Fire Watch

by Connie Willis

  “Looking for a weapon?” Langby said, so clearly it was hard to believe he was hurt at all. “Why not just leave me here? A bit of overexposure and I’d be done for by morning. Or would you rather do your dirty work in private?”

  I stood up and yelled to the men on the roof above us. One of them shone a pocket torch down at us, but its light didn’t reach.

  “Is he dead?” somebody shouted down to me.

  “Send for an ambulance,” I said. “He’s been burned.”

  I helped Langby up, trying to support his back without touching the burn. He staggered a little and then leaned against the wall, watching me as I tried to bury the incendiary, using a piece of the planking as a scoop. The rope came down and I tied Langby to it. He had not spoken since I helped him up. He let me tie the rope around his waist, still looking steadily at me. “I should have let you smother in the crypt,” he said.

  He stood leaning easily, almost relaxed against the wooden supports, his hands holding him up. I put his hands on the slack rope and wrapped it once around them for the grip I knew he didn’t have. “I’ve been onto you since that day in the Gallery. I knew you weren’t afraid of heights. You came down here without any fear of heights when you thought I’d ruined your precious plans. What was it? An attack of conscience? Kneeling there like a baby, whining, ‘What have we done? What have we done?’ You made me sick. But you know what gave you away first? The cat. Everybody knows cats hate water. Everybody but a dirty Nazi spy.”

  There was a tug on the rope. “Come ahead,” I said, and the rope tautened.

  “That WVS tart? Was she a spy, too? Supposed to meet you in Marble Arch? Telling me it was going to be bombed. You’re a rotten spy, Bartholomew. Your friends already blew it up in September. It’s open again.”

  The rope jerked suddenly and began to lift Langby. He twisted his hands to get a better grip. His right shoulder scraped the wall. I put up my hands and pushed him gently so that his left side was to the wall. “You’re making a big mistake, you know,” he said. “You should have killed me. I’ll tell.”

  I stood in the darkness, waiting for the rope. Langby was unconscious when he reached the roof. I walked past the fire watch to the dome and down to the crypt.

  This morning the letter from my uncle came and with it a five-pound note.

  December 31—Two of Dunworthy’s flunkies met me in St. John’s Wood to tell me I was late for my exams. I did not even protest. I shuffled obediently after them without even considering how unfair it was to give an exam to one of the walking dead. I had not slept in how long? Since yesterday when I went to find Enola. I had not slept in a hundred years.

  Dunworthy was in the Examination Buildings, blinking at me. One of the flunkies handed me a test paper and the other one called time. I turned the paper over and left an oily smudge from the ointment on my burns. I stared uncomprehendingly at them. I had grabbed at the incendiary when I turned Langby over, but these burns were on the backs of my hands. The answer came to me suddenly in Langby’s unyielding voice. “They’re rope burns, you fool. Don’t they teach you Nazi spies the proper way to come up a rope?”

  I looked down at the test. It read, “Number of incendiaries that fell on St. Paul’s—Number of land mines—Number of high explosive bombs—Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries land mines—high explosive bombs—Number of volunteers on first watch—second watch Casualties Fatalities—” The questions made no sense. There was only a short space, long enough for the writing of a number, after any of the questions. Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries. How would I ever fit what I knew into that narrow space? Where were the questions about Enola and Langby and the cat?

  I went up to Dunworthy’s desk. “St. Paul’s almost burned down last night,” I said. “What kind of questions are these?”

  “You should be answering questions, Mr. Bartholomew, not asking them.”

  “There aren’t any questions about the people,” I said. The outer casing of my anger began to melt.

  “Of course there are,” Dunworthy said, flipping to the second page of the test. “Number of casualties, 1940. Blast, shrapnel, other.”

  “Other?” I said. At any moment the roof would collapse on me in a shower of plaster dust and fury “Other? Langby put out a fire with his own body. Enola has a cold that keeps getting worse. The cat …” I snatched the paper back from him and scrawled “one cat” in the narrow space next to “blast.” “Don’t you care about them at all?”

  “They’re important from a statistical point of view,” he said, “but as individuals they are hardly relevant to the course of history.”

  My reflexes were shot. It was amazing to me that Dunworthy’s were almost as slow. I grazed the side of his jaw and knocked his glasses off. “Of course they’re relevant!” I shouted. “They are the history, not all these bloody numbers!”

  The reflexes of the flunkies were very fast. They did not let me start another swing at him before they had me by both arms and were hauling me out of the room.

  “They’re back there in the past with nobody to save them. They can’t see their hands in front of their faces and there are bombs falling down on them and you tell me they aren’t important? You call that being an historian?”

