Connie Willis - All Clear

The air should have smelled of mud and fish, but it didn’t. It was cool and clean and smelled of rain. And once, lilacs. They walked quickly, silently, past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge and Cleopatra’s Needle. I’m seeing all this for the last time, Polly thought.

Mr. Dunworthy halted for a moment to look at the House of Commons, which would be gutted in May, and she wondered if he felt the same way. She had worried the long journey would be too much for him, but he showed no signs of tiring, though he still leaned on Colin’s arm, so she was concerned when Colin said, “We need to stop for a moment,” and led Mr. Dunworthy over to an iron bench set against the Embankment’s wall.

“I can go on,” Mr. Dunworthy protested.

Colin shook his head. “You sit down, too, Polly. Before we go through, I need to tell you something.”

And she knew that look. She had seen it before—on Miss Laburnum’s face the night Mike died, on Mr. Dunworthy’s when he told her he’d destroyed the future.

You’ll only be able to get one of us out, she thought. Or you won’t be able to go with us. She stood behind the bench, bracing herself.

“I didn’t save you by myself,” Colin said. “I had help. From Michael Davies.”

“One of the messages he put in the paper got through,” Polly said.

“Yes. It was a message he wrote in 1944—”

“1944?” Polly said. “But—”

“He wrote it while working with British Intelligence on Fortitude South. He wasn’t killed that night in Houndsditch. He faked his death so he could try to find Denys Atherton and get word to Oxford.”

Mike’s not dead. But that’s good news, she thought, and looked over at Mr. Dunworthy, but the expression on his face was the same as on Colin’s. Whatever the bad news was, Colin had already told him, and she thought suddenly of them standing there in the theater’s aisle when she came back from changing her clothes, and of Eileen’s wiping away tears.

“Tell me,” she said.

“It was a newspaper engagement notice.” He smiled wryly. “Announcing the engagement of Polly Townsend to Flight Officer Colin Templer. Davies’s job was writing false newspaper articles and personal ads and letters to the editor for the local newspapers, but some of them were also coded messages to us.”

Eileen was right, she thought. There were things going on behind the scenes that we knew nothing about.

“So I began looking for other messages,” Colin said. He told them about finding out everything he could about Fortitude South, discovering what name Davies had been using and where he’d been stationed.

“And you went through to get him,” Polly said. “But you weren’t in time.”

He nodded. “We tried, but we couldn’t get the drop to open till after—” He didn’t finish what he’d been going to say. “We were too late to save him,” he said instead.

But, as on that day in the pub with Mr. Dunworthy, that wasn’t all. There was still bad news to come.

And then she knew what it was. Had on some level always known. “He was killed by a V-1,” she said, and didn’t need to see Colin’s face to confirm it. “In a newspaper office in Croydon.”

“Yes.”

“I should have stayed with him,” she murmured. “I shouldn’t have gone off to help Paige. If I’d stayed with him, I could have—”

Colin shook his head. “Even we couldn’t save him. He was too badly injured. But the tourniquets you tied kept him alive long enough to tell us that you’d still been alive when he left in January of 1941 and that Eileen was with you.”

So Colin had gone to find Eileen after the war, and she’d told him where they were. Mike had got them out, just as he’d promised he would. But at what a cost!

“I should have known it was him,” she said.

Colin shook his head. “He was doing his best to keep you from finding out. His one thought was rescuing you. And if you hadn’t gone, I couldn’t have got him out of there and back to Oxford.”

You were the person in the ambulance from Brixton, Polly thought, looking at Colin. There was nothing of the impetuous, impossible boy she’d known in the man standing in front of her now, and nothing of the careless, charming Stephen Lang.

Colin sacrificed himself, too, she thought despairingly. How much of his youth, how many years, had he given up to come and find her, to fetch her home? I am so sorry. So sorry.

“Michael insisted on telling me everything he knew about where you were before he’d let me take him through to Oxford,” Colin said. “He was afraid once he got to hospital, he wouldn’t have the chance. He would have been so glad to know he got you out.” He smiled at her. “And if I’m going to do that, we’d better go.”

She nodded wearily. Colin helped Mr. Dunworthy get slowly to his feet, and they set off again, following the rose-colored river, guided by the drone of planes and the crump of bombs and the deadly, starry sparkle of incendiaries, till they came at last to Ludgate Hill. And there above them at the end of the street stood St. Paul’s, silver against the dark sky, the ruins all around it hidden by the darkness or transformed to enchanted gardens.

“It’s beautiful,” Colin breathed. “When I came here in the seventies, it was totally hidden by concrete buildings and car parks.”

“The seventies?”

“1976, actually,” he said. “The year they declassified the Fortitude South papers. I’d been here earlier—I mean, later—earlier and later—in the eighties. We couldn’t get anything before 1960 to open or anything after 1995, when we could have gone online, so I had to do it the hard way. I came here to search the newspaper archives and the war records for clues to what might have happened.”

Colin, who had wanted to go to the Crusades, spending—how long—in reading rooms and libraries and dusty newspaper morgues?

“And you found the engagement announcement,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Yes. I also found your death notice. And Polly’s.”

“Mine?” Polly said. “But I checked the Times and the Herald. It wasn’t—”

“It was in the Daily Express. It said you’d been killed at St. George’s, Kensington.”

How must Colin have felt, reading that, all alone and eighty years from home? And how many years had he sat there in archives, hunched over volumes of yellowing newspapers, over a microfilm reader?

“But you didn’t stop looking,” Polly said.

“No. I refused to believe it.”

Like Eileen, Polly thought.

“I had a bit more trouble hanging on to the belief that you were alive after Michael Davies told me you and Eileen were at Mrs. Rickett’s, and it turned out it had been bombed.” He smiled at her.

“But you didn’t stop looking.”

“No, and you weren’t dead. And neither was Mr. Dunworthy. At least for the moment. But the sooner I get you both back to Oxford, the better I’ll feel. Let’s go,”

he said, and hurried them toward St. Paul’s.

Halfway there Mr. Dunworthy stopped and stood there on the pavement, his head down.

Oh, no, Polly thought. Not now, not this close. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I ran into her here,” Mr. Dunworthy said, pointing down at the pavement. “The Wren.”

“Lieutenant Wendy Armitage,” Colin said. “Currently working at Bletchley Park. One of Dilly’s girls. She helped crack Ultra’s naval code. Come along. It’s nearly midnight.”

They hurried on up the hill. “We need to go in the north door,” Colin said, and started across the courtyard.

Mr. Dunworthy pulled him back. “The watch’ll see you. They’re still up on the roofs. This way,” he whispered, and led the way around the perimeter of the Mr. Dunworthy pulled him back. “The watch’ll see you. They’re still up on the roofs. This way,” he whispered, and led the way around the perimeter of the courtyard, keeping to the shadows, till they were even with the porch.