“Is the V-1 assignment your only one to World War Two?” he asked, and Eileen looked, horrified, at him and then Polly.
“Is it?” he pressed her. “Or did you go to Pearl Harbor? Or the end of the Blitz?” he asked, remembering she’d known all about those attacks, too.
“No,” she said, and looked like she was telling the truth. But then, he’d thought she was telling the truth before.
“You weren’t here in World War Two on any other assignment besides this one and the V-1s and V-2s?”
“No.”
Thank God, he thought, but the V-1s assignment was bad enough. Denys Atherton wouldn’t be here till March of 1944, which was cutting it awfully close.
If he’d come through. And to get to him, they had to survive the next three years and the rest of the Blitz, and in another few weeks they wouldn’t know when or where the bombs were going to be. And if the increase in slippage was bad enough for Dunworthy to have switched drops that were years apart, there might not be anything they could do till well after Polly …
But they didn’t know the increase was that big. And even if it was, the increase might only be on a few drops. And there might be some other reason Phipps hadn’t come. Bletchley Park was still a divergence point, and, for all they knew, so were these months of the Blitz. And the soldiers at Dunkirk had thought they were licked, and look how that had turned out.
“Don’t worry, Polly,” he said. “We’ll get you out of here. We’ve got three years to figure out something. And there’s still Denys Atherton.”
“And Historian X,” Eileen said. “The historian who’s here till the eighteenth.”
He’d hoped they’d forgotten about that. “Afraid not,” he said.
“Why not?” Eileen said.
“Because Historian X was Gerald,” Polly said. “Wasn’t it, Mike?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?” Eileen asked.
“Yes.” He told them about the date on the letter. “And there was a train ticket to Oxford for December eighteenth, and his departure letter was postmarked the sixteenth.”
“Oh, dear,” Eileen said.
“But we still have the drop in St. John’s Wood,” Mike said. “And on my way here, I saw that hoardings have gone up on the site in front of your drop, Polly.”
“So if the drop wouldn’t open because people could see into it,” Eileen said eagerly, “it may begin working again.”
“Exactly,” Mike said. He stood up. “What say we get out of here and give the Luftwaffe a clear shot at this atrocity?” he suggested, looking around at the Albert Memorial statuary. “I’ll take you two to lunch and we’ll plan our strategy for finding the drop. Eileen, did you hear from Lady Caroline?”
“Yes, but not from the officer at the manor.”
“Write them again, and write your vicar and see what you can find out about the riflery range. Maybe they’ve moved it. And I’ll write my barmaid and see if they’ve taken the beach defenses down. You said the invasion had been called off, didn’t you, Polly?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’ll take the defenses down.”
“You don’t know that,” Eileen said. “Or maybe Mike’s barmaid’s written to say the retrieval team’s been there, and all our problems will be solved.”
“Eileen’s right. We’ll stop by Mrs. Leary’s on our way to lunch and pick up my mail. Come on,” he said, pulling Polly and then Eileen to their feet and walking them back to Mrs. Leary’s.
When they arrived, Eileen said, “While you’re collecting your letters, I’ll go see if we’ve had any.”
“It’s Sunday,” Polly said. “There’s no post on Sunday.”
“But the retrieval team may have rung up,” she said, and hurried off toward Mrs. Rickett’s.
Mike watched her till she rounded the corner and then turned to Polly.
“You said you saw Eileen on VE-Day. Was she the only person you saw?”
“What do you mean? There were thousands of people in Trafalgar Square that night—”
“Was I one of them?” If she had seen him, it would be proof they hadn’t got out, that they’d still been there when Polly’s deadline passed.
“No,” Polly said. “I didn’t see you.”
“Did you see something else, something that made you think she was there because we didn’t get out?”