  The flunkies dragged me out the door and down the hall. “Langby saved St. Paul’s. How much more important can a person get? You’re no historian! You’re nothing but a—” I wanted to call him a terrible name, but the only curses I could summon up were Langby’s. “You’re nothing but a dirty Nazi spy!” I bellowed. “You’re nothing but a lazy bourgeois tart!”

  They dumped me on my hands and knees outside the door and slammed it in my face. “I wouldn’t be an historian if you paid me!” I shouted, and went to see the fire watch stone.

  December 31—I am having to write this in bits and pieces. My hands are in pretty bad shape, and Dunworthy’s boys didn’t help matters much. Kivrin comes in periodically wearing her St. Joan look, and smears so much salve on my hands that I can’t hold a pencil.

  St. Paul’s Station is not there, of course, so I got out at Holbom and walked, thinking about my last meeting with Dean Matthews on the morning after the burning of the city. This morning.

  “I understand you saved Langby’s life,” he said. “I also understand that between you, you saved St. Paul’s last night.”

  I showed him the letter from my uncle and he stared at it as if he could not think what it was. “Nothing stays saved forever,” he said, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to tell me Langby had died. “We shall have to keep on saving St. Paul’s until Hitler decides to bomb something else.”

  The raids on London are almost over, I wanted to tell him. He’ll start bombing the countryside in a matter of weeks. Canterbury, Bath, aiming always at the cathedrals. You and St. Paul’s will both outlast the war and live to dedicate the fire watch stone.

  “I am hopeful, though,” he said. “I think the worst is over.”

  “Yes, sir.” I thought of the stone, its letters still readable after all this time. No, sir, the worst is not over.

  I managed to keep my bearings almost to the top of Ludgate Hill. Then I lost my way completely, wandering about like a man in a graveyard. I had not remembered that the rubble looked so much like the white plaster dust Langby had tried to dig me out of. I could not find the stone anywhere. In the end I nearly fell over it, jumping back as if I had stepped on a body.

  It is all that’s left. Hiroshima is supposed to have had a handful of untouched trees at ground zero. Denver the capitol steps. Neither of them says, “Remember men and women of St. Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.” The grace of God.

  Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,” but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St. Paul’s eve
ry time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. Which sounds to me like a course description for History Practicum 401. What a fine time to discover what historians are for when I have tossed my chance for being one out the windows as easily as they tossed the pinpoint bomb in. No, sir, the worst is not over.

  There are flash burns on the stone, where legend says the Dean of St. Paul’s was kneeling when the bomb went off. Totally apocryphal, of course, since the front door is hardly an appropriate place for prayers. It is more likely the shadow of a tourist who wandered in to ask the whereabouts of the Windmill Theatre, or the imprint of a girl bringing a volunteer his muffler. Or a cat.

  Nothing is saved forever, Dean Matthews, and I knew that when I walked in the west doors that first day, blinking into the gloom, but it is pretty bad nevertheless. Standing here knee-deep in rubble out of which I will not be able to dig any folding chairs or friends, knowing that Langby died thinking I was a Nazi spy, knowing that Enola came one day and I wasn’t there. It’s pretty bad.

  But it is not as bad as it could be. They are both dead, and Dean Matthews too, but they died without knowing what I knew all along, what sent me to my knees in the Whispering Gallery, sick with grief and guilt: that in the end none of us saved St. Paul’s. And Langby cannot turn to me, stunned and sick at heart, and say, “Who did this? Your friends the Nazis?” And I would have to say, “No, the communists.” That would be the worst.

  I have come back to the room and let Kivrin smear more salve on my hands. She wants me to get some sleep. I know I should pack and get gone. It will be humiliating to have them come and throw me out, but I do not have the strength to fight her. She looks so much like Enola.

  January 1—I have apparently slept not only through the night, but through the morning mail drop as well. When I woke up just now, I found Kivrin sitting on the end of the bed holding an envelope. “Your grades came,” she said.

  I put my arm over my eyes. “They can be marvelously efficient when they want to, can’t they?”

  “Yes,” Kivrin said.

  “Well, let’s see it,” I said, sitting up. “How long do I have before they come and throw me out?”

  She handed the flimsy computer envelope to me. I tore it along the perforation. “Wait,” she said. “Before you open it, I want to say something.” She put her hand gently on my burns. “You’re wrong about the history department. They’re very good.”

  It was not exactly what I expected her to say. “Good is not the word I’d use to describe Dunworthy,” I said and yanked the inside slip free.

  Kivrin’s look did not change, not even when I sat there with the printout on my knees where she could surely see it.

  “Well,” I said.

  The slip was hand-signed by the esteemed Dunworthy I have taken a first. With honors.

