FLIGHT OFFICER STEPHEN LANG TELEPHONED MARY NINETEEN times over the next two weeks. She instructed the other girls to tell him she was out on a run or fetching supplies. “Or tell him I was hit by a V-1,” she said to Talbot in exasperation when he rang up for the sixteenth time. “Tell him I’m dead.”
“I doubt that would stop him,” Talbot said. “You do realize you’re only making things worse, don’t you? There’s nothing a man finds so attractive as a woman who plays hard to get.”
“So you think I should go out with him? Fairchild’s my partner, and Stephen’s her true love. She’s been mad about him since she was six!”
“I’m only saying that the more you run, the more he’ll pursue you.”
“So what do you think I should do?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Mary had no idea either. She obviously couldn’t go out with him—just the fact that he wanted her to was killing poor Fairchild—and she didn’t dare talk to him on the telephone. But he refused to take no for an answer.
“I think you should go out with him, Triumph,” Parrish said, “and use the occasion to convince him Fairchild’s the one he should be going out with.”
Which had been a dreadful idea ever since the days of the American Pilgrims, when John Alden had attempted to persuade Priscilla Mullins to go out with Miles Standish, and Priscilla had said, “Speak for yourself, John.” The last thing she needed was for Stephen to say, “Speak for yourself, Isolde.”
She wondered if John Alden had been a time traveler, who’d then had no idea how to get out of the muck-up he was in. And it was a muck-up. Everyone at the post got involved, and Reed and Grenville were both furious with Mary. “I think it’s positively skunky to steal another girl’s man,” Grenville said, and when Mary attempted to explain, she added, “Well, you must have done something.”
“Look at her,” Reed whispered, glancing over at Fairchild. “She’s absolutely heartbroken.”
She was, though she hadn’t said a word of reproach to Mary. She hadn’t said anything to her. She was silent on their runs, except for saying, “I need a stretcher over here!” and “This one’s got internal injuries,” and at the post she kept carefully out of hearing of the telephone, but she was obviously suffering. And Mary was clearly responsible for that suffering, which meant either her being here had altered events, which was impossible— historians couldn’t do that—or that her coming between Fairchild and Stephen didn’t matter, that they wouldn’t have got together even if she hadn’t been here. Because Stephen had been killed.
Of course he’d been killed. He was not only tipping V-1s but living in the middle of Bomb Alley. And hundreds of thousands of charming young men just like him had been killed at Dunkirk and El Alamein and Normandy.
But it will kill Fairchild, she thought, and was afraid it might have done exactly that. She wouldn’t have been the first person in World War II to have lost someone and volunteered for dangerous duty. And Mary couldn’t help feeling that if Fairchild did that, it would have been her fault, that both their deaths would be on her head. If she hadn’t been here and pushed Talbot into the gutter, Talbot wouldn’t have wrenched her knee. She wouldn’t have had to substitute for her, and Stephen would never have come to the post.
Or perhaps he would have. Perhaps he’d have asked Talbot out to dinner, and exactly the same thing would have happened, with Talbot the villain. Or perhaps Talbot would have gone to that dance they never got to and met a GI who promised her nylons, and he’d made a date with Talbot for that day, and she’d asked Fairchild to drive to Hendon in her place. And she and Stephen had fallen in love on the way to London, and they’d have had a wartime wedding and lived happily ever after.
Fairchild could just as easily have driven him through Golders Green or down Tottenham Court Road and they’d both have been killed, Mary told herself. And either way, you can’t change the outcome. If you could have, the net wouldn’t have let you come through.
But just because historians couldn’t affect events didn’t mean they should intentionally create problems, so she made certain she was unavailable when Stephen rang up, spent her off-duty time away from the post, and volunteered to go after the supplies the Major constantly wangled out of other posts, hoping Stephen would get bored and turn his attentions to Fairchild, where they belonged.
But he continued to ring her up. Fairchild looked more and more wan, and nothing, not even the arrival of a new ambulance—which the Major had managed against all odds to talk HQ out of—stopped the FANYs from discussing “poor Fairchild.”
And on the first of September, the Major made it worse by issuing a new duty roster on which she and Fairchild were no longer partnered, leading to endless speculation over whether she or Fairchild had asked for the change.
Mary was almost grateful when the V-2 attacks began in September. It gave them all something else to think about, and it gave Stephen’s squadron a new challenge. His calls became less frequent and then ceased as the RAF wrestled with the problem of how to stop these new, much more deadly attacks.
Even Spitfires had no chance of catching up to the V-2s—they flew at nearly four thousand miles an hour, which was faster than the speed of sound, and took only four seconds to reach their target. As a result, there was no siren or warning rattle. The only sound they made was a sonic boom, and if one heard that, one had already survived the explosion.
The rockets struck out of nowhere, and it was amazing just how terrifying that was. Even the unflappable FANYs began staying indoors and stealing surreptitious glances at the sky when they were on a run. Sutcliffe-Hythe moved all her belongings down to the cellar, and Parrish told a GI who wanted to take her to a jitterbugging contest that she had to stay in and wash her hair.
On the way home from a run one morning, they saw a group of children with suitcases and with pasteboard tags around their necks being loaded onto buses.
“What’s happening?” Mary asked.
“They’re being evacuated to the north,” Camberley explained, “out of range.”
Reed said wistfully, “I wish I could go with them.”
The damage from the V-2s was terrifying, too. Instead of smashed houses, there were entire flattened areas, so obliterated it was impossible to tell what had been there. The number of victims taken away from incidents in mortuary vans went up sharply, and so did the number who died en route to hospital. Some casualties simply
