Connie Willis - All Clear

Mr. Dunworthy nodded and started up the aisle toward the exit.

“Polly?” Colin said gently. “Ready?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go home,” and started up the aisle with him.

“Wait!” Sir Godfrey called. “I would speak with thee ere you go.”

Polly and Colin turned in the doorway and looked down at the stage. Sir Godfrey stood in front of the curtain, still in his Hitler uniform and his ridiculous mustache.

“My lord?” she said, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Colin, and he wasn’t Duke Orsino or even Crichton. He was Prospero, just as he had been that first night they had acted together in St. George’s cellar.

“ ‘I have given you here a third of mine own life,’ ” he said, “ ‘or that for which I live.’ ”

Colin nodded.

“ ‘I promise you calm seas,’ ” Sir Godfrey called, and raised his hands in benediction, “ ‘auspicious gales, and sail so expeditious that shall catch your royal fleet far off.’ ”

She lives. If it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR

Imperial War Museum, London—7 May 1995

I MANAGED TO COME THROUGH AND FIND POLLY AND MEROPE, Colin thought, but I came too late to rescue them. “I was too late, wasn’t I?” he asked Binnie, and, as if on cue, the sound effects of the bombs started in again.

“No,” Binnie said when they’d diminished to where she could be heard.

“What? I got Polly and Mr. Dunworthy out before their deadlines?”

“I don’t know. I know you left with them for the drop, and Mum—I mean, Eileen—said you must have got through because—”

“But if I left to take them to the drop, why didn’t Merope, I mean Eileen, go with us?”

“Because of us,” Binnie said. “Alf and me. She’d promised she wouldn’t leave us. And she needed to be here to tell you where Polly and Mr. Dunworthy were.”

And so she’d sacrificed herself and stayed behind. But there must be some other way, especially since she wasn’t the one who’d told him; Binnie was. But he could deal with that later. Just now, he needed to find out where they were.

“Binnie,” he said eagerly, “we’ve got to come up with times when they were together in one place. You said Eileen made the decision to stay—which means she must have been there as well—so it has to be a time when all three of them were together. Before the first of May. That’s when Mr. Dunworthy’s deadline is. I’m assuming the best time for them to be together is during a raid. Did they go to a tube shelter during the raids?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you need to tell me where they’re living and what times they’re likely to all be at home. I know about Mrs. Rickett’s. Are they still in Kensington? If they are, then that may mean the drop Polly used will open—”

Binnie was frowning at him.

“I know this was a long time ago,” he said, “and it’s difficult to remember exactly where they were at any given time, but this is critical. If you can’t remember an exact date, then if you can just tell me which tube shelter, I can look up the dates when there were raids and—”

She shook her head, still frowning.

“Why won’t that work?” he said. “Did they not always go to the tube station when there were raids?”

“It doesn’t matter whether they did or not,” Binnie said. “That isn’t where they were.”

“Where they—”

“When you came.” She smiled at his uncomprehending look. “You’re forgetting, this all happened already. Over fifty years ago. Mum stayed behind so she could be here to make it happen, to tell you where they were.” She smiled ruefully. “And when she couldn’t be—”

“She sent you.”

“Yes.”

“She told you who she was?” he said, trying to process all this.

“Yes, but we’d worked it out on our own ages before that. When we were at the manor, we followed her out to the drop.”

“You saw her go through?” The drop wasn’t supposed to have opened if anyone was nearby.

“No, but we saw her just after she’d come back, and there were lots of other clues, mistakes and things, and then when you came and took Polly and Mr.

Dunworthy, we were dead certain. Only there’s still a good deal we don’t know. Like why it took you so long to get here.”

“None of the drops in England in 1940 would open,” he said. “When Mr. Dunworthy didn’t return, we tried every possible temporal and spatial location, and nothing would work. At first, we thought it was every drop, but the ones in other places and times weren’t affected, just those in England and Scotland and the first three months of 1941. We could get a few drops to open after mid-March, but by then we had no idea where they were. Polly’d left Townsend Brothers, and they weren’t at Notting Hill Gate.”

“So you came here to find someone who might have known her, so they could tell you where she was,” Binnie said.

“Yes.” He didn’t mention all the months he’d spent searching National Service and Civil Defence records looking for their names after Michael had told him Polly and Eileen had been planning to sign up, or all the years before that that he’d spent sitting in libraries and newspaper morgues trying to find out if they were still alive, and calculating coordinates for drop after failed drop, and attempting to convince Badri and Linna that rescue was possible, and meeting with Dr. Ishiwaka and every other time-travel theorist he could corner, trying to find out what the bloody hell had gone wrong.

“Alf said he was certain it had happened at one of the anniversary celebrations,” Binnie was saying.

“Wait,” Colin said. “Didn’t Eileen tell you I’d be here today?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand,” Colin said. “Why not?”

“Because she didn’t know where you’d be. All she knew was that at some point she’d told you where they were, and that that was how you’d known where to come.”

“But—”

“She said she didn’t need to know, that she’d be able to find you because she had found you,” Binnie said, and smiled. “Mum was always rather an optimist. Even when she found out about the cancer, she told us, ‘You mustn’t worry. It will all come right in the end.’ When she died I was afraid something had gone wrong, but Alf said it couldn’t have because then you couldn’t have come, so it was up to us to make it happen.” She beamed at him. “And we did.”

“But I still don’t understand. How did you and your brother know I’d be here on this particular date?”

“We didn’t. We’ve been looking for you ever since Mum died.”

“Ever since—”

“Ever since—”

She nodded. “At first we concentrated on Notting Hill Gate Underground Station and Oxford Street, and, of course, Denewell Manor—it’s a school now—but it was too much territory to cover, even with Michael and Mary—”

“Who?”

“Michael’s my son, and Mary’s my sister—half-sister really, though I never think of her that way.”

“She’s Eileen’s daughter?”

“I’m sorry, I keep thinking you know all this. Mum—Eileen—married the—”

There was a loud screaming swish and the sound of an explosion. The shelter walls shook, and a bright white light flashed on, simulating the flash from the bomb. It went to yellow and then red, bathing the shelter and Binnie’s face in an eerie light.

“Eileen married—?” Colin prompted her, shouting over the noise.

Binnie didn’t answer. She was staring at him with an odd look on her face, as if she’d just realized something.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he said, wondering if the sounds had triggered some traumatic memory. “Are you all right?”