All Clear

There was a poster on the wall behind Binnie with a picture of a housewife, a nurse, and an ARP warden on it. You Can Win the Battle, it read.

I didn’t win it, he thought numbly. I was too late. Eileen’s been dead nearly a decade. I wasn’t able to rescue her. Or Polly.

“I’m so sorry,” Binnie said. “I should have told you that first thing. It was a cancer.”

A cancer which could have been cured easily if Eileen had been home in Oxford where she belonged. Which they still might be able to cure if he could go back and get her out in time. If she had been alone when she died, he might still be able to …

“Did she die in hospital?” he asked urgently. “Was anyone with her?”

Binnie looked at him, frowning. “Of course. All of us were.”

Which meant there was no way to rescue her at the last moment, no way to whisk her off in a stolen ambulance and send her back through. He sank back down on the bench beside Binnie and put his head in his hands.

“We all got to tell her goodbye,” Binnie said. “The end was very peaceful.”

Peaceful, he thought bitterly. Dying stranded in the past like Polly before her, waiting in vain for rescue. Only Eileen must surely have given up waiting, given up hoping, years before. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s a pity,” she said, nodding. “She would have loved to see you again. But at least we found you.” She beamed at him. “When you didn’t find Mum, we were afraid something had gone wrong. Or at least I was. But Alf said we had to have found you, because if we hadn’t, you couldn’t have come to fetch Polly and—”

“Fetch—?” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “What are you talking about?”

“Your coming to take them back through the drop.”

“But you just said I wasn’t able to find Eileen.”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied, surprised. “I meant you didn’t find her now, not then.”

“I found Eileen and Polly?”

She nodded. “And Mr. Dunworthy.”

“Mr. Dunworthy? He’s alive?”

Binnie nodded. “Polly found him at St. Paul’s.”

“He’s alive,” Colin murmured, unable to take it all in. “I thought he was dead. His death notice was in the newspapers.”

“No, he was only injured.”

“And I was able to come through to get them out?” he asked.

She nodded.

But if he had succeeded, Eileen wouldn’t still have been here. She wouldn’t have died still trying to find him. “What happened?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. “I came too late to be able to get them out, didn’t I?”

Journeys end in lovers meeting.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT

London—19 April 1941

POLLY’S SWORD HIT THE STAGE WITH A CLATTER. “YOU’RE gonna catch it now!” Alf said, but she didn’t hear him.

“Colin,” she tried to say, but no sound came out. She glanced over at Mr. Dunworthy, who still stood there gripping the theater-seat back for support, and then back at Colin.

Though it wasn’t the Colin she’d known. There was nothing of the eager, high-spirited boy who’d followed her around Oxford like a puppy, who’d told her he intended to marry her when he grew up, in the man standing there in the aisle before her with his ARP helmet in his hands.

But it didn’t matter. Polly had known the moment she saw him standing there in the aisle that it was Colin. And that he had come, just as he had promised he would, to rescue her. But at what cost? He looked not only older but sadder, grimmer, his face lined with suffering and fatigue.

Oh, Colin, she thought, what’s happened to you since I saw you seven months ago?

But she knew that, too. He had spent weeks, months, years, frantically trying to get to them—trying to get the drops, any drop, to open. And then, when he’d failed, trying to puzzle out what had happened, trying to follow a trail which had gone cold.

I have ridden long, weary miles, she thought. I have searched long, hopeless years. And fought battles and spells and brambles and time. And found her.

Found all of them. She looked at Mr. Dunworthy, hanging on to the back of the theater seat for dear life, as though he still couldn’t believe what had happened. He looked like the Admirable Crichton and Lady Mary must have looked when the ship had finally arrived.

“They’ve reconciled themselves to living out their remaining lives and dying on the island,” Sir Godfrey had said when they were rehearsing the rescue scene. “And now rescue is at hand. No, no, no! No smiles! I want staggered, stunned, unable to believe they have been saved. Joyous and sad and afraid, all at once.”

And silent, Polly thought, as if we’re under a spell.

Colin was under it, too. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken. He stood there perfectly still, with his ARP helmet in his hands, looking at her, waiting.

For me to break the spell, she thought.

“Oh, Colin,” she said, and came down the steps into the theater and up the aisle to where he stood. “You said you’d come rescue me if I got into trouble. And here you are!”