All Clear (11 page)

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. If we’d found them and told them what had happened, Oxford would have known what was going to happen when it sent us through.
We’d
have known what was going to happen.”

He considered that. “Maybe they couldn’t tell us because it would create a paradox. If we knew we were going to be trapped, we wouldn’t come, and we had to come because we
had
come.”

“But Mr.
Dunworthy
wouldn’t have let us come. You know how overprotective he is. He’d never have let you come knowing they couldn’t get you out after you were injured.”
And he wouldn’t have let me come knowing I had a deadline
.

But she couldn’t say that. “This is a man who was worried I might get my foot caught in a barrage-balloon rope,” she said instead. “He’d never have let us get trapped in the Blitz. Or let you go to Coventry to get us out. The entire city burned. It would be suicide for you to go there. You’re here to observe heroes, not die trying to be one.”

“Then we need to come up with somebody besides Ned and Verity. Who else was here? Didn’t Dunworthy go to the Blitz at some point?”

“He went several times, but—”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I know he observed the big raids on May tenth and eleventh, because he talked about watching the fire in the House of Commons, and that happened on the tenth.”

“And you said before that the ninth and tenth were the worst raids of the Blitz?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Nothing. We need something sooner. When else was he here?”

“I don’t know. I remember him telling a story about attempting to get to his drop, and the gates at Charing Cross Railway Station being shut and him not being able to get in.”

“But you don’t know the date?”

“No.”

“But if he told you he was trying to get to his drop, that means it must have been somewhere in Charing Cross.”

“No, it doesn’t. He might have been taking the train to his drop. He could have been going anywhere.”

“But it’s a place to start, and we can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. I want you to go check it while I’m at Beachy Head. Unless one of these names I got at Biggin Hill turns out to be Phipps’s airfield. Speaking of which, what’s keeping Eileen?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “I
need to read them to her. I managed to wangle a ride to Beachy Head, and the guy’s leaving at two, but I don’t want to waste my time there if Gerald’s at one of these other airfields.”

Eileen hurried in just as Mike was paying the bill, saying, “Sorry, I was applying at Mary Marsh, and they kept me waiting.”

Mike read her the list. She shook her head decisively at each of the names.

“Okay, then, it’s Beachy Head,” he said. He hurried off to catch his ride. “I’ll be back before the fourteenth.”

So you can go to Coventry
, Polly thought.

She had to keep him from doing that. Which meant she had to find Gerald’s airfield.

Over the next few days, she spent her lunch breaks going to Victoria and St. Pancras Stations to copy down two-word names beginning with B and P from the departure boards and her evenings incurring Sir Godfrey’s wrath by trying to get additional airfield names from Lila and Viv, but they were almost no help at all.

“We nearly always go to the dances at Hendon,” Lila said.

“There’s one on Saturday,” Viv told her. “You and your cousin could come with us.”

She nearly accepted. They could ask the airmen they danced with where else they’d been stationed. But she was afraid if they weren’t there when Mike came back, he’d decide to go to Coventry, which would be not only dangerous but pointless.

Because if Mike had found Ned and Verity and given them the message, that would mean Mr. Dunworthy had known for
years
that all this was going to happen and not only allowed it to but arranged it. Arranged for Mike to go to Dunkirk, for Eileen to go to a manor where the evacuees had the measles, had manipulated and lied to all of them from the moment they entered Oxford.

It’s impossible
, she told herself.

But even as she thought it, she was remembering.
He made me bring extra money, he made me learn the raids through December thirty-first. He insisted I work in a department store that was never hit during the entire Blitz
. And if they
had
managed to get a message through, then he’d have known they were pulled out in time and that they weren’t in any actual danger.

But if Mr. Dunworthy
had
lied, then why hadn’t he sent Mike to Dunkirk in the first place instead of scheduling him to do Pearl Harbor and letting him get his L-and-A implant? And why had Linna and Badri
been questioning everyone about increased slippage if they already knew about it?

Mike still wasn’t back by the twelfth, and they’d had no word from him. It hadn’t taken him this long when he went to Biggin Hill.

