All Clear

London—Spring 1941

SOMEONE WAS CALLING HER. THE ALL OLEAR MUST HAVE GONE, she thought, but it was Sir Godfrey. “Wake up,” he said sternly. “Can you hear me, miss?”

Her head ached. I must have nodded off during rehearsal. He’ll be furious. And then, It can’t be Sir Godfrey, he always calls me Viola, and remembered where they were.

They were still in the bombed theater, and she was lying on top of Sir Godfrey, her full weight pressing down on him. “I’m sorry, Sir Godfrey,” she said. “I must have fallen on you when I passed out.”

He didn’t answer.

“Sir Godfrey? Wake up,” she said, and attempted to shift herself off him, but the effort made her head ache worse.

“Don’t try to move, miss, we’re coming,” the voice said from somewhere above them. “Careful. I can smell gas.”

“Sir Godfrey,” she said, but he didn’t respond.

And she should have known she couldn’t save him, that they would come too late. “Oh, Sir Godfrey, I am so sorry,” she murmured, and laid her head against his shoulder.

“Miss!” the voice said imperatively. “Are you trapped?”

Yes, she thought, and then hands were reaching down, lifting her off Sir Godfrey.

“No, you mustn’t, he’s bleeding,” she protested, but they had already pulled her out of the hole and sat her down, and now they were lifting the theater seats from Sir Godfrey’s legs, placing a jack under a pillar, jumping down into the hole, bending over him.

“Was there anyone else in the theater when the bomb hit, miss?” the one who’d pulled her out asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t here. When I saw the theater’d been hit, I came to find Sir Godfrey, and I caught my heel,” she said, trying to explain, “and while I was trying to free it, I heard his voice—”

“Well, it’s no wonder your heel got caught. This isn’t the sort of shoe to be clambering about an incident in,” he said, looking down at her gilt shoe, at her other, bare foot, and then at her costume, or what was left of it.

“I had to take off my skirt to make a compress,” she began, but he wasn’t listening.

“She’s injured,” he called to someone else, and when she looked down, she saw that her bathing suit and her hands were both covered in blood.

“That isn’t mine. It’s Paige’s,” she said, and even though it was too late and he was already dead, she told them, “Sir Godfrey has a chest wound. You need to apply direct pressure.”

“We’ll see to him, don’t you worry,” he said, examining her hands. “You’re certain you’re not hurt?”

I have blood on my hands, she thought, watching him dully as he turned them over, looking for cuts. Like Lady Macbeth. “ ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’ ” she murmured.

“Miss—”

“You don’t understand. I killed him. I altered events—”

“She’s in shock,” he said to someone.

“No,” she said. Not shock. Shock was when one didn’t see it coming, like that day at what was left of St. George’s when she realized something terrible had happened, that no one was coming for her. This was different. She had known all along it would end this way.

“Bring a stretcher!” he called.

It’s no use. You can’t save me either, she thought, and wondered dimly why she hadn’t died from the gas, too. That way I wouldn’t be able to do any more damage. I wouldn’t be able to kill anyone else.

“I need to get you over to the ambulance,” he said. “Can you walk, do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking, They must not have had a stretcher. Major Denewell must have borrowed all of them.

“That’s a good girl,” he said, and put his hand under her arm and helped her to her feet. “Here we go.”

But when she tried to walk, she swayed and fell against him.

He grabbed her arm. “Is your leg injured?”

“No, it’s my shoe,” she said. “I’m all right,” but when she tried again, her head spun and she nearly pitched forward. “My head—”

“You’ve breathed in a bit of gas, miss, that’s why you’re dizzy,” he said, easing her down onto the toppled back of a theater seat. “You need to take deep breaths … that’s it.”

He raised his head and called over her to the men gathered around the hole, “Sit here a minute, miss—what’s your name?”

“Mary,” she said, but that wasn’t right. This was the Blitz, not the V-1s. “Viola.”

“Viola, listen, my name’s Hunter. I want you to stay here a moment while I go fetch some oxygen to help you breathe, all right?”

She nodded.

“I’ll be back straightaway,” he said, and went to meet two men coming across the wreckage with a stretcher. He said something and took the stretcher from them, and they clambered back across the rubble. He took it over to the hole, where they were lifting out the section of balcony wall.

So they can remove Sir Godfrey’s body, she thought, watching them. You should wait till the gas is shut off.

“Fetch me a plasma drip,” someone called from the hole, and one of the men bounded off like a deer across the tangle of wreckage.

Why is he hurrying? Polly thought, bewildered. Sir Godfrey’s already dead.

