All Clear

London—Winter 1941

FOR SEVERAL LONG MINUTES AFTER MR. DUNWORTHY TOLD her, Polly simply sat there next to his bed. In the long nights lying awake on the platform, in the emergency stairway, she’d thought that she’d imagined every possible explanation for their plight, every possible dreadful outcome, but this was unimaginably more terrible. Not only were they going to die, but they would be responsible for the deaths of everyone who’d befriended them, everyone who’d helped them and been kind to them—Marjorie and Eileen’s vicar and Daphne and Miss Laburnum and Sir Godfrey. Everyone they cared about.

“So that’s that?” she said finally.

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and she could only nod, her eyes full of tears for him, for them. And for all the people they had killed.

Would kill. She must have made some sort of sound because Mr. Dunworthy reached out a hand to her and said, beseechingly, “Polly—”

She stood up and took the glass from him. “Try to rest,” she said, and switched off the lamp. “Put out the light, and then put out the light.”

She took the glass out to the dark kitchen and set it on the table, closed Binnie’s fairy-tale book, and then went down to the cellar and sat at the bottom of the stairs, staring into darkness.

She had thought she’d given up hoping that they’d somehow be rescued even before Mike died, even before they’d failed to get a message to John Bartholomew, but she realized now that some part of her had gone on hoping. Gone on believing that there was some other, magical explanation which, as Eileen said, accounted for everything. Which fit all the facts and was right there in front of you all the time, only you couldn’t see it. But this wasn’t an Agatha Christie murder mystery, with a tidy solution and a happy ending. There was no happy ending. And she was the murderer.

They were all murderers. Mr. Dunworthy had killed a Wren, and Mike had killed Commander Harold and Jonathan, Eileen had been responsible for the vicar’s joining up, and she had been responsible for Marjorie’s enlisting in the Royal Army Nursing Service.

Were they next? Or would it be Private Hardy or Alf and Binnie or Sir Godfrey? Or Mrs. Sentry, or the FANYs at Woolwich and Croydon whom Polly had wangled supplies from, or the little boy who’d shhed her at the pantomime? Or the strangers who had the misfortune of being next to them in Townsend Brothers or the tube station or Trafalgar Square when the continuum—flailing, sparking, melting down like an incendiary and burning through space and time—killed her or Mr.

Dunworthy or Eileen?

She thought suddenly of Ethel in the book department at Townsend Brothers who had been killed by shrapnel. Had Polly killed her by talking to her about ABCs and planespotting?

She sat there in the cellar all night, till Alf opened the door and shouted, “Polly’s down ’ere!”

She went upstairs. Eileen was cooking breakfast, and Binnie was setting the table. “What was you doin’ down there?” Alf asked. “I didn’t hear no raid.”

“I was thinking,” Polly said.

“Thinkin’!” he hooted.

“Hush,” Eileen said, and to Polly, “You mustn’t worry. Mr. Hobbe’s going to be all right. His fever’s down.”

She sent the children to their room to get dressed. “You didn’t get taken on as an air-raid warden, did you? Or with a rescue crew? Things were so muddled last night, I forgot to ask.”

Muddled.

“No,” she said.

“Are you going to try again today?” Eileen asked.

You don’t understand, Polly thought. I’m the last person anyone would want on a rescue squad, pulling people out of the rubble, administering first aid.

She thought suddenly of the man in Croydon whose legs she’d tourniqueted. She’d been afraid he’d died, but what if he should have died there in the rubble, and her saving him had only doomed him to a worse, lingering death in hospital? And what if the tying of that tourniquet had been the act that had tipped the balance and brought about all their downfalls?

No, it couldn’t have been because her drop had still opened, had still let her go back to Oxford and come through again to finish the deed. But it might have helped, might have jostled the china ever closer to the edge.

“I mean, you’ve seen with Mr. Dunworthy how deadly being out on the streets at night is,” Eileen was saying. “Working as a warden is far too dangerous.”

“You’re right, it is. I’m not going to do it.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Eileen said, and flung her arms around Polly. “I’ve been so worried! Now, sit down and have a cup of tea, and I’ll take Mr. Dun—Mr. Hobbe—his.”

Polly obeyed.

Eileen was gone several minutes. When she came back out, she whispered, “I asked him about the Alhambra, and he said it wasn’t hit, that only two theaters were damaged during the Blitz, and neither one was during a performance.”

