Connie Willis - All Clear

“A bit?” Mike said, laughing, but the fumes grew so overpowering they had to abandon the staircase and go sleep in the station, which was no warmer.

“We must get Mike a coat,” Eileen said on the way to work the next morning. “Perhaps there’ll be one marked down that we can buy.”

But they had no time to look amid the preparations for the New Year’s sales and then the sales themselves, which people flocked to in spite of the wretched weather. The next few days there was bone-chilling fog and almost constant sleet.

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Eileen asked as they hurried to Oxford Circus after work. “It means there won’t be any raids.”

It also meant that getting Mike a coat was more urgent than ever and that the benzene was increasingly overpowering when Eileen’s coat got wet. “Miss Snelgrove said the odor would fade,” Eileen said, “but it doesn’t seem to, does it?”

“No,” Polly said. It was a good thing there was a ban on smoking in the shelters. A stray flicked match and they’d both go up in flames.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about our having to volunteer,” Eileen said as they got on the train. “Perhaps I could volunteer to be an ambulance driver at St. Bart’s. When I took the ambulance back, Dr. Cross said if I hadn’t got those passengers to hospital when I did, they’d have died.”

“What passengers?”

Eileen told her about the unconscious ambulance driver and the Army lieutenant. Thank goodness Mike isn’t here to hear this, Polly thought. The last thing he needed was to begin worrying all over again about the possibility of their having altered the course of the war.

We couldn’t have, she told herself. We won the war. And the twenty-ninth went just like it was supposed to. But after Mike and Eileen were asleep, she stole away to look at a discarded newspaper and make certain.

The Guildhall had burned just as it had in the historical records, and so had St. Bride’s and St. Mary-le-Bow. But All Hallows by the Tower had burned, too. She’d thought it had been only partially destroyed. And the Evening Standard said the Germans had dropped fifteen thousand incendiaries instead of eleven thousand.

But those could easily be errors in reporting, she thought, crawling back under Eileen’s reeking coat. We won the war. Eileen and I were both there on VE-Day.

But the discrepancies haunted her all the next day, and on her lunch break she bought the Herald and the Daily Mail to check and then went up to the book department to tell Eileen not to say anything to Mike about her possibly driving an ambulance for St. Bart’s. “Or about what Dr. Cross said. He’d think driving an ambulance was too dangerous.”

“That’s true,” Eileen said absently, much more concerned with getting Mike a coat.

“It’s supposed to snow tonight,” she said, and an hour later she came down to report that she’d persuaded her supervisor to let her leave an hour early to go to the Assistance Board. She asked what size coat Mike wore and said, “I’ll try to get you a hat as well, Polly. Tell Mrs. Rickett I won’t be in to supper. And you needn’t Assistance Board. She asked what size coat Mike wore and said, “I’ll try to get you a hat as well, Polly. Tell Mrs. Rickett I won’t be in to supper. And you needn’t wait for me. I’ll meet you at Notting Hill Gate. Have you a rehearsal tonight?”

“I’m not certain,” Polly said. “The troupe’s still arguing over what play to do next.”

And when she arrived, she found them discussing whether to do another play at all, given the fact that the intermittency of the raids and the winter weather were causing people to stay at home instead of using the shelter.

Including some of the troupe. Miss Laburnum was still recovering from her cold, and neither Sir Godfrey nor Mr. Simms was there. “We can’t put on a play without a cast,” Mr. Dorming grumbled. “Or an audience.”

“But if we did, that would encourage people to come to Notting Hill Gate,” the rector said. “We’d be doing our bit to help keep the populace safe.”

“Perhaps instead of a play, we could give a series of dramatic readings,” Miss Hibbard suggested. “That way we wouldn’t need everyone to be here.”

While they discussed possible ones to do, Polly was able to sneak away to the emergency staircase to see if Eileen was there yet. Halfway there she ran into Mike, who’d apparently just arrived. His hair and the pumpkin-orange scarf were wet, and he looked half frozen. Polly was glad Eileen had gone to get him a coat.

She told him where Eileen had gone. “She said she’d meet us here, but I don’t know if she’s arrived yet. I was just going to check the staircase.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. “You check the canteen, and I’ll meet you back at the escalator.”

Eileen wasn’t in the queue for the canteen. Polly went back down to the District Line to wait, standing in the southbound archway so she could spot Eileen and Mike but still duck back into the tunnel if any of the troupe descended the escalator. She didn’t want to get dragged off to the platform to discuss the merits of reading scenes from The Little Minister versus The Importance of Being Earnest.

But Mr. Simms was the only one she saw come down. He was carrying his dog, Nelson—who was afraid of the slatted escalator treads—in his arms.

There weren’t nearly as many people in the station as usual, and most of the ones who were there were carrying umbrellas, not bedrolls and picnic baskets. The rest of the shelterers must have decided, as Mr. Dorming had said, to take their chances that with the inclement weather there wouldn’t be a raid. She hoped they were right.

And that Eileen would be here soon. I hate not knowing when and where the bombs are going to fall, she thought.

Mike came back. “Eileen’s still not here?”

“No. Did you hear planes on your way to the station?”

“No.” He looked up the escalator. “Where did she say she was going for the …? Here she is.”

He pointed up at the top of the escalator and two men who’d just stepped on, and behind them, only her red hair visible, Eileen. Mike waved at her. “It looks like she was successful.”

Polly caught a glimpse of a gray tweed overcoat over Eileen’s arm and a woman’s dark blue hat in her other hand. Mike waved again.

Eileen saw them. She waved back with the blue hat.

Polly put her hand to her mouth.

“Looks like she was able to get a new coat, too,” Mike said.

Yes, Polly thought sickly, watching Eileen push past the two men and hurry down the moving steps toward them. She was wearing a bright green coat, and there was no mistaking it.

It was the coat she had been wearing in Trafalgar Square on VE-Day.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

—T. S. ELIOT, FOUR QUARTETS

Croydon—October 1944

MARY ROLLED DOWN THE WINDOW OF THE AMBULANCE and leaned out, straining to hear. She was certain she’d heard the rattling putt-putt of a V-1.

“A flying bomb?” Fairchild said. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Shh,” Mary ordered, but she couldn’t hear anything either. Could it have been another motorcycle or—?

An enormous boom shook the parked ambulance.

“Oh, my God,” Fairchild said. “That was nearly on top of us.” She leaned forward to turn the ignition and start the ambulance’s bells. “You don’t think it hit the ambulance post, do you?”

“No, it was nearer than that.”

It was. The rocket had fallen just off the high street they’d driven through only minutes before, smashing shops and stores. At the near end, an estate agent’s was still recognizable, and at the other the marquee of a cinema stood at an awkward angle. Fires burned here and there among the wreckage.