All Clear

As soon as she reached the chemist’s, she rang up the Alhambra. “Your luck’s in,” Hattie said. “Canning Town got it last night, so Tabbitt hasn’t made it in either, but he’ll be here tomorrow, so you’d better be. And if I were you, I’d think of a different excuse in the meantime. He’ll never believe the one you just told me.” There was a pause. “Oh, I’ve got to go. I’m on. Victory number. Ta.”

But there won’t be any Victory numbers, Polly thought, feeling her way back to the house through the darkness of the blackout. And what will happen to Hattie when we lose the war? And to the other girls in the chorus?

You know what will happen to them, she thought.

But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that. Mr. Dunworthy had said he didn’t know if the continuum was collapsing or correcting itself. And there were things in his But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that. Mr. Dunworthy had said he didn’t know if the continuum was collapsing or correcting itself. And there were things in his theory which didn’t fit. If their actions had been a threat, why had they been allowed to come through at all? Why hadn’t they been prevented from coming in the first place, like Gerald?

And once they were here, why hadn’t they been allowed to leave? Mr. Dunworthy had said it was to contain the infection, but if Polly’s drop had opened, she wouldn’t have stumbled, shell-shocked and stricken, into Townsend Brothers, and Marjorie wouldn’t have ended up in Jermyn Street, wouldn’t have become a nurse, and if the people on the beach watching the smoke from Dunkirk hadn’t prevented Mike from going to his drop, he wouldn’t have fallen asleep on the Lady Jane and ended up in Dunkirk and saved Hardy’s life. And if Eileen’s drop had opened, she wouldn’t have been able to keep the City of Benares letter from Mrs. Hodbin; she wouldn’t have been there to drive the ambulance on the twenty-ninth and save her passengers’ lives.

That was the cruelest irony of all, that they had undone the future out of a desire to help—Eileen’s giving Binnie aspirin to bring her fever down and tearing up the letter to keep the children from drowning, Mike’s unfouling the propeller because he couldn’t stand the thought of fourteen-year-old Jonathan being killed and pushing the two firemen away from the collapsing wall.

Even the act which had set it all in motion had come not from malice but from an innocent desire to see something beautiful. It seemed impossible that compassion and kindness should be the weapons of destruction, that just the opposite should be true. It was true that in a chaotic system, good actions could have bad consequences, but why—?

Polly had the sudden feeling that she knew the answer to that, that it lay just out of reach, like a word on the tip of one’s tongue. She stopped on the street and stared into the blacked-out darkness, mentally reaching for it. It had something to do with Alf and Binnie blocking Eileen’s way, and the shelter at Holborn—

A siren not twenty feet away screamed, and she jumped, startled and then annoyed at the interruption of her train of thought. It had had something to do with the shelter at Holborn … no, that couldn’t be right, Alf and Binnie had been at Blackfriars, not Holborn, but it was Holborn, she was certain of it. Holborn and Mike’s missing the bus and …

No, it was gone. And this raid wasn’t going to be one of those times with twenty minutes from alert to bombs. She could already hear planes, and she should get the aspirin to Mr. Dunworthy as soon as possible.

But when she arrived home, he was asleep. Alf was, amazingly, sitting at the kitchen table doing his lessons. Whatever he’d done to the tube station guard or the truant officer must have been something appalling even for him.

Binnie was reading aloud to Eileen from the book of fairy tales. “ ‘You must be home before the clock strikes twelve,’ the fairy godmother told Cinderella, ‘or the spell will be broken.’ ”

“Should I wake Mr. Dun—Mr. Hobbe and give him the aspirin?” Polly interrupted to ask Eileen.

“No, sleep is the best thing for him.”

“What does that mean, the spell will be broken?” Binnie asked. “What happens when it’s midnight?”

“I’ll wager Cinderella blows up,” Alf said. “Boom!”

“Go on to bed, Polly,” Eileen said. “You look done in.”

I am, she thought. We all are. And midnight’s coming.

She went to bed, but sleep was out of the question, and when she heard Mr. Dunworthy coughing in the night, she got up quietly, fetched a glass of water, and took it and the aspirin in to him.

He was sitting up in bed. “Oh, good, it’s you,” he said when she switched on the lamp beside the bed. “I need to tell you something.” And whatever it was, it was more bad news, because he had the same hopeless look he’d had in St. Paul’s and in the pub.

“First, you need to take these,” she said, and while he downed them, she felt his forehead. It was still hot. “You’re still feverish. You need to try to sleep. Whatever it is, you can tell me in the morning.”

“No,” he said. “Now.”