She limped over to the hole. They were lifting him out and onto the stretcher. His chest was bandaged, a pad of white gauze taped to the wound, and there was a bandage on his wrist and a line of tubing running up his arm to a glass bottle full of plasma one of them was holding.

“Easy, don’t jar him,” the man holding the bottle said as they lifted the stretcher. “You’ll set him bleeding again.”

He isn’t dead, she thought wonderingly.

But that didn’t mean she’d saved his life. She’d only delayed his death. He’d die on the way to hospital. Or on the way to the ambulance, as they carried him across the wreckage on the stretcher. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and the men looked over at her.

“What the bloody hell’s she still doing here?” the one holding the plasma said. “She needs medical attention.”

Hunter hastened over to her. “Viola, I’m going to take you to the ambulance now,” he said. “Put your arm round my neck.”

“Careful,” one of the stretcher-bearers warned as they started across the wreckage with it. “If you strike a spark, you’ll send us all up.”

“We must go, Viola,” Hunter said urgently. “The theater could go up any moment.”

Of course, the gas. One of the stretcher-bearers’ hobnailed boots will scrape against the iron leg of a seat, and the gas will explode in a fireball and envelop us all.

Including Hunter, who stayed behind to try to help me.

She had to get away from him. Perhaps if he wasn’t near her or the stretcher when the theater went up, he’d only be injured. “I’m all right. I can walk on my own,” she said, and struck out away from him across the tangle of seats, going as quickly as she could with one shoe and one bare foot.

“Careful, slow down!” Hunter called behind her. “You’ll fall.”

She clambered across a row of seats and over a mahogany railing. The men carrying the stretcher were halfway across the theater, the bottle of plasma held aloft like a lantern.

Polly stepped down onto what had been a wall, painted with masks of Comedy and Tragedy. She glanced back at Hunter. He was only a few steps behind her.

Go away, she thought frantically, hobbling across Tragedy, across Comedy, I’m deadly, and her single heel went through the plaster, all the way up to her ankle.

She fell forward onto her hands and knees.

“What happened?” Hunter said, and before she could warn him to keep away, he jumped down beside her and helped her to stand. “Are you hurt?”

“No, my foot—”

“I need some help here!” Hunter called after the stretcher-bearers. “She’s—”

“No,” Polly said. “You need to leave me here and go fetch a crowbar.” But he was already on one knee beside her, pulling on her ankle.

“The heel’s caught,” he said. “Can you pull your foot out of the shoe?”

No, she thought, twisting around to look at the stretcher. The rescue crew nearly had it to the opening. The explosion would come any moment. Hunter wouldn’t have time to make it out, even if he left her now.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

And he must have thought she was talking about the shoe because he said, “No matter. We’ll just have to get you out, shoe and all.” He reached his hand down through the ragged-edged plaster and fumbled with her foot. “I told you you’d get into trouble clambering about an incident in high heels, though all in all, it’s a very good thing you did.”

No, it isn’t, she thought bitterly. I got you all killed. She turned to take one last look at Sir Godfrey and the men carrying the stretcher, but they weren’t there.

“Where?” she said, and heard voices shouting, doors slamming, a motor starting up.

The ambulance, she thought. They’re transporting him to hospital.

The ambulance roared off, bells ringing. Which meant Sir Godfrey was still alive. And the rescue crew was still alive. The theater hadn’t gone up.

“They made it out,” she murmured, unable to take it in.

Hunter looked up briefly from struggling with her foot. “Good. He should be right as rain once they get him to hospital and get him stitched up. You should be proud. You saved his life.”

Like Mike saved Hardy’s life, she thought. And Eileen kept Alf and Binnie from going on the City of Benares.

“It was clever, you stopping up that hole with your clothes,” Hunter was saying. “If you hadn’t found him and known what to do, he’d have been for it.”

It’s true, she thought. If she hadn’t caught her heel and bent down to free it, she’d never have heard him calling. And if she hadn’t been wearing these shoes, her heel wouldn’t have caught.

“For want of a shoe,” she murmured, and had a sudden vision of Mike saying, “If I hadn’t come through when I did, I wouldn’t have missed the bus and been stuck in Saltram-on-Sea, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep on the Commander’s boat …”

And if I hadn’t gone to the Works Board to volunteer to be an ambulance driver, I wouldn’t have been assigned to ENSA, I wouldn’t have been performing at the Alhambra …

“Try to move your foot back and forth,” Hunter said. “That’s it.” He reached his arm down deeper. “Keep moving it. I’ve nearly got it free.”

She nodded absently, thinking, If Mrs. Sentry hadn’t seen me in A Christmas Carol, she wouldn’t have assigned me to ENSA.

