“It ain’t measles, is it?” Binnie asked. “We ain’t gonna be quarantined, are we?”
We already are, Polly thought.
“Is ’e going to die?” Alf asked.
Yes. On or before May first.
“He’ll be perfectly fine,” the doctor said heartily. “All he needs is to be kept warm and to rest, and he’s not to worry over anything. He needs building up, so he’s to have beefsteak and eggs—whole, not dried—every day.”
“But how?” Eileen said. “The rationing—”
“I’m writing a prescription. Take it to the ration office, and they’ll give you the necessary coupons.” He handed her the prescription and a paper packet. “And he’s to take this powder, dissolved in a glass of water, at bedtime.”
“Just like in an Agatha Christie novel,” Eileen said, looking at the packet after the doctor’d gone. “That’s always how the victim’s murdered.”
“Who’s been murdered?” Alf asked eagerly.
“No one. Go do your lessons,” Eileen said, still examining the packet. “But I doubt whether there’s anything in this powder for a fever. Aspirin’s the only thing which will help.”
Nothing will help, Polly thought, but she offered to go to the chemist’s for the tablets. “I need to ring the theater and tell them I’m not coming in. I can do that while I’m at the chemist’s.”
“Oh, I forgot all about your rehearsal,” Eileen said. “You could still go. I can care for Mr. Dunworthy.”
“It’s too late. By the time I got there, the performance would be over. And someone’s got to go for the aspirin.”
And she needed to get away for a few moments, to think out how she was going to tell Eileen. She would not be upset on her own behalf, but Polly couldn’t bear the look Eileen would have on her face when she told her they weren’t getting out. And worse, that she wasn’t the only one with a deadline. That Mr. Dunworthy had one, too. Soon.
As soon as she reached the chemist’s, she rang up the Alhambra. “Your luck’s in,” Hattie said. “Canning Town got it last night, so Tabbitt hasn’t made it in either, but he’ll be here tomorrow, so you’d better be. And if I were you, I’d think of a different excuse in the meantime. He’ll never believe the one you just told me.” There was a pause. “Oh, I’ve got to go. I’m on. Victory number. Ta.”
But there won’t be any Victory numbers, Polly thought, feeling her way back to the house through the darkness of the blackout. And what will happen to Hattie when we lose the war? And to the other girls in the chorus?
You know what will happen to them, she thought.
But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that. Mr. Dunworthy had said he didn’t know if the continuum was collapsing or correcting itself. And there were things in his theory which didn’t fit. If their actions had been a threat, why had they been allowed to come through at all? Why hadn’t they been prevented from coming in the first place, like Gerald?
And once they were here, why hadn’t they been allowed to leave? Mr. Dunworthy had said it was to contain the infection, but if Polly’s drop had opened, she wouldn’t have stumbled, shell-shocked and stricken, into Townsend Brothers, and Marjorie wouldn’t have ended up in Jermyn Street, wouldn’t have become a nurse, and if the people on the beach watching the smoke from Dunkirk hadn’t prevented Mike from going to his drop, he wouldn’t have fallen asleep on the Lady Jane and ended up in Dunkirk and saved Hardy’s life. And if Eileen’s drop had opened, she wouldn’t have been able to keep the City of Benares letter from Mrs. Hodbin; she wouldn’t have been there to drive the ambulance on the twenty-ninth and save her passengers’ lives.
That was the cruelest irony of all, that they had undone the future out of a desire to help—Eileen’s giving Binnie aspirin to bring her fever down and tearing up the letter to keep the children from drowning, Mike’s unfouling the propeller because he couldn’t stand the thought of fourteen-year-old Jonathan being killed and pushing the two firemen away from the collapsing wall.
Even the act which had set it all in motion had come not from malice but from an innocent desire to see something beautiful. It seemed impossible that compassion and kindness should be the weapons of destruction, that just the opposite should be true. It was true that in a chaotic system, good actions could have bad consequences, but why—?