I’m going to have to tell her, Polly thought despairingly. But not yet. I can’t bear it. And Alf and Binnie had come back into the kitchen and were arguing over who got to feed the parrot. “Mind the gap, Binnie!” it squawked.

“My name’s not Binnie,” Binnie said. “It’s Vera. Like Vera Lynn.”

Alf, his mouth full, said, “I thought it was Rapunzel.”

“Rapunzel was a noddlehead,” Binnie said. She held out a bit of bread to the parrot. “Say, ‘Mind the gap, Vera.’ ”

We’ll have to send them away, Polly thought. It’s the only way to keep them safe. They’ll have to be evacuated, and it was almost funny.

“Why’d Rapunzel just sit there in that tower?” Binnie asked. “Whyn’t she cut off ’er ’air and climb down it? That’s what I’d do. I wouldn’t stay in any old tower.”

In the bustle of clearing the table, gathering the children’s lessons up, and retying Binnie’s hair ribbon, Polly had no chance to speak to Eileen alone.

“Alf, pull your socks up,” Eileen said, putting on her coat. “Binnie, stop that. Polly, can you go fetch the meat and eggs for Mr. Hobbe?” She handed her the order the doctor had written out. “And see if the butcher has a soup bone so we can make some broth.”

Polly promised to do that and to go fetch Mr. Dunworthy’s things from where he was staying. She dressed, did the washing up, and then, when she couldn’t put it off any longer, went in to see Mr. Dunworthy. He looked even frailer in the gray morning light. The skin over his cheekbones and at his temples was nearly translucent, but for the first time since she’d found him, he didn’t look like he had more bad news to tell her. “You look a bit better,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“I should be asking you that,” he said.

She smiled wryly. “I’m still standing.”

“Like St. Paul’s.”

Exactly like St. Paul’s—battered, damaged, and looking out on a landscape of devastation.

“I had something else to say last night,” he said. “We don’t know for certain that the war was lost. There’s a possibility that the continuum may succeed in undoing the damage we’ve incurred.”

“Though it will have to kill us to do it,” she said.

But it was still better than the alternative. And her dying to stop Hitler from winning the war was no different from what tens of thousands of British soldiers and civilians had done, and they’d had no guarantee that they’d be successful either.

But at least they hadn’t had to worry about endangering everyone else in the foxhole or the shelter by their mere presence. “What about the others?” she asked him.

“The contemps we’ve interacted with?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Those factors that protected the continuum for so long—the ability to absorb and diminish and cancel out effects—may be factors in the correction as well.”

Translation: It might only have to kill a few of them.

“If we separate ourselves from them and don’t have any more contact, is there a chance that will keep them from being killed?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. Perhaps.” But there was not much hope in his voice. “It’s impossible to know how far the damage has spread and if alterations have already occurred that must be counteracted.”

Were Alf and Binnie supposed to have gone on the City of Benares and drowned? Or died along with their mother near Piccadilly Circus? And was Marjorie supposed to have died in the rubble and Private Hardy at Dunkirk and Stephen Lang on the way to London from Hendon Airfield? Or would Mrs. Hodbin have torn up the letter, Private Hardy have been picked up by another boat, the others have survived and gone on to do exactly what they did do? There was no possible way to tell.

But if we haven’t altered their lives already, Polly thought, then perhaps our staying away from them from now on can protect them from being caught within our deadly blast radius. Thank goodness we’re not at Mrs. Rickett’s anymore and not staying at Notting Hill Gate. And now that she was at ENSA, she had a perfect excuse for quitting Sir Godfrey’s troupe. She went and got the ration coupons and then the eggs and a quarter pound of beef, but no soup bone. The butcher hadn’t any. She had to settle for bouillon cubes.

She took them home, made Mr. Dunworthy a soft-boiled egg, and then set out again to fetch his things from a dreary, chill room in the only part of Carter Lane which hadn’t burned on the twenty-ninth. She’d intended to go tell Mr. Humphreys that she’d got Mr. Hobbe safely home, but now she didn’t dare risk it. He had been nothing but kind to her. He didn’t deserve …

She stopped short on the pavement. That was what Mr. Dunworthy had started to say last night when he’d refused to go to St. Bart’s, that the nurses had been very kind to him and that they didn’t deserve to die for it.