But why, if the continuum was trying to repair itself, hadn’t it kept her from being here the way it had kept Mike from getting to Dover, the way it had kept her and Eileen and Mike from reaching Mr. Bartholomew the night of the twenty-ninth?

Mike pushed two firemen out of the way of a collapsing wall that night, Polly thought suddenly. And Eileen saved someone’s life, too. The man in the ambulance.

And Binnie had been driving. Binnie, whom Eileen had nursed through pneumonia.

Why, if the past had sealed itself off to repair the damage Mike had caused, hadn’t it stopped Eileen from saving that bombing victim’s life? A hundred and sixty people had been killed the night of the twenty-ninth. It would have been easy to kill Mike and Eileen and her, too. Or to let them find John Bartholomew and go back to Oxford.

If they’d gone back, they wouldn’t have been here to further complicate things. She wouldn’t have been able to save Sir Godfrey, and Eileen wouldn’t have been able to save the man in the ambulance. And Eileen had had John Bartholomew in her sights. She’d run after him.

But Alf and Binnie had kept her from catching him. Alf and Binnie, whom Eileen had kept from going on the City of Benares.

“Got it,” Hunter said, and her heel, and foot, came abruptly loose.

She nearly fell. “Are you all right?” he asked, steadying her.

“Yes,” she said, righting herself and pulling her foot up out of the broken plaster, annoyed that he had interrupted her train of thought. What had she …? Alf and Binnie. They’d kept Eileen from catching John Bartholomew—

“Is your ankle injured?”

“No.” She set out across the wreckage again so he’d stop talking, so he wouldn’t break the fragile thread of thought she was following. If Alf and Binnie hadn’t kept Eileen from catching John Bartholomew …

They kept her from going back to Oxford the last day of her assignment, too, Polly thought, by getting the measles. If Alf hadn’t fallen ill, Eileen wouldn’t have been caught by the quarantine, and she wouldn’t have been there to take them back to London and keep the letter from Mrs. Hodbin. And if the net had sent Mike through on the right day, he would have been able to catch the bus to Dover, and he would never have ended up in Dunkirk, never have ended up saving Hardy.

And if the net had sent me through at six in the morning instead of the evening, I wouldn’t have been caught out during a raid and ended up at St. George’s. I wouldn’t have met Sir Godfrey.

But the slippage was supposed to prevent historians from altering events. It was supposed to—

“Wrong way,” Hunter said, taking her arm.

“What?”

“You can’t get out that way. It’s blocked. Through here,” he said, leading her over a fallen pillar and down a broken staircase. “That’s it, only a few more steps.”

“What did you say?” Polly asked him, pulling back against his hand on her arm, trying to make him stop.

“I said, ‘only a few more steps.’ We’re nearly there.”

“No, before that,” she said. “You said—”But they were down the stairs and out of the theater and he was handing her over to two FANYs.

“She needs to be taken to hospital,” Hunter said. “Possible internal injuries and exposure to gas. She’s a bit muddled.”

“Over here!” a man in a helmet called from across the street, and Hunter started toward him.

“Wait!” Polly called after him.

She had nearly had it, the knowledge which had been hovering just out of reach since he’d told her she’d saved Sir Godfrey’s life. “I need to speak to him,” she said to the FANYs, but he was already gone, she was already being wrapped in a blanket, being bundled into the back of an ambulance. “I need to ask him—”

“The man you saved has already been taken to hospital. You can speak to him there,” the FANY said, putting a mask over her nose and mouth. “Take a deep breath.”

“No,” Polly said, pushing it violently away, “not Sir Godfrey. Hunter, the man who brought me out.” But the doors were already shut, the ambulance was already moving. “Driver, you’ve got to go back. He said something when we were coming out of the theater. I must ask him what it was!”

“She’s confused,” the attendant called up to the driver. “It’s the effects of the gas.”

No, it’s not, Polly thought. It’s a clue.

He had said … something, and when she’d heard the words, they’d set up an echo of someone else, saying the same words … and for an instant it had all made sense—Alf and Binnie blocking Eileen’s way, and Mike unfouling the propeller, and the measles and the slippage and A Christmas Carol. If she could only remember …

Hunter had said, “You can’t get out that way. It’s blocked.” Like their drops. Hers had been bombed, and Mike’s had a gun emplacement on it, and Eileen’s had been fenced off and turned into a riflery range, blocking their way back. Like Alf and Binnie had blocked Eileen’s way, like the station guard had kept Polly from leaving Notting Hill Gate and going to the drop the night St. George’s was destroyed—

It has something to do with that night, Polly thought. The guard wouldn’t let me leave, and I went to Holborn—

“This won’t hurt,” the attendant said, clamping the oxygen mask down over her nose and mouth and holding it there. “It’s only oxygen. It will help clear your head.”

