Connie Willis - All Clear

“I didn’t make it in time,” he said.

Eileen shook her head. “The dean said he left an hour ago. He—”

“The door’s locked,” the man said, clutching at Mike’s sleeve. “What do I do now?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said, and sat down on the wet steps next to the girls. “I don’t know.”

God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

—CHRISTMAS MESSAGE OUTSIDE THE RUINS OF

ALL HALLOWS BARKING CHURCH, ON WHICH

SOMEONE HAD UNDERLINED THE WORD

“NOTHING” IN SOOT

St. Paul’s Cathedral—30 December 1940

POLLY SAT THERE ON THE BROAD STEPS OF ST. PAUL’S, looking at Mike standing below her and Eileen. He looked as exhausted as she felt. He was in his shirtsleeves, and there was a bandage on his arm. She wondered what had happened to his coat.

“Bartholomew’s gone?” he repeated blankly, looking from her to Eileen. “Maybe we can still catch him. He can’t have got far in this mess. If we can find out which way he went—”

Polly shook her head. “He took the tube.”

“From Blackfriars? Maybe he’s not to the station yet. If we hurry—”

“From St. Paul’s.”

“St. Paul’s? You mean the drop’s here at the cathedral?”

“No, he left from St. Paul’s Station.”

“But last night it wasn’t—”

“It’s up and running this morning,” Eileen said.

“I bet we could catch ’im,” Alf said, and Binnie nodded.

“We’re quick.” They stood up as if ready to dart off after him.

Mike looked over at them and then back at Polly. “Do you think—?”

She shook her head. “He’d been gone nearly an hour when we got here.”

“Did you ask the fire watch if Bartholomew said where he was going?” Mike asked. “I mean, not where he was really going. But he might have told them where his—”

“Yes,” she said, cutting him off before he could say “his drop” and looking pointedly over at Alf and Binnie, who were all ears. “He told them his uncle in Wales had sent for him.”

“Did you ask them what else he said? He might have dropped some hint about where he was really going—”

Where he was going was Oxford. “Mike—”

“Did you ask them which train he was taking? That’ll at least tell us which direction he was heading.”

No, it wouldn’t. St. Paul’s was only two stops away from access to every other line on the Underground. “Mike, it’s no use. He’s gone,” Polly said, but he was already striding up the steps and into St. Paul’s.

Polly scrambled to her feet and went inside after him. He was already halfway to the transept, his footsteps echoing in the deserted nave. She called, “Half the fire watch has already gone home, and the other half’s gone to bed. Mike!” She ran after him.

It was last night all over again—her running endlessly after a man she couldn’t catch—and she was suddenly too weary to try. She stopped and walked back down the dank, smoky nave through the charred scraps of paper that lay everywhere, the flaming orders of worship that had danced through the air last night. Now they littered the floor like black leaves.

There was still a puddle of water from where she had doused the burning postcards, and next to it lay the half-burnt print of The Light of the World. Polly bent to pick it up. The left-hand side of the picture where the door was supposed to be was blackened and curled, and when Polly touched it, that half crumbled into flakes and fell away, so that Christ’s hand was raised to knock on nothingness.

Polly looked at the print a long moment, then laid it gently on the desk and went outside and sat down on the broad step next to Eileen and the children, and in a moment Mike came back outside and sat down between them. “Bartholomew didn’t say anything to anybody,” he said. “He just left. I am so sorry, Polly.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You tried your—”

“I beg your pardon,” the man whom she’d seen speak to Mike before as he got out of the taxi said. He was standing at the foot of the steps, looking beseechingly up at Mike. “Should I go home, do you think? Or should I wait here?”

“The place he worked was destroyed last night,” Mike explained to them.

“What do I do now?” the man said.

I have no idea, Polly thought.

“Stay here,” Mike said decisively. “The owners of the business are bound to show up sooner or later.”

But what if they don’t come till it’s too late? Polly thought.

“Thank you,” the man said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

They watched him go back down the steps and across the puddle-filled courtyard. “Helpful,” Mike said bitterly. “It’s my fault we didn’t find Bartholomew, you know. If I’d asked you about him and about St. Paul’s nearly burning down instead of assuming he’d been here at the end of the Blitz. Or seen that damned wall coming down—”

“What wall?” Eileen asked.

He told them how he’d been knocked unconscious and woken up in St. Bart’s.

“You were there?” Eileen said incredulously. “At St. Bart’s?”

We were all at St. Bart’s last night, Polly thought.

The injured firewatcher might have been in the bed next to the unconscious Mike. Mike might have been only inches away from Mr. Bartholomew, as she had been The injured firewatcher might have been in the bed next to the unconscious Mike. Mike might have been only inches away from Mr. Bartholomew, as she had been up in the rafters of St. Paul’s, separated from him by only a wall. They had been so close.

But everything had conspired against them, from Theodore’s refusal to leave the pantomime to the blocked streets which had kept them from getting here before he left this morning. It was as if the entire space-time continuum had been engaged in an elaborate plot to keep them from reaching John Bartholomew. Just as it had kept her and Eileen from finding each other last autumn. “How all occasions do inform against us,” she thought.

“It isn’t your fault, it’s mine,” Eileen was saying. “If I’d listened to Mr. Bartholomew’s lecture, I’d have known he was still here, and we could have found him weeks ago. And now it’s too late—”

“ ’Ow come you can’t go to Wales an’ get ’im?” Alf asked.

“ ’Cause they don’t know where ’e is in Wales,” Binnie said. “And you ’eard ’im.” She pointed at Mike. “ ‘E ain’t really goin’ there. ’E only said ’e was,” and Polly was glad she’d stopped Mike from saying any more than he already had. They’d obviously been listening to every word the three of them had said. And she was almost certain they were the two delinquents she’d seen stealing the picnic basket that night in Holborn, though she hadn’t said anything to Eileen.

“Well, if ’e ain’t in Wales, then where’s ’e gone?” Alf was asking Eileen.

“We don’t know,” Polly said. “He didn’t tell us.”

“I bet I could find ’im.”

“How?” Binnie said. “You don’t even know what ’e looks like, you dunderpate.”

“I ain’t a dunderpate. Take it back,” Alf said, and dove at Binnie. She darted away down the steps and across the forecourt, Alf in hot pursuit.

Eileen was still blaming herself. “I should simply have told the incident officer I couldn’t take the ambulance to St. Bart’s.”

And I shouldn’t have rushed off to St. Bart’s without finding out the injured firewatcher’s name and who’d gone with him to hospital, Polly thought. If she hadn’t, she’d have found out what Mr. Humphreys had told her a few minutes ago, that he’d helped Bartholomew put the injured man in the ambulance and then gone back up to the roofs. She could’ve told Mr. Humphreys to tell Mr. Bartholomew not to leave till they got there.