What if he went to Coventry without telling us
? Polly thought, looking over at the lifts from her stocking counter, hoping one would open and Mike would emerge.

One of them finally did, but it wasn’t Mike. It was Eileen. “I came for two reasons,” she said. “I’m determined to have the name of Gerald’s airfield for Mike when he gets back from Beachy Head, so I came to tell you I’m going to go scour the secondhand bookshops for an old ABC or a book about the RAF or
something
with airfield names, and I wanted to make certain there weren’t any raids in Charing Cross Road today.”

“There aren’t any daytime raids anywhere in London today,” Polly reassured her.

“Oh, good. I’m sorry I’m such an infant about them—”

“It’s not being an infant to be frightened of someone who’s trying to kill you,” Polly said. “You said you had two reasons for coming?”

“Yes. I wanted to tell you I found out why Lady Caroline didn’t write. I got another letter from Mrs. Bascombe. Lady Caroline’s husband was killed.”

“Oh, dear. Had you met him?”

“No, Lord Denewell worked in London at the War Office, and the house he was staying in was bombed—”

“Lord Denewell? You worked for
Lady Denewell
?”

“Yes, at Denewell Manor. Why? Is something wrong? Did you meet Lord Denewell?”

“No. Sorry. I saw Miss Snelgrove looking this way. Perhaps you’d better go—”

“I will. I only wanted to ask you if you thought it would be all right for me to send her a letter of condolence? I mean, with my being a servant and everything. I’m afraid she’ll think I’m acting above my place, but—”

Polly cut her off. “Miss Snelgrove’s coming. We’ll discuss it tonight. Go look for your ABC.”

Eileen nodded. “I won’t come back till I have either a list of airfields or a map in hand.”

She started toward the lifts. “Wait,” Polly said, running after her. “If you have to ask for a map, tell them you want it for your nephew who’s interested in planespotting. That way they won’t be suspicious.”

“Planespotting … I never thought of that,” Eileen said. “Polly, listen,
I’ve just had an idea—uh-oh, Miss Snelgrove at eleven o’clock,” she whispered. “I’ll see you tonight.” And she hurried off.

“Miss Sebastian,” Miss Snelgrove said.

“Yes, ma’am. I was only—”

“Miss Hayes will be returning to work today, and I’d like you to be here to assist her, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting to take your lunch break till two—”

“I’m happy to,” Polly said, and meant it. Marjorie was coming back to work. Polly’d been afraid she’d been too traumatized by her experience to stay in London, but she was coming back.

And when she arrived, she was nearly her old rosy-cheeked self.
I was right
, Polly thought.
I didn’t alter the end result. Everything’s worked out just as it would have if Marjorie’d never been injured
.

“I’ll wrap your parcels for you till your arm’s better,” she told Marjorie, “though you can no doubt do better with one hand than I can with two. I never have got the hang of it, and now that the paper and string are rationed—”

But Marjorie was shaking her head. “I’m not staying. I only came to tell everyone goodbye.”

“Goodbye?”

“Yes. I’ve handed in my notice.”

“But—”

“I … the nurses in hospital were so kind to me. I wouldn’t have made it if it weren’t for them, and it made me think about what
I
was doing to help win the war. I couldn’t bear to see Hitler come marching down Oxford Street because I hadn’t done all I could.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve joined Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Service. I’m going to be an Army nurse.”

I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I CAN GET A MAP,
EILEEN THOUGHT
, hurrying out of Townsend Brothers and up Oxford Street to the tube station to catch a train to Whitechapel.
Alf Hodbin has one. His planespotting map. Why didn’t I think of it before
?

She could get it from him and locate Gerald’s airfield—she was nearly positive she’d recognize the name when she saw it—and Polly and Mike would stop looking at her as though she were an imbecile for not remembering. And they could go to the airfield, find Gerald, and go home.

If Alf still has the map
, she thought. And if he’d give it to her. He might well refuse, especially if he sensed how badly she needed it. Hopefully he and Binnie would still be in school and she could get it from their mother instead and not have to worry about Alf’s refusing or about the children following her and finding out where she lived. Though it wouldn’t matter—she wouldn’t be here that much longer.