“No, nothing except that our drops won’t open and Mr. Dunworthy was worried about a slippage increase and was changing assignments to chronological—”
“But he didn’t change yours. And the fact that you didn’t see me there with Eileen means she’s right. She was there on a later assignment. Otherwise, I’d have been there with her. How did she look? Excited? Sad?”
“Not sad,” Polly said, frowning as if trying to remember. “Optimistic,” she said finally.
He looked hard at her, trying to decide if she was still keeping something from him. “You’re sure it was Eileen? That it wasn’t just somebody who looked like her?”
“No, I’m certain it was her.”
“Then why, when I left for Bletchley Park, were you so worried about Marjorie?”
“Because I did change what happened. And a nurse is in a position to save who knows how many lives—”
“But whatever she does, we know it can’t lose the war. You may have gone to VE-Day before all this other stuff happened, but Eileen didn’t. She hasn’t gone yet. She went after I saved Hardy and after Marjorie was dug out of the rubble.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Polly said.
“Well, it’s true. Either we didn’t alter events or there was no lasting harm done,” Mike said. “I wish you’d told me all this before I left for Bletchley Park. I got worried after that encounter with Turing.”
“Turing? Alan Turing?” Polly cried. “What encounter?”
“He nearly ran me down with his bicycle,” Mike said. “He swerved at the last minute, and crashed into a lamppost. He wasn’t hurt, and neither was his bike, but when I found out it was him, it scared me to death. But thank God it didn’t do any damage. I’ll be right back.”
He ran inside to ask Mrs. Leary if he’d received anything while he was gone and then came back out. “No letter and no messages,” he said. “Where’s Eileen? Isn’t she back?”
“No, she must have got caught by Miss Laburnum. She’s doing the costumes for the play. We’d best go rescue her.” But as they came round the corner they saw Eileen running toward them, waving a letter.
“I thought you said there wasn’t any mail delivery on Sunday,” Mike said to Polly.
“You’ve had a letter from Daphne,” Eileen called excitedly, running up. “It came yesterday, but since it was addressed to you, Mrs. Rickett thought it had been sent to the wrong address, and she was planning to send it back. Thank goodness I saw it before she did.”
She handed it to Mike. He opened the letter and then frowned.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The letter’s dated a week ago. She must have forgotten to mail it.” He began reading the letter. “She also misplaced the other address I gave her. That’s why she sent it to Mrs. Rickett’s. And—”
He stopped short, reading silently. “Oh, my God!”
“What?” Eileen and Polly said in unison.
“I don’t believe this. Listen to this,” he said excitedly. “ ‘You said to tell you if anyone came round asking after you. Two men came in to the Crown and Anchor last night, asking all sorts of questions. They said they were friends of yours and that they needed to get in touch with you and did I know where you were.” He looked up at Eileen. “Christ, you were right. The retrieval team’s here. They’ve been here for over a week.”
“I told you they’d find us,” Eileen said smugly. “Did she tell them where you were?”
Obviously not, or they’d have been here by now. “No,” he said, and told them he’d leave for Dover that night.
“I think we should go with you
,” Eileen said, “or at least Polly should. She’s the one it’s the most urgent to get out.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to have to get the information out of Daphne, and she wouldn’t appreciate my showing up with another woman.”
“She wouldn’t need to go with you to the pub,” Eileen argued. “She could stay at the inn or—”
“The inn and the pub are one and the same,” he said, “and even if they weren’t, Saltram-on-Sea’s a tiny village. Daphne’d know about Polly within five minutes of her arrival. Besides, I have no idea how I’m going to get there.”
He explained about the bus service having been discontinued and the gasoline rationing making it hard to rent a car. “I’ll probably have to hitchhike, and it could take two or three days. Plus, it’s a restricted area. I’ve got a press pass, but neither of you do.”
Polly agreed. “The trains will be jammed with Christmas travelers and soldiers home on leave. Perhaps instead of going there, you should write to Daphne. It might be quicker.”
