She shook her head, still frowning.
“Why won’t that work?” he said. “Did they not always go to the tube station when there were raids?”
“It doesn’t matter whether they did or not,” Binnie said. “That isn’t where they were.”
“Where they—”
“When you came.” She smiled at his uncomprehending look. “You’re forgetting, this all happened already. Over fifty years ago. Mum stayed behind so she could be here to make it happen, to tell you where they were.” She smiled ruefully. “And when she couldn’t be—”
“She sent you.”
“Yes.”
“She told you who she was?” he said, trying to process all this.
“Yes, but we’d worked it out on our own ages before that. When we were at the manor, we followed her out to the drop.”
“You saw her go through?” The drop wasn’t supposed to have opened if anyone was nearby.
“No, but we saw her just after she’d come back, and there were lots of other clues, mistakes and things, and then when you came and took Polly and Mr.
Dunworthy, we were dead certain. Only there’s still a good deal we don’t know. Like why it took you so long to get here.”
“None of the drops in England in 1940 would open,” he said. “When Mr. Dunworthy didn’t return, we tried every possible temporal and spatial location, and nothing would work. At first, we thought it was every drop, but the ones in other places and times weren’t affected, just those in England and Scotland and the first three months of 1941. We could get a few drops to open after mid-March, but by then we had no idea where they were. Polly’d left Townsend Brothers, and they weren’t at Notting Hill Gate.”
“So you came here to find someone who might have known her, so they could tell you where she was,” Binnie said.
“Yes.” He didn’t mention all the months he’d spent searching National Service and Civil Defence records looking for their names after Michael had told him Polly and Eileen had been planning to sign up, or all the years before that that he’d spent sitting in libraries and newspaper morgues trying to find out if they were still alive, and calculating coordinates for drop after failed drop, and attempting to convince Badri and Linna that rescue was possible, and meeting with Dr. Ishiwaka and every other time-travel theorist he could corner, trying to find out what the bloody hell had gone wrong.
“Alf said he was certain it had happened at one of the anniversary celebrations,” Binnie was saying.
“Wait,” Colin said. “Didn’t Eileen tell you I’d be here today?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand,” Colin said. “Why not?”
“Because she didn’t know where you’d be. All she knew was that at some point she’d told you where they were, and that that was how you’d known where to come.”
“But—”
“She said she didn’t need to know, that she’d be able to find you because she had found you,” Binnie said, and smiled. “Mum was always rather an optimist. Even when she found out about the cancer, she told us, ‘You mustn’t worry. It will all come right in the end.’ When she died I was afraid something had gone wrong, but Alf said it couldn’t have because then you couldn’t have come, so it was up to us to make it happen.” She beamed at him. “And we did.”
“But I still don’t understand. How did you and your brother know I’d be here on this particular date?”
“We didn’t. We’ve been looking for you ever since Mum died.”
“Ever since—”
She nodded. “At first we concentrated on Notting Hill Gate Underground Station and Oxford Street, and, of course, Denewell Manor—it’s a school now—but it was too much territory to cover, even with Michael and Mary—”
“Who?”
“Michael’s my son, and Mary’s my sister—half-sister really, though I never think of her that way.”
“She’s Eileen’s daughter?”
“I’m sorry, I keep thinking you know all this. Mum—Eileen—married the—”
There was a loud screaming swish and the sound of an explosion. The shelter walls shook, and a bright white light flashed on, simulating the flash from the bomb. It went to yellow and then red, bathing the shelter and Binnie’s face in an eerie light.
“Eileen married—?” Colin prompted her, shouting over the noise.
Binnie didn’t answer. She was staring at him with an odd look on her face, as if she’d just realized something.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” he said, wondering if the sounds had triggered some traumatic memory. “Are you all right?”
“How strange,” she murmured. “I wonder if she …? That would explain …”
“You wonder if she what? Who? Eileen? What is it?”
She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Nothing. I keep forgetting you don’t know anything that’s happened. Eileen married shortly after the war, and they had two children. Besides Alf and me, I mean. Godfrey, that’s her son, assisted us as well, but even with all of us looking, we hadn’t any luck, and then Alf said, ‘We’ve got to think about this from Colin’s point of view. Where would he look?’ And that was when it occurred to us that you’d go where people who were in the Blitz were likely to be, and luckily that was just before the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s beginning, and—”
“You’ve been doing this since 1990?”
“No. 1989. The war actually began in ’39, you know, though there weren’t any battles for nearly a year. But there were several evacuated-children’s reunions, and then in the spring there were all the Battle of Britain exhibitions, and of course every year the VE-Day parades. Those were the most difficult. So many cities had their own, and all on the same day—”
“Do you mean to tell me you’ve been going to parades and anniversary celebrations and museum exhibitions for six years?” There must have been scores, even hundreds. “How many have you gone to?”
“All of them,” she said simply.
All of them.
“It’s not so bad as it might have been,” Binnie said. “It’s only May. Since it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, there will be celebrations all year, including a special memorial service for the fire watch at St. Paul’s on December twenty-ninth.” She grinned mischievously at him. “At least you didn’t go to that.”
No, but I was planning to, he thought, and the Dunkirk Commemoration at Dover and the Eagle Day Air Show at Biggin Hill and the “Life in the Tube Shelters”
exhibit at the London Transport Museum. And if he had, Binnie, or Alf, or one of Eileen’s other children would have been there as well. They’d spent nearly as much time and effort searching for him as he had for Polly. “Binnie—” he said.
“My, will you look at that,” a woman’s voice said from only a few feet away, “a gas mask! Do you remember having to carry them everywhere with us? And having those tiresome gas drills?”
“Oh, dear, they’re coming back from lunch,” Binnie whispered. She stood up.
“Wait,” Colin said. “You still haven’t told me where they are.”
She sat back down. “I’m not sure I did tell you. I think Mr. Dunworthy may have—”
“Mr. Dunworthy? I thought you said they were all in one place.”
“They were, but Mr. Dunworthy was the one who found you. Or you found him—I don’t know that bit of it—and brought you there.”
“But where did I find him?”
“In St. Paul’s.”
St. Paul’s? That meant he’d used Mr. Dunworthy’s drop. But it hadn’t opened once since Mr. Dunworthy had gone through, despite thousands of attempts. “Did I use the drop in St. Paul’s?” he asked.
“I don’t know that either. Why?”
“Because it’s not working.”