“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.”
Viola: What country, friends, is this?
Captain: This is Illyria, lady.
Viola: And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
TWELFTH NIGHT
London—Winter 1941
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.
“And don’t say, ‘This is time travel,’ like that,” Eileen said, even though Polly hadn’t said anything. “There are scores of reasons why they might not have been able to come through yet. Slippage and divergence points and …”
But the most likely is that that isn’t what happened at all, Polly thought. Mike didn’t go through, and there was no drop in Houndsditch. Only an HE, followed by incendiaries.
“He can’t be dead,” Eileen said. “He promised he’d get us out.”
Yes, and Colin promised he’d come rescue me if I got into trouble, Polly thought. Sometimes promises can’t be kept.
“Perhaps he got a new lead on the retrieval team and went off to find them,” Eileen said. “He went to Manchester without telling us.”
Which didn’t account for his half-burnt papers being in Houndsditch, or his things being at Mrs. Leary’s. If he had gone off, he would have taken his razor and shaving soap with him.
Polly had hoped there would be some clue among his belongings as to what he had been doing in Houndsditch, though she was almost afraid to find out. What if he’d caught sight of Eileen going to find Alf and Binnie and followed her? Houndsditch wasn’t that far from Bank Station. Or what if he’d been on some dangerous mission to get the three of them out? He’d looked so desperate and distracted after she told him about Eileen’s coat. What if, in his
desperation, he’d seen someone he thought might be the retrieval team and followed them to Houndsditch? To his death.
I shouldn’t have told him, she thought. I should have lied about the coat. If he had died attempting to save them, to get her out before her deadline, she didn’t think she could bear it.
But if they knew what he’d been doing in Houndsditch, Eileen might come to her senses, so the next night Polly stayed behind at Mrs. Rickett’s and dried out Mike’s still-wet notebook in the oven and then went carefully through its crinkled leaves.
The ink on some of the pages had run or washed away. Like the code in the bigram books, she thought, peering at the blurred words, attempting to decipher them.
There were notes for a newspaper story on an all-female AA-gun squadron, the list of names she’d given him before he went to Bletchley Park—“Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Dilly Knox”—and what looked like a list of ideas for possible newspaper stories: “Wartime Weddings,” “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” “Winter and War: Ten Survival Strategies.”
Survival strategies, Polly thought, and felt the pain begin to seep through, like blood through a shirt.
Several pages had been torn out of the notebook. The list of upcoming raids, Polly thought.
The remaining pages were notes for an article called “Doing Our Bit: Heroes on the Home Front,” and a list of names, addresses, and times. “Canteen worker, Mrs. Edna Bell, 6 Cuttlebone Street, Southwark, Jan. 10, 10 P.M.,” and below that, “Firespotter,” and a name that might have been “Mr. Woodruff” or “Mr. Walton” and “Jan. 11, 11 P.M., 9 Houndsditch, corner of H and Stoney Lane.”
He hadn’t been following Eileen or looking for the retrieval team. He had gone to Houndsditch to interview a firespotter for a story he was writing on home-front heroes for the Daily Express. It wasn’t her fault. He hadn’t been killed attempting to save them.
She had thought that knowledge would be a comfort, but it wasn’t, and she realized that she had been hoping as much as Eileen that there was some mistake, some other explanation. That he wasn’t truly dead. But he was.
And if he was dead, then no one was coming to rescue them. She might have been able to convince herself that Mr. Dunworthy would have allowed Mike to be left here with an injured foot and her here with a deadline, but there was no way he would have allowed one of them to be killed if he could help it.
Which meant he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t get them out. And it scarcely mattered if the reason was slippage or their having altered events or some catastrophe in Oxford. Mike was dead. “Mike Davis, 26, died suddenly. Of enemy action.”
She took Mike’s things back to Mrs. Rickett’s, and put them in a drawer of the bureau, then took out the half-charred print of The Light of the World she had retrieved from the floor of St. Paul’s, unfolded it, and sat there on the bed, looking at it—at Christ’s hand, still raised to knock on the door though the door had burned away to nothing, and at his face. It held no expression at all.
“Would you care for me to make arrangements for a memorial service for your friend, Miss Sebastian?” the rector asked her on Friday. “I should be glad to officiate. I’ve arranged with the rector of St. Bidulphus’s to have Mr. Simms’s funeral there, and I could speak to him about a service for Mr. Davis.”
But Eileen wouldn’t hear of it. “He isn’t dead,” she insisted, and when Polly showed her the entry in his notebook, she said, “That doesn’t say the eleventh. It says the seventeenth. Or the seventh. Look how the water’s blurred the numbers. And even if it does say the eleventh, it doesn’t mean he kept the appointment.”
On Tuesday, Polly went to Mr. Simms’s funeral. She had attempted to persuade Eileen to go, too, but she’d refused to leave her post at the foot of the escalator. “I might miss Mike,” she said, looking hopefully up at the people descending.
The entire troupe was at St. Bidulphus’s, including Nelson. Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard both wore black-veiled hats and carried black-edged handkerchiefs.
