All Clear (57 page)

THE VICAR ONLY HAD A FORTY-EIGHT-HOUR LEAVE, SO THEY
held Mike’s memorial service the next afternoon. The troupe attended, and Mrs. Willett. She didn’t bring Theodore, who had a cold. He was staying with her neighbor.

Mrs. Leary came, and Mike’s editor and Miss Snelgrove and two men, awkward and stiff in black suits, who for one heart-jarring moment Polly thought might, against all odds, be the retrieval team, but who turned out to be two firemen whom Mike had rescued on the night of the twenty-ninth. They told Polly and Eileen that Mike had warned them when a wall was about to fall on them and saved their lives, and they were sorry that they hadn’t been there to save his.

Alf and Binnie came, too, bearing a bouquet of browning lilies Polly was convinced they’d stolen off someone’s grave. “We seen when it was. In the papers,” Binnie said, looking around St. Paul’s in awe.

“Coo, this church is fancy!” Alf said. “There’s lots of nice things in ’ere.”

“Yes, and anyone who tries to steal one of them goes straight to the bad place,” Eileen said, sounding almost like her old self for the first time since Mike had died.

With the vicar’s arrival, she had abandoned her vigil at the foot of the escalator and had agreed to a memorial service. And when Miss
Laburnum told her she simply
couldn’t
wear her green coat to it, she’d let Miss Laburnum lend her a much-too-large black coat.

Too willingly
, Polly’d thought. Eileen was still quiet and withdrawn, and Polly feared she’d gone from denial to despair, though it was difficult not to, with Mike and Mr. Simms dead, and the gentle vicar going off to war. Eileen was right. He was almost certain to be killed.

Polly had wanted her to face reality, but now she was afraid that that reality might crush her, and she was glad to see some of her spirit return as she took charge of the Hodbins. “You must sit still and be absolutely quiet,” Eileen told them.

“We
know
,” Alf said, offended. “When—ow!” he wailed, and his voice echoed through the vast spaces of the cathedral. Mr. Humphreys came scurrying down the south aisle toward them.

“Binnie
kicked
me!”

“Kicking’s not allowed in church,” Mr. Goode said calmly.

“And neither is hitting each other with floral offerings,” Eileen said, extracting the lilies from them and handing them to the vicar.

She steered Alf and Binnie through the gate and into the chapel, told them to sit down and stay put, and then took Polly by the arm and led her out into the south aisle. “Alf and Binnie said you found them and told them about Mike.”

“Yes,” Polly said, afraid Eileen would consider that somehow a betrayal. “I thought they might be a comfort—”

“Where did you find them? In Whitechapel?”

“No, I didn’t know where they lived, so I looked in the tube stations.”

Eileen nodded as if that had confirmed something.

“We’re about to begin the service,” the vicar said, coming out.

“Yes, of course,” Eileen said.

They went back in, and Eileen sat down between Alf and Binnie, telling them they had to be quiet, and showing them the correct place in the prayer book, and Polly felt reassured all over again.

But after the service began, sitting there looking like a child in her too-large coat, Eileen got the odd, withdrawn look again, as if she were somewhere else altogether.

But we’re not
, Polly thought, listening to the litany.
We’re here in 1941 and Mike is dead
. It seemed impossible that they were at his funeral—and it
was
his funeral, whether there was a body or not. No wonder Eileen had refused to believe it. It couldn’t possibly be true.

And not only had he died here, far from home, but he wasn’t even
being laid to rest under his own name. It was Mike Davis, an American war correspondent from Omaha, Nebraska, who’d died, not historian Michael Davies, who had come to the past to study heroism and died there, abandoned, shipwrecked, trying to rescue his companions.

Polly had asked Mr. Goode to do the eulogy, remembering his sermon that day in Backbury. He spoke of Mike and his bravery at Dunkirk and then said, “We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings—”

And pumpkin-colored scarves
, Polly thought.

“—and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances”—here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs—“and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a soldier, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith.

“But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, though hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do ‘our bit.’ For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long.

