All Clear

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.

“It’s no one’s fault,” she said.

They couldn’t have found him no matter what they did because it had all happened already, and when he got back to Oxford, he hadn’t been bearing a message from them. It had been a hopeless enterprise from the beginning. It had all been hopeless—the attempts to contact Mike’s retrieval team and the search for Gerald.

The door behind them opened, and Mr. Humphreys came out bearing a tray with a teapot and cups on it. “Your friend Mr. Davis said you were still out here,” he said to Polly, handing her and the others cups and saucers. “And I thought you might like some tea. It’s such a cold morning.”

He poured out their tea, then went down the steps and over to the man who’d asked Mike what he should do and then over to Alf and Binnie, who were playing in the still-smoldering wreckage.

He gave them biscuits and then came back. “I’m so sorry you missed your friend, Miss Sebastian,” he said. “I’ll ask Dean Matthews if he had an address where Mr.

Bartholomew might be reached. Do you need assistance in getting home?”

Yes, she thought, but you can’t help us.

She shook her head.

“If you need bus fare or—”

“No,” Polly said. “We have transport.”

“Good. Drink your tea,” he ordered. “It will make you feel better.”

Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month’s sugar ration into it.

She drained the cup, feeling suddenly ashamed of herself. She wasn’t the only one who’d had a bad night. Or the only one facing a frightening future. And the outlook wasn’t totally bleak. The fact that they hadn’t found Mr. Bartholomew meant that Mr. Dunworthy hadn’t betrayed them, that Colin hadn’t lied to her.

And her actions, and Mike’s and Eileen’s, didn’t seem to have affected events. Last night had gone just as it was supposed to. St. Paul’s was still standing, and the rest of the City wasn’t. History was still on track.

For the past two months Polly’d been terrified of finding proof they’d altered the course of the war, but now she almost wished historians were able to alter events, to alter this—the Guildhall and the Chapter House and all those beautiful Christopher Wren churches destroyed. And all the horrors that were still to come—Dresden and Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And Jerusalem and the Pandemic and the pinpoint bomb which would obliterate St. Paul’s. To repair the whole bloody mess.

But what could do that? The three of them had attempted all last night to find a single man and deliver a single message, to no avail. What made her think they could repair history, even if they knew how to go about it? And there was no way to know. The continuum was far too complex, too chaotic, to ensure that an attempt to avert a disaster wouldn’t lead to a worse one. And, as horrific as World War II had been, at least the Allies had won. They’d stopped Hitler, which had been an unarguably good thing.

But at such a terrible, terrible price—millions dead, cities in ruins, lives destroyed. Including mine, she thought. And Eileen’s and Mike’s.

She glanced over at them, sitting hunched on the steps, Eileen looking half frozen and about to cry, Mike with his arm bandaged and his foot half shot off. They looked done in, and Polly felt a wave of love for both of them. They had done all this, quite literally risked life and limb, for her because of her deadline. And they would both have sacrificed their lives if it had meant getting her safely home. Which meant the least she could do was to pull herself together.

Mr. Humphreys had managed to, and so had London. The day after they’d watched half their city burn down around their ears, Londoners hadn’t sat there feeling sorry for themselves. Instead, they’d set about putting out the fires that were still burning and digging people out of the rubble. They’d repaired water mains and railway tracks and telephone lines, shown up at their jobs, even if where they worked was no longer there, swept up glass. Gone on.

If they could do it, she could, too. “Once more into the breach,” she thought, and stood up and brushed the soot off her coat.

“We need to be going,” she said. She gathered up their cups and saucers, took them inside, set them on the desk next to the half-burned print of The Light of the World, and started out, then went back to look at it again—at the lantern raised to light the nothingness which lay before it, the darkness on all sides, at Christ’s robe smeared with soot from the charred, flaking edge.

She’d expected his face to look as done in, as defeated, as Eileen’s and Mike’s, but it didn’t. It was filled with kindness and concern, like Mr. Humphreys’s.

She fished sixpence out of her bag, laid it on the desk, folded the picture into quarters, put it in her pocket, and went outside.

“We need to go,” she said to Mike and Eileen. “We’ll be late for work. And we must take the ambulance back to St. Bart’s.”

“And get my coat,” Mike said. “And Eileen’s.”

“I need to take the children home first,” Eileen said. “Alf! Binnie!” she called to them.

