Oxford Time Travel 1 - Blackout

by Connie Willis

  “Nuthin’,” Alf said and ran off again.

  “Perhaps I’d best check the churchyard when I get home,” the vicar told Eileen. “Alf may have decided tombstones would make excellent roadblocks when the Germans invade.”

  “No, it’s something else,” Eileen said. “If it were anyone but Alf, I’d think he was worried about his sister being”—her voice caught—“buried so far away from home.”

  “There’s no improvement?” he asked kindly.

  “No.” And if there hadn’t been two floors separating them, she’d have laid her head on his shoulder and sobbed.

  He gave her a comforting smile and said, “I know you’re doing your best.”

  But I’m afraid it’s not good enough, she thought, and went to bathe Binnie’s hot limbs and coax more aspirin into her, though she worried she might be making things worse, not better. But the next night when she didn’t wake her to give the tablets to her—deciding it was better to let her sleep—her temp immediately shot up again. Eileen resumed giving it to her, wondering what she’d do when the tablets ran out.

  I’ll have to tell the vicar and hope he doesn’t tell Dr. Stuart, she thought. Or tie my sheets together and go out the window after some, but it wasn’t necessary. That afternoon Binnie’s temp abruptly went down, leaving her bathed in sweat.

  “Her fever’s broken,” Dr. Stuart said. “Thank God. I feared the worst, but sometimes, with Providence’s help—and good nursing,” he patted Eileen’s hand, “the patient pulls through.”

  “So she will recover?” Eileen said, looking down at Binnie. She looked so thin and pale.

  He nodded. “She’s through the worst of it now.”

  And she seemed to be, though she didn’t rally as quickly as the other children. It was three days before her breathing eased and a full week before she was able to sip a little broth on her own. And she was so… docile. When Eileen read her fairy stories, which Binnie usually despised, she listened quietly.

  “I’m worried,” Eileen told the vicar. “The doctor says she’s better, but she just lies there.”

  “Has Alf been in to see her?”

  “No. He’s liable to give her a relapse.”

  “Or shake her out of her apathy,” he said.

  “I think I’ll wait till she’s stronger,” Eileen said, but that afternoon, watching Binnie lying in her cot, gazing listlessly at the ceiling, Eileen sent Una to fetch Alf.

  “You look ’xactly like a corpse,” he said.

  Well, this was a good idea, Eileen thought, and was about to escort him out when Binnie pushed herself up against the pillows.

  “I do not,” she said.

  “You do so. Everybody said you was goin’ to die. You was out of your ’ead and everything.”

  “I was not.”

  Just like old times, Eileen thought and, for the first time since Binnie had fallen ill, felt a loosening of the tightness around her heart.

  “She did almost die, didn’t she, Eileen?” Alf said and turned back to Binnie. “But you ain’t goin’ to now.”

  Which seemed to reassure Binnie, but that night as Eileen put her into a fresh nightgown, she asked, “Are you certain I ain’t going to die?”

  “Positive,” Eileen said, tucking her in. “You’re growing stronger every day.”

  “What ’appens to people who die, when they ’aven’t got no name?”

  “You mean, when no one knows who they were?” Eileen asked, puzzled.

  “No. When they ain’t got a name to put on the tombstone. Do they still get to get buried in the churchyard?”

  She’s illegitimate, Eileen thought suddenly. Having an unmarried mother had been a true stigma for children in this era, with the child branded a bastard.

  But the stigma hadn’t extended as far as tombstones. “Binnie, your name is your name, no matter whether your mother is married or not…”

  Binnie made a sound of complete disgust, and Eileen was certain that if she hadn’t still been too weak to get out of bed, she’d have stomped from the room like her brother. As it was, she turned over onto her side and faced the wall.

  Eileen wished the vicar was here. She racked her brain to recall any customs involving names and tombstones in 1940, but she couldn’t think of anything. Alf, she thought. He knows what this is all about, and hastily gathered up the dirty linen. “I’m taking these downstairs,” she told Binnie. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  No response. Eileen dumped the linens in the laundry and went to the ballroom, where Alf was wrapping Rose in bandages. “I’m practicin’ for the ambulance,” he said.

