Blackout

War Emergency Hospital-September 1940

MIKE HAD HAD NO IDEA ANYONE WAS SITTING THERE IN the high-backed wicker chair. When the voice said, “I thought you were supposed to keep your weight off that foot, Davis,” it startled him so much he let go of the chair back, came down full on his bad foot, nearly fell, and had to clutch wildly at the potted palm to stay upright.

At the same time, a wild hope surged through him. It’s the retrieval team, he thought. Finally.

The man was wearing the hospital-issue pajamas and maroon bathrobe, but he could have gotten those from Wardrobe. “Patient” would be a perfect disguise for getting into the hospital, and he was the right age for an historian. And he’d waited till they were alone in the sun-room to speak.

“Sorry, old man, I didn’t mean to give you a fright,” he said, leaning over the arm of the chair to smile at Mike.

“You know my name,” Mike said.

“Oh, right, we haven’t been properly introduced, have we?” He extended his hand. “Hugh Tensing. I’m on the third floor.”

And you’re not the retrieval team, Mike thought. Now that he looked closer, he saw Tensing was much too thin, and he had the drawn, strained look of an invalid.

“You’re Mike Davis, the American war correspondent,” Tensing was saying. “You repaired a broken propeller with your bare hands and single handedly rescued the entire BEF, according to Nurse Baker. She can’t stop talking about you.”

“She’s wrong,” Mike said. “The propeller wasn’t broken. It was just fouled, and all I did was pull-”

“Spoken like a true hero,” Tensing said. “Modest, humble even though you were injured in the line of duty-”

“I wasn’t-”

“I see, it’s all a fabrication. You weren’t actually in Dunkirk at all,” Tensing said, smiling. “You were in your newspaper office in London when a typewriter fell on your foot. Sorry, it won’t wash. I know you’re a hero. I’ve seen you take dangerous risks.”

“Dangerous-?”

“Just now. Openly defying your nurse’s orders. And Matron’s wrath. You’re far braver than I am.”

“Yes, well, I’m not brave enough to risk being caught,” Mike said, “and they may be here any minute, so I’d better make my way back to where I’m supposed to be.” He let go of the palm tree and stretched out his hand to grab the windowsill.

“No, wait, don’t go,” Tensing said. “I wasn’t hiding from you just now. I was hiding from my nurse, hoping she’d think someone had taken me back to the ward so I could do the same thing you were doing. As a matter of fact, I was treading exactly the same circuit when your nurse wheeled you in and nearly caught me red-handed. Or is it red-footed?”

Mike glanced down at Tensing’s feet, but there was no cast.

“Back injury,” Tensing said. “For which they have prescribed-”

“Bed rest,” Mike guessed.

“Exactly. ‘You must be patient. Your recovery will take time,’ utterly failing to comprehend that the one thing I don’t have-”

“-is time.”

“Exactly. A man after my own heart.” He grinned. “And because you are, I’ve a proposition for you. I can see you want the same thing I do-to get back in the war.”

You’re wrong, Mike thought. I want to get out of it. Before I do any more damage.

“The last time I was caught trying to hasten my recovery,” Tensing went on, “I was denied sunroom privileges for three weeks, all because I lacked an adequate warning system. I therefore propose a partnership.”

A partnership, Mike thought grimly. I shouldn’t even be talking to you, let alone helping you “hasten your recovery.” What if you get back in the war a month earlier than you would have, thanks to me, and kill somebody you’re not supposed to and change the outcome of the war?

“I propose,” Tensing was saying, “that one of us guard the door while the other walks, and give a warning if someone comes in. It won’t require any effort. They’ll glance in the door and see you reading or-what were you doing just now?”

“Working a crossword puzzle.”

“They’ll see you solving a crossword and assume all’s quiet on the western front and go away again.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then you’ll call out a warning, and I’ll sink into the nearest chair and give an excellent imitation of a patient napping. And then as soon as they’re gone, we’ll switch places, and I’ll stand guard while you walk, and we’ll both be recovered and out of here in no time. What do you say?”

No, Mike thought, I can’t risk it.

On the other hand, the sooner he got out of this hospital and this century, the better, for him and the century. “All right,” he said, “but how do we arrange to both be here at the same time?”