They were still messing about in the ruins, poking at a smoldering timber with sticks and then jumping back as it crumbled into glowing embers.

“Come along. I’ll take you home.”

“ ’Ome?” Binnie said. The children looked at each other and then up at her. “We don’t need nobody to take us,” Alf said. “We can get there on our own.”

“No, the trains to Whitechapel may not be running, and your mother will be worried to death,” Eileen said. “I want to tell her where you’ve been all night and how much help you were.” She started down the steps toward them.

Alf and Binnie exchanged glances again, then dropped their sticks and tore off down the street, running as fast as they could.

“Alf! Binnie! Wait!” Eileen called, and took off after them, Polly and Mike in pursuit, but they’d already vanished into the tangle of smoking ruins beyond Paternoster Row.

“We’ll never catch them in that maze,” Mike said, and Eileen nodded reluctantly.

“Will they be all right, do you think?” Polly asked.

“Yes, they’re expert at taking care of themselves,” Eileen said, looking after them and frowning. “But I wonder why—”

“They were probably afraid if you took them home they’d have to go to school,” Mike said, and when they reached the ambulance, he peered at the petrol gauge and said, “We couldn’t have taken them home anyway. We don’t have enough gas to get to Whitechapel and back. We’ll be lucky if we’ve got enough to get us to St.

Bart’s.”

“If we can find St. Bart’s,” Eileen said. She started the car. “Alf was my navigator, remember?”

Polly nodded, thinking of all the blocked streets and barricades.

“I think I can get us there,” Mike said.

And he did.

Eileen’s coat was still hanging over the railing where she’d left it, but Mike’s was nowhere to be found, and he refused to ask the staff. “I left without being discharged,” he told them, “and they’re liable to try to put me back in the hospital.”

“I thought you said you’d scarcely burned your arm at all,” Polly said.

“I did. It’s nothing. But that doesn’t mean they’ll let me out, and I can’t afford to be stuck in here doing nothing, like I was all those weeks in Orpington. I don’t need a coat.”

“But it’s winter,” Eileen said. “You’ll catch your death—”

“I’ll go find it,” Polly said, taking charge. “Eileen, go turn the ambulance in. Mike, wait for us out front.”

He nodded and limped off toward the door.

“You don’t suppose they’ll arrest me for stealing the ambulance, do you?” Eileen asked.

“Considering the blood-covered state of your coat, no. But if they do, I’ll help you escape,” Polly said, and went up to the ward to ask about Mike’s coat.

The nurse thought it likely they’d had to cut it off him when he was brought in. “You might check in Emergency.”

It wasn’t there either, or with the matron. Polly went out front to tell Mike. He and Eileen were both there. “You weren’t arrested?” Polly asked Eileen.

“No, they were extremely nice about it. You didn’t find Mike’s coat?”

“No, sorry. I’ll have to ask Mrs. Wyvern to get you another. Here.” Polly took off the pumpkin-colored scarf Miss Hibbard had given her. “Take this till we get you a coat.” She wrapped it around his neck as if he were a child, and they set out for the tube station.

It was open, but the Hammersmith and Jubilee Lines were both out of commission, and the District Line wasn’t running between Cannon Street and Temple.

“This means there may still be a chance of catching Bartholomew,” Mike said. “If the train he needed to take was destroyed or wasn’t running, he may not have gone back yet. He may still be here in London.”

“Mike,” Polly protested, “he left two hours—”

“You two go on to work. If I catch him, I’ll come get you at Townsend Brothers,” Mike said, and took off before they could stop him.

“Do you think there’s a chance—?” Eileen asked Polly.

“No,” Polly said, though it took them an hour and a half just to reach Townsend Brothers.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Miss Snelgrove said. “Neither Doreen nor Sarah can make it in, and the New Year’s sales begin day after tomorrow—good heavens, you’re hurt!” she said to Eileen, and ordered Polly to telephone for an ambulance.

“It’s not my blood,” Eileen said, looking down at her coat. “I don’t suppose you know of anything which will take out bloodstains?”

“Benzene,” Miss Snelgrove said promptly, “though it looks as if it’s soaked through.”

She sent Eileen up to Housewares for a bottle of the cleaning fluid and set Polly to lettering placards for the New Year’s sales while she went to fill in for Sarah.

Polly spent the rest of the day printing “Special New Year’s Mark-down” and worrying about why Mike didn’t come and about his burned arm and what they were going to do after tomorrow.

