All Clear (53 page)

“Oh, I wasn’t referring to you,” Miss Laburnum said. “I meant Mr. Simms. He’s volunteered to be a firespotter, and Lila and Viv scarcely ever come. They’re always off to service club dances.”

“They’re not going to one tonight, are they?” Polly asked anxiously. The big raids which had hit Bank and Liverpool Street stations were tonight.

“I do hope not,” Miss Laburnum said. “We’re reading a scene from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and we’ll need them for Mustardseed and Peaseblossom.”

Neither Mike nor Eileen was back when the sirens went, or at Notting Hill Gate when Polly got there. Before they’d left the night before, she’d reminded them to take shelter the moment they heard the sirens and not to board any train that would go through Bank or Liverpool Street Station, which meant they might be some time getting here.

She left a note for them in the staircase and went out to the platform. Lila and Viv, thankfully, were there, and so was everyone else except Mr. Simms, who was on duty, and Mrs. Rickett, whom Mr. Dorming reported was convinced the weather was too bad for raids. “She may be right,” he said. “It looks as though it might snow.”

That won’t stop the Luftwaffe tonight
, Polly thought.

The troupe did Titania and Bottom’s scene from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the rector recited the Lord Admiral’s song from
H.M.S. Pinafore
, and Polly and Sir Godfrey did a scene from
The Importance of Being Earnest
, raising their voices over the screech and thud of what sounded like hundreds of bombs.

Polly kept expecting Eileen and Mike to come at any moment, but they didn’t. Mrs. Rickett did, looking annoyed at having been wrong about the raids. “Did Miss O’Reilly come home after I left for here?” Polly asked her.

“No, she hasn’t been there since this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?”

She nodded. “She told me she wouldn’t be in to dinner and to give you this.”

She handed Polly an envelope. Inside was a scrawled note from Eileen: “Dear Polly, Worried about Alf and Binnie. They said Bank was
one of the stations they’re often in. Have gone to make certain they’re not there. Eileen.”

Gone to make certain they’re not there
? Polly thought, horrified. On the night Bank Station was bombed?

She grabbed up her coat and began putting it on. “Where are you going?” Sir Godfrey asked.

“To find Miss O’Reilly.”

“But it’s nearly eleven,” Miss Laburnum said. “The trains will have already stopped for the night.”

“She’ll surely have gone to a shelter when the raids began,” the rector said.

That’s just the problem
, Polly thought.
She’s gone to a shelter which is going to be bombed
.

But Eileen knew it was going to be bombed. She’d find Alf and Binnie and get them out of there immediately. If they didn’t refuse to go. They’d delayed her on the twenty-ninth. What if they delayed her tonight and kept her from leaving the station?

“I’m certain nothing will happen to your friend,” the rector said reassuringly.

He’s right
, Polly thought.
You’re forgetting about VE-Day. You saw her there in her green coat, which means she can’t have been killed at Bank Station
.

But Mike hadn’t been there on VE-Day. What if he’d gone with her? “Did Mr. Davis come to the boardinghouse this afternoon?” she asked Mrs. Rickett. “Did you show him this note?”

Mrs. Rickett drew herself up angrily. “I most certainly did not. I haven’t even
seen
your Mr. Davis today. I am
not
in the habit of handing over my boarders’ mail to their gentleman friends.”

“No, of course not,” Polly said hastily. “It’s only that I’m so worried. They should both have been here hours ago, and the raids are so bad tonight.”

“There’s nothing you can do till morning,” Mr. Dorming said.

Nothing except worry
, Polly thought, listening to the crumping bombs and wishing she knew when Bank Street had been hit and what else had been bombed. And where Mike was. What if he’d spotted Eileen as she was leaving Mrs. Rickett’s and followed her? And then lost her in the crowd at Bank and didn’t realize she’d taken Alf and Binnie to another station? What if he was still at Bank looking for her?

You don’t know that he followed her
, she thought.
He could very well have gone to check your drop. Or to Fleet Street to deliver an ad and couldn’t get back
.
He’d been late last night because he’d been working on a story.
He’s very likely in the cellar of the
Herald
and Eileen’s at a tube shelter which wasn’t hit, trying to prevent Alf and Binnie from picking other shelterers’ pockets, and the best thing you can do is get some sleep
.

