“Then there’s no reason to keep us here,” she said, “and we can go home.”
“Eileen—”
“Mr. Dunworthy, you said every historian who’s come here has altered events, and they all went back to Oxford. And after you ran into the Wren, you went back to Oxford. So now that we’ve done what we were supposed to do, they should be able to come and fetch us, shouldn’t they? Or our drops should begin working again.”
She looked expectantly from Polly to Mr. Dunworthy and back again. “We need to go check them.”
“I’ll go to the drop in St. Paul’s this morning,” Mr. Dunworthy promised.
But after Eileen had elicited a promise that Polly would check her drop on her way to the theater and had left to drive General Flynn, he said to Polly, “She may, of course, be right about the drops—”
“But if she were, Colin would already be here.”
“Yes,” he said, “and the fact that he isn’t very likely means our part in this is not over.”
“I know,” Polly said, thinking of how Major Denewell had told her and the other FANYs the war could still be lost even during that last year.
“More may be required of us before the end,” Mr. Dunworthy told her.
Including our lives, Polly thought.
She had nearly died rescuing Sir Godfrey. The next time she might not make it. Like the countless rescue workers and ARP wardens and firemen who’d died digging people out of the rubble or taking people to shelter or defusing bombs. Or she might simply be killed outright by an HE, as Mike had been, and all the other people who’d died in the Blitz and in hospitals and prison camps and newspaper offices. Casualties of war.
But still even in death, doing their bit. Like Mike. It was his death that had made her go to the Works Board and volunteer to be an ambulance driver and be assigned to ENSA and save Sir Godfrey.
“I know there’s a good chance we won’t make it back,” she told Mr. Dunworthy, and as she did, it struck her that that was what soldiers said when they were leaving for the front.
“But it doesn’t matter,” she said, and meant it. “All that matters is that Sir Godfrey didn’t die and I’m not responsible for losing the war, and that I can see Miss Laburnum and Doreen and Trot without getting them killed. And if I’m killed, I won’t be the only one to die in World War Two. I’m only sorry I got you into this.”
“We got each other into it. And we may yet get out.”
“And if not, we still stopped Hitler in his tracks.” She smiled at him.
“We did indeed,” he said, and looked suddenly years younger. “And we, like St. Paul’s, are still standing, at least for the moment. Speaking of which, when I go there to check the drop, I intend to ask to be taken on as a volunteer. I have always wanted to serve on the fire watch and help save St. Paul’s—”
He stopped, an odd look on his face.
“What is it?” Polly asked. “Are you feeling ill?”
“What is it?” Polly asked. “Are you feeling ill?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just occurred to me … I think I may already have saved it. The night I came through, I crashed into a stirrup pump, and two of the fire watch came down to investigate and found an incendiary which had burned through the roof. If I hadn’t been there—”
“They might not have discovered it till too late, and the fire—” Polly said, and stopped as well, thinking of the fire on the desk which she had put out the night they’d been trying to find John Bartholomew.
“And if my being there did save it, then it may do so again,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying, “even if I can only be at St. Paul’s for two weeks. But you will need to help me persuade them. And convince Eileen.”
Convincing Eileen proved to be the more difficult of the two. “But it’s dangerous,” she said. “The north transept—”
“Won’t be bombed till April sixteenth,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I’ll phone in and tell them I’m ill that night.”
“What about the big raids on May tenth and eleventh? You said the entire city—”
“St. Paul’s wasn’t hit either of those nights,” he reassured her.
And it doesn’t matter, Polly wanted to shout at her. He won’t be here. His deadline will already have passed. And the chances are I’ll only have two weeks after that. If she had another task, it almost certainly lay between now and the end of the Blitz. There would be only occasional raids after that, but they’d had far fewer casualties. Which meant her deadline wasn’t the end of 1943. It was May eleventh.
But she couldn’t tell Eileen that. In the first place, she wouldn’t believe her. And in the second place, the task at hand was to convince her to allow Mr. Dunworthy to join the fire watch. So instead Polly said, “St. Paul’s won’t suffer any more damage till 1944 and the V-1 and V-2 attacks.”
“But if there won’t be any more damage, then why do you need to be in the fire watch, Mr. Dunworthy?” Eileen persisted.
“Because I may be the reason there wasn’t damage,” Mr. Dunworthy said, which didn’t help his case.
“No,” Eileen said firmly. “It’s too dangerous. The incendiaries and the roofs … You might fall.”
“None of the fire watch was injured or killed in 1941,” Mr. Dunworthy told her, and Polly wondered if that was a lie, if Mr. Dunworthy was hoping to die at St.
Paul’s as well as work there.
“And being in the cathedral will give me opportunities to check the drop when no one’s around,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and Eileen eventually relented, though she insisted on walking him to and from the cathedral every night he was on duty.