“Unless the retrieval team’s there in Saltram-on-Sea. Or unless she doesn’t know where they are. I may have to track them down after I’ve talked to her. I’ll phone you as soon as I’ve found them.”
“But if they’re in Saltram-on-Sea, how will we get there?” Eileen asked worriedly. “You said it was a restricted area.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Mike said.
Eileen was still looking anxious.
“Don’t worry. If the retrieval team’s here, they can go back through to Oxford and get you all the passes and papers you need. Or they may decide it’s easier to set up another drop closer to London. Look, I’ll call you as soon as I know what the plan is.”
“How much money do you think you’ll need?” Polly asked, digging in her shoulder bag. “Never mind. Take this.” She handed him some money.
“What about you two?” he asked.
“I’ve kept back enough for our tube fares, and we’ll be paid the day after tomorrow.”
She handed him a handwritten list. “Here are the raids on London and the southeast for the next week. The Luftwaffe was concentrating mostly on the Midlands and the ports in December, so it’s not a very long list, and I’m sorry I don’t know more about the raids on southeastern England. I didn’t have those implanted. Oh, and when you get to Dover, you need to be especially careful. It was under bombardment for nearly the entire war. The list I made for you only goes to the twentieth. If you think you’ll be gone longer than—”
He shook his head, folded up the paper, and put it in his pocket. “We’ll be back in Oxford long before that.”
“Oh! Wouldn’t it be heaven if we were home by Christmas?” Eileen said rapturously.
“It would,” Mike said, “but first I’ve got to get to Saltram-on-Sea, which means I’ve got to get to Victoria Station before the Underground shuts down. Are there any raids tonight, Polly?”
“Yes,” she said, “but not till 10:45.”
“Then if I want to be out of London before they start, I’d better get going.”
“Do you want us to go with you to Victoria?” Polly asked.
“No, you need to be here where the retrieval team can find you, in case they gave up on me. Is your play group still putting on The Admirable Crichton?”
“No, now we’re in rehearsals for A Christmas Carol.”
“You’d better tell them you can’t do it,” he said.
He gave both of them a peck on the cheek, said, “I’ll call as soon as I know anything,” and took off. If he could get an express to Dover, he could be there by midnight and on the main road to Saltram-on-Sea by dawn and maybe be able to hitch a ride with a farmer heading up the coast early.
But Polly had been right. The trains were jammed, and as the agent informed him when he bought his ticket, military personnel were being given first priority.
“I’m willing to stand in the corridor,” Mike said.
“First priority is standing in the corridor,” the ticket agent said. “I can get you out on the 2:14 Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?”
“Sorry, sir. It’s the best I can do. The holidays, you know. And the war, of course.”
Of course. “You don’t have anything sooner than Tuesday?”
“No, sir. I can get you on the 6:05 to Canterbury tomorrow. You might be able to get a train to Dover from there.” And after Mike had attempted unsuccessfully to buy a ticket off several people in the queue for the 9:38 to Dover, that was what he opted for, a move he regretted almost immediately.
Since the train went before the tube began running in the morning, he couldn’t go back to Notting Hill Gate to spend the night, and there wasn’t anywhere in Victoria to sleep. He had to sit up all night on an unbelievably uncomfortable wooden bench.
And once he got on the train, he was even sorrier. Not only did it turn out to be a local, and even more packed than the Lady Jane had been on the way back from Dunkirk, but less than five miles out of London it was shunted onto a siding while three troop trains and a freight train loaded with military equipment passed.
After nearly an hour and a half, the train started up again, went half a mile, and stopped again, this time for no reason at all. “Air raid,” a soldier close to the window said, looking out. “I hope the jerries aren’t out hunting trains today. We’re sitting ducks, aren’t we?” after which everyone spent the next few minutes looking up at the ceiling and listening for the deadly hum of approaching HE 111s.
“I’d rather be back on the front line than here,” another soldier said after a few minutes. “Waiting about for the blow to fall, and not a bloody thing you can do about it.”