“So it is with heaven,” the vicar said. “By our deeds here on earth, in this world so far from the one we long for, we make heaven possible. We not only live in the hope of heaven but, by each doing our bit, we bring it to pass.”

Mike did
his
bit
, Polly thought.
He did everything he could do to save us. Like Mr. Dunworthy. Like Colin
.

Because sitting there watching the vicar, she was absolutely convinced that Colin had searched desperately for her, had turned Oxford and the lab upside down, trying to find out what had gone wrong, trying to come up with a plan to get them out.

She could see him demanding action, trying drop site after drop site for one which would open, scouring historical records and newspapers and books on time travel, searching for clues to what had happened, refusing to give up. And if he had failed, if he had died before he was able
to get them out, it wasn’t his fault any more than it was Mike’s. They had tried. They had done their bit.

As soon as the service was over, Mr. Humphreys dragged the vicar off to look at Captain Faulknor’s memorial, and Eileen hustled Alf and Binnie out of the chapel, leaving Polly to thank everyone for coming and to listen to their condolences.

“We must trust in God’s goodness,” Miss Hibbard said, patting her hand.

Mrs. Wyvern patted it, too. “God never sends us more than we can bear.”

“Everything which happens is part of God’s plan,” the rector intoned.

Sir Godfrey came up to her, his hat in his hand.

If he has some appropriately cheerful Shakespeare quote, like “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” or “All will yet be well,” I’ll never forgive him
, Polly thought.

“Viola,” he said, and shook his head sadly. “ ‘The rain it raineth every day.’ ”

I love you
, she thought, tears stinging her eyes.

Miss Laburnum came up. “We must have faith at trying times like these,” she said, and turned to Sir Godfrey. “I have been thinking, we should do a dramatic reading from
Mary Rose
. There’s a heartbreaking scene where her son comes looking for his dead mother …”

She dragged Sir Godfrey off, and Polly went to look for Eileen. She couldn’t see her or the Hodbins anywhere, and she didn’t want her to have to listen to the rector’s or Mrs. Wyvern’s platitudes. She went out into the nave and toward the dome.

Eileen was looking at
The Light of the World
with Alf and Binnie. Or rather, Alf and Binnie were looking at it, and Eileen was staring at Alf and Binnie with the same blind, withdrawn look. Polly’d hoped the vicar’s words would aid Eileen in coming to terms with Mike’s death, but they didn’t seem to have helped.

And the Hodbins were certainly of no help. “Why’s ’e wearin’ a dress?” Alf asked, pointing at the painting. “And what’s ’e standin’ there for?”

“ ’E’s knockin’ up the people what live there, you dunderpate,” Binnie said.

“
You’re
the dunderpate,” Alf said. “Nobody lives there. Look at that door. It ain’t been opened in years. I’ll wager the people what lived there went off and didn’t tell ’im. Or else they’re
dead
. ’E can go on knockin’ forever, and nobody’ll come.”

That’s the last thing Eileen needs to hear
, Polly thought, and said, “We should be going. We don’t want to be caught out when the sirens go.” But Eileen gave no indication that she heard her. She continued to stare blindly at Alf and Binnie.

Polly tried again. “Eileen, we need to go rescue the vicar. Mr. Humphreys took him to look at Faulknor’s memorial and—”

“Alf, Binnie, come with me,” Eileen said abruptly, and herded them back to the now-deserted chapel. She opened the gate.

“Why’re we goin’ back in ’ere?” Binnie asked as Eileen motioned them inside.

“We didn’t nick nothin’,” Alf said.

Oh, no
, Polly thought.
What did they steal now
?

“We wasn’t even
in
’ere,” Alf said. “We was lookin’ at that picture the whole time.”

Eileen shut and latched the gate and then turned to face them.

“We didn’t take nothin’,” Binnie said. “Honest.”

Eileen didn’t even seem to have heard that. “How long has your mother been dead?” she asked.

Dead
?

“You’re daft,” Alf said. “Our mum ain’t dead.”

