All Clear (34 page)

“I’ll ask them when I see them,” Mike lied. “You were going to go get the address?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and pattered up the stairs, turning as she ran to give Mike one of those over-the-shoulder smiles that had no doubt snared her new husband. “I’ll only be a moment.”

She was as good as her word, reappearing almost immediately with a sheet of lined paper torn from a notebook like the one he carried. “Here it is,” she said, handing it to him.

He looked down at the address. It was in Edgebourne, Kent. That must be where their drop was.

“It’s near Hawkhurst,” Daphne said.

Hawkhurst. Well, he wouldn’t have to go all the way back to Saltram-on-Sea, but almost. He’d have to make that whole long, uncomfortable trip back in a packed train.

At least it wasn’t on the coast, so he wouldn’t have to deal with guards and checkpoints. But he was afraid it wasn’t big enough to have a railroad station. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He felt all the near panic of the last six months melt away. The retrieval team was here, and they were going home.

“Thank you,” he said, and kissed Daphne impulsively on the cheek. “You’re wonderful.”

“Now, then,” she said, blushing, “you mustn’t do that sort of thing, you know. I’m a married woman. Rob—”

“Is a very lucky guy.”
And so am I. You have just saved my life. All our lives
. “Listen,” he said. “Be careful. When the sirens go, don’t be a hero. Get yourself to the shelter. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Oh, dear, I
did
break your heart, didn’t I?” She smiled sympathetically at him. “You mustn’t worry. You’ll meet someone, and you’ll be just as happy as Rob and I are. You’ll see, it will all work out for the best. Rob says—”

The sirens went, and Mike used them as an excuse to leave. “Remember what I said,” he told her. “You get to that shelter.” And he limped off before she could tell him what Rob had said and what her wedding dress had looked like and how he’d find a nice girl.

I already have a nice girl
, he thought.
Two of them
.

Who he needed to call and tell the good news to as soon as he got to the station. He hadn’t wanted to call them before for fear he wouldn’t be able to find Daphne or for fear she wouldn’t have the retrieval team’s address, but now they needed to quit their jobs and get ready to go. And he needed to ask Polly if Manchester had been bombed on the twenty-second and how badly.

In spite of the sirens having gone nearly fifteen minutes ago, he still didn’t hear any planes. Manchester must have a longer warning period than London, since they were farther north and west. He didn’t hear any guns either, and the only searchlights were out toward the docks. But they gave off enough light to see his way by.

He hobbled on toward the train station, cursing his limp.
Which I won’t have in a few more days
, he thought.
I’ll have a brand-new foot, and Polly won’t have to worry about still being here on her deadline, and Eileen won’t ever have to suffer through another raid
.

A man hurried past him, carrying a spray of holly.

We’ll be home for Christmas
, Mike thought. He pushed through the station door and headed for the line of red phone booths along the far wall to call Polly and Eileen. Would it be better for him to go back to London and get them, and the three of them go to Edgebourne together, or should he have them meet him there? That would be faster, and it would mean Eileen and Polly were safely out of London sooner. But if something went wrong and they got separated …

Maybe he’d better go get them. That way they’d all be together and—

What am I talking about
? he thought.
All I have to do is get to Edgebourne and tell them where Polly and Eileen are, and they can have another team go get them. Tonight if they want. Or the night I left for Saltram-on-Sea
. This was
time travel. Eileen and Polly were probably already in Oxford. In which case all he needed to do was get back to Kent and tell the retrieval team where they were the day he’d left.

He looked up at the departures board. There was an express leaving for Reading in six minutes. He limped over to the ticket counter. “One way to Reading on the 6:05,” he said.

The ticket agent shook his head.

“Or on the next train east I can get a space on.”

“No departures during a raid,” the agent said, and pointed up at the high ceiling, where a sudden buzz of planes was becoming a dull roar. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, mate. I’d find a shelter if I were you.”

THREE NIGHTS AFTER MIKE LEFT FOR SALTRAM-ON-SEA
, Eileen asked anxiously, “Shouldn’t we have heard from him by now?”

