, you know.”

“I know,” he said. “I saved Cess’s life.” And Chasuble’s. And Jonathan’s and the Commander’s. And that dog’s. He wondered what had happened to it, and whether it had helped to win the war.

“Don’t quit on me, Davies,” Colin said. “You can do this.”

Ernest shook his head. “Kiss me, Hardy,” he murmured.

“What?”

He bent nearer, and Ernest saw that it was Hardy. “I’m glad I saved your life,” he said. “No matter what.”

“Finally!” Hardy said, “Thank God!” and scooped him up in his arms.

Just like at St. Paul’s, Ernest thought, the captain dying in Honour’s arms, though he’d never seen it—the sandbags had hidden it. And the captain hadn’t seen it either. He’d died the moment after he’d tied the boats together. He’d never known whether they’d won or not.

“Did we?” he asked Colin.

And he must only be a boy after all because he was crying. “Don’t do this, Davies,” he pleaded. “Not now. Michael!”

No, not Michael. Or Mike Davis. Or Ernest Worthing. And not Shackleton. “That’s not my name,” he said, and tried to tell him what it was, but the blood was everywhere, in his mouth, his ears, his eyes, so he couldn’t hear Colin, he couldn’t see the drop opening. “It’s Faulknor.”

Your courage

Your cheerfulness

Your resolution

Will bring us victory.

—GOVERNMENT POSTER,

1939

London—Spring 1941

THE SEDATIVE THE NURSE GAVE POLLY MUST HAVE BEEN morphine because her sleep was filled with muddy, mazelike dreams. She was trying to get to the drop, which lay just on the other side of the peeling black door, but it had already shut, the train was already pulling out, and this was the wrong platform. She had to get to Paddington in time for the 11:19 to Backbury, and the troupe was blocking her way. She had to step over them—Marjorie and the woman at the Works Board and the ARP warden who had caught her that first night and taken her to St. George’s. And Fairchild and the librarian at Holborn and Mrs. Brightford, sitting against the wall reading to Trot.

“And the bad fairy said to Sleeping Beauty,” Mrs. Brightford read, “ ‘You will prick your finger on a spindle and die.’ ”

“No, she won’t,” Trot said. “The good fairy will fix it.”

“She can’t fix it,” Alf said contemptuously. “They got here too late.”

“She can so,” Trot retorted, going very red in the face. “It says so in the story. Can’t she, Polly?”

“I don’t know,” Polly said. “I fear they’ll only make things worse.”

“Hush,” Mrs. Brightford said. “And then the good fairy said, ‘The spell is already cast, and I cannot undo it, but I will do what I can.’ ” And Polly wanted to stay and listen to the end of the story, but she was late, she had to get to Dulwich before the twenty-ninth. She ran through tunnels and corridors and up stairs which were sometimes in Holborn and sometimes in Padgett’s, and she couldn’t run very fast because she was carrying the answer that she had puzzled out, clenched in her fist like a subway token.

She didn’t dare let go of it. She had to hold it tight against her stomach till she had the string wrapped round it, till she had all the ends tucked in. She had been late getting to Dulwich and missed hearing the first V-1s, so she hadn’t known what they sounded like, so she had knocked Talbot into the gutter and wrenched her knee and had had to drive Stephen, and if she hadn’t, he and Talbot would have been killed in Tottenham Court Road, and he wouldn’t have come up with the idea of tipping the V-1s …

But it wasn’t a V-1, it was a siren, and Polly had to go out onstage and bend over and flip up her skirt, but her knickers didn’t say, “Air Raid in Progress,” they said

“Wrong Way Round,” and when she tried to look over her shoulder to read the message, a V-1 came over, rattling like a motorcycle, and she had to run downstairs to the shelter in Padgett’s basement, holding the answer tight in her hand, the answer that made it all make sense—Eileen’s driving lessons and Stephen and the Wren and Alf and Binnie’s parrot and the library at Holborn.

But she wasn’t in Holborn, she was in St. Paul’s, trying to find a way up to the roofs. But she couldn’t. It was too dark. She needed a torch.

Mike had it, he was swinging it back and forth, trying to see what was fouling the propeller. “Shine it over here,” she said, but Mike said, “I can’t. There’s no time.

The U-boats will be here any minute.” And when she looked up at the boat looming above them, she saw it wasn’t the Lady Jane, it was the City of Benares.

“Get the lantern!” Mike shouted.

“What lantern?”

“In the painting,” he said, and she ran back down the curving staircase, past the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, her hands cupped protectively around the answer, through the north transept and under the dome to the south aisle …

And full tilt into Alf and Binnie, colliding with them, her hands reaching out instinctively to break her fall, opening, spilling all of it—the slippage and Agatha Christie and the Lady Jane and the air-raid warden and her bloomers—like pennies, like Crimson Caress lipstick onto the pavement and into the road. “Oh, no,” she said, bending to pick it up. “Oh, no.”

“Shh, it’s all right,” someone said, and she opened her eyes. A nurse in a wimple and a starched white apron was bending over her, taking her pulse. “You’re in hospital.”

“I lost—” Polly murmured.

“Whatever it is, you can find it later,” the nurse said. “You must try to sleep.”

“No,” Polly said, thinking, It had something to do with detective novels. And Sleeping Beauty. And a horse. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse …”

“I must see Sir Godfrey,” she said.

“Sir Godfrey?” the nurse said blankly, and Polly thought, They’ve taken him to some other hospital, like the man I tied the tourniquet on in Croydon. Or to the morgue.

He died on the way to hospital, Polly thought. I didn’t save his life after all.

But the nurse was saying, “It was lucky you found him in time. And lucky you knew what to do.”

But we weren’t lucky, Polly thought. I was late getting to Dulwich. Mike missed the bus to Dover. He missed Daphne in Saltram-on-Sea and had to follow her all the way to Manchester, and Eileen came to Townsend Brothers the one day I was gone. And the night of the twenty-ninth, everything had conspired against them—

the air-raid warden who stopped them just as they were going into St. Paul’s and the doctor who waylaid Eileen and the fires and falling walls and blocked-off streets.

And Alf and Binnie.

“Why is it everywhere I go there are horrible children?” Eileen had asked, but if it hadn’t been for the Hodbins, Eileen wouldn’t have survived after Mike died. And if she hadn’t insisted on taking them in, if they hadn’t insisted on bringing their parrot, Alf and Binnie wouldn’t have got them thrown out of the boardinghouse. They all might have died along with Mrs. Rickett.

“It’s lucky we got thrown out, ain’t it?” Alf had said, and Mr. Humphreys had said, “What luck you came to Saint Paul’s today. He’s here, the man I told you about.” And Mike had said, “It’s lucky that was the only available room in Bletchley, or I’d never have found out what happened to Gerald Phipps.”