Polly had the sudden feeling that she knew the answer to that, that it lay just out of reach, like a word on the tip of one’s tongue. She stopped on the street and stared into the blacked-out darkness, mentally reaching for it. It had something to do with Alf and Binnie blocking Eileen’s way, and the shelter at Holborn—
A siren not twenty feet away screamed, and she jumped, startled and then annoyed at the interruption of her train of thought. It had had something to do with the shelter at Holborn … no, that couldn’t be right, Alf and Binnie had been at Blackfriars, not Holborn, but it was Holborn, she was certain of it. Holborn and Mike’s missing the bus and …
No, it was gone. And this raid wasn’t going to be one of those times with twenty minutes from alert to bombs. She could already hear planes, and she should get the aspirin to Mr. Dunworthy as soon as possible.
But when she arrived home, he was asleep. Alf was, amazingly, sitting at the kitchen table doing his lessons. Whatever he’d done to the tube station guard or the truant officer must have been something appalling even for him.
Binnie was reading aloud to Eileen from the book of fairy tales. “ ‘You must be home before the clock strikes twelve,’ the fairy godmother told Cinderella, ‘or the spell will be broken.’ ”
“Should I wake Mr. Dun—Mr. Hobbe and give him the aspirin?” Polly interrupted to ask Eileen.
“No, sleep is the best thing for him.”
“What does that mean, the spell will be broken?” Binnie asked. “What happens when it’s midnight?”
“I’ll wager Cinderella blows up,” Alf said. “Boom!”
“Go on to bed, Polly,” Eileen said. “You look done in.”
I am, she thought. We all are. And midnight’s coming.
She went to bed, but sleep was out of the question, and when she heard Mr. Dunworthy coughing in the night, she got up quietly, fetched a glass of water, and took it and the aspirin in to him.
He was sitting up in bed. “Oh, good, it’s you,” he said when she switched on the lamp beside the bed. “I need to tell you something.” And whatever it was, it was more bad news, because he had the same hopeless look he’d had in St. Paul’s and in the pub.
“First, you need to take these,” she said, and while he downed them, she felt his forehead. It was still hot. “You’re still feverish. You need to try to sleep. Whatever it is, you can tell me in the morning.”
“No,” he said. “Now.”
“All right,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
He took a deep, ragged breath. “The continuum will go on attempting to correct itself whether it can succeed or not.”
Like a vanquished army fighting bravely on, Polly thought.
“And since we’re the source of the damage,” he said, “and since access to the future is no longer available—”
“It will have to kill us to stop us doing any more damage.”
Mr. Dunworthy nodded.
“You think that’s why Mike—Michael—was killed, to stop him from altering any more events?”
“Yes.”
“And it will do the same to us,” Polly said. “Including Eileen.”
He nodded.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Before the end of the Blitz, I would say. That’s its best opportunity. There are a number of large raids between now and the tenth of May.”
“But you know where the raids are and where and when the bombs hit, and we can make certain we’re in Notting Hill Gate on those nights. It’s safe!” she insisted, but even as she said it, she could hear Mrs. Brightford reading Sleeping Beauty to Trot, could hear her reading about the king destroying every spinnin
g wheel in the kingdom, vainly attempting to stop the inevitable.
“Isn’t there anything that can be done?” she asked.
He was silent, and she thought, appalled, He still hasn’t finished. There’s more bad news to come. And how could anything be worse than a death sentence for Eileen?
“What is it?” she asked, but she already knew. Their actions hadn’t just affected the course of the war. They’d affected Theodore and Stephen and Paige and Mr. Humphreys. Eileen had kept Alf and Binnie from going on the City of Benares, and Mike had kept Hardy from being killed at Dunkirk. Those alterations would have to be corrected, too.
And how many others? Marjorie? Major Denewell? Miss Laburnum and the rest of the troupe? If she hadn’t done that reading of The Tempest with Sir Godfrey, they wouldn’t have formed the troupe. They wouldn’t have been safely in Notting Hill Gate every night instead of at home being killed, like they were supposed to be.
“It’s not just going to kill us, is it?” Polly asked, her throat dry with fear. “It’s going to kill everyone we’ve come into contact with, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?