But the bombs kept waking her, and she crept off twice to see if either of them had come back to the emergency staircase.

The all clear went at half past five. “But they’ll have to wait till the trains start,” the rector said.

“I know,” Polly said, and gave them half an hour extra, in case the first trains were too crowded to squeeze onto, but they still didn’t come.

“They may have gone home and assumed they’d meet you there, Miss Sebastian,” Miss Laburnum said, folding up her blanket.

“I thought of that, but I’m afraid if I leave—”

“You’ll miss them,” Miss Laburnum said. “I quite understand. You stay here, and if Miss O’Reilly’s at home, I’ll tell her where you are. And I’ll stop at Mrs. Leary’s on the way and tell her to tell Mr. Davis.”

“I’ll be here for at least another hour,” Mrs. Brightford said, pointing at her still-sleeping girls, “so if you want to go look for her, I can have her wait here till you return.”

“
Thank
you!” Polly said gratefully, and ran out to each of the platforms to see which lines weren’t running, and then stationed herself at the foot of the District level escalator so she’d be able to spot Eileen and Mike no matter which way they came in from, searching the crowd anxiously for an orange scarf or a green coat.

There was Eileen, emerging from the northbound tunnel. “Eileen!” Polly called, and ran over to her. “Thank goodness!” She looked past her into the tunnel. “Is Mike with you?”

“Mike? No, he told me yesterday morning he had to work last night. Isn’t he here?”

“No, but the Central Line’s down. Damage on the line. He probably couldn’t get back. I was afraid he might have gone to Liverpool Street or Bank looking for you.”

“Alf and Binnie weren’t
in
Bank. They were at Embankment, but the only way I could be sure of keeping them there was to stay with them. I couldn’t very well tell them”—she lowered her voice—“that Bank and Liverpool Street were going to be hit, and you know Alf and Binnie. If I’d forbidden them to go there without giving them a reason, they’d have gone there immediately to see why. And besides, I needed to find out something.”

Exactly how many crimes they’ve committed
? Polly said silently, looking
up at the people coming down the escalator. Miss Laburnum should have got to Mrs. Leary’s by now and told Mike. If he was there.

“I’ve been thinking about how Alf and Binnie ran away the other morning when I said I’d take them home,” Eileen said. “And how the day I borrowed the map from them, they wouldn’t let me in.”

More and more people were coming down the escalator, shelterers with their bedrolls under their arms, making the trek back to the East End, and factory workers on the early shift, but there was still no sign of Mike.

“And Alf and Binnie are so dirty and ragged. I mean, I know their mother doesn’t take proper care of them, but Binnie’s wearing the same dress she had at the manor, and it was too short for her even then. And—”

Miss Laburnum was coming down the escalator toward them. “It’s all right,” Polly called up to her. “I found her. You were right. She spent the night—”

And saw the ARP warden on the step above her. And the look on Miss Laburnum’s face. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?” But she already knew.

No
, she thought.
No
.

“Are you Miss Sebastian?” the ARP warden said, and she must have nodded because the warden said, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid your friend Mr. Davis was killed last night.”

MIKE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD BEEN KILLED IN THE
raid. Mr. Simms had, too. He’d been filling in for a warden who had the flu when the ARP post was hit. Nelson had been with him, and the dog’s whimpering had led the rescue crew to his master, but it was too late. Mr. Simms had already bled to death.

Nelson was unhurt, except for a lacerated paw, but Mr. Simms had no family, and there was concern among the troupe over what would become of him. But the next week Mr. Dorming brought Nelson to Notting Hill Gate and announced that he had paid a guinea for him.

“Mr. Dorming doesn’t even
like
dogs,” Polly said when Miss Laburnum told her. “And I thought Mrs. Rickett didn’t allow her boarders to keep pets.”

“I told you, my dear. Mr. Dorming’s moved out. He’s taken Mr. Simms’s old rooms.”