  January 2—Two things came in the mail today. One was Kivrin’s assignment. The history department thinks of everything, even to keeping her here long enough to nursemaid me, even to coming up with a prefabricated trial by fire to send their history majors through.

  I think I wanted to believe that was what they had done, Enola and Langby only hired actors, the cat a clever android with its clockwork innards taken out for the final effect, not so much because I wanted to believe Dunworthy was not good at all, but because then I would not have this nagging pain at not knowing what had happened to them.

  “You said your practicum was England in 1400?” I said, watching her as suspiciously as I had watched Langby.

  “1349,” she said, and her face went slack with memory. “The plague year.”

  “My God,” I said. “How could they do that? The plague’s a ten.”

  “I have a natural immunity,” she said, and looked at her hands.

  Because I could not think of anything to say, I opened the other piece of mail. It was a report on Enola. Computer-printed, facts and dates and statistics, all the numbers the history department so dearly loves, but it told me what I thought I would have to go without knowing: that she had gotten over her cold and survived the Blitz. Young Tom had been killed in the Baedaker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2006, the year before they blew up St. Paul’s.

  I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of human kindness. They think of everything.

  Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in hospital next day, and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It seems to me that perhaps Langby is.

  January 3—I went to see Dunworthy today I don’t know what I intended to say—some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve in the fire watch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.

  But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright image of St. Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry that I broke your glasses, sir.”

  “How did you like St. Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.

  “I loved it, sir,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “So do I.”

  Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul’s at what is, like Langby like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

  Some story ideas are simply better than others, which is why they are stolen so often. Attending your own funeral is one of those ideas that must appeal to people on some deep and continuing level because I got the idea from Tom Sawyer by way of General Hospital, and who knows where else it had been.

  The day that Luke sneaked back to get something or other (he was on the run from somebody or other) and found his funeral in full swing, I thought, Oh, for heaven’s sake, now they’re ripping off Mark Twain! and almost immediately began to consider the possibility of stealing the idea myself. I kept thinking of the horrified expression on Aunt Polly’s face in that moment before she realized Tom was really alive. She looked, I thought, watching Luke listen smirkingly to his own eulogies, as if she had seen a ghost.

  Service for the Burial of the Dead

  I should not have come, Anne thought, clenching her gloved hands in her lap. She had come early so that she could sit well to the back, but not so early that people would talk. She had hesitated at the back of the church for only a moment, to take a deep breath and put her head up proudly, and in that moment old Mr. Finn had swooped down on her, taken her arm, and led her to the empty pew behind the one tied off with black ribbon for the mourning family.

  I should not have come alone, she thought. I should have made my father come. Even as she thought it she saw her father’s red and angry face as she tied on her black bonnet.

  “You are going to the funeral, then?” he had said.

  “Yes, Father.” She had buttoned her gray pelisse over her gray silk, tied her chip bonnet under her chin.

  “And not even wear black?”

  She had calmly put on her gloves. “My black cloak is ruined,” she had said, thinking of his face that night when she came in, the black wool cloak soaked with frozen rain, the hem of her black merino heavy with mud. He had thought s
he’d killed Elliott even then, before the news that he was missing, before they had started dragging the river. He still believed it and would have shown it in his red, guilty face when he walked her down the aisle at the funeral. But he would at least have walked her to a safe corner, protecting her from the talk of the townspeople, if not from their thoughts. Perhaps they thought she had murdered Elliott, too, or perhaps they only thought she had no pride, and that at least was true.

  She had lost what little pride she had that night, waiting on the island for Elliott. She had not even thought what it would mean when she agreed to meet him. She had thought only of wearing her warmest clothes against the November rain, the black merino, the black wool cloak, her sturdy boots. Only after she had stood in the rain for hours under the oak tree, its bare branches no protection from the wind or the approaching dark, had she thought what a terrible thing she was doing. When he comes, I must say no, she thought, the winter rain dripping off her ruined bonnet.

  He had no intention of throwing Victoria over as he had thrown her over. Victoria was small and fair and had a wealthy father. The marriage was set for Christmas. Victoria’s brother, now at sea, had been sent for to be best man at the wedding. Elliott had not even been kind enough to tell her of his engagement. Her father had told her. “No,” she had said, and thought as she said it that it must be true because she had never, in all the time she had loved Elliott, been able to say no to him.

  Was that why she had agreed to meet him on the island? Because she still could not say “no,” even when it meant her downfall? It did not matter. He had not come. She had waited nearly all night, and when she crept home, chilled to the bone, she knew she would not have been able to say no if he had. She could summon no anger at him, and when they found his boat, no grief. She did not feel anything and that had helped her to walk with old Mr. Finn to the front of the church, her eyes dry, no guilty color in her cheeks.