She debated giving a message for Mr. Humphreys to the volunteer at the desk, but she wasn’t even sure she had any business being in St. Paul’s. Yet she didn’t want Mr. Humphreys tracking Mr. Dunworthy down out of concern. She settled for giving a note addressed to Mr. Humphreys to a woman going inside and asking her to give it to the verger. And what if even that moment-long encounter was enough to require a correction? Or her conversation with Hattie when she went to the Alhambra that afternoon?

“Did you get that rescue job you wanted?” Hattie asked her when she arrived for rehearsal.

“No,” Polly said.

“Then you can rescue the second act. Here,” she said, handing her a bathing suit with a Union Jack emblazoned on it. “Cheer up. ENSA may not be as heroic as rescue work, but we keep up the soldiers’ spirits and make them forget their troubles for a few hours, don’t we? Singing and dancing can help win the war, too.”

Mr. Tabbitt put her in the show that very night, serving as assistant to a magician. She was very bad at it, but so was the magician, and the main interest of the audience, which consisted almost entirely of soldiers, seemed to be her abbreviated costume.

“Tits and tinsel,” Hattie said. “That’s our motto.”

“I thought it was ENSA: Every Night Sexy Acts,” one of the chorus girls said, flouncing past them in an even skimpier costume as they stood in the wings.

“That’s Joyce,” Hattie said. “Nice, but a bit too fond of the boys.”

A handsome young man dressed as an RAF pilot brushed past them.

“And that’s Reggie,” Hattie said. “Also a bit too fond of the boys. That’s one thing I like about ENSA. One never has to worry about being fondled. Except by Mutchins, our beloved stage manager. Watch out for him. He’s a menace.”

So am I, Polly thought. Like one of those fiendish delayed-action bombs set to go off when someone comes too near.

It took her two days to find the courage to tell Eileen. Polly remembered how sick she’d looked when she’d found out about Polly’s deadline, remembered her refusal to budge from the foot of the escalator when she found out Mike was dead, and was afraid the same thing would happen, but she took the news with an almost frightening calmness. “I knew it had to be bad when you brought him in,” she said. “He’s certain we lost the war?”

“Mr. Dunworthy says there’s no way to be absolutely certain, and there’s a possibility the continuum will be able to correct itself—”

“But it won’t help us.”

“No,” Polly said, feeling like a doctor giving a patient a terminal diagnosis.

“And he’s certain there’s nothing we could do that would change things back?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re in an unwinnable situation.”

“Yes.”

An unwinnable situation with not even a way to get out of it. If Polly killed herself, or even let a convenient HE do it for her, that still wouldn’t put an end to the damage she could do, the changes she might effect. She would endanger the rescue crews who had to dig for her. Or delay them from digging for someone else, and that someone else would die from a broken gas main in the meantime. And her death would affect Doreen and Miss Snelgrove and the troupe.

And Sir Godfrey, who last time he thought she was buried in the rubble had moved heaven and earth to find her, who had sent ripples out in all directions.

She’d been wrong—she wasn’t a delayed-action bomb. She was a UXB that would blow up if someone didn’t defuse it—but that, if someone attempted to, was even more likely to explode. And once the bomb squad had set it ticking, they didn’t dare stop, and the only safe way to dispose of it was to take it out to Barking Marshes, where it could explode without harming anyone.

But the continuum had no Barking Marshes, and short of being dead, there was no way Polly could get out of her service with ENSA and out of endangering everyone in the cast, to say nothing of all those soldiers and sailors in the audience.

She lay awake nights, thinking of everyone she might have unwittingly endangered—Fairchild and Lady Denewell and Talbot, whose knee she’d wrenched, and Sarah Steinberg and the other shopgirls at Townsend Brothers and the guard at Padgett’s who’d chased her up the stairs, the old man with the fringed pink silk cushion who’d caught her when her legs gave way and eased her down to the curb after she’d seen St. George’s.

And that was only her. What about Eileen’s evacuees and Agatha Christie and the nurses and doctors and patients at the hospital in Orpington? And at St. Bart’s?

Mr. Dunworthy had clearly thought he’d put his nurses and doctors in danger. He’d also said that perhaps not everyone they’d come into contact with had to be part of the correction, but even if only a few of them were …

She knew now how Theodore’s neighbor felt. She wanted to shut herself in the cupboard under the stairs and stay there, even if it offered no protection at all. But that was impossible. She had to make Mr. Dunworthy soft-boiled eggs and tea and keep Alf from asking him how it felt to be blown up and Binnie from sharing her opinions of fairy tales, had to learn her lines, practice tap routines, rip ruffles off her costumes and sew sequins on them. And face Eileen’s unquenchable optimism.