Polly didn’t remember Miss Laburnum having told her that. She didn’t even remember having been told that Mr. Simms had been killed, though she must have been because she recalled wondering if he had been in Houndsditch, too. She remembered scarcely anything of those first few days. It was all she could manage to absorb the fact that Mike was dead and to do all the things that had to be done.

She had always wondered how the contemps had found the courage to go on after their husbands, parents, children, and friends had been
pulled lifeless from the rubble. But it wasn’t courage. It was that there were so many things that had to be taken care of that by the time one had done all of them, it was too late to give way.

She had to go with the warden to the ARP post to identify Mike’s effects and sign for them, had to talk to the incident officer, had to telephone Townsend Brothers to tell them she and Eileen wouldn’t be in to work, and to remove Mike’s belongings from his room so new tenants could move in. “I do hate to worry you so soon,” Mrs. Leary said, “but it’s a couple who were bombed out last night and have nowhere to go.”

“It’s quite all right,” Polly said. And because she didn’t want Mrs. Leary going through his things and finding a list of upcoming raids and thinking he had been a spy, she went straight over.

But there was nothing incriminating in his room, only his clothes and his suitcase, his towel and shaving things, and a paperback biography of Shackleton.

She packed them up, took them back to Mrs. Rickett’s, and went to the
Daily Express
to tell his editor, all the while protected by a barrier of numbness through which the pain would presently begin to work its way.

But there was no time to worry about that. She had to respond to Mike’s editor’s questions and to the condolences of the troupe and Sir Godfrey’s anxious concern, had to put the flowers Doreen had brought “from everyone on third” in water. And, worst of all, had to deal with Eileen, who refused to believe Mike was dead.

“It’s all a mistake. It was someone else,” she insisted, even though the warden had shown them Mike’s identity card and ration book and the reporter’s notebook he’d carried. And the pumpkin-colored scarf Miss Hibbard had knitted and Polly had lent him at St. Bart’s that morning after they’d tried to find John Bartholomew.

The edges of his papers were charred, and all of the things were sodden. “The fire hoses,” the warden explained apologetically.

“Those could have been stolen from him,” Eileen said. “Alf and Binnie stole that sort of thing from people all the time. I won’t believe it till I’ve seen the body.”

But there wasn’t a body, as the warden gingerly explained. “It was a thousand-pounder, and then incendiaries, you see.”

Polly saw. There would only have been fragments too small for the rescue squad to have collected. She thought of Paige Fairchild telling her at one of her first V-1 incidents, “Don’t bother with anything smaller than a hand.”

“It can’t have been Mike,” Eileen insisted. “What would he have been
doing out in the middle of a raid? We all promised we’d go to a shelter the moment the sirens went.”

“Perhaps it was too far away and he hadn’t enough time—”

“No,” Eileen said. “I asked the warden. She said Houndsditch wasn’t hit till eleven. And what would he have been doing in Houndsditch? He never mentioned it to you, did he?”

“No. But remember Marjorie? She didn’t tell anyone she was going to meet an airman either. There was no reason anyone knew of for her to have been in Jermyn Street.”

“And Marjorie wasn’t dead. Mike isn’t either.”

“Eileen—”

“He might have been injured and wandered away, or got hit on the head and can’t remember who he is,” Eileen argued and insisted on checking the hospitals—even though the authorities had already done that—and waiting at the foot of the escalator in Oxford Circus Station where they’d agreed to meet if something went wrong.

“You can’t go on doing this,” Polly said after the third night. “You must get some sleep.”

Eileen shook her head. “I might miss him,” she said, and when he still hadn’t come by the fourth night, she said, “Perhaps he found the retrieval team, and they pulled him out. And he wanted to come fetch us, but there wasn’t time—”

Polly shook her head, remembering how adamant he’d been about them splitting up when he realized Mr. Bartholomew was at St. Paul’s. “He’d never have gone through without us.”

“Perhaps he hadn’t any choice. Like Shackleton. He had to leave us behind to go fetch help. Perhaps the drop was in Houndsditch, and if they didn’t go through immediately, it would have been destroyed, so he went and now he’s working with Badri and Linna to find another drop site for us.