  “Alf, come with me,” Eileen said. “Now,” and took him into the music room and shut the door. “I want to know why Binnie’s worried over her name being on a tombstone, and don’t say you don’t know.”

  Something in her tone must have convinced him she meant business, because he muttered, “She ain’t got one.”

  “A tombstone?”

  “No, a name,” and at Eileen’s bewildered look, “Binnie ain’t a real name. It’s just short for ’Odbin.”

  “Can you believe he told Binnie she didn’t have a first name?” she told the vicar when he arrived the next day. “And she apparently believed him.”

  “Did you ask Binnie?” he said.

  “What do you mean? You can’t seriously think… everyone has a first name. Just because they come from a poor—”

  He was shaking his head. “The Evacuation Committee’s run into more than one slum child without a name, and the billeting officer’s had to make one up on the spot. I’m not certain you realize how hard some of the children’s lives were at home. Many of them had never slept in a bed before they came here—”

  Or used a toilet, Eileen thought, remembering her prep. Some evacuees from the slums had urinated on the floors of their foster homes or squatted in a corner. And Mrs. Bascombe had told her several of the evacuees at the manor had had to be taught to use a knife and fork when they’d first come. But a name! “Alf has a name,” she argued, but the vicar wasn’t convinced.

  “Perhaps their father felt differently about a boy. Or perhaps it wasn’t the same father. And you must admit, Mrs. Hodbin—if she is a Mrs.—hasn’t shown much maternal instinct.”

  “True. But still…” she said, and when she went in to talk to Binnie, tried to reassure her. “I’m certain your name’s not short for Hodbin,” Eileen told Binnie. “That’s only Alf teasing. I’m certain it’s a nickname—”

  “For what?” Binnie said belligerently.

  “I don’t know. Belinda? Barbara?”

  “There ain’t no ‘n’ in Barbara.”

  “Nicknames don’t always have the same letters,” Eileen said. “Look at Peggy. Her real name’s Margaret. And there are all sorts of nicknames for Mary—Mamie and Molly and—”

  “If Binnie’s short for somethin’, why ain’t nobody ever said what?” she said, and was so skeptical Eileen wondered if their mother had made some comment that had put the idea in their heads. Whatever had, it was the last thing Binnie needed while she was recovering. After a fortnight her eyes had a shadowed look and she hadn’t gained back any of the weight she’d lost.

  Eileen said briskly, “If you haven’t got a name, then you must choose one.”

  “Choose one?”

  “Yes, like in ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’”

  “That wasn’t choosin’. It was guessin’.”

  Why did I think this would work? Eileen wondered, but after a minute, Binnie said, “If I chose a name, you’d call me it?”

  “Yes,” Eileen said, and was immediately sorry. Binnie spent the next few days trying on names like hats and asking Eileen what she thought of Gladys and Princess Elizabeth and Cinderella. But as maddening as the parade of names was, it did the trick. Binnie began to make rapid progress, growing rounder and more pink-cheeked by the day.

  In the meantime, the Magruders proved conclusively they hadn’t had the measles before, no matter what their mo
ther had said, and Eddie and Patsy also broke out. By the evacuation of Dunkirk, Eileen had nineteen patients in varying degrees of spottiness and/or recovery.

  Alf was thrilled about the ongoing rescue. “The vicar says they’re going over in fishing boats and rowboats to get our soldiers,” he reported happily. “I wish I could go.”

  I wish I could, too, Eileen thought. Michael Davies is in Dover reporting on the evacuation right now.

  “They’re gettin’ strafed and bombs dropped on ’em and everything,” Alf said, which at this point seemed infinitely preferable to caring for a score of feverish, fretful, molting children. Once the rash went away, their skin developed brownish, peeling patches. “Now you really look like a corpse,” Alf told Binnie. “If you was at Dunkirk, they’d think you was dead and leave you behind on the beach, and the jerries’d kill you.”

  “They would not!” Binnie shrieked.

  “Out,” Eileen ordered.

  “I can’t go out,” Alf said reasonably. “We’re under quarantine.”

  He was quite literally bouncing off the walls. Eileen found several portraits askew and Lady Caroline and her hunting dogs sprawled flat on the floor, and when she ordered them out of the ballroom, they retreated to Lady Caroline’s bathroom, a fact Eileen didn’t discover till water began dripping from the library ceiling.

