Connie Willis - All Clear

notice you—”

“Oh, you mustn’t worry yourself over that,” Mrs. Jolsom said, drying a cup and saucer and putting them away in the cupboard. “I only asked for that because of the boarders from the Park going off without bothering to notify me.” She folded the tea towel and hung it over the edge of the counter. “Or not coming at all, and me left holding the room for weeks. And do you know what the billeting officer said when I told him? He said he didn’t know anything about it. He even denied sending the letter!”

The letter. That day in the lab, when Phipps had returned from his drop, he’d said he’d sent the letter. Could it have been the letter reserving a place to stay? But he was supposed to have come through in the summer, not the fall.

You don’t know that, Mike thought. July was when the recon and prep was, not necessarily the assignment. Maybe that was why the first drop had been necessary

—because of the lodging shortage and the necessity of making arrangements months in advance. And if there’d been increased slippage on his drop, Mrs. Jolsom would have been left holding the room. Which was why she had the only vacancy in Bletchley.

I should have made that connection, Mike thought.

“Do you leave in the morning, Mr. Davis?” Mrs. Jolsom was asking.

No, tonight, he started to say, and then remembered there wasn’t a train to Banbury till morning. “Yes, but I need to go see Dr. Pritchard first, so I’ll probably be leaving before you’re up. Your boarder who didn’t show up, what was his—”

The doorbell rang. Jesus, Mike thought, it’s Tensing. I shouldn’t have underestimated him.

Mrs. Jolsom took off her apron and went to answer it. Mike tiptoed to the kitchen door and opened it a crack. A man’s voice, and Mrs. Jolsom answering him, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Mike heard the front door shut and moved away from the kitchen door. Mrs. Jolsom came in. “It was a young man looking for a room.”

What if it was Phipps? “Did he leave?” Mike asked, then ran to the door, opened it, and looked out, but he couldn’t see anyone on the blacked-out street. “What did he look like?” he asked Mrs. Jolsom, who’d followed him to the door.

“He was an older gentleman,” Mrs. Jolsom said, clearly taken aback. “Why?”

“I thought it might be a patient I met yesterday at Dr. Pritchard’s,” Mike said, cursing himself. Talk about behaving suspiciously. “I was going to tell him I could get out tonight so he could move in. I can go to a hotel.”

“I wouldn’t think of doing that to you, Mr. Davis,” she said, “and certainly not for someone who would come looking for a room this time of night. You stay as long as you like.” She started for the stairs. “Good night.”

Mike reached across and put his hand on the railing to stop her. “I just didn’t want to leave you stuck with a vacant room like that boarder of yours who didn’t show up—”

“Oh, you mustn’t worry about that, Mr. Davis.” She patted his hand. “I quite understand your needing to leave. Is it quite a serious surgery?”

If he said yes, she’d ask a bunch of worried questions, but if it wasn’t serious, then why was it so urgent? And either answer would get them back to the subject of her boarder who hadn’t showed up, and he had to know his name. Before the 11:10 train.

“I should imagine I’ll come through all right,” he said. “It’s funny the billeting officer making a mistake like that. They’re usually extremely efficient. You said the billeting officer said there’d been a miscommunication. Couldn’t you have got the dates wrong or—”

“I most certainly did not,” she said, bristling. “Miscommunication? The billeting officer wouldn’t even admit he’d sent me the letter, when his signature was right there on it.” She marched into the parlor and came back with a letter. “There’s his name, plain as day, Captain A. R. Eddington.”

She thrust the letter in Mike’s face. It read, “Billeting order for Professor Gerald Phipps, arriving 10 October 1940.”

You lived from day to day in the war … you might suddenly hear that someone you were very fond of had been killed.

—FANY AMBULANCE DRIVER

Dulwich—Summer 1944

FLIGHT OFFICER STEPHEN LANG TELEPHONED MARY NINETEEN times over the next two weeks. She instructed the other girls to tell him she was out on a run or fetching supplies. “Or tell him I was hit by a V-1,” she said to Talbot in exasperation when he rang up for the sixteenth time. “Tell him I’m dead.”

“I doubt that would stop him,” Talbot said. “You do realize you’re only making things worse, don’t you? There’s nothing a man finds so attractive as a woman who plays hard to get.”

“So you think I should go out with him? Fairchild’s my partner, and Stephen’s her true love. She’s been mad about him since she was six!”

“I’m only saying that the more you run, the more he’ll pursue you.”

“So what do you think I should do?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Mary had no idea either. She obviously couldn’t go out with him—just the fact that he wanted her to was killing poor Fairchild—and she didn’t dare talk to him on the telephone. But he refused to take no for an answer.

“I think you should go out with him, Triumph,” Parrish said, “and use the occasion to convince him Fairchild’s the one he should be going out with.”

Which had been a dreadful idea ever since the days of the American Pilgrims, when John Alden had attempted to persuade Priscilla Mullins to go out with Miles Standish, and Priscilla had said, “Speak for yourself, John.” The last thing she needed was for Stephen to say, “Speak for yourself, Isolde.”

She wondered if John Alden had been a time traveler, who’d then had no idea how to get out of the muck-up he was in. And it was a muck-up. Everyone at the post got involved, and Reed and Grenville were both furious with Mary. “I think it’s positively skunky to steal another girl’s man,” Grenville said, and when Mary attempted to explain, she added, “Well, you must have done something.”

“Look at her,” Reed whispered, glancing over at Fairchild. “She’s absolutely heartbroken.”

She was, though she hadn’t said a word of reproach to Mary. She hadn’t said anything to her. She was silent on their runs, except for saying, “I need a stretcher over here!” and “This one’s got internal injuries,” and at the post she kept carefully out of hearing of the telephone, but she was obviously suffering. And Mary was clearly responsible for that suffering, which meant either her being here had altered events, which was impossible—historians couldn’t do that—or that her coming between Fairchild and Stephen didn’t matter, that they wouldn’t have got together even if she hadn’t been here. Because Stephen had been killed.

Of course he’d been killed. He was not only tipping V-1s but living in the middle of Bomb Alley. And hundreds of thousands of charming young men just like him had been killed at Dunkirk and El Alamein and Normandy.

But it will kill Fairchild, she thought, and was afraid it might have done exactly that. She wouldn’t have been the first person in World War II to have lost someone and volunteered for dangerous duty. And Mary couldn’t help feeling that if Fairchild did that, it would have been her fault, that both their deaths would be on her head. If she hadn’t been here and pushed Talbot into the gutter, Talbot wouldn’t have wrenched her knee. She wouldn’t have had to substitute for her, and Stephen would never have come to the post.

Or perhaps he would have. Perhaps he’d have asked Talbot out to dinner, and exactly the same thing would have happened, with Talbot the villain. Or perhaps Talbot would have gone to that dance they never got to and met a GI who promised her nylons, and he’d made a date with Talbot for that day, and she’d asked Fairchild to drive to Hendon in her place. And she and Stephen had fallen in love on the way to London, and they’d have had a wartime wedding and lived happily ever after.