—CHARLES DICKENS, A CHRISTMAS CAROL
London—Winter 1941
FOR SEVERAL LONG MINUTES AFTER MR. DUNWORTHY TOLD her, Polly simply sat there next to his bed. In the long nights lying awake on the platform, in the emergency stairway, she’d thought that she’d imagined every possible explanation for their plight, every possible dreadful outcome, but this was unimaginably more terrible. Not only were they going to die, but they would be responsible for the deaths of everyone who’d befriended them, everyone who’d helped them and been kind to them—Marjorie and Eileen’s vicar and Daphne and Miss Laburnum and Sir Godfrey. Everyone they cared about.
“So that’s that?” she said finally.
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and she could only nod, her eyes full of tears for him, for them. And for all the people they had killed.
Would kill. She must have made some sort of sound because Mr. Dunworthy reached out a hand to her and said, beseechingly, “Polly—”
She stood up and took the glass from him. “Try to rest,” she said, and switched off the lamp. “Put out the light, and then put out the light.”
She took the glass out to the dark kitchen and set it on the table, closed Binnie’s fairy-tale book, and then went down to the cellar and sat at the bottom of the stairs, staring into darkness.
She had thought she’d given up hoping that they’d somehow be rescued even before Mike died, even before they’d failed to get a message to John Bartholomew, but she realized now that some part of her had gone on hoping. Gone on believing that there was some other, magical explanation which, as Eileen said, accounted for everything. Which fit all the facts and was right there in front of you all the time, only you couldn’t see it. But this wasn’t an Agatha Christie murder mystery, with a tidy solution and a happy ending. There was no happy ending. And she was the murderer.
They were all murderers. Mr. Dunworthy had killed a Wren, and Mike had killed Commander Harold and Jonathan, Eileen had been responsible for the vicar’s joining up, and she had been responsible for Marjorie’s enlisting in the Royal Army Nursing Service.
Were they next? Or would it be Private Hardy or Alf and Binnie or Sir Godfrey? Or Mrs. Sentry, or the FANYs at Woolwich and Croydon whom Polly had wangled supplies from, or the little boy who’d shhed her at the pantomime? Or the strangers who had the misfortune of being next to them in Townsend Brothers or the tube station or Trafalgar Square when the continuum—flailing, sparking, melting down like an incendiary and burning through space and time—killed her or Mr. Dunworthy or Eileen?
She thought suddenly of Ethel in the book department at Townsend Brothers who had been killed by shrapnel. Had Polly killed her by talking to her about ABCs and planespotting?
She sat there in the cellar all night, till Alf opened the door and shouted, “Polly’s down ’ere!”
She went upstairs. Eileen was cooking breakfast, and Binnie was setting the table. “What was you doin’ down there?” Alf asked. “I didn’t hear no raid.”
“I was thinking,” Polly said.
“Thinkin’!” he hooted.
“Hush,” Eileen said, and to Polly, “You mustn’t worry. Mr. Hobbe’s going to be all right. His fever’s down.”
She sent the children to their room to get dressed. “You didn’t get taken on as an air-raid warden, did you? Or with a rescue crew? Things were so muddled last night, I forgot to ask.”
Muddled.
“No,” she said.
“Are you going to try again today?” Eileen asked.
You don’t understand, Polly thought. I’m the last person anyone would want on a rescue squad, pulling people out of the rubble, administering first aid.
She thought suddenly of the man in Croydon whose legs she’d tourniqueted. She’d been afraid he’d died, but what if he should have died there in the rubble, and her saving him had only doomed him to a worse, lingering death in hospital? And what if the tying of that tourniquet had been the act that had tipped the balance and brought about all their downfalls?
No, it couldn’t have been because her drop had still opened, had still let her go back to Oxford and come through again to finish the deed. But it might have helped, might have jostled the china ever closer to the edge.
“I mean, you’ve seen with Mr. Dunworthy how deadly being out on the streets at night is,” Eileen was saying. “Working as a warden is far too dangerous.”