Yes
, Polly thought. They were at Mrs. Rickett’s. The sirens hadn’t gone and the rehearsal for
A Christmas Carol
didn’t begin till eight, so Eileen had insisted on their waiting till the last moment to leave for Notting Hill Gate, hoping Mike would phone, but he hadn’t.

“I doubt if he’ll phone before next week,” Polly said reassuringly.

“Next
week
?”

“Yes. He may not even be there yet, given all the wartime travel delays and no bus service from Dover. And the retrieval team may not be in Saltram-on-Sea. They may be in Folkestone or Ramsgate, or they may have gone off looking for Mike after they spoke to Daphne—”

“In which case it might take Mike
days
to locate them,” Eileen said, sounding relieved.

“Exactly,” Polly said, not mentioning that it didn’t matter how long it took Mike to contact the team because this was time travel. If he did find them, all he needed to do was tell them where she and Eileen were and a second team could have been at Mrs. Rickett’s immediately after Mike left for Victoria Station. Which meant either he hadn’t found them or something had happened to him, and she had no intention of telling Eileen that. It would only frighten her, and Polly was already frightened enough for both of them—correction, for all three of them.

The letter from Daphne combined with Eileen having told him she’d witnessed the end of the war seemed to have convinced him they hadn’t altered the future. He’d even brushed off his collision with Alan Turing.

But he didn’t know about Eileen’s withholding the
City of Benares
letter from Alf and Binnie Hodbin’s mother. Or about Eileen’s having given Binnie aspirin when she had the measles.

Mike had said Turing hadn’t been injured by the collision, but he wouldn’t have had to be. This was Alan Turing, the man who was behind Bletchley Park’s success, and he still hadn’t cracked the naval Enigma code. What if Mike’s colliding with him had interrupted his train of thought at a crucial moment, and he didn’t crack the code? Or what if Mike had done something else while he was in Bletchley which—combined with Hardy’s rescue and what she and Eileen had done—would tip the balance of the war later on? Or what if he’d done something now in Saltram-on-Sea?

I should have warned him
, she thought.
I should have told him about the
City of Benares
and about the possible discrepancies
. But she wasn’t certain they
were
discrepancies. And he’d been so distraught when she told him about her deadline, and then, after he’d got the letter from Daphne, so certain that the retrieval team had come.

And if they have, then there’s no reason to worry him with any of this. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

But what if they haven’t
?

“You
are
worried, aren’t you?” Eileen asked anxiously. “About Mike’s not phoning.”

“No,” Polly said firmly. “Remember, he said the phone at the Crown and Anchor wasn’t at all private. He may have to wait till he arrives back in Dover to find one that is. Or the telephone lines may be out.”

From the shelling Dover is taking every night
, Polly added silently, wishing Mike would find a way to phone so she could tell him about the shelling and the upcoming raids. He’d be all right for the next few days—the raids would all be in the Midlands or the west—Liverpool on the twentieth, Plymouth on the twenty-first, and Manchester the night after that. But on the twenty-fourth Dover would undergo a major shelling, and two trains in Kent would be machine-gunned from the air.

They waited another quarter of an hour, hoping he’d phone. “It’s twenty till,” Polly said finally. “We really must leave, or I’ll be late for rehearsal.”

“All right,” Eileen said reluctantly. “Wait, was that the phone? It’s Mike. I
knew
it!” She pelted down the stairs to answer it.

It was Mrs. Rickett’s sister, and it was clear they intended to talk for
some time. “She’s phoned twice in the past three days. Mike’s very probably phoned already and couldn’t get through,” Eileen said as they walked over to Notting Hill Gate. She paused. “You knew Lady Caroline, didn’t you? When you were in Dulwich.” And when Polly looked at her in surprise, “The day I got the letter from the vicar about Lady Caroline and Lord Denewell, you said ‘You
worked
for Lady Denewell?’ ”

And what else has she worked out
? Polly wondered.

“Yes,” she said. “She was my commanding officer.”

Eileen nodded as if she already knew that. “And she made you do all the work.”

