Connie Willis - Blackout

“Yes, do make her tell us where she’s been, Sir Godfrey,” Miss Laburnum urged.

“But shouldn’t we go back to our own corner first?” Mr. Simms suggested. “Someone’s liable to take our space.”

“We are rather in the way here,” the rector said and led the way back along the crowded platform through the jostling passengers, Bess and Trot holding Polly by the hand.

“It’s not so cozy here as the shelter in St. George’s, I’m afraid,” Miss Laburnum said.

“And it’s rather noisy,” Mrs. Brightford added, “though when the trains stop, it’s a bit better.”

“I like it,” Lila whispered to Polly as they followed the rector. “There’s a canteen and-”

“And lots of nice-looking men,” Viv finished.

They reached the end of the platform. “Now, sit down,” Miss Laburnum said, gesturing to Lila and Viv to make room for Polly, “and tell us all about your adventures.”

Sir Godfrey gently took the mug and sandwich-which she was still unaccountably holding-from her and handed them to Viv. Polly sat down. So did everyone else, moving their camp stools and blankets to form a circle around her. “What happened to you?” Lila asked. “Why didn’t you come back to Mrs. Rickett’s?”

“Tell us everything,” Trot said.

“Aye, Miranda,” Sir Godfrey said. “‘Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found thy father’s court?’”

“She didn’t,” Trot said. “We found her!”

“Hush, darling,” her mother said. “Let her speak.”

“‘Aye, speak, maid,’” Sir Godfrey ordered. “‘Give us particulars of thy preservation, how thou hast met us here who three days since were wrecked upon this shore.’”

She couldn’t tell them she’d spent a night in the drop. Instead, she said the sirens had gone when she was still at work, and she’d had to spend the night in Townsend Brothers’ basement shelter. “And the next morning there wasn’t time to go home before work, and that night it happened again. And when I came home Saturday morning, I saw the church, and they said people had been killed. I thought you were all dead. Who was killed?”

“Three firemen and an ARP warden,” the rector said. “And the entire bomb disposal squad.”

Miss Hibbard shook her head sadly. “Poor brave men.”

“The mine’s parachute had caught on a cornice of the building next to the vicarage,” Mr. Dorming explained. “They were trying to cut it down when it went off.”

“But I still don’t see how you-”

“We’d all been evacuated,” Mr. Simms explained.

“We’d no more than arrived at St. George’s when the ARP warden knocked on the door,” Miss Laburnum said, “and told us we had to leave immediately.”

“Sir Godfrey refused to go without you,” Lila said. “He said you wouldn’t know about the bomb and we must wait till you arrived, but the warden said they’d cordoned off the area.”

“They took us to a makeshift shelter in Argyll Road,” Miss Laburnum said, “and we were no sooner there than it went off. If we’d waited even a few minutes longer-” She shook her head.

“As soon as the raid let up, they sent us here,” Lila said, “and the tube authorities wouldn’t let Nelson in-”

“And Mr. Simms said he couldn’t just leave him outside in the middle of a raid,” Viv put in eagerly.

“Sir Godfrey told the guard he was an official member of our acting troupe,” Mr. Simms said, “so then they had to let him in.” He patted Nelson’s head affectionately.

“We were certain you’d be here,” Mrs. Brightford said.

And she had been, but then she’d gone to Holborn to observe the shelterers.

“Sir Godfrey went to Bayswater and Queensway stations to see if you might have been sent there,” Miss Hibbard said, “but you hadn’t.”

“And then,” Miss Laburnum said, “when you didn’t come back to the boardinghouse the next morning…”

The boardinghouse. She’d told herself the retrieval team hadn’t been able to find her because they’d been killed, that there’d been no one at Mrs. Rickett’s to tell them she lived there. But they weren’t dead. They would have been there to tell the retrieval team. So where were they?

“We feared the worst,” Miss Laburnum said.

So do I, Polly thought, and felt the panic begin to stir again.

“We were afraid there were areas which hadn’t been cordoned off and you hadn’t seen the Danger-Keep Out notices in the dark,” the rector said, “and had come along to the church.”

“And been killed,” Trot said.

“Sir Godfrey insisted the rescue squad search through the wreckage of the entire church,” Lila said.

That rescue shaft I saw wasn’t for them, Polly thought. It wasn’t for Sir Godfrey. They were looking for me.

“They told him it was no use,” Viv said, “that the entire weight of the sanctuary and the roof had collapsed directly onto the shelter, and no one could have survived under there, but Sir Godfrey refused to give up. He was determined to find you, no matter how long it took.”

Like Colin, Polly thought. The problem wasn’t only that the retrieval team hadn’t come, it was that Mr. Dunworthy and Colin hadn’t. They’d have moved heaven and earth to find her. “Mrs. Rickett, did anyone come to the boardinghouse looking for me?” she asked.

“Everyone was looking for you,” Mrs. Rickett said reprovingly. “Sir Godfrey spent all day yesterday and today searching the hospitals for you. You could at least have attempted to notify us that you were unharmed.”