“Leave that to me. I think half past ten’s best. Earlier than that and Colonel Walton’s likely to be in here reading the Guardian. Shall I make the rounds first, or would you rather?”

“No, you go. I can only manage a few minutes at a time,” Mike said and began hobbling back to his wheelchair. “What should our code be? ‘The dog barks at midnight’? Isn’t that what spies always use?”

Tensing didn’t answer.

Mike looked back, wondering if he’d already walked off to the other side of the room and couldn’t hear him, but he was still sitting in the wicker chair, frowning. “Tensing? I said-”

“Yes. Sorry. I was trying to think of an appropriate code. Just call out one of your crossword clues. Tell me when you reach your chair.”

“I’m there,” Mike said, lowering himself into it. He picked up his crossword, rolled himself over by the door, and then looked over at Tensing beginning his circuit. Tensing didn’t have to hold on to the furniture, but twice he had to stop, his hands tightening into white-knuckled fists.

What if he has internal injuries, Mike worried, and has no business doing this? What if my helping him walk makes his injury worse?

Tensing made two halting trips around the edges of the room and then said, “Your turn,” and took his place at the door while Mike worked his way over to the windows and back.

“How did you come to take up crosswords?” he asked as Mike grabbed for a bookcase. “I thought Americans preferred baseball.”

“They wouldn’t let me have the newspaper otherwise, and I wanted to read the war news,” Mike said, reaching for a chair back. “I’m not really very good at your crosswords.”

“Most Americans can’t solve them at all.” There was a silence and then he said, “Six across: barrage.”

“What?” Mike said, stopping.

“Nightly gunfire full of anger.”

“Is that the code? Do you hear someone coming?”

“No, it’s the answer to six across.”

“Oh,” Mike said, limping over to the potted palm.

“‘Rage’ is a synonym for ‘anger.’”

“Is that the code?”

“No, sorry. Perhaps we’d better go with ‘the dog barks at midnight’ after all. I was explaining the clue. ‘Rage’ is a synonym for ‘anger,’ and ‘full of’ means one word inside another. ‘Going the wrong way’ means it’s an anagram, and so does ‘muddled.’” His voice changed. “Thirty-eight down: caught in the act.”

That had to be the code. Mike pushed off violently from the bookcase to the potted palm, clamping his jaw against the pain, and flung himself into his wheelchair. “Go,” he said, propelling his chair rapidly to the door, and Tensing rolled his into the wilderness of wicker-handing off Mike’s crossword as he went by-and disappeared behind a curio cabinet.

Mike barely had time to reach for his pencil before a nurse appeared. She scanned the room suspiciously. “Have you seen Lieutenant Tensing?” she asked Mike.

“He’s over there,” Mike whispered, nodding toward the far end. “Why don’t you come back later? I think he’s asleep.”

“Good,” she said. “He needs rest. You haven’t seen him trying to get out of his chair, have you?”

“No,” Mike said and would have asked her about his injury, but Sister Gabriel came to take him back before he could.

He spent all afternoon worrying about it. What if there was a bullet lodged in Tensing’s spine, or a piece of shrapnel, and walking would dislodge it? Or what if Tensing was shell-shocked, like Bevins, and likely to hurl himself off a cliff as soon as he was walking well enough to get to one?

“I met a patient named Tensing today in the sunroom,” he said to Sister Carmody when she came with his tea. “What’s he in for?”

“You make us sound like a prison,” she scolded. “We’re not allowed to discuss patients’ injuries.”

“Was he a pilot?”

“No, he’s something to do with the War Office,” she said, wringing out the sponge in the basin.

“The War Office?” Mike said. “How’d he get injured working a desk job?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he was in an automobile accident or something. He’s got five cracked ribs and a sprained back,” she said and then looked appalled. “Please don’t tell Matron I told you that. I could get in trouble.”

So could I, he thought. But if Tensing worked in the War Office, at least Mike wouldn’t be helping him go back into battle. And walking wouldn’t hurt a sprained back and cracked ribs.

