Blackout ac-1

by Connie Willis

  “As soon as the raid let up, they sent us here,” Lila said, “and the tube authorities wouldn’t let Nelson in-”

  “And Mr. Simms said he couldn’t just leave him outside in the middle of a raid,” Viv put in eagerly.

  “Sir Godfrey told the guard he was an official member of our acting troupe,” Mr. Simms said, “so then they had to let him in.” He patted Nelson’s head affectionately.

  “We were certain you’d be here,” Mrs. Brightford said.

  And she had been, but then she’d gone to Holborn to observe the shelterers.

  “Sir Godfrey went to Bayswater and Queensway stations to see if you might have been sent there,” Miss Hibbard said, “but you hadn’t.”

  “And then,” Miss Laburnum said, “when you didn’t come back to the boardinghouse the next morning…”

  The boardinghouse. She’d told herself the retrieval team hadn’t been able to find her because they’d been killed, that there’d been no one at Mrs. Rickett’s to tell them she lived there. But they weren’t dead. They would have been there to tell the retrieval team. So where were they?

  “We feared the worst,” Miss Laburnum said.

  So do I, Polly thought, and felt the panic begin to stir again.

  “We were afraid there were areas which hadn’t been cordoned off and you hadn’t seen the Danger-Keep Out notices in the dark,” the rector said, “and had come along to the church.”

  “And been killed,” Trot said.

  “Sir Godfrey insisted the rescue squad search through the wreckage of the entire church,” Lila said.

  That rescue shaft I saw wasn’t for them, Polly thought. It wasn’t for Sir Godfrey. They were looking for me.

  “They told him it was no use,” Viv said, “that the entire weight of the sanctuary and the roof had collapsed directly onto the shelter, and no one could have survived under there, but Sir Godfrey refused to give up. He was determined to find you, no matter how long it took.”

  Like Colin, Polly thought. The problem wasn’t only that the retrieval team hadn’t come, it was that Mr. Dunworthy and Colin hadn’t. They’d have moved heaven and earth to find her. “Mrs. Rickett, did anyone come to the boardinghouse looking for me?” she asked.

  “Everyone was looking for you,” Mrs. Rickett said reprovingly. “Sir Godfrey spent all day yesterday and today searching the hospitals for you. You could at least have attempted to notify us that you were unharmed.”

  “How could she have notified us?” Lila said. “She thought we were dead.”

  Mrs. Rickett glared at her.

  “What matters is that you’re alive and safe and we’re all here together,” the rector said in his peacemaking voice. “All’s well that ends well, isn’t that right, Sir Godfrey?”

  “Indeed. ‘And if it end so meet, the bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ Or to quote our fair Trot, ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’”

  “Except for the fact that Hitler was trying to kill them,” Mr. Dorming said dourly.

  And except for the fact that the retrieval team hasn’t been to the boarding-house. Where are they? What if something terrible’s happened? But she had thought something terrible had happened to the group, and here they all were, safe and sound.

  You were foolish to panic, she told herself. There could be lots of reasons why the retrieval team hasn’t found you yet. Perhaps they’d gone to the boardinghouse before Mrs. Rickett and the others had got back home. Or perhaps the streets around it had been cordoned off, and only residents had been allowed through. Or Badri had had difficulty finding a drop site for the team. It had taken him six weeks to find her one.

  But she kept coming back to the fact that this was time travel. No matter how long it took Oxford to locate another drop or check every department store and Underground station, they could still have returned to Oxford, sent a second team through, and had them waiting for her outside Townsend Brothers that first morning.

  Unless they couldn’t get there, she thought, remembering how much difficulty she’d had getting to St. Paul’s that Sunday and to Oxford Street the day after John Lewis, and how the indomitable Miss Snelgrove hadn’t made it into work that same day. If Badri had had difficulty locating a new drop site and, as a result, the retrieval team had had to come through in the East End or Hampstead Heath, or somewhere outside London altogether, they might still be there, unable to get into the city because the trains and buses weren’t running. Or they might have made the mistake of entering a roped-off area or trying to cross a mound of rubble and had been arrested for looting.