“How could she have notified us?” Lila said. “She thought we were dead.”

Mrs. Rickett glared at her.

“What matters is that you’re alive and safe and we’re all here together,” the rector said in his peacemaking voice. “All’s well that ends well, isn’t that right, Sir Godfrey?”

“Indeed. ‘And if it end so meet, the bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ Or to quote our fair Trot, ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’”

“Except for the fact that Hitler was trying to kill them,” Mr. Dorming said dourly.

And except for the fact that the retrieval team hasn’t been to the boarding-house. Where are they? What if something terrible’s happened? But she had thought something terrible had happened to the group, and here they all were, safe and sound.

You were foolish to panic, she told herself. There could be lots of reasons why the retrieval team hasn’t found you yet. Perhaps they’d gone to the boardinghouse before Mrs. Rickett and the others had got back home. Or perhaps the streets around it had been cordoned off, and only residents had been allowed through. Or Badri had had difficulty finding a drop site for the team. It had taken him six weeks to find her one.

But she kept coming back to the fact that this was time travel. No matter how long it took Oxford to locate another drop or check every department store and Underground station, they could still have returned to Oxford, sent a second team through, and had them waiting for her outside Townsend Brothers that first morning.

Unless they couldn’t get there, she thought, remembering how much difficulty she’d had getting to St. Paul’s that Sunday and to Oxford Street the day after John Lewis, and how the indomitable Miss Snelgrove hadn’t made it into work that same day. If Badri had had difficulty locating a new drop site and, as a result, the retrieval team had had to come through in the East End or Hampstead Heath, or somewhere outside London altogether, they might still be there, unable to get into the city because the trains and buses weren’t running. Or they might have made the mistake of entering a roped-off area or trying to cross a mound of rubble and had been arrested for looting.

Or, more likely, it had taken them two full days of dealing with daytime raids and diversions and damage on the Underground lines to reach Oxford Street, by which time she’d have gone home with Marjorie. And rather than face the trek back, they’d decided to simply wait till Monday. In which case they’d be at Townsend Brothers tomorrow morning.

But they weren’t, even though Polly stayed at her counter through her lunch and tea breaks to make certain she didn’t miss them.

Marjorie was overjoyed that Sir Godfrey and the others hadn’t been killed. “I told you things would work out all right in the end,” she said.

Not quite, Polly thought, hoping the retrieval team would be at the boardinghouse when she got home, but they weren’t there either. “Did anyone come and ask for me today?” she asked Mrs. Rickett.

“If they had, I would obviously have told you,” she said, offended. “Who were you expecting? I hope I needn’t remind you of the rules against having gentlemen in your room.”

The team wasn’t at Notting Hill Gate either, though Polly searched every tunnel and platform.

“Mrs. Wyvern and the rector and I have had the most ingenious idea,” Miss Laburnum said when Polly came back from searching. “We shall have our own theatrical troupe!”

“Here in the shelter,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “We’ll do public dramatic readings. It will be excellent for civilian morale-”

“And not only dramatic readings,” Miss Laburnum interrupted. “We shall put on a play! Sir Godfrey will star, and we shall all be in it.”

“I did amateur theatrics when I was up at Oxford,” the rector said. “I played the Reverend Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.”

“What a coincidence!” Mrs. Wyvern said. “I played Cecily in that play at school,” something Polly found impossible to picture.

“We can do Barrie’s The Little Minister,” Miss Laburnum enthused.

Sir Godfrey will love that, Polly thought. And even if they didn’t drive him away by doing Barrie, the theaters would reopen in another fortnight, and he’d be returning to the West End.

“Isn’t putting on a play a wonderful idea?” Miss Laburnum asked her.

“I… are you certain Sir Godfrey will be willing?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “It’s his chance to aid the war effort.”

“The Little Minister’s such a lovely play,” Miss Laburnum said. “Or we could do Mary Rose. Do you know the play, Miss Sebastian? It’s about a young woman who vanishes and then reappears years later, not a day older, and then vanishes again.”

She must have been an historian, Polly thought.

But Mary Rose’s retrieval team had obviously come and fetched her. Unlike mine. Where are they?

They weren’t waiting for her outside the station the next morning. Or at Mrs. Rickett’s. Or outside Townsend Brothers. Which meant the problem had to be something besides diversions and transportation delays.

Slippage, she thought. There had been four and a half days’ slippage on her drop, which she’d assumed had been because of a divergence point. Could there have been another divergence point the day the drop had been damaged-or on subsequent days-which would have kept their drop from opening? The Battle of Britain was over and the attack on Coventry wasn’t till mid-November. The Luftwaffe had begun dropping the nasty bundles of HEs and incendiaries called Gцring breadbaskets around then, but the retrieval team’s presence couldn’t have affected that. Had Churchill or General Montgomery had a near-deadly encounter? Or the King?