Tensing was good as his word about getting him to the sunroom. An orderly appeared every day at ten-thirty to take Mike up. He’d worried about his nurses getting suspicious, but they were swamped with new patients, most of them RAF pilots. And with Tensing standing guard, he was able to get in nearly an hour of exercise every day. By the middle of the next week he was walking-all right, limping-unassisted half the length of the room. And, with Tensing’s helpful hints, filling in the Daily Herald puzzle in forty minutes flat.

Tensing was doing even better. He was walking not only in the sun-room, but the length of the wards and then up and down stairs with his doctors’ approval. “At this rate, you’ll be out of here in a week or two,” Mike told him when Tensing came down Wednesday in robe and slippers to see him in the ward.

“No,” he said, pulling over a chair. “I’m being discharged tomorrow morning. I got word this afternoon.” He sat down and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Sorry to break up our partnership, old man, but duty calls, and you’re doing splendidly. You’ll be out of here in no time.”

“You’re going back to your old job?” Mike said, thinking, What if the War Office gets bombed? Right now London’s as dangerous as the front.

“My old job?” Tensing said, looking disconcerted.

“Yes, in the War Office.”

“Oh. Yes. It’s not a glamorous job, I know, filling up forms, but it must be done. And London’s rather exciting these days, with the raids and all.”

“Is that how you got injured before? In a raid?”

“Nothing so dramatic, I’m afraid. A typewriter fell on me.” He shook Mike’s hand. “I hope we meet again.”

We won’t, Mike thought, but he nodded. “Good luck.”

Tensing shook his head. “Wrong response. The correct answer is ‘nineteen across: clumsy curtain wish,’” and went out.

It took Mike ten minutes to figure out that the answer was “Break a leg.” He wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it to Sister Carmody when she came over to his bed, but before he could ask her to take it to Tensing, she asked, “Are you feeling well enough for a visitor?”

“A visitor?” It couldn’t be Daphne. In her last letter she’d written that there’d been an influx of soldiers to the coast, “with the invasion coming,” and as a result, the inn was so busy she was unable to get away, which he’d decoded as meaning she’d found someone new to flirt with. Thank God.

“Yes, it’s a new patient,” Sister Carmody said. “As soon as he was admitted, he asked if you were here.”

So he’d been right about the retrieval team coming disguised as patients. “Where is he?” He started to swing his feet over the side of the bed, and then remembered he was supposed to still be bedridden.

“I’ll send him in,” Sister Carmody said, and almost immediately the ward doors swung open and a man with a freckled face, a bandaged shoulder, and a cast on his arm came striding jauntily into the ward. It was Hardy.

“Do you remember me?” he said. “Private David Hardy? From Dunkirk?”

“Yes,” Mike said, looking at his cast. I’d hoped you’d died, that you hadn’t had the chance to do any damage.

“I wouldn’t have been surprised if you didn’t remember,” Hardy was saying. “You were pretty badly off. How’s your foot? Did they have to cut it off?”

“No.”

“They didn’t? I thought it’d definitely have to come off,” he said cheerfully. “It looked like bloody hell.”

“How’d you get that?” Mike asked, pointing at Hardy’s cast.

“Dunkirk,” Hardy said. “Messerschmitt. It was coming straight at us, and I dove for the deck and came up hard against the side. Smashed my shoulder blade to bits. That’s why I’m here, to have surgery on it because it’s not healing properly, and the moment I arrived I asked, ‘Is there a patient here who mangled his foot unfouling a propeller at Dunkirk?’ and they said yes. I can’t tell you how glad I was. The hospital in Dover hadn’t any record of your ever having been admitted, even though I’d seen you into the ambulance myself, so I thought you must have died on the way to hospital. And then when they said they were sending me to Orpington, I thought perhaps that was what had happened to you, and here you are. I’m awfully glad I found you. I wanted to thank you for saving my life. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be in a German prison camp. Or worse.”

He beamed at Mike. “And I wanted you to know what a good day’s work you did when you rescued me. As soon as I’d had a hot meal and a sleep, I went back over on the Mary Rose, and then, when she was sunk, the Bonnie Lass. I made four trips altogether and personally got five hundred and nineteen men safely on board and back to Dover.” He grinned happily at Mike. “And all because I saw that light of yours.”