“No. She was a wonderful commanding officer, hardworking, always thinking of her girls, determined to get us the supplies we needed. That’s why I was so surprised. From what you’d told me about her—”

“I think it must have been because of losing her husband
and
her son. War changes people. It makes people do things they never thought they could,” Eileen said thoughtfully. “In Mrs. Bascombe’s last letter, she said Una’s become quite a good driver in the ATF. You don’t suppose the war will improve Alf and Binnie Hodbin, do you?”

“I very much doubt it.”

“So do I,” Eileen said as they turned onto Kensington Church Street. “Have you told the troupe that you may not be here for the performance of
A Christmas Carol
and that they need to arrange for an understudy?”

“Not yet,” Polly said, wishing she could believe that Mike had simply been delayed and that the retrieval team would be waiting for them when they arrived at the tube station, or that when Mrs. Rickett came, she’d tell them Mike had phoned after she’d rung off.

She didn’t, and there was no one at the tube station or at Townsend Brothers the next morning. “He’ll phone today, I know it,” Eileen said confidently, going up to the book department. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

But there was no time for lunch. There were Christmas decorations to put up—evergreen and cellophane garlands and paper bells (the aluminum-foil ones had gone to Lord Beaverbrook’s Spitfire drive) and banners reading
There’ll Always Be a Christmas
. And there was a horde of customers to contend with.

“The only good thing,” Polly told Eileen when they met after work, “is that we’ve sold so much we’ve run completely out of brown paper.”

But when she arrived at Townsend Brothers the next day there was a large stack of Christmas paper on her counter. “Miss Snelgrove found it in the storeroom,” Doreen said. “From Christmas two years ago. Wasn’t that lucky?”

Polly stared hopelessly at the holly-sprigged sheets. “Haven’t we a duty to turn it in to the War Ministry for the war effort, to make stuffing for gun casings or something?” she asked.

Miss Snelgrove glared at her. “We have a duty to our customers to make this difficult Christmas as happy as possible.”

What about
my
Christmas
? Polly thought. She attempted to convince her customers it was their patriotic duty to take their purchases home unwrapped, but to no avail. It was the only wrapping paper they were likely to get their hands on for the duration, and they didn’t intend to pass up the chance. Some of them even bought things just to obtain the paper, as witness all the bilious lavender-pink stockings she sold. She spent nearly all her time struggling with knots and corners and the rest of it struggling to learn her lines for
A Christmas Carol
.

She had been wrong about the play. The female roles
were
small, but there were a great many of them, and Polly found herself playing not only Scrooge’s lost love, Belle, but also the eldest Cratchit daughter, one of the businessmen soliciting a charitable donation from Scrooge (in a false mustache and sideburns), the boy sent to buy the turkey (in a cap and knee pants), and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

How appropriate
, she thought. She hadn’t realized till now that the play was about time travel, and that Scrooge was a sort of historian, journeying to the past and then back to the future.

And he had altered events. He’d given Bob Cratchit a raise, he’d improved the lot of the poor, he’d saved Tiny Tim’s life. But in
A Christmas Carol
, there wasn’t the possibility that what he’d done would have a bad effect. In Dickens, good intentions always resulted in good outcomes.

And none of his characters had deadlines.

They can occupy the same time twice
, Polly thought enviously, watching the rector playing the young Scrooge and Sir Godfrey playing the elder in the same scene.

When Sir Godfrey wasn’t onstage, he was berating Miss Laburnum for her failure to secure a turkey for the Christmas-morning scene.

“There are simply none to be had, Sir Godfrey,” she said. “The war, you know.”

Or he was shouting at Viv (Scrooge’s nephew’s wife) and Mr. Simms (the Ghost of Marley) for their inability to learn their lines.

“I suppose you don’t know your lines for the tombstone scene either, Viola,” he growled at Polly when she missed a cue.

“I haven’t any lines,” Polly reminded him. “All I do is point at Scrooge’s grave.”

“Bah, humbug!” he said, bellowed at Tiny Tim (Trot) to get her cane out of the way, and started them through the Scrooge-confronts-his-own-death scene.