All Clear

And it was a good thing she was behind the screen, that he couldn’t see her face, because that was the line from Lady Mary’s final scene with Crichton. She had to clutch her costume to her chest to keep from holding her hand impulsively out to him as Lady Mary had done, to keep from saying, “I will never give you up.”

She swallowed hard. “Tell them to break a leg,” she said lightly.

There was no answer, and when she peeked around the screen a long minute later, he was gone. For good. Because that was what that last scene of The Admirable Crichton was all about, lovers parting forever. And that was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? What she’d—

The girls came tumbling through the door, grabbing costumes, plunking down to touch up their makeup. “No wonder you wouldn’t go out with the stage-door hangers-on,” Cora said. “Clever girl. You had your eyes on something much better, didn’t you?”

Polly didn’t answer. She stepped into her costume and turned to have Hattie do the slide fastener.

“What I don’t understand is, what are you doing at ENSA?” Hattie asked. “He could get you a part in a real show.”

Reggie leaned in again. “Curtain.”

Polly hurried onstage, glad to have something to take her mind off Sir Godfrey. When she came off, Mr. Tabbitt told her to go change into her Air Raid Adelaide costume.

“But what about the barrage-balloon skit?”

“Cora can do it,” he said. “I have a feeling the raids are going to be bad tonight.”

He was right. She’d scarcely had time to get into her bloomers before the sirens went, and it was a bad raid—nearly all HEs. Polly, changing into her nurse’s costume for the hospital skit, felt her heart jerk with each one. What if she hadn’t sent Sir Godfrey away soon enough?

I shouldn’t have talked to him at all, she thought. I should have shut the door in his face.

Tabbitt knocked and then leaned in. “The bombs are making the audience nervy. I need you to do another air-raid bit,” and sent her out to show her knickers again.

“I don’t like this,” Hattie said nervously as Polly came off. “That last one sounded like it was next door.”

“It was two streets over,” Reggie said, pulling on his general’s uniform. “On Shaftesbury.”

“How do you know?” Hattie demanded.

“I was outside, smoking a fag, and the warden told me. The Phoenix got hit.”

I cannot overemphasize the importance of maintaining as long as humanly possible the Allied threat to the Pas-de-Calais area.

—GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,

June 1944

London—May 1944

ERNEST STARED STUPIDLY AT CESS ACROSS THE RAISED hood of the car. “We’re to take Colonel von Sprecht to Kensington Palace?”

“Yes,” Cess said, looking from him to the colonel, still asleep inside the car. “What’s wrong, Worthing?”

Kensington Palace is only two streets away from Notting Hill Gate Station, that’s what’s wrong. It’s only a few streets away from Mrs. Rickett’s.

“You don’t think the colonel will die before we get him there, do you?” Cess asked nervously.

“No,” Ernest said, pulling himself together. “I thought we were done with him, that’s all. Every mile we’re in that car with him, there’s a chance he’ll tumble to what we’re doing.”

“Not if we keep our mouths shut,” Cess said. “There’s nothing he can see now to give it away. It was brilliant, your driving while he was asleep so we’d come in from the east. And Kensington Palace isn’t far.”

“Where is it exactly? Show me on the map,” Ernest said, hoping it wasn’t as close to Notting Hill Gate as Cess had said, but it was. There was a road which went directly to the palace, though. He wouldn’t have to drive past the tube station, and with dignitaries like Patton there, civilians wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the palace.

And there wouldn’t be any air raids till after the invasion, so Eileen wouldn’t be going to the tube shelter, and the chances of running into her, even in Notting Hill or Kensington, were tiny. You looked for her and Polly for weeks during the Blitz and couldn’t find them.

Right, and you managed to collide with Alan Turing not ten minutes after you’d arrived in Bletchley. And this was the time of day when she could be arriving home from work.

But she wouldn’t still be working in Oxford Street. When the National Service Act had gone into effect, she’d have been assigned to some kind of war work. She might not even still be in London.

And if you didn’t get them out, you didn’t get them out, and seeing Eileen—or not seeing her—doesn’t change whether she’s here or not, whether you’re going to be able to reach Atherton or not. It’s already happened.

But he couldn’t rid himself of the idea that now, at the very last minute, this close to contacting Atherton, he’d ruin things by catching sight of her stepping off a bus or coming down the street in her green coat, and it was a huge relief to turn down the road to the palace, to pull up to the gates.

The guard looked at their papers and said, “If you’ll just pull in there, sir, behind that staff car.” He indicated the last car in a long line stretching all the way to the palace.