  Or, more likely, it had taken them two full days of dealing with daytime raids and diversions and damage on the Underground lines to reach Oxford Street, by which time she’d have gone home with Marjorie. And rather than face the trek back, they’d decided to simply wait till Monday. In which case they’d be at Townsend Brothers tomorrow morning.

  But they weren’t, even though Polly stayed at her counter through her lunch and tea breaks to make certain she didn’t miss them.

  Marjorie was overjoyed that Sir Godfrey and the others hadn’t been killed. “I told you things would work out all right in the end,” she said.

  Not quite, Polly thought, hoping the retrieval team would be at the boardinghouse when she got home, but they weren’t there either. “Did anyone come and ask for me today?” she asked Mrs. Rickett.

  “If they had, I would obviously have told you,” she said, offended. “Who were you expecting? I hope I needn’t remind you of the rules against having gentlemen in your room.”

  The team wasn’t at Notting Hill Gate either, though Polly searched every tunnel and platform.

  “Mrs. Wyvern and the rector and I have had the most ingenious idea,” Miss Laburnum said when Polly came back from searching. “We shall have our own theatrical troupe!”

  “Here in the shelter,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “We’ll do public dramatic readings. It will be excellent for civilian morale-”

  “And not only dramatic readings,” Miss Laburnum interrupted. “We shall put on a play! Sir Godfrey will star, and we shall all be in it.”

  “I did amateur theatrics when I was up at Oxford,” the rector said. “I played the Reverend Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.”

  “What a coincidence!” Mrs. Wyvern said. “I played Cecily in that play at school,” something Polly found impossible to picture.

  “We can do Barrie’s The Little Minister,” Miss Laburnum enthused.

  Sir Godfrey will love that, Polly thought. And even if they didn’t drive him away by doing Barrie, the theaters would reopen in another fortnight, and he’d be returning to the West End.

  “Isn’t putting on a play a wonderful idea?” Miss Laburnum asked her.

  “I… are you certain Sir Godfrey will be willing?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “It’s his chance to aid the war effort.”

  “The Little Minister’s such a lovely play,” Miss Laburnum said. “Or we could do Mary Rose. Do you know the play, Miss Sebastian? It’s about a young woman who vanishes and then reappears years later, not a day older, and then vanishes again.”

  She must have been an historian, Polly thought.

  But Mary Rose’s retrieval team had obviously come and fetched her. Unlike mine. Where are they?

  They weren’t waiting for her outside the station the next morning. Or at Mrs. Rickett’s. Or outside Townsend Brothers. Which meant the problem had to be something besides diversions and transportation delays.

  Slippage, she thought. There had been four and a half days’ slippage on her drop, which she’d assumed had been because of a divergence point. Could there have been another divergence point the day the drop had been damaged-or on subsequent days-which would have kept their drop from opening? The Battle of Britain was over and the attack on Coventry wasn’t till mid-November. The Luftwaffe had begun dropping the nasty bundles of HEs and incendiaries called Gцring breadbaskets around then, but the retrie
val team’s presence couldn’t have affected that. Had Churchill or General Montgomery had a near-deadly encounter? Or the King?

  Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard followed the Queen’s activities faithfully. When Polly got to Notting Hill Gate that night, she asked them if the royal family had been in the news lately.

  “Oh, my, yes,” Miss Laburnum said, and told her Princess Elizabeth had been on the wireless with an encouraging message for the evacuated children, which wasn’t exactly what Polly was looking for.

  “The Queen visited the East End yesterday,” Miss Hibbard said. “The bombed-out families, you know. There was a woman there who was trying to get her little dog out of the rubble. Poor thing, it was too frightened to come out. And do you know what the Queen did? She said, ‘I’ve always been rather good with dogs,’ and she got down on her hands and knees and coaxed it out. Wasn’t that lovely of her?”