I don’t want it cleared, Polly thought. Not till she remembered what he’d said, not until she’d worked it out. It was a puzzle, like one of Mike’s crosswords. It had something to do with Holborn and Mike’s bus and ENSA and her shoe.

No, not her shoe—the shoe the horse had lost. “For want of a horse, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the war …”

The ambulance jolted to a stop, and they were opening the doors, carrying her inside the hospital past a woman at a desk.

Like Agatha Christie that night at St. Bart’s, Polly thought, and for an instant she nearly had it. It was something to do with Agatha Christie. And that night she’d gone to Holborn. The sirens had gone early, and the guard wouldn’t let her go to the drop, and so she hadn’t been there when the parachute mine exploded, she had thought they were all dead and had staggered into Townsend Brothers, and Marjorie had seen her and decided to elope with her airman—

“Let’s get you out of those clothes,” the nurse said, and they were taking her bloody swimsuit off, putting her into a hospital gown and a bed, bombarding her with questions so that she couldn’t concentrate. She had to keep explaining that her name wasn’t Viola, it was Polly Sebastian, that she wasn’t a chorus girl at the Windmill, that she wasn’t injured.

“It’s not my blood,” she insisted. “It’s Sir Godfrey’s.”

She’d nearly forgotten about Sir Godfrey, she had been so fixed on remembering what Hunter had said, but if he’d died on the way to hospital, it didn’t matter. If she hadn’t saved his life …

“Is he here?” she asked. “Is he all right?”

“I’ll send someone to see,” the nurse promised, taking her pulse, pulling the blankets up over her. “This will help you to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” Polly said, but it was too late. The needle was already in her arm.

“Marjorie,” she murmured, determined not to lose her train of thought. Marjorie had decided to elope with her airman, and so she’d been in Jermyn Street when it was hit, and so she’d …

But the sedative was already working, her thoughts already breaking up like fog into wisps of thought, already drifting from her grasp. She couldn’t remember what Marjorie … no, not Marjorie. Agatha Christie. And the measles and a horse and that night at Holborn. There hadn’t been anywhere to sit, so she’d stood in line at the canteen waiting for the escalators to stop, and Alf and Binnie had run by, had stolen the woman’s picnic basket. Alf and Binnie, who’d kept Eileen from going to St. Paul’s … no, that wasn’t Eileen, it was Mr. Dunworthy. They’d kept Mr. Dunworthy from going to St. Paul’s, and he’d collided with Alan Turing. No, Mike had collided with Alan Turing. Mr. Dunworthy had collided with Talbot, and her lipstick had rolled into the street, and Sir Godfrey …

Polly must have called out his name because the nurse hurried over. “He’s resting comfortably. Now try to sleep.”

I can’t, Polly thought groggily. I have to be there. “If you aren’t, there will be no one there to avert the inevitable disaster,” Hunter had said. No, that was Sir Godfrey, talking about Mrs. Wyvern and the pantomime. Hunter had said, “It was lucky you knew what to do.”

I learned it in Oxford, she thought, so I could pose as an ambulance driver and observe the V-1s and V-2s. But the Major sent us to Croydon to find John Bartholomew. No, not to Croydon, to St. Paul’s. But the streets were roped off because of the UXB, and I sneaked past the barrier and up the hill, but it was a cul-de-sac. I’d gone the wrong way—

Wrong way. That was what Hunter had said.

“Wrong way,” Polly murmured, and saw the ginger-haired librarian at Holborn holding an Agatha Christie paperback, heard her saying, “I’m convinced I know who the murderer is, and then, when I’m nearly to the end, I realize I’ve been looking at the entire situation the wrong way round, that something else entirely is going on.”

No, the librarian hadn’t said that, Eileen had, that day in Oxford. No, that wasn’t right either. But it didn’t matter. Because Polly had it—the idea she’d been pursuing all the way across the wrecked theater. And it all—Talbot and Marjorie and St. Paul’s and the measles and the stiff strap on her gilt shoe—fit together. It all made sense, and she knew it was vital to hold on to it, not to let it drift away, but it was impossible, the sedative was already closing in like fog, obliterating everything.

“Like the spell in Sleeping Beauty,” she tried to say, but she couldn’t. She was already asleep.

There just isn’t any way we’re gonna live through this thing.

—NAVIGATOR LIEUTENANT LOU BABER,

467TH BOMBARDMENT GROUP