Connie Willis - All Clear

Polly and Sir Godfrey were the only ones in that scene, which meant she had no chance to look through Sir Godfrey’s Times for more airfields. And after rehearsal was over, when she asked Mrs. Brightford if she knew the names of any, Sir Godfrey said dryly, “Does this mean that you, too, will be abandoning us to ‘foot it featly here and there,’ Lady Mary?”

“No,” she said, hoping Holborn had had an ABC.

“It didn’t,” Eileen reported on her return. “And it only had two newspapers. The librarian said children keep taking them for the scrap-paper drive. But she had heaps of Agatha Christies.

“Look,” she said excitedly when they reached the emergency staircase, showing Polly a paperback book. “Murder in the Calais Coach!”

“Is that the one you thought had a personal ad in it?”

“No, that’s not by Agatha Christie, it’s by Dorothy Sayers. At least I think that’s what it was in. It might have been in Murder Must Advertise instead, and at any rate, the library didn’t have either one. But”—she produced another paperback—“it did have The ABC Murders.”

Which was not quite the same as an ABC. But, as Eileen said, it was full of place-names, which might help her remember. Eileen had also retrieved a wadded-up edition of the Daily Mirror from a dustbin.

She handed it to Polly, and Polly began looking through it for the names of airfields and any references to the afternoon raid. There was nothing about bombing—

which was a relief—but nothing about a false alarm either, or an aeroplane crash.

There was a story about the Battle of Britain, which said the RAF’s efforts had “changed the course of the war,” and which listed several airfields.

“Bicester?” Polly asked.

“No.”

“Broadwell?”

“No.”

It wasn’t Greenham Common or Grove or Bickmarsh either. “Have you had any luck remembering what else Gerald said?” Polly asked her.

“Nothing useful. I remember Linna was speaking on the phone to someone who was angry that the lab had changed the order of their French Revolution assignments.”

Let’s hope they’re not trapped there like we are here, Polly thought. They might end up being guillotined.

“I feel so stupid, not being able to remember,” Eileen said.

“You had no way of knowing it was important,” Polly reassured her. “We’ll find the name of the airfield tomorrow when I buy the ABC.”

“Or your drop might have opened,” Eileen said, cheering up. “And Mike will be waiting for us outside the station so we can all go through together.” But when the all clear went at five, he wasn’t there or at Mrs. Rickett’s.

“He very likely went back to Mrs. Leary’s to sleep when the raids ended,” Polly said.

“Should we go to the drop to check?” Eileen asked.

“No, there are too many people about in the morning. And we need to get you a ration book before I go to work, so you can begin eating at Mrs. Rickett’s.”

But applying for a new ration book required an identity card, which had also been in Eileen’s handbag, and since she’d been living in Stepney, she couldn’t apply for a new one at the local council office. She had to go to the one nearest to where she’d been living.

for a new one at the local council office. She had to go to the one nearest to where she’d been living.

“Which is where?” Polly asked the clerk at the Kensington council office.

“In Bethnal Green.”

“Bethnal Green?”

“Yes,” the clerk said, and told them the address.

“Are there raids in Bethnal Green today?” Eileen whispered as they left the counter.

“No,” Polly said.

“But you looked so—”

“I thought it might be where Gerald had said he was going. It begins with a B and has two words.”

“No, I’m almost certain the second word began with a P.”

Polly sent Eileen off and hurried to work and up to the book department, but the railway guide was no longer there. “A man from the Ministry of War came in last week and took it,” Ethel said.

“How all occasions do inform against us,” Polly thought. “Would you have a railway map, then?”

“No, he confiscated those as well. To keep them from falling into German hands. You know, in case of invasion. Though if they’ve got as far as Oxford Street, I shouldn’t think they’d need maps, would you?”

“No,” Polly said, but that wasn’t what worried her. What worried her was that the Ministry of War had come in last week. What did they know that had made them think invasion was coming now? Hitler had called off Operation Sea Lion at the end of September and postponed the invasion till spring.

What if he didn’t? Polly thought. What if this is a discrepancy?

It could be a disastrous one. By spring he’d decided to abandon the invasion altogether so he could concentrate on attacking Russia. If instead he invaded now …

“Are you all right?” Ethel asked her.

“Yes. If you haven’t any railway maps, what about an ordinary map of England?” she asked.

“No, he took those as well. I take it someone in your family’s a planespotter?”

“Yes,” Polly said, latching on to the explanation. “He’s twelve.”

“My little brother spends all his time scanning the skies for Heinkels and Stukas.”

“So does my nephew,” Polly said, and worked the conversation around to airfields. She got several more names from her and another one on her lunch break, though none had two words of which the second began with a P.

But when she returned to her counter, there was good news. Miss Snelgrove had told Doreen that Marjorie was being released from hospital and would be coming back to Townsend Brothers soon. Which meant this was just like her other assignment—it had looked like she’d altered events, but in the end things had worked out.

She should have had more faith in time-travel theory and in the complexity of a chaotic system.

And she should have remembered her history lessons. The code for the D-Day invasion had been broken by the Nazis, which could have been catastrophic for the Allies—but when the wireless operator had shown Field Marshal Rundstedt the Verlaine poem, he’d ignored it. “I hardly think the Allies will announce the invasion over the wireless,” he’d said.

And there were hundreds of examples like that scattered throughout history. “All’s well that ends well,” Polly thought, quoting Shakespeare and Sir Godfrey, and focused on quizzing Sarah Steinberg, whose brother was in the RAF, about airfields.

By the end of the day, she’d obtained a dozen names. She tried them out on Eileen when she came back from Bethnal Green, with no luck. Eileen hadn’t been able to get an identity card either. “The clerk in Bethnal Green told me I had to go to the National Registration office, but it isn’t open on Monday.”

“It’s probably just as well,” Polly said. “Mrs. Rickett serves trench pie on Monday night.”

“What’s that?”

“No one knows. Mr. Dorming’s convinced she makes it out of rats.”

“It can’t possibly be that bad,” Eileen said. “And at any rate, I don’t care. I can bear anything now that I’ve found you and Mike. I’d be willing to eat sawdust.”

“That would be Mrs. Rickett’s victory loaf, which we have on Thursdays,” Polly said. She tried to give Eileen some money for lunch, but she refused it.

“We’ll need all our money for our train fare to the airfield,” Eileen said, and went off to see if Selfridges had an ABC.

It didn’t. And neither did the Daily Herald’s office. When Polly got off work, Eileen and Mike were both waiting for her outside the staff entrance, and they reported no luck in finding one.