Like Polly, Mike thought. It must have been hell for her when she realized her drop wouldn’t open, and worse keeping it to herself these last weeks while he and Eileen talked about options she knew wouldn’t work. But the worst must have been not being able to do anything about it. His lying there in the hospital worrying about what had happened to the retrieval team and whether he’d messed things up by saving Hardy had been bad enough. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if he’d already been to Pearl Harbor, even if it was a year from now, or, like the day the V-1s started, three and a half years off.
It didn’t matter when it was. It was still heading straight at you. Like the German Army getting closer and closer to Dunkirk, and you sitting there helplessly on the beach, listening to the guns in the distance, and hoping to God a ship would show up and take you off before the Germans got there, and nothing for you to do in the meantime but wait.
Which is what all three of them would have been doing right now if he hadn’t got Daphne’s letter. Thank God it had come when it did. He couldn’t have stood just sitting there cooling his heels. It was a hell of a lot easier to fire a machine gun at the Zeroes or hand up ammunition than to just sit there and be shot at, a hell of a lot easier to take a leaky launch over to Dunkirk than to sit on a beach waiting for the Germans to come.
Or the Japanese. He’d assumed, when he found out Gerald hadn’t come through, that his roommate Charles hadn’t either, but what if he had? What if he was in Singapore, and his drop wouldn’t open, and the Japanese would be there any minute, and he didn’t dare leave Singapore for fear he’d miss the retrieval team?
Charles won’t be in Singapore, Mike told himself, because as soon as I find them, I’ll tell them they’ve got to pull him out. I’ll go with them to get him if I have to.
But that wouldn’t take anywhere near as much courage as Charles having to sit there at the country club in his dinner clothes and listen to radio bulletins describing the Japanese Army’s approach.
When he’d read that book Mrs. Ives had given him in the hospital, he’d thought Shackleton was the hero, taking off in a tiny boat and braving Antarctic seas to bring help, but now he wondered if it hadn’t taken more courage to stay on that barren island and watch the boat disappear, and then wait as weeks and months we
nt by, with no guarantee that anybody was ever coming, while their feet froze and the food ran out and the weather got worse and worse.
Back when he’d been scanning the newspapers, looking for the names of airfields, there’d been a story about an old woman being dug out of the wreckage of what had been her house and the rescue crew asking her if her husband was under there with her. “No, the bloody coward’s at the front!” she’d said indignantly.
He’d laughed when he read it, but now he wasn’t so sure it had been a joke. Maybe England was the front, and the real heroes were the Londoners sitting in those tube stations night after night, waiting to be blown to smithereens. And Fordham, lying there in the hospital in traction. And everyone on this train, waiting patiently for it to begin moving again, not giving way to panic or the impulse to call Hitler and surrender just to get it over with. He was going to have to rethink the whole concept of heroism when he got back to Oxford.
If he got back to Oxford. At this rate, he wasn’t sure he’d even make it to Canterbury, let alone Saltram-on-Sea.
He did, but it took him two more days of delayed departures, waits on sidings, and fruitless trips to garages. He ended up hitching rides in a half-track, a sidecar, and a turnip truck.
The truck was driven by a pretty land girl who’d grown up in Chelsea and was now slopping hogs and milking cows on a farm a few miles west of Saltram-on-Sea.
“The work ruins your hands,” she said when he asked her how she liked it, “and I despise getting up before dawn and smelling of manure, but if I didn’t have something to do, I’d go mad with worry. My husband’s serving in the North Atlantic, escorting convoys, and sometimes I don’t hear from him for weeks at a time. And I feel as though I’m contributing something.”
She smiled at him. “There are four of us girls, and we all get along famously, so that helps, and Mr. Powney’s not nearly so gruff as some of the other farmers.”
“Wait—you work for Mr. Powney?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I can’t believe it,” he said, laughing. “Does he have a bull?”