All Clear (89 page)

“I don’t know. Perhaps the system only allows minor changes. Or unintentional ones. Or perhaps something else is going on in those
divergence points which makes it impossible to alter them. Or perhaps we came into the picture too late. Like the Good Fairy in
Sleeping Beauty
—”

“The Good
Fairy
?”

“Yes,” she said earnestly. “She couldn’t undo the spell, she could only make it less terrible. Time travel wasn’t invented till long after the start of the continuum. Perhaps we’re too late to completely repair it, but we can still—”

“But even if that’s true, and even if you saved Sir Godfrey’s life and Mike saved Hardy’s and I saved the Wren’s, we still altered events, and history’s a chaotic system where a good action, done with the best intentions, can have the opposite effect. How can you be certain that even if the continuum intended us to make repairs, we did? That we didn’t make things worse instead?”

“Because they were already worse.”

“Worse? What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if we’ve been looking at the war the wrong way round? What if the disaster had already occurred, and the outcome we were altering was a
bad
outcome?”

“A bad outcome?” Mr. Dunworthy said, bewildered.

“
Yes
. What if the Allies
lost
the war? You said there were dozens of times when the outcome balanced on a knife’s edge, like in that old saying, ‘For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe—’ ”

“—the horse was lost.”

“Yes, and because of that, the rider and the battle and the war were lost. There were scores of times in World War Two like that, when if things had gone even slightly differently, we’d have lost. Well, what if we
did
lose?” she asked. “What if your Wren was killed in Ave Maria Lane and Sir Godfrey was killed in Bristol and Eileen’s bombing victim died in the back of the ambulance because they couldn’t find a driver and Hardy ended up in a German POW camp and they lost the war?”

“But then time travel would never have been invented. Ira Feldman—”

“No, because the continuum’s a chaotic system, which means time travel was already a part of it, and they
hadn’t
lost it. Because you’d come and run into a Wren and set a cascade of events in motion. And Mike was part of that cascade, and our being stranded here.”

“We’re the horseshoe, in other words.”

“
Yes
—”

“And you’re saying we waltzed in, tightened a few nuts and bolts, and
won the war?” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Historians as Little Miss Fix-Its? My dear, history’s a chaotic system. It’s far more complicated than—”

“I
know
it’s complicated. I’m not saying we won it. And I’m not saying your Wren or Hardy or Sir Godfrey or Alf and Binnie or whoever it is they and Eileen treated on the twenty-ninth was who won it either. Or even that saving them was what tipped the balance. It may have been something else altogether—Marjorie’s deciding to become a nurse, or one of the FANYs I worked with borrowing my dance frock, or Mike’s nearly colliding with Alan Turing. Or something we don’t even know we did—our stepping ahead of someone onto an escalator or hailing a taxi or asking for directions. Mike might have done something in hospital, or Eileen might have affected one of her evacuees. Or I might have taken too long to wrap a customer’s parcel and delayed
her
five minutes, so that she missed her bus, or got caught in the tube when the sirens went.”

“But you think whatever that action was, one of us did it,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “And it was one of us who won the war.”

“No,” she said, frustrated. “I’m not saying that either. No one person or thing won the war. People argue over whether it was Ultra or the evacuation from Dunkirk or Churchill’s leadership or fooling Hitler into thinking we were invading at Calais that won the war, but it wasn’t any one of them. It was
all
of them and a thousand, a million, other things and people. And not just soldiers and pilots and Wrens, but air-raid wardens and planespotters and debutantes and mathematicians and weekend sailors and vicars.”

“Doing their bit,” Mr. Dunworthy murmured.

“Yes. Canteen workers and ambulance drivers and ENSA chorus girls. And historians. You said no one can be in a chaotic system and not affect events. What if your—our—coming to the past added another weapon to the war, a secret weapon like the French Resistance or Fortitude South?”

“Or Ultra.”

“Yes,” Polly said. “Like Ultra. Something which operated behind the scenes, and which, combined with everything else, was enough to avert disaster, to tip the balance.”

