But he didn’t know about Eileen’s withholding the City of Benares letter from Alf and Binnie Hodbin’s mother. Or about Eileen’s having given Binnie aspirin when she had the measles.
Mike had said Turing hadn’t been injured by the collision, but he wouldn’t have had to be. This was Alan Turing, the man who was behind Bletchley Park’s success, and he still hadn’t cracked the naval Enigma code. What if Mike’s colliding with him had interrupted his train of thought at a crucial moment, and he didn’t crack the code? Or what if Mike had done something else while he was in Bletchley which—combined with Hardy’s rescue and what she and Eileen had done—
would tip the balance of the war later on? Or what if he’d done something now in Saltram-on-Sea?
I should have warned him, she thought. I should have told him about the City of Benares and about the possible discrepancies. But she wasn’t certain they were discrepancies. And he’d been so distraught when she told him about her deadline, and then, after he’d got the letter from Daphne, so certain that the retrieval team had come.
And if they have, then there’s no reason to worry him with any of this. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
But what if they haven’t?
“You are worried, aren’t you?” Eileen asked anxiously. “About Mike’s not phoning.”
“No,” Polly said firmly. “Remember, he said the phone at the Crown and Anchor wasn’t at all private. He may have to wait till he arrives back in Dover to find one that is. Or the telephone lines may be out.”
From the shelling Dover is taking every night, Polly added silently, wishing Mike would find a way to phone so she could tell him about the shelling and the upcoming raids. He’d be all right for the next few days—the raids would all be in the Midlands or the west—Liverpool on the twentieth, Plymouth on the twenty-first, and Manchester the night after that. But on the twenty-fourth Dover would undergo a major shelling, and two trains in Kent would be machine-gunned from the air.
They waited another quarter of an hour, hoping he’d phone. “It’s twenty till,” Polly said finally. “We really must leave, or I’ll be late for rehearsal.”
“All right,” Eileen said reluctantly. “Wait, was that the phone? It’s Mike. I knew it!” She pelted down the stairs to answer it.
It was Mrs. Rickett’s sister, and it was clear they intended to talk for some time. “She’s phoned twice in the past three days. Mike’s very probably phoned already and couldn’t get through,” Eileen said as they walked over to Notting Hill Gate. She paused. “You knew Lady Caroline, didn’t you? When you were in Dulwich.”
And when Polly looked at her in surprise, “The day I got the letter from the vicar about Lady Caroline and Lord Denewell, you said ‘You worked for Lady Denewell?’ ”
And what else has she worked out? Polly wondered.
“Yes,” she said. “She was my commanding officer.”
Eileen nodded as if she already knew that. “And she made you do all the work.”
“No. She was a wonderful commanding officer, hardworking, always thinking of her girls, determined to get us the supplies we needed. That’s why I was so surprised. From what you’d told me about her—”
“I think it must have been because of losing her husband and her son. War changes people. It makes people do things they never thought they could,” Eileen said thoughtfully. “In Mrs. Bascombe’s last letter, she said Una’s become quite a good driver in the ATF. You don’t suppose the war will improve Alf and Binnie Hodbin, do you?”
“I very much doubt it.”
“So do I,” Eileen said as they turned onto Kensington Church Street. “Have you told the troupe that you may not be here for the performance of A Christmas Carol and that they need to arrange for an understudy?”
“Not yet,” Polly said, wishing she could believe that Mike had simply been delayed and that the retrieval team would be waiting for them when they arrived at the tube station, or that when Mrs. Rickett came, she’d tell them Mike had phoned after she’d rung off.
She didn’t, and there was no one at the tube station or at Townsend Brothers the next morning. “He’ll phone today, I know it,” Eileen said confidently, going up to the book department. “I’ll see you at lunch.”
But there was no time for lunch. There were Christmas decorations to put up—evergreen and cellophane garlands and paper bells (the aluminum-foil ones had gone to Lord Beaverbrook’s Spitfire drive) and banners reading There’ll Always Be a Christmas. And there was a horde of customers to contend with.
to Lord Beaverbrook’s Spitfire drive) and banners reading There’ll Always Be a Christmas. And there was a horde of customers to contend with.
“The only good thing,” Polly told Eileen when they met after work, “is that we’ve sold so much we’ve run completely out of brown paper.”
But when she arrived at Townsend Brothers the next day there was a large stack of Christmas paper on her counter. “Miss Snelgrove found it in the storeroom,”
Doreen said. “From Christmas two years ago. Wasn’t that lucky?”
Polly stared hopelessly at the holly-sprigged sheets. “Haven’t we a duty to turn it in to the War Ministry for the war effort, to make stuffing for gun casings or something?” she asked.
Miss Snelgrove glared at her. “We have a duty to our customers to make this difficult Christmas as happy as possible.”
What about my Christmas? Polly thought. She attempted to convince her customers it was their patriotic duty to take their purchases home unwrapped, but to no avail. It was the only wrapping paper they were likely to get their hands on for the duration, and they didn’t intend to pass up the chance. Some of them even bought things just to obtain the paper, as witness all the bilious lavender-pink stockings she sold. She spent nearly all her time struggling with knots and corners and the rest of it struggling to learn her lines for A Christmas Carol.
She had been wrong about the play. The female roles were small, but there were a great many of them, and