Sir Godfrey recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech: “ ‘They shall not speak of this, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.’ ”
And the rector, giving the eulogy, said, “Mr. Simms was no less a soldier than the men in Henry the Fifth’s army, and no less a hero.”
So was Mike, Polly thought, and it didn’t matter what he had been doing when he died any more than it mattered whether an RAF pilot was killed in a dogfight or while he was on leave. Mike had still died trying to get them out. He had devoted every moment since he’d found them to doing that. And it didn’t matter that he’d failed either. History was full of failed attempts—Thermopylae, Scott’s trek back from the South Pole, the siege of Khartoum. He was still a hero.
After the funeral, the rector asked Polly again about scheduling a service. “I could speak to the Reverend Mr. Unwin now, or perhaps you’d like to have it in some other church.”
Yes, Polly thought, St. Paul’s. It’s where all the heroes are: Wellington and Lord Nelson and Captain Faulknor. Mike should be there as well, though she knew they’d never allow it.
But she asked Mr. Humphreys anyway, and, to her surprise, he said that they could hold a small private service in the Chapel of St. Michael and St. George. “I am so sorry about Mr. Davis,” Mr. Humphreys said. “It’s difficult sometimes to see God’s plan in all this violence and death, but with His help, it will all come right in the end.”
He asked Polly what day she’d like to have the service, and she told him about Eileen. “People often find death difficult to accept,” he said, shaking his head, “particularly when it is sudden. Is there someone she’s close to who could help her through this? Her mother or father, perhaps, or a friend from school?”
None of them has been born yet, Polly thought, going to Oxford Circus to attempt to persuade Eileen to return to Mrs. Rickett’s and get some sleep. Things couldn’t go on this way. Eileen was eating almost nothing and sleeping scarcely at all. There were dark hollows under her eyes and a driven, distracted look about her.
Like Mike had, Polly thought. She must get through to her somehow.
But Eileen wouldn’t listen to her. And there’s no one else here she’s close to, Polly thought, and then realized that wasn’t true. She wrote to the vicar in Backbury, and when she didn’t hear back from him after several days, went in search of Alf and Binnie Hodbin.
They were hardly ideal comforters, but Eileen cared about them—she’d been talking about them just before they found out about Mike. And the important thing now was to jar Eileen back to reality, something Alf and Binnie were experts at.
Polly didn’t know where they lived except that it was in Whitechapel, and according to Eileen, no one was ever at home. Which left the tube stations.
She started with Embankment, where Eileen had last seen them, and then searched Blackfriars and Holborn. When she still couldn’t find them, she began collaring urchins and questioning them as to the Hodbins’ whereabouts, which didn’t work either. The children clearly thought she was from Child Services or a schoolmistress and weren’t about to tell her anything, so she switched tactics, giving them twopence to deliver a message to Alf and Binnie and promising another twopence on delivery.
They were waiting outside Townsend Brothers when she left work the next day. So was the urchin she’d promised the twopence to. She paid him, and he darted off.
As soon as he’d gone, Binnie said, “Did somethin’ ’appen to Eileen?”
“Was she killed?” Alf demanded.
“No, nothing’s happened to Eileen.”
“Then ’ow come she ain’t ’ere?” Binnie asked.
“Does she need us to go with her in the ambulance again and tell her which way to go?” Alf asked.
“No,” Polly said, frustrated. Eileen was liable to come out the staff door at any moment. Polly needed to
tell them about Mike before she got here. “It’s about her friend, Mr. Davis. You met him that morning at St. Paul’s.”
“The bloke what didn’t have no coat?”
“Yes,” Polly said, remembering with a sharp pang Mike sitting there defeatedly in his shirtsleeves on St. Paul’s steps, remembered wrapping the pumpkin-colored scarf round his neck. “He was killed, and—”
“Eileen won’t ’afta go to an orphanage, will she?” Alf asked.
“No, you noddlehead,” Binnie said. “Only children get sent to orphanages.”
“Eileen’s been feeling very sad since Mr. Davis was killed,” Polly said, “and I was hoping you two might cheer—”
“Was it a bomb what killed ’im?” Binnie cut in.
“Yes, and Eileen—”
“What sorta bomb?” Alf demanded. “A thousand-pounder or a parachute mine?” Before Polly could answer, he said, “Parachute mines is the worst. They blow you up! Ka-blooie!” He flung his arms out. “And bits of you go everywhere!”
What was I thinking? Polly asked herself. These two have no business going anywhere near Eileen.
But now how would she get rid of them? Especially when Binnie was saying, “So you want we should cheer Eileen up?”
“Yes, but Eileen’s too sad to see anyone yet. I thought perhaps you could send her a condolence card.”
“We ain’t got no money,” Alf said.
“We could come to the funeral,” Binnie said. “When is it?”
“We don’t know yet,” Polly said, fumbling in her bag for money. She had to get rid of them before Eileen came out.
“ ’Ow can we send ’er a card?” Binnie said. “We don’t know where she lives.”
And I have no intention of telling you, Polly thought. “You can send it to Townsend Brothers.”
“And we ain’t got money for a stamp,” Alf said.
“Yes, you do,” Polly said, coming up with a shilling. “Here.”