“Oh, Polly,” she murmured, “we’re going to be such good friends!”
And though she couldn’t possibly have heard her, Polly turned as if she had and looked straight at her. But