All Clear (59 page)

“Do you think we’d better flee while we can?” Parrish asked.

“No, it will only make it worse when she
does
catch us,” Talbot said.

“Perhaps she’s come to celebrate with us,” Reardon said.

“Does she
look
like she’s celebrating?” Talbot asked.

She didn’t, despite the festive tricorn.
I’ll miss you, too, Major
, Mary thought, and leaned toward Paige, who was still calling and waving to Stephen, and kissed her on the cheek. Paige didn’t even notice.

Mary edged slowly away from her and then turned, squeezed quickly along the porch to the steps, and down the same way she’d come up, taking her cap off and keeping her head down in case Paige realized she was gone and began looking for her.

If she did, Paige would hopefully assume she’d tried to get down to Stephen and been carried away by the crowd.
Which could be true
, she thought, reaching the front of the steps.

She set out at an angle across the square in the direction of Charing Cross. Halfway across, she caught a current that swept her in the direction she wanted to go and let it carry her. It looked like it might even deliver her neatly at the entrance to the tube station.

With time to spare
, she thought, stopping at the edge of the square to look at her watch.

The little man in the bowler was still in exactly the same place. “Three cheers for Patton!” he shouted, but the “Hip, hip, hurrahs” were drowned out by the approaching beats of the conga line. She pushed through the crowd toward the Underground station. Hopefully, it would be less jammed than when they’d come. Certainly none of these people showed any sign of going home any time soon, and once the train got past Holborn, it should be—

“Come on, ducks!” a burly merchant marine shouted in her ear. He grabbed her around the waist, thrust her into the conga line ahead of him, and forced her hands onto the waist of the soldier in front of her.

“No! I haven’t time for this!” she cried, but it was no use. The marine had an iron grip on her waist, and when she tried to plant her feet firmly on the ground and refuse to go, he simply picked her up and held her out before him.

She was carried remorselessly back into Trafalgar Square and across it by the snaking “dunh duh dunh duh”-ing dancers. They were heading straight back to the National Gallery. “You don’t understand!” she shouted. “I’ve got to get to the Underground station! I must—”

“Here then, let her go. That’s a good chap,” a man’s voice said, and she felt herself grabbed by the waist and plucked neatly out of the conga line. The marine and the rest of the line danced past her and away.

“
Thank
you,” she said, turning to look at her rescuer, but before she
got a good look at his face—she scarcely had time to register the fact that he was a soldier and that he was wearing a clerical collar—there was a loud explosion over by the fountain.

“Sorry, I believe I know who did that,” he said, and strode off through the crowd, presumably to rescue someone else.

“Thank you again, whoever you are,” Mary said, and set off for the tube station again, this time keeping to the very edge of the square and the street.

The little man in the bowler was still standing outside leading cheers. “Three cheers for Dowding!” he shouted.

He’s going to run out of heroes to cheer
, she thought, squeezing past him to the entrance, but she was wrong. As she ran down the stairs, she heard him shout, “Three cheers for the firespotters! Three cheers for the ARP! Three cheers for all of us! Hip hip hurrah!”

THEY LASTED LESS THAN A FORTNIGHT AT MRS. RICKETT’S
, even though Alf and Binnie had proved quite adept at keeping their parrot out of sight—and earshot—of the landlady. Mrs. Bascombe was a quick study, and it only took Alf a day to teach her not to do her air-raid imitations except when the actual sirens were going and not to screech, “ ’Itler’s a bloody bastard!” at anyone who came near her cage.

But she was, unfortunately, also quick to pick up whatever she happened to overhear and to repeat it in a dead-on imitation of their voices—which explained how Alf and Binnie had been able to keep the masquerade of their mother’s still being alive going for so long.

But that skill also led to Mrs. Rickett’s hearing what she thought was Binnie saying, “What is this swill? It tastes bloody awful,” and using her key to get in, expecting to find, as she told Eileen, cooking going on in the room. And finding herself instead face-to-face with the beady-eyed Mrs. Bascombe.

“Not to worry,” the parrot had said in a spot-on imitation of Alf’s voice. “We’ll ’ide ’er. The old witch’ll never find out,” and all five of them had found themselves out of a place to live and forced to take up residence in Notting Hill Gate Station for the next two nights.