  “Alf and us were playing Evacuation from Dunkirk,” a sopping-wet Theodore explained.

  The next time the vicar called up to the nursery window to ask if there was anything they needed, Eileen said yes rather desperately. “Something to amuse the ones who aren’t ill. Games or puzzles or something.”

  “I’ll see what the Women’s Institute can come up with,” he said, and the next day delivered a basket full of donated books (Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Child’s Book of Martyrs), jigsaw puzzles (St. Paul’s Cathedral and “The Cotswolds in Spring”), and a Victorian board game called Cowboys and Red Indians, which inspired the Hodbins to lead the children on a whooping war-painted rampage through the corridors.

  “And yesterday I caught Alf playing Burned at the Stake,” she called down to the vicar on his next visit, “with Lady Caroline’s Louis Quinze hat stand and a box of matches.”

  He laughed up at her. “I can see stronger measures are required.”

  He was as good as his word. The next day the basket he brought contained ARP armbands, a logbook, and an official RAF chart showing the distinctive silhouettes of Heinkels, Hurricanes, and Dornier 17s. Alf promptly became an ace aeroplane spotter, lecturing everyone on the difference between a Messerschmitt and a Spitfire—“See, it’s got eight machine guns on the wings”—and hanging out in the ballroom window and shouting, “Enemy aircraft at three o’clock,” every time a plane appeared and diving to record the number, type, and altitude in the logbook. The only plane most days was the plane carrying the post to Birmingham, but that didn’t discourage him, and comparative peace reigned for several days.

  It was, of course, too good to last. Soon, Alf began flying bombing sorties through the kitchen. And the sickroom, and torturing Binnie. When she suggested Beauty for her name—“You know, like in Sleeping Beauty”—Alf hooted, “Beauty? Beast, more like! Or Baby, ’cause that’s what you are, bawlin’ when you was ill and beggin’ Eileen not to leave. You made ’er swear and everythin’.”

  “I never,” Binnie said indignantly. “I don’t even like her. She can go this minute for all I care.”

  I would if I could, Eileen thought, but while she’d been intent on taking care of her evacuees, Samuels had boarded up all the doors except the one in the kitchen, moved his chair in front of that, and nailed shut the windows in every room but the ballroom, which was always full of children. And she only had ten more days. If no one else came down with the measles.

  But if they did, surely Oxford would attempt to pull her out. She was surprised they hadn’t already. Now that most of the children had recovered and Binnie was out of danger, Una and Mrs. Bascombe could easily handle the situation, but there was no sign of the retrieval team and no message from them. “No letters have come for me, have they?” she asked Samuels.

  “No,” he said. Which must mean the quarantine was nearly over, and none of the other children were going to get the measles. Eileen began counting the days.

  Two days before the quarantine was to be lifted, Lily Lovell came down with a roaring case, and ten days later Ruth Steinberg, and two weeks after that Theodore. “At this rate, we’ll still be quarantined at Michaelmas,” Samuels grumbled.

  Eileen wasn’t sure she could make it. Alf nearly fell out of the window trying to identify a plane, and Binnie began holding air-raid drills standing at the top of the main stairway and giving her imitation of an air-raid siren. “That ain’t the siren for air raids, you slowcoach,” Alf told her. “You’re doin’ the all clear. This is the air raid,” and let loose a bloodcurdling up-and-down yowl that Eileen thought would break Lady Caroline’s crystal.

  “They simply must go outside and run off some of their energy before they wreck the house,” she told Mrs. Bascombe. “It wouldn’t be breaking quarantine if they stayed on the front lawn. If anyone came we could come inside straightaway.”

  Mrs. Bascombe shook her head. “Dr. Stuart will never allow it—”

  There was an unearthly wail from the stairway. “Air raid!” Theodore shrieked, giggling, and the children thundered through the kitchen toward the cellar steps, knocking a pan full of cakes off the table and onto the floor where Alf, wearing his ARP armband and a colander-helmet, stepped in the middle of it.

  “Exactly how many more days is it till the end of quarantine?” Mrs. Bascombe asked, helping Eileen pick up cakes.

  “Four,” Eileen said grimly, reaching for one that had gone under the flour bin.