“I don’t think Mr. Dunworthy’s right,” she said the day after Polly told her. “Saving people’s lives is a good thing, and after all, Mr. Dunworthy didn’t intend to run into the Wren—”

“And the German pilots who got lost didn’t mean to start the London Blitz,” Polly said. “The sailor lighting a cigarette on deck didn’t mean to get his convoy blown up. History’s a chaotic system. Cause and effect aren’t—”

“Linear. I know. But even in a chaotic system, good deeds and good intentions—and courage and kindness and love—must count for something, or else history would be even worse than it already is,” Eileen said.

She refused to send Alf and Binnie away. “When the vicar tried to place them last summer before we left Backbury, no one would take them,” she said. “And even if we could find someone, they’d only run away to London and begin living on their own again. And collecting UXBs. They’d be in just as much danger as they are with me.”

Except that the continuum wouldn’t be after them. “But by sending them away, you’d be saving their lives,” Polly argued.

“I thought you said saving lives was a bad thing,” Eileen said. “That that was how we got into this mess in the first place. That if I’d let Alf and Binnie go on the City of Benares and drown, if I’d let that man in the back of the ambulance bleed to death, that everything would be fine.”

“Eileen—”

“Don’t you see? If I send them away, they may be killed, and if I keep them here, they may be killed. But if I send them away, they’ll think I’m abandoning them, and that will kill them. They’ve already been abandoned by everyone they’ve ever known. They can’t survive that again. And I swore I’d take care of them.”

But don’t you see? You can’t, Polly thought.

But Eileen was right, it was a no-win situation, so it probably made no difference where they were. Eileen had saved both of their lives once and Binnie’s twice, and that would clearly have to be corrected. She tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that the Hodbins could take care of themselves. That if anyone could survive a correction—or a war—it was the two of them.

Polly wanted desperately to believe that it was possible for them, and at least some of the others, to survive. And that it was possible to do something even now to protect them, even though she feared it was as useless as Sleeping Beauty’s father burning the spinning wheels.

But she kept away from St. Paul’s and Kensington anyway and took the bus instead of the tube, searching for a seat where she wouldn’t have to be next to someone, taking care to watch where she was going so that she didn’t collide with anyone. She stayed strictly away from Oxford Street, and when Mr. Tabbitt dispatched her to buy sateen or ribbon for costumes, she went to Regent Street or Harrods and said no more than “Five yards, please.”

Even that might be enough to seal the shopgirl’s fate, but at least she wasn’t at Townsend Brothers, where she might endanger Doreen or Miss Snelgrove. Or in Notting Hill Gate with the troupe. And the effort of avoiding people kept her mind off the sprawling network of people they’d come into contact with: the bombing victims she’d saved while she was stationed at Dulwich, the bus driver who’d taken her to Backbury, the servants at the manor, the people who’d been on the train with Eileen and her and Mike, and the girls who’d picked Mike up and dusted him off in Bletchley.

And it kept her mind off Mr. Dunworthy, who was not improving, in spite of eggs and Eileen’s aspirin and a large soup bone that Alf and Binnie had got somewhere and about which both Eileen and Polly thought it best not to ask questions.

“I’m worried about him,” Eileen said. “The doctor says it’s not the head injury, that that’s nearly healed, and that it’s not pneumonia. He doesn’t know what it is.”

It’s thinking about what’s going to happen to us and to Charles Bowden, who will still be in Singapore when the Japanese arrive, and to whoever Mr. Dunworthy sent off to the storming of the Bastille. And to who knows how many other historians who were in equally dangerous times and places when their drops slammed shut.

It’s the weight of the world.

“I’m afraid he’s not going to recover,” Eileen, who never gave up on anything or anybody, said, so Polly wasn’t surprised when she found Alf and Binnie waiting for her one night outside the stage door.

“Eileen sent us to fetch you,” Binnie said.

“Is it Mr. Hobbe?” she asked.

“Mr. Hobbe?” Alf said. “Nothin’ like. It’s Mrs. Rickett’s boardinghouse. It got bombed last night.”

“Direct hit,” Binnie said.

“Kabloom!” Alf shouted. “Ain’t it a good thing we was thrown out?”

“The flowers are turning very red. Repeat. The flowers are turning very red.”

—CODED BBC MESSAGE BROADCAST BY THE

FRENCH RESISTANCE BEFORE D-DAY