Blackout (64 page)

“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.”

POLLY’S JOURNEY BACK TO LONDON WAS EVEN WORSE
than the one to Backbury had been. The train had no empty seats, and she had to stand squashed in the corridor—the only advantage of which was that she couldn’t fall down when the train swayed or stopped so the inevitable troop trains could pass.

When she changed trains at Daventry, she managed to snag a seat in a compartment, but at the next stop scores of soldiers poured onto the train, all with enormous kit bags which they crammed onto the overhead racks and then, when they were filled, set on the already crowded seats, squashing Polly into a smaller and smaller space.

Colin warned me about the dangers of blast and shrapnel, but not about the possibility of being smothered. Or stabbed to death
, she thought, attempting to shift the kit bag on her right, which appeared to have a bayonet in it from the way it was poking her in the side.

And why had the train had to arrive in Backbury on time, today of all days? No other train had been on time during the entire war. If it had been put onto a siding by even a single troop train, she’d have had time to speak to the vicar and find out for certain if Merope had gone back to Oxford.

Of course she’s gone back
, she argued.
She left when the Army took over the manor
. Her assignment had obviously been designed to end then. With everyone leaving, her disappearance wouldn’t even have been noticed. They’d have assumed she’d taken another job or gone home to her family, like the sergeant said. But what if she hadn’t left for Oxford? What if the evacuees had been sent to another village, and Merope’d gone with them?

No, the sergeant had said the children had gone back to London, and even if they’d been sent to another manor, it would have had its own staff to care for them. And the last thing Merope would have wanted to do was to go with the Hodbin children.
And
to leave her drop. If she’d been told to accompany them, she’d have made some excuse and gone to the drop and through to Oxford as soon as possible.

Either way, she was gone, which meant Polly was stuck here till someone came to fetch her. But it also meant she could stop imagining that the net was broken, or worse, and that they wouldn’t be able to come get her before her deadline. Merope’s drop was obviously working or she couldn’t have gone back.

Which meant the problem had to be a divergence point—or a series of them—and the team would be here as soon as they were over. Or they might already be over, and the team was waiting for her at Townsend Brothers, though it was highly unlikely they’d have come on the
one
day she’d been gone.

If it
was
only one day. At this rate it would take her a week to get back to London. The train from Daventry had been so late and there’d been so many delays that by six o’clock they still hadn’t reached Hereford, which meant she might as well have stayed till the service was over, talked to everyone in Backbury, and taken the bus back. But after Reading they made better time, and by ten one of the soldiers reported, “We’re coming into Ealing. We should be in London soon.”

The train pulled out of the station and then stopped. And sat. “Is it another troop train?” Polly asked.

“No. Air raid.”

Polly thought of the vicar’s sermon. “We fear we will be trapped in this dreadful place forever,” he’d said.
Truer words
, she thought, leaning her head against the kit bag and trying to catch a little sleep.

It was a good thing Marjorie had said she’d cover for her if she wasn’t there at the opening bell. They didn’t make it to Euston Station till half past eight the next morning, after which she still had to run the obstacle course of London-After-a-Big-Raid. The Piccadilly, Northern, and Jubilee Lines weren’t running; the bus she needed to take was lying on its side in the middle of the road; and there were notices saying Danger UXB barring access to every other street.

It was half past eleven before she reached Townsend Brothers. Marjorie would almost certainly have told Miss Snelgrove about Polly’s ailing mother by now. She’d have to ask Marjorie exactly what she
had
told her, so they could coordinate their stories.

But Marjorie wasn’t there. When Polly got to the floor, Doreen hurried over to her and demanded, “Where
have
you been? We thought you’d gone off with Marjorie.”

“Gone off?” Polly said, glancing over at Marjorie’s counter, but a plump brunette she didn’t recognize was standing behind it. “Where?”

“No one knows. Marjorie didn’t say a word to anyone. She simply didn’t come in this morning. Miss Snelgrove was
livid
, what with not knowing whether you’d be in and us so busy. Customers have been coming in in
droves.”
She pointed at the brunette. “They had to send Sarah Steinberg down from Housewares to fill in till they can hire someone.”

“Hire someone? But just because Marjorie didn’t come in doesn’t mean she’s given her notice. She might have had difficulty getting here. I had a dreadful time coming from the station. Or something might have happened to her.”

“That was the first thing we thought of, what with the raids last night,” Doreen said. “And when Miss Snelgrove rang her landlady, she said Marjorie hadn’t come in last night, and she’d rung the hospitals. But she rang back a bit ago and said she’d checked Marjorie’s room, and all her things were gone. Marjorie was always on about going to Bath to live with her flatmate, but I never thought she’d actually do it, did you?”

“No,” Polly said. Marjorie hadn’t said a word about leaving. She’d promised to cover for her and to tell the retrieval team where she was. What if they’d been here this morning?

“Did anyone come in—?” she began, but Doreen cut her off.

“Quick, Miss Snelgrove’s coming,” she whispered. She scuttled off to her own counter, and Polly started toward hers, but too late. Miss Snelgrove was already bearing down on her.

“Well?”
she demanded. “I trust you have a good reason for being two and a half hours late?”

That all depends on what Marjorie told you on Saturday
, Polly thought. Had she said she was ill or visiting her mother?

“Well?”
Miss Snelgrove said, folding her arms belligerently across her chest. “I trust you’re feeling better.”

She’d told her she was ill, then.
I hope
. “No, actually, I’m still a bit gippy. I rang up to say I wouldn’t be in today, but they said you were dreadfully shorthanded, so I thought I’d best try to come in.”

Miss Snelgrove was not impressed. “To whom did you speak?” she demanded. “Was it Marjorie?”

“No, I don’t know who it was. I didn’t know about Marjorie till I got here. I was so surprised—”

“Yes, well, go and tell Miss Steinberg she can go back to her department. And I believe you have a customer.”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” Polly said and went over to her counter, but Miss Snelgrove continued to watch her like a hawk, so she didn’t have a chance to ask Sarah if anyone had come in asking about her this morning, and no chance to talk to Doreen either till Miss Snelgrove went on her lunch break.

As soon as she was out of sight, Polly darted over to Doreen’s counter and asked her, “Marjorie didn’t say whether anyone had come in asking for me before she left, did she?”

“No, I didn’t even have a chance to talk to her,” Doreen said. “We were swamped, what with you being out ill and all, and then, just before closing, Miss Snelgrove said I’d made a mistake in my sales receipts, and I had to tote them all up again and by the time I’d finished, Marjorie’d gone.” She looked speculatively at Polly. “Who were you expecting? Did you meet someone?”

“No,” Polly said. She repeated the story she’d told Marjorie about her cousin coming to London. “And you didn’t see her talking to anyone?”