“And win the war,” Mr. Dunworthy said softly.

There was a long silence, and then he said, almost longingly, “But there’s no proof …”

No
, she thought,
except that so many lives saved and so many sacrificed
—
so much courage, kindness, endurance, love—must count for something even in a chaotic system
.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t any proof.”

There was a knock, and Eileen leaned in the door, her red hair windblown and her cheeks rosy. “What are you two doing sitting here in the dark?” she said, and switched on the light. “You look as if you could both do with some tea. I’ll put the kettle on.”

“No, wait,” Polly said. “Did you find out who the man you saved was?”

“Yes.” She took off her hat. “The admitting nurse wouldn’t tell me anything, and neither would the matron, so then I hit on the idea of going to the men’s ward and telling the nurse that Mrs. Mallowan had sent me to find out.”

“Mrs. Mallowan?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“That’s Agatha Christie’s married name.” She unbuttoned her green coat. “The nurse and I chatted a bit about
Murder in the Calais Coach
, and I told her about Agatha Christie’s new book, which hasn’t come out yet. It’s all right, Polly, I told her I had an editor friend who’d let me look at it. And as a result, she let me look at the ambulance log.”

“And the man you saved was—?”

“There were three people, actually, or at any rate the nurse said she doubted they’d have survived if they hadn’t been brought immediately to hospital. I wrote them down,” Eileen said, taking a sheet of paper out of her handbag and reading from it. “Sergeant Thomas Brantley, Mrs. Jean Cuttle—that was the ambulance driver—and Captain David Westbrook.”

Mr. Dunworthy made an involuntary sound.

“Do you know who Captain Westbrook is?” Polly asked him.

Mr. Dunworthy nodded. “He was killed on D-Day, after single-handedly holding a critical crossroads till reinforcements arrived.”

“SO YOU’RE TELLING ME ALF AND BINNIE ARE
WAR HEROES?
”
Eileen said after Polly and Mr. Dunworthy had explained Polly’s theory to her.

“Yes,” Polly said. “You were right about their being a secret weapon. Only they’re on our side. Their jumping out in front of you when you were chasing John Bartholomew and delaying you was what was responsible for your being forced into driving the ambulance that night, so that you were able to save Captain Westbrook’s life—”

“And they delayed the train.”

“Train?” Polly said.

“When we came to London. They chased a headmistress out of our compartment, and she tried to have us thrown off the train, and it made us late leaving the station. And later we found out the railway bridge ahead of us had been bombed, and Alf said, ‘It was a good thing we was late.’ ” She looked up at Polly wonderingly. “They saved my life.
And
the headmistress’s.”

“And you saved Captain Westbrook’s.”

“And you two and Mike and I won the war?” Eileen said.

“
Helped
to win the war,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Tipped the balance.”

“But I don’t understand. If they’d lost the war before we came, then how could you have been at VE-Day? There wouldn’t have
been
a VE-Day, would there?”

“Yes,” Polly said, “because by 1945, you’d already saved Captain Westbrook’s life and I’d already saved Sir Godfrey—”

“But you hadn’t done that when you were at VE-Day,” Eileen said, hopelessly confused. “You hadn’t even come to the Blitz yet.”

“Yes, I had,” Polly said patiently. “I came to the Blitz in 1940, and I went to Trafalgar Square on VE-Day five years later, in 1945.”

“But what about all those years before any of us came here, before time travel was even invented? The war was lost then, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Polly said. “It was always won because we had always come. We were always here. We were always a part of it.”

“The past and the future are both part of a single continuum,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and launched into a long and involved explanation of chaos theory.

“But I still don’t understand—”

“Don’t understand what?” Binnie asked, coming in and announcing that from now on she wished to be called Florence—“Like Florence Nightingale”—and become a nurse, which put an end to the conversation.

But the next morning after Alf and Binnie had gone to school, Eileen brought up the subject again. “So because Mr. Dunworthy ran into the Wren and Mike untangled the propeller and you saved Sir Godfrey, it changed things just enough that we won the war, is that right?”

“Yes,” Polly said.