Polly told the station guard that Mrs. Bascombe was a prop in the troupe’s new play, and Sir Godfrey, coming in behind them, exclaimed, “Good God! Don’t tell me they’ve decided to do
Treasure Island
!”

And when Miss Laburnum saw it, she said, “Oh, it would be perfect for
Peter Pan
!”

“It’s not staying,” Polly said, and asked if anyone knew of a vacant flat. No one did, and Polly wasn’t able to find anything in the “To Let” ads in the
Times
Sir Godfrey lent her.

“There’s ’eaps of ’ouses nobody lives in ’cause the people what lived in ’em are dead,” Binnie suggested.

“We know how to get into ’em,” Alf said.

“We are
not
breaking into dead people’s houses.”

“Not all of ’em are dead,” Binnie protested. “Some of ’em are just empty.”

“We are not breaking into
any
houses.”

“Wait, that gives me an idea,” Eileen said. “I remember one of Lady Caroline’s friends telling her they were having difficulty finding someone to stay in their London house and look after it, and the situation’s probably worse now, with the bombing.”

She turned to the
To Hire
column. “Listen to this. ‘Wanted, live-in caretaker.’ The address is in Bloomsbury.”

Eileen went to see the estate agent listed in the ad the next day and came back to Townsend Brothers jubilant. “When I told him we had two children and a parrot—”

“You
told
him?” Polly said.

“Yes, and he said, ‘I’ve had four of the houses in my charge blitzed in the past month. Two children and their pet can scarcely do more damage than that.’ ”

I wouldn’t say that
, Polly thought.
These are the Hodbins
.

“The house is in Millwright Lane,” Eileen said. “Is that a safe address?”

Polly didn’t know whether the list of addresses had been good to the end of the Blitz or only through December, but at least it wasn’t near the British Museum or in Bedford Square. And she thought most of the attacks in Bloomsbury had been in the autumn.

But it was still London. “I think we should take Alf and Binnie to the country,” she told Eileen. “You researched the statistics on children who stayed in London. You know they’d be much safer there.”

“But that means you’d have to leave Townsend Brothers. How would the retrieval team find us?”

The retrieval team’s not coming
, Polly thought.

“We could put messages in the newspapers like the ones we put in before,” she said. “Telling them where we’d gone.”

“No, the best lead they have is Oxford Street.”

“We could go to Backbury, then. Or I could stay here and you go—I’m the one with the deadline. And then if the retrieval team comes, I can tell them where you are.”

“No, there’s twice the chance of finding us with two of us. We’re
not
splitting up. We’re staying
here
,” she said, and the next day she told Polly she’d spoken to the estate agent and taken the position.

“But what about your National Service?” Polly objected.

“When I tell them about my caretaking job and about the Hodbins, they’ll
have
to give me something here.”

Polly hoped she was wrong, that they’d assign her to something safely out of London, but they didn’t. They gave her a job with the ATS, driving military officers.

Which is safer than working on an anti-aircraft gun crew
, Polly thought. Or in a munitions factory. Factories were frequently targeted by the Luftwaffe.

And the house they moved into was near Russell Square, which was safe. But the house next door had been reduced to rubble and the one across from it had had its roof smashed in. “That means ours won’t be hit,” Alf said.

Binnie nodded wisely. “Bombs never ’it the same spot twice.”

Polly knew from experience that that wasn’t true, but she didn’t contradict them. Nowhere in London was safe, but at least this wasn’t the East End, which continued to be hammered; the house had a sturdy-looking cellar; and even Eileen’s and her own cooking was better than Mrs. Rickett’s, “though I’m beginning to sympathize with her,” Eileen said after a week. “How exactly does one produce meals for a family of four with one pound of meat and eight eggs a week?”

“We can get you some birds to cook,” Binnie said. “There’s lots of pigeons here.”

“And squirrels,” Alf said, brandishing his slingshot.

It really
is
too bad we can’t smuggle them into Nazi Germany to drive Hitler to distraction instead of us
, Polly thought, though on the whole things were going better than she’d expected. The children were going to school, the deserted houses meant there were scarcely any neighbors for Alf and Binnie to annoy, and Eileen seemed much more cheerful.