“She’s down at Piccadilly Circus this minute,” Binnie said, sidling toward the gate. “We’ll go fetch ’er.”

Eileen stepped firmly between them and the gate. “You’re not going anywhere.” She looked across at Polly. “Their mother was killed in a raid last autumn, and they’ve been covering it up ever since. They’ve been living on their own in the shelters.

“Haven’t you?” Eileen demanded, looking at the children. “How long has she been dead?”

“We told you,” Alf said, “she ain’t—”

“She died at St. Bart’s, didn’t she?” Eileen said. “That’s how you knew where the hospital was, isn’t it? And why you wanted to leave, because you were afraid a nurse would recognize you and tell me what happened.”

“No,” Alf said. “You said you needed to get to St. Paul’s. That’s why we was—”

“How long has she been dead, Binnie?”

“We
told
you—” Alf began.

“Since September,” Binnie said.

Alf turned on her furiously. “What’d you tell ’er that for? Now she’ll turn us in.”

Binnie ignored him. “We didn’t find out till October, though,” she said. “Sometimes Mum don’t come ’ome for two or three days, so we didn’t think nothin’ of it, but after a bit we got worried and went lookin’ for her, and one of Mum’s friends said she was in a pub what got ’it by a thousand-pounder.”

And there wasn’t a body left to identify
, Polly thought.
Like Mike
. And the “friend” was either a fellow prostitute or one of Mrs. Hodbin’s clients, neither of whom would have wanted to have anything to do with the police, so her death hadn’t been reported to the authorities.

“She’d already been killed when I came to borrow the map, hadn’t she?” Eileen asked. “That was why you wouldn’t let me in and told me she was sleeping.”

Binnie nodded. “That’s what we told the landlady, too. Mum slept a lot when she was ’ome, you see, and we ’ad the ration books, so it was all right. Till we run out of money and couldn’t pay the rent.”

“And the landlady found out about Mrs. Bascombe,” Alf said.

“Their parrot,” Eileen explained to Polly.

“So we told ’er we was all goin’ to live with Mum’s sister in the country.”

“And you went to live in the shelters,” Eileen said.

“But what did you live on if you hadn’t any money?” Polly asked, and then thought,
Picking pockets and stealing picnic baskets
.

Mr. Humphreys and the vicar were coming back, Mr. Humphreys still talking of Captain Faulknor.

Binnie looked stricken. “You ain’t gonna tell the vicar, are you?”

“Promise you won’t tell nobody,” Alf said, “or we’ll ’afta go to a orphanage.”

“Ah, here you are,” Mr. Humphreys said.

The vicar looked at them, taking in the latched gate, Eileen’s sentry-like stance, the children’s expressions. “What’s going on here, Miss O’Reilly?” he asked.

Please
, Binnie mouthed.

Eileen turned, unlatched the gate, and let them into the chapel. “Alf and Binnie were just telling me about their mother,” she said. “She was killed last autumn. They’ve been living on their own in the shelters.”

Binnie looked utterly betrayed.

“What’d you do that for?” Alf wailed. “Now they’ll send us away, and you’re the only one what’s nice to us.”

“We don’t need no one to take care of us,” Binnie said belligerently. “Me ’n’ Alf can take care of ourselves.”

“I’ll take them in,” Eileen said.

“What?”
Polly said. “You can’t—”

“Someone must. They obviously can’t go on living in the tube stations,” Eileen said. “Mr. Goode, can you arrange for me to be named their guardian?”

“Yes, of course, but …” He turned to Mr. Humphreys. “Would you mind terribly showing the children round the cathedral for a bit? We need to discuss—”

“Of course,” Mr. Humphreys said. “Poor things. Come along with me, children.”

“It’ll be all right,” Eileen said to Binnie.

“You swear?”

“I swear. Go on, go with Mr. Humphreys.”

They’ll bolt, just as they did the morning after the twenty-ninth
, Polly thought, but they went docilely off with the verger.

“Come, I’ll show you
The Light of the World
,” Polly heard him say as they went up the aisle.

“We already seen it,” Alf said.