“Then there’s no reason to keep us here,” she said, “and we can go home.”

“Eileen—”

“Mr. Dunworthy, you said every historian who’s come here has altered events, and
they
all went back to Oxford. And after you ran into the Wren,
you
went back to Oxford. So now that we’ve done what we were supposed to do, they should be able to come and fetch us, shouldn’t they? Or our drops should begin working again.” She looked expectantly from Polly to Mr. Dunworthy and back again. “We need to go check them.”

“I’ll go to the drop in St. Paul’s this morning,” Mr. Dunworthy promised.

But after Eileen had elicited a promise that Polly would check her drop on her way to the theater and had left to drive General Flynn, he said to Polly, “She may, of course, be right about the drops—”

“But if she were, Colin would already be here.”

“Yes,” he said, “and the fact that he isn’t very likely means our part in this is not over.”

“I know,” Polly said, thinking of how Major Denewell had told her and the other FANYs the war could still be lost even during that last year.

“More may be required of us before the end,” Mr. Dunworthy told her.

Including our lives
, Polly thought.

She had nearly died rescuing Sir Godfrey. The next time she might not make it. Like the countless rescue workers and ARP wardens and firemen who’d died digging people out of the rubble or taking people to shelter or defusing bombs. Or she might simply be killed outright by an HE, as Mike had been, and all the other people who’d died in the Blitz and in hospitals and prison camps and newspaper offices. Casualties of war.

But still even in death, doing their bit. Like Mike. It was his death that had made her go to the Works Board and volunteer to be an ambulance driver and be assigned to ENSA and save Sir Godfrey.

“I know there’s a good chance we won’t make it back,” she told Mr. Dunworthy, and as she did, it struck her that that was what soldiers said when they were leaving for the front.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said, and meant it. “All that matters is that Sir Godfrey didn’t die and I’m not responsible for losing the war, and that I can see Miss Laburnum and Doreen and Trot without getting them killed. And if I’m killed, I won’t be the only one to die in World War Two. I’m only sorry I got you into this.”

“We got each other into it. And we may yet get out.”

“And if not, we still stopped Hitler in his tracks.” She smiled at him.

“We did indeed,” he said, and looked suddenly years younger. “And we, like St. Paul’s, are still standing, at least for the moment. Speaking of which, when I go there to check the drop, I intend to ask to be taken on as a volunteer. I have always wanted to serve on the fire watch and help save St. Paul’s—”

He stopped, an odd look on his face.

“What is it?” Polly asked. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just occurred to me … I think I may already have saved it. The night I came through, I crashed into a stirrup pump, and two of the fire watch came down to investigate and found an incendiary which had burned through the roof. If I hadn’t been there—”

“They might not have discovered it till too late, and the fire—” Polly said, and stopped as well, thinking of the fire on the desk which she had put out the night they’d been trying to find John Bartholomew.

“And if my being there
did
save it, then it may do so again,” Mr.
Dunworthy was saying, “even if I can only be at St. Paul’s for two weeks. But you will need to help me persuade them. And convince Eileen.”

Convincing Eileen proved to be the more difficult of the two. “But it’s dangerous,” she said. “The north transept—”

“Won’t be bombed till April sixteenth,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I’ll phone in and tell them I’m ill that night.”

“What about the big raids on May tenth and eleventh? You said the entire city—”

“St. Paul’s wasn’t hit either of those nights,” he reassured her.

And it doesn’t matter
, Polly wanted to shout at her.
He won’t be here. His deadline will already have passed. And the chances are I’ll only have two weeks after that
. If she had another task, it almost certainly lay between now and the end of the Blitz. There would be only occasional raids after that, but they’d had far fewer casualties. Which meant her deadline wasn’t the end of 1943. It was May eleventh.

But she couldn’t tell Eileen that. In the first place, she wouldn’t believe her. And in the second place, the task at hand was to convince her to allow Mr. Dunworthy to join the fire watch. So instead Polly said, “St. Paul’s won’t suffer any more damage till 1944 and the V-1 and V-2 attacks.”