“I’ve been thinking about Dunkirk,” she said. “Mike said the soldiers sitting waiting on the beaches thought no one was coming for them and they’d be captured by the Germans. But they didn’t know about the launches and rowboats and ferries which were being rounded up to come
fetch them. And the soldiers wading ashore on D-Day didn’t know about all the things going on behind the scenes, like the deception campaign—what did you call it?”

“Fortitude.”

“Fortitude,” Eileen said, “or about all the things the French Resistance was doing, or Ultra. And it may be the same with us. There may be all sorts of things going on we don’t know about. Mr. Dunworthy may be working on a plan to get us out this very minute. Or he may already be on his way here.”

But this is time travel
, Polly thought, despairing of ever making her understand.
If they were coming, they’d already be here
.

“We mustn’t give up hope,” Eileen said. “Dunkirk worked out all right in the end.”

“Never give up,” Alf said behind them, and they both jumped.

Oh, no
, Polly thought.
How much did he hear
? But when she turned around, it was only the parrot.

“I’m sorry,” Eileen said. “I told Alf and Binnie to teach her something patriotic to say instead of ‘Hitler’s a bloody bastard.’ ”

“Loose lips sink ships,” Mrs. Bascombe squawked.

“Well, she’s certainly right about that,” Polly said. “We need to watch what we say with the children here.”

“Donate your scrap metal,” the parrot croaked. “Dig for victory. Do your bit.”

Eileen was certainly doing her bit by taking in Alf and Binnie. She deserved some sort of medal. But everyone they knew was doing theirs, too—the vicar, and Mr. Dorming, who’d taken on Mr. Simms’s job as a firespotter, and Doreen, who’d given her notice at Townsend Brothers and signed up for the ATA.

“I’m going to be an Atta Girl and fly a Tiger Moth,” she said proudly.

Her departure for the ATA and Sarah Steinberg’s—she was going to do her National Service as an RAF plotter—left the third floor terribly shorthanded, and Miss Snelgrove told Polly that Townsend Brothers was applying for an Employer Hardship Exemption for her so she could remain in her job.

Eileen was overjoyed. “I’ve been ever so worried about how the retrieval team would find you after you left to do your National Service.”

“I told Miss Snelgrove no,” Polly said. “I’m going to try to get assigned to a rescue squad.”

“A rescue squad?” Eileen said. “But why?”

Because I have a deadline, and if I simply sit here waiting for it, I’ll go mad
.
And I keep thinking of Marjorie, lying there in that rubble with no one coming to dig her out. I know exactly how that feels. I can’t bear to think of anyone else going through that. And if Colin was here—if he was the one who was trapped—that’s what he would do
.

She didn’t say any of that to Eileen. She said, “If they don’t get the waiver, I’ll almost certainly be assigned to somewhere outside of London. I need to sign up now.”

“But a rescue squad,” Eileen said. “It’s so dangerous. Couldn’t you drive an ambulance instead? That’s what you did before, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I can’t risk it. I might be assigned to a unit with one of the FANYs I knew and create a paradox. And rescue work’s not that dangerous. We don’t go to the incident till after the bomb falls. And you heard Binnie. Bombs never fall in the same place twice.”

“But what about the retrieval team? How will they find us?”

“I’ll tell Miss Snelgrove which unit I’ve been assigned to,” Polly said. The next morning Polly gave her notice at work and went to the Works Board. She filled up a registration form and eventually had her name called by a stern woman with a pince-nez.

“I’m Mrs. Sentry. Please be seated,” the woman said without looking up from the form. “I see your last employment was as a shop assistant with a department store. I assume you can do sums. Can you type?”

If she said yes, she would end up in Whitehall, typing requisition forms for the War Office. “No, ma’am,” she said. “I was hoping to be assigned to a rescue squad.”

Mrs. Sentry shook her head. “You’re far too slight to do the lifting involved.”

“Well, then, some other sort of Civil Defence work.”

Mrs. Sentry looked at her over her pince-nez. “My job is to match you with the job for which you’re best suited. Are you married?”