She looked immediately sympathetic. “Oh, of course. The nurse told me about the shock making you lose your memory and how you’ve only just got it back, and how badly injured you were, your foot… how is…?” she stammered, glancing at the outline of his foot under the covers and then away. “You said in your letter you’d had surgery on it. Were they able to-?” she began, and then stopped, biting her lip.
“My foot’s healing well. The bandages are supposed to come off next week.”
“Oh, good.” She thrust the cardboard box at him. “I brought you some grapes. I wanted to bake you a cake, but it’s so difficult to get sugar and butter, what with the rationing-”
“Grapes are just what the doctor ordered. Thanks. And thank you for coming such a long way to see me,” he said, trying to figure out a way to bring the conversation around to asking her if anyone had come into the pub inquiring about him. “Did you come by bus?”
“No, Mr. Powney took me to Dover, and I took the train from there,” she said, taking off her gloves and laying them across her lap.
Mr. Powney. So he’d finally shown up.
“I couldn’t come before because of the pub being busy on the weekend. Dad wanted me to write, but I didn’t like to, you being injured and all.” She picked up her gloves again and twisted them. “I thought it would be better to tell you in person.”
The retrieval team had been there. What story had they told her? That they were looking for him because he was AWOL? Was that why the Commander hadn’t told them where he was? “Tell me what?” he asked.
“About the Commander and his grandson Jonathan,” she said, twisting the gloves in her hands.
“What about them? Daphne?”
She looked down at the tortured gloves. “They were killed, you see. At Dunkirk.”
We cannot tell when they will try and come. We cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all.
London-21 September 1940
POLLY LOOKED PAST MARJORIE AT THE SPIRE OF ST. Martin-in-the-Fields. Beyond it lay Charing Cross. And Trafalgar Square. You’re wrong, she thought. It won’t come out right in the end. Not for me. Another siren, to the south, began to wail, and then another, their sound filling the dark street where they sat on the steps.
“There’s the siren,” Marjorie said unnecessarily. “We shouldn’t stay here.”
I can’t do anything else, Polly thought. My drop’s broken, and the retrieval team didn’t come.
“The bombers will be here any minute. Can you walk, do you think, Polly?” Marjorie asked, and when she didn’t answer, “Shall I try to find someone to help?”
And expose them to the dangers of the raid that would begin in a few minutes? Polly was already endangering Marjorie, who was selflessly trying to help her. And the bomb that had destroyed St. George’s wasn’t the last one that would be dropped. There would be more parachute mines and HEs and deadly shrapnel tonight. And the next night. And the next.
And Marjorie and Miss Snelgrove and the old man who sat me down on the curb at St. George’s are in as much trouble as I am. The only difference is that they don’t know the date of their deaths. The least she could do was not get them killed for trying to help. “No,” she said, forcing her voice to sound steady, “I’m all right.” She got up from the steps. “I can make it to Charing Cross. Which way is it?”
But when Marjorie pointed down the darkened street and said, “That way. We can cut through Trafalgar Square,” she had to clench her fists and hold them tightly at her sides to keep from grabbing Marjorie’s arm for support.
You can do this, she told herself, willing her legs to support her. You saw it before, on the way to St. Paul’s. But she hadn’t known then that she was trapped here.
You have to do it.
It won’t look anything like it did that night.
She needn’t have worried, it was too dark to see anything. The lions, the fountains, the Nelson Monument were only outlines in the blackness. But Polly kept her eyes carefully fixed ahead, concentrating on reaching the station, finding a token in her handbag, getting on the descending escalator.
Charing Cross didn’t look as it had that night either, filled with celebrating people. It looked like every other tube station Polly’d been in since she got here, jammed with passengers and shelterers and running children.
And it was safe. It had been hit on September tenth, but wouldn’t be hit again till the twenty-ninth of December. And on the noisy, crowded platform, conversation would be impossible. She wouldn’t have to answer Marjorie’s questions, to keep up the pretense that she was all right.
But Marjorie didn’t look for an unoccupied space where they could sit. She didn’t even spare a glance for the shelterers. She went straight down to the Northern Line and toward the northbound tunnel. “Where are you going?” Polly asked.
“Bloomsbury,” Marjorie said, pushing her way through the tunnel. “That’s where I live.”
“Bloomsbury?” There were raids over Bloomsbury tonight. But the sirens had already gone. The guard wouldn’t let them out of the station when they got there. “Which is your station?” Polly asked, praying it wasn’t one of the ones that had been hit.
“Russell Square.”
The streets bordering Russell Square had been pummeled with bombs in September, and the square had been hit by a V-1 in 1944, but the station itself wouldn’t be hit till the terrorist attacks of 2006. They’d be safe there.
But when they reached it, the gates hadn’t been pulled across. “Oh, good, Russell Square’s siren hasn’t gone yet. They don’t close the gates till then,” Marjorie said, and started outside. “I’m glad. I promised Miss Snelgrove I’d give you supper, and one can’t get so much as a cup of tea here.”
“Oh, but I don’t want to-”
“I told you, you’re not imposing. In fact, you may well have saved me.”
“Saved you? How?”
“I’ll tell you all about it when we reach my boardinghouse. Come along. I’m starving.” She took Polly’s arm and struck off down the darkened street.
As they walked, Polly tried to remember what parts of Bloomsbury had been hit on the twenty-first. Bedford Place had been almost completely destroyed in September and October, and so had Guildford Street and Woburn Place. The British Museum had been hit three times in September, but except for the first time, on the seventeenth, the specific dates hadn’t been on Colin’s list. And a Luftwaffe dive-bomber had crashed in Gordon Square, but she didn’t know the date of that either.
Marjorie led Polly down a series of winding streets, stopped in front of a door, knocked, and then used her latchkey. “Hullo?” she called, opening the door. “Mrs. Armentrude?” She listened a moment. “Oh, good, they’ve all gone to St. Pancras. She leaves early to get a good space. We’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“Don’t you go to St. Pancras?”
“No,” she said, leading the way up a flight of carpeted stairs. “There’s a gun in Tavistock Square that goes all night long so that it’s impossible to get any sleep.”
Which meant this wasn’t near Tavistock Square.
“So which shelter do you go to?”
“I don’t.” They went up another carpeted flight and then an uncarpeted one and down a dark corridor. “I stay here.”
“There’s a shelter here, then?” Polly asked hopefully.
“The cellar,” Marjorie said, opening the door onto a room exactly like Polly’s except for an enamel stand with a gas ring, a worn chintz-covered chair with a pair of stockings draped over the back, and a shelf with several tins,