She looked at her watch. It was just one. She should be able to get to Whitechapel well before school let out. But Alf and Binnie had constantly played truant in Backbury, and Mrs. Hodbin didn’t seem the type who’d see to it that they went to school. And if they were there …

I’m going to have to bribe them
, she decided. But with what?

I
know
, she thought, and took a train to the Tower of London, where she bought a book on beheadings at the first souvenir shop she could find and a film-star magazine for Binnie, then set out for Whitechapel.

Which proved nearly impossible to get to. The District Line was shut down.
Polly said there weren’t any daytime raids today
, Eileen thought nervously, going back upstairs to take a bus, but the damage turned out to have been from a raid the night before—damage which became apparent as she neared Whitechapel. There was a massive crater in the middle of Fieldgate Street and, a bit farther on, the wreckage of a warehouse lying across the road.

Polly’d said the East End had been badly bombed, but Eileen hadn’t expected it to be this bad. On every street at least one of the clapboard tenements had collapsed inward in a heap of wood and plaster. Others had toppled sideways onto the next tenement and the next and the next, like a line of falling dominoes.

Eileen was grateful there weren’t any raids today. She didn’t know how Polly and Mike stood them. “You’ll get used to them,” Polly’d said. “A few more weeks, and you won’t even hear them,” but it wasn’t true. She still jumped every time she heard the
crump
of an HE and flinched at the
poom-poom-poom
of the anti-aircraft guns. Even the wail of the sirens sent her into a panic. If there
had
been raids in the East End today, she wasn’t certain she could have summoned the courage to come, map or no map.

At Commercial Street, she was supposed to change buses, but with every street barricaded she decided it would be faster to walk the half-mile to Gargery Lane. It was already three o’clock. But even walking was difficult. Entire streets had been reduced to rubble, and the tenements which still stood had their sides smashed in or their fronts torn away, the furniture inside exposed to the street. In one, a kitchen table set for breakfast stood on a now-slanting floor, food still on the plates. In another, a staircase climbed up into empty space. And in between, everything was smashed flat, including the corrugated iron roof of an Anderson shelter exactly like the one she and Theodore had spent so many nights in.

In more than one place, rubble covered the street, too, and Eileen had to backtrack and go around, getting thoroughly lost in the process. She had to ask directions and then ask again—first of an elderly man pushing a pram full of household belongings and then of a middle-aged woman sitting on the curb with her head in her hands. “Gargery Lane? It’s down that way,” the woman said, pointing toward a line of gutted buildings. “If it’s still there. They were hit hard last night.”

I should definitely have given Mrs. Hodbin that letter
, Eileen thought guiltily. Alf and Binnie would have been safer on the torpedoed
City of Benares
than in this dreadful place. She hurried past the blackened shell of a tenement. What if Gargery Lane was a burnt-out ruin or a heap of
plaster and bricks? What if Alf and Binnie had been killed, and it was her fault?

But miraculously it was there, and fairly intact. The windows had been taped over and covered with bits of cardboard, but the row of houses still stood, and they were proudly flying Union Jacks. The tenement the Hodbins lived in had “Weel Gett Our Own Bak, Adolff!” written across its brown wooden front in red paint—no doubt Alf’s handiwork, since most of the words were misspelled. Its windows were boarded up, too, all except for one, which must have been just blown out. Shards of glass lay on the pavement in front of it.

The door stood ajar.
Good
, Eileen thought. She could hopefully avoid the alarming woman with the red hands this time. She stepped over the broken glass and squeezed into the tiny front vestibule past a bicycle, a stirrup pump, and two buckets with ARP stenciled on them, one of which was full of soaking rags and the other of potato peelings.

The door on her right shot open, and the woman with the red hands came charging out at her, brandishing a rag mop. “Thought you could sneak past me, did you?” she shouted, raising the mop above her head with both hands like an axe. “Not this time, you little bastard!”