  Mrs. Wyvern said doubtfully, “It doesn’t seem quite dignified for a queen to-”

  “Nonsense, she did just what a queen should have done,” Mr. Simms said. “Isn’t that right, Nelson?” He scratched the dog’s ears. “She was doing her bit for the war effort.”

  But the rescue of a dog wasn’t likely to affect the war’s outcome one way or the other. And Buckingham Palace wouldn’t be bombed again till March.

  Polly borrowed Sir Godfrey’s Times and read the headlines and then went to Holborn and looked through the library’s supply of the previous week’s Heralds and Evening Standards, looking for other events it might have been necessary to keep historians away from.

  The National Gallery had been hit, but an historian couldn’t affect where bombs fell. An incendiary bomb had started a small fire in the House of Lords that a few minutes’ delay could have turned into a major blaze. An historian could have affected that, but the retrieval team would have had no reason to be there or at St. Thomas’s Hospital, which was hit the same night. A land mine had landed on Whitehall’s Hungerford Bridge. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the War Office, including Churchill. That was a possibility, though that divergence point would only have lasted for the time it took to remove the bomb. Polly couldn’t find anything which would keep the net from opening for the five days since her drop had been damaged.

  Though the event wouldn’t have to be the sort of thing that made the papers. In London now, a few minutes’ delay in getting to a shelter or in boarding a train could make a life-or-death difference. And it could be the sort of action that set a domino-like chain of events in motion that would take several days or weeks to play out. And in the meantime, there was nothing she could do but wait.

  Or find some other historian who was here-and not in the Blitz-and use his drop. Who might be here now? Merope had said Gerald Phipps was doing something in World War II, but she hadn’t said what or when. Michael Davies was doing Dunkirk. He might be here. But Dunkirk had been over for nearly four months. He was probably in Pearl Harbor by now, or at the Battle of the Bulge, neither of which did her any good. He’d mentioned his roommate, but he’d been doing Singapore, also of no help. Polly frowned, trying to remember if he and Merope had mentioned anyone else who-

  Merope. Might she still be in Backbury? When Polly’d seen her in Oxford, she’d said she still had months left on her assignment, but that might mean anything. She tried to remember if Merope had said anything else about how long her assignment was. Most of the children had been evacuated in September and October 1939. If Merope had been on a yearlong assignment, there was a chance she might still be there.

  I need to write her immediately, Polly thought. But what was her name? Eileen Something. An Irish name. O’Reilly or O’Malley. Or Rafferty. She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember the name of the manor either. Had Merope even mentioned it?

  There would scarcely be more than one manor near Backbury. But what if there were? And even if there was only one, she couldn’t send a letter addressed only to “Eileen the Irish Maid at the Manor near Backbury.”

  I’ll have to go up to Backbury and find her, she thought. She’d need to go up there to use her drop at any rate, and going would be quicker than writing and then waiting for a letter back.

  But what if she’s not there? Polly thought. I’ll have given up my job-and the best chance the retrieval team has of locating me-for naught. And what if it is a divergence point that’s standing in their way, and they come the moment I’m gone? She’d better stay here.

  But every day that went by increased the chance of Merope’s going back to Oxford and Polly’s missing her. And she needn’t quit her job to go find her-she could show Miss Snelgrove Props’s letter saying that her mother was gravely ill and that she needed to come at once. Miss Snelgrove could scarcely refuse to let her go in that sort of situation, and she’d been extremely understanding the day the shelter had been destroyed. And as far as the retrieval team went, Polly could tell Marjorie to tell anyone who came in asking for her that she worked there and when she’d be back.

  And making the journey to Backbury would be better than sitting here fretting over what would happen if the retrieval team didn’t come by her deadline. But, given her recent run of luck, they’d arrive as soon as she left. Especially if the divergence point they were being kept from interfering with was the big attack on Fleet Street, which would happen Wednesday night.

  I’ll give it till Thursday, she thought. Surely they’ll be here by then. But they weren’t.