“You’re right, it is. I’m not going to do it.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Eileen said, and flung her arms around Polly. “I’ve been so worried! Now, sit down and have a cup of tea, and I’ll take Mr. Dun—Mr. Hobbe—his.”
Polly obeyed.
Eileen was gone several minutes. When she came back out, she whispered, “I asked him about the Alhambra, and he said it wasn’t hit, that only two theaters were damaged during the Blitz, and neither one was during a performance.”
I’m going to have to tell her, Polly thought despairingly. But not yet. I can’t bear it. And Alf and Binnie had come back into the kitchen and were arguing over who got to feed the parrot. “Mind the gap, Binnie!” it squawked.
“My name’s not Binnie,” Binnie said. “It’s Vera. Like Vera Lynn.”
Alf, his mouth full, said, “I thought it was Rapunzel.”
“Rapunzel was a noddlehead,” Binnie said. She held out a bit of bread to the parrot. “Say, ‘Mind the gap, Vera.’ ”
We’ll have to send them away, Polly thought. It’s the only way to keep them safe. They’ll have to be evacuated, and it was almost funny.
“Why’d Rapunzel just sit there in that tower?” Binnie asked. “Whyn’t she cut off ’er ’air and climb down it? That’s what I’d do. I wouldn’t stay in any old tower.”
In the bustle of clearing the table, gathering the children’s lessons up, and retying Binnie’s hair ribbon, Polly had no chance to speak to Eileen alone.
“Alf, pull your socks up,” Eileen said, putting on her coat. “Binnie, stop that. Polly, can you go fetch the meat and eggs for Mr. Hobbe?” She handed her the order the doctor had written out. “And see if the butcher has a soup bone so we can make some broth.”
Polly promised to do that and to go fetch Mr. Dunworthy’s things from where he was staying. She dressed, did the washing up, and then, when she couldn’t put it off any longer, went in to see Mr. Dunworthy. He looked even frailer in the gray morning light. The skin over his cheekbones and at his temples was nearly translucent, but for the first time since she’d found him, he didn’t look like he had more bad news to tell her. “You look a bit better,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“I should be asking you that,” he said.
She smiled wryly. “I’m still standing.”
“Like St. Paul’s.”
Exactly like St. Paul’s—battered, damaged, and looking out on a landscape of devastation.
“I had something else to say last night,” he said. “We don’t know for certain that the war was lost. There’s a possibility that the continuum may succeed in undoing the damage we’ve incurred.”
“Though it will have to kill us to do it,” she said.
But it was still better than the alternative. And her dying to stop Hitler from winning the war was no different from what tens of thousands of British soldiers and civilians had done, and they’d had no guarantee that they’d be successful either.
But at least they hadn’t had to worry about endangering everyone else in the foxhole or the shelter by their mere presence. “What about the others?” she asked him. “The contemps we’ve interacted with?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Those factors that protected the continuum for so long—the ability to absorb and diminish and cancel out effects—may be factors in the correction as well.”
Translation: It might only have to kill a few of them.
“If we separate ourselves from them and don’t have any more contact, is there a chance that will keep them from being killed?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. Perhaps.” But there was not much hope in his voice. “It’s impossible to know how far the damage has spread and if alterations have already occurred that must be counteracted.”
Were Alf and Binnie supposed to have gone on the City of Benares and drowned? Or died along with their mother near Piccadilly Circus? And was Marjorie supposed to have died in the rubble and Private Hardy at Dunkirk and Stephen Lang on the way to London from Hendon Airfield? Or would Mrs. Hodbin have torn up the letter, Private Hardy have been picked up by another boat, the others have survived and gone on to do exactly what they did do? There was no possible way to tell.
But if we haven’t altered their lives already, Polly thought, then perhaps our staying away from them from now on can protect them from being caught within our deadly blast radius. Thank goodness we’re not at Mrs. Rickett’s anymore and not staying at Notting Hill Gate. And now that she was at ENSA, she had a perfect excuse for quitting Sir Godfrey’s troupe. She went and got the ration coupons and then the eggs and a quarter pound of beef, but no soup bone. The butcher hadn’t any. She had to settle for bouillon cubes.