  “All clear!” Binnie shouted from the cellar door, and the children roared back through the kitchen and up the stairs again, shrieking.

  “No running!” Mrs. Bascombe called futilely after them. “Where’s Una got to? Why isn’t she watching them?”

  “I’ll go find her,” Eileen said, dumping the last of the trampled cakes onto the baking pan and going upstairs. Knowing Alf and Binnie, she might be tied to a chair or locked in a closet.

  She wasn’t. She was lying on Peggy’s cot in the ballroom. “I think I’ve caught the measles,” she said. “I feel so hot, and I have an awful headache.”

  “You said you’d had them.”

  “I know. I thought I had. I must have been wrong.”

  “Perhaps it’s only a cold,” Eileen said. “Oh, Una, you can’t have the measles!”

  But she did. Dr. Stuart confirmed it on his visit, and Una broke out the next day. Mrs. Bascombe, determined not to let the quarantine be prolonged yet another month by Eileen’s catching them, took over Una’s nursing herself and forbade Eileen to go anywhere near her, which was just as well. She might have throttled her.

  The children had to be kept quiet so as not to disturb Una—a nearly impossible task. Eileen tried telling fairy stories to the children, but Alf and Binnie interrupted constantly and questioned every aspect of the story. “’Ow come they didn’t just lock the door when the bad fairy tried to come to the christenin’?” they asked when she attempted to tell “Sleeping Beauty,” and “’Ow come the good fairy couldn’t undo the whole spell ’stead of makin’ ’er sleep a ’undred years?”

  “Because she came too late,” Eileen said. “The spell was already cast. She didn’t have the power to undo it.”

  “Or p’raps she weren’t very good at spells,” Alf said.

  “Then how come she’s the good fairy?” Binnie demanded.

  “Rapunzel” was even worse. Binnie wanted to know why Rapunzel hadn’t cut off her hair herself and climbed down it, and Binnie promptly tried to demonstrate on Rose’s braids.

  Why did I wish she was her old self again? Eileen thought and announced they were going to do lessons instead.

  “You can’t!” Binnie
protested. “It’s summer!”

  “These are the lessons you missed when you were ill,” Eileen said. She made the vicar bring their schoolbooks, and he must have sensed she was near the breaking point, because he brought her a basket of strawberries and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

  “I thought it might prevent The Murder of Alf and Binnie Hodbin,” he said. He also brought the post. And the war news. “The RAF’s holding its own, but the Luftwaffe has five times their number of planes, and now the Germans have begun attacking our airfields and aerodromes.”

  She passed that on to Alf and got nearly an entire week of calm out of it. Then she caught him hanging out the sitting room window looking through Lady Caroline’s opera glasses, which he promptly hid behind his back, dropping them in the process. “I was only trying to see if it was a Stuka,” he said as she picked them up. There was an ominous tinkle of glass. “It was your fault. If you hadn’t scared me, I wouldn’t have dropped them.”

  Six more days, Eileen thought, hoping the manor wouldn’t be reduced to a pile of rubble by then. But finally Dr. Stuart proclaimed everyone clear, and had Samuels unboard the doors and take down the notices.

  Five minutes later, Eileen was on her way to the drop. She didn’t even set out the letter from her ailing mother in Northumbria. Mrs. Bascombe would assume she simply hadn’t been able to take any more, which was close to being true.

  It was raining hard, but she didn’t care. I can dry off in Oxford, she thought. Somewhere where there are no children. She walked swiftly to the road and cut into the woods. The trees were in full leaf and daisies and violets bloomed at their feet.

  I hope I can find the drop, she thought, momentarily bewildered by the lush greenery, but there was the clearing and the ash tree. It was overgrown, and ivy and woodbine trailed everywhere. Eileen brushed the raindrops off the face of her watch, checked the time, and sat down to wait.

  An hour went by and then another. By noon it was clear it wasn’t going to open, but she sat there in the wet till nearly two, thinking, Perhaps they didn’t realize the quarantine was lifted this morning.

  At a quarter after two the rain became a torrent, and she was forced to give up. She slogged back to the road and the manor. Binnie was standing in the kitchen door waiting for her. “You’re all wet,” she said helpfully.