As of January first, they wouldn’t know where and when any of the raids were or what was safe, except for Townsend Brothers and Notting Hill Gate. She assumed Mrs. Rickett’s and Mike’s boardinghouse were, too, though Badri hadn’t said whether the list of allowed addresses was safe for the duration of the Blitz or only till the end of her assignment. But Mr. Dunworthy had been so insistent that she stay in a tube station which hadn’t been hit at all that he was unlikely to have let her stay in a boardinghouse that had been.

But unlikely wasn’t certain, which meant they’d best spend their nights in Notting Hill Gate—and hope they got there before the raids began.

Which was impossible with the short winter days. The sirens routinely went before five. And Mike’s job took him all over London, and there were daytime raids to worry about. And UXBs and dangling parachute mines. And the fact that by closing time Mike still hadn’t shown up.

Where was he? And what if he got blood poisoning in his burned arm? Or caught pneumonia? Though that at least she could do something about, and after work she and Eileen went straight to Notting Hill Gate to speak to Mrs. Wyvern about a coat.

She wasn’t there. “She and the rector are helping with a fund-raiser for families who’ve been bombed out,” Miss Hibbard told her.

“Do you know where?” Polly asked. There weren’t any raids tonight, so she could go find her, but she hadn’t told Miss Hibbard the location of the fund-raiser.

I’ll have to ask Miss Laburnum, Polly thought. “Did she say when she was coming over?”

“She has a bad cold,” Miss Hibbard said. “I told her she should stay at home. The station’s so drafty and cold.”

It was, and the emergency staircase was even icier. When Mike finally arrived, Polly and Eileen took off their coats, and the three of them huddled together under them as Mike told them where he’d been, which had apparently been in every tube station in London, with no luck. “I should have gone to St. Paul’s Station as soon as I got to the cathedral,” he said. “If I had—”

“You still couldn’t have caught him,” Polly said.

“I’ll figure out a way to get you out of here before your deadline, Polly,” he said fiercely.

“What about the retrieval team?” Eileen asked. “You still might be able to find them,” and Polly realized that in all the excitement the night before, they hadn’t told her what had happened.

“I did find them,” Mike said, “but it wasn’t the retrieval team. It was a guy I knew in hospital.”

Eileen’s face fell. “But they still might come. I could write to Mr. Goode again. And the manor. Or we could check Polly’s drop again. It might be working by now.”

“You’re right,” he said. “We’ll do all those things. And I’ll figure out a way to get you both out of here. But right now we need to concentrate on staying alive till I do. Where are tomorrow’s raids?”

“There aren’t any tomorrow either,” she said. “But I’m afraid I have more bad news.” She told them about not knowing about the raids after the first of the year.

“But Notting Hill Gate’s safe, right?” Mike said. “And Townsend Brothers, so you two are safe during the day.”

“No,” Eileen said. “My supervisor told me today they plan to let all the Christmas help go as soon as the New Year’s sales are over.”

“And we have another problem,” Polly said. “Sometime—I don’t know when—Eileen and I are going to be conscripted.”

“Conscripted?” Mike said. “Into the Army?”

“Not necessarily, but into some sort of national service. The ATS or the land girls or working in a war-industry factory. It’s the National Service Act. All British civilians between the ages of twenty and thirty must sign up.”

“Can’t you get a deferment from Townsend Brothers or something?” Mike asked.

“No,” Polly said. “And if we don’t volunteer before it goes into effect, we run the risk of being assigned somewhere outside of London.”

“Which means we’d better find a way out of here fast,” Mike said, frowning.

“Don’t you know when any of the raids are, Polly?” Eileen asked nervously.

“Some of them,” Polly said. “And some nights the Luftwaffe attacked other cities.”

“And they can’t attack when the weather’s bad,” Mike said, “which should help for the next couple of months. And the Blitz ends in May, right?”

“Yes, May eleventh,” Polly said. But between now and then nearly twenty thousand civilians will be killed.

“So all we have to do is get through the next four and a half months,” Mike said, “and then we’re safe till Denys Atherton gets here.”

Safe, Polly thought.

“And that’s a worst-case scenario. We’re bound to figure out a way to get home before—” He stopped. “What is it, Polly? Why are you looking like that?”

“Nothing. What is that dreadful odor?”

“My coat,” Eileen confessed. “I’m afraid I used a bit too much benzene on it to get the blood out.”

“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