  11 Across:-But some bigwig like this has stolen some of it at times. (Solution: Overlord)

  – DAILY HERALD CROSSWORD CLUE SUSPECTED OF BEING A MESSAGE TO THE GERMANS, 27 MAY 1944

  War Emergency Hospital-September 1940

  “COMMANDER HAROLD AND JONATHAN WERE KILLED AT Dunkirk?” Mike said to Daphne. “No, they weren’t. They made it safely back to Dover. I was with them. The Commander helped put me on the stretcher-”

  “That’s when you were hurt?” Daphne asked. “On that first journey?”

  “Yes-first journey?”

  She nodded. “When the Lady Jane turned up missing, the Commander’s granddaughter-Jonathan’s mum-was afraid they’d gone to Dunkirk. She asked Dad to go down to Dover to find out what he could, and the Admiralty told him they’d gone to Dunkirk on their own and brought troops back and then set off again immediately, but that they didn’t make it back that time. They didn’t know what had happened to them, but we do know they made it over to Dunkirk that second time. Mr. Powney saw them.”

  “Mr. Powney? The farmer who’d gone to buy the bull?”

  “Yes. That’s why he didn’t come back that day. He never made it to Hawkhurst. On his way there he found out about the rescue effort and went to Ramsgate to volunteer. They put him on a coast guard cutter, and he made three journeys and rescued ever so many soldiers.”

  “And he saw the Commander and Jonathan?”

  “Yes, in Dunkirk. On the thirtieth. They were loading troops onto the Lady Jane under heavy fire. He hailed them, but they were too far away to hear him. And the Daffodil saw them leaving the east mole, but they weren’t seen after that. The officer who talked to Dad said it was likely a torpedo got them on the way back. Or a mine.”

  Or a Stuka, Mike thought, remembering the shriek of the diving plane. Or another corpse in the propeller.

  “When your letter for him came, Miss Fintworth-she’s our postmistress-didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t give it to Jonathan’s mum-she’d gone to her people in Yorkshire after she got the bad news-and she didn’t like to send it back since it was plain you didn’t know what had happened, so she brought it to Dad to ask him what to do. I hope you don’t think we did wrong by opening it, but Dad said it might be urgent, being from a hospital and all, and when we read it and found out you’d been injured at Dunkirk, we thought you must have been with them. We knew you didn’t know”-she gave the gloves another twist-“how things had ended, or you wouldn’t have written the Commander, but we thought perhaps you were there when the L
ady Jane was hit and then got separated from them somehow and been rescued, and that you knew what had happened.”

  No, but I know why they died, he thought. Because he’d untangled their propeller. He’d made it possible for them to go back again.

  Daphne was looking questioningly at him.

  “No, I was injured on that first run,” he managed to say. “I didn’t know they’d gone over there again. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, looking down at her gloves. “Dad says it was the Commander’s foolhardiness got them killed. The Small Vessels Pool had turned the Lady Jane down, you see. Dad says he should have listened to them.”

  “He wanted to help,” Mike said. “A lot of boats went over on their own, and it was a good thing. The Army was in a pretty bad spot.”

  “And you went along to help them. I think it was marvelous of you to do that, being a Yank and everything. It was very brave. The officer told Dad that the Commander and Jonathan brought home nearly a hundred of our boys. He said they were true heroes.”

  They were, he thought. You wanted to observe heroism, and you got your wish. “Absolutely. They showed a lot of courage.”

  Daphne nodded solemnly. “You were a hero as well. The nurse told me about your untangling the propeller and all that. She said you should have a medal.”

  A medal, he thought bitterly, for being where he wasn’t supposed to be, for murderously altering events. If I hadn’t unfouled that propeller, that bomb would have hit the Lady Jane and damaged her rudder. They wouldn’t have been able to make that second trip-

  Daphne was looking worriedly at him. “I’ve tired you out,” she said, standing up and beginning to pull on her gloves. “I should go.”

  “No, you can’t.” He hadn’t been able to ask her about the retrieval team yet. “Can’t you stay a little longer?”

  She hesitated, looking uncertainly in the direction of the doors. “The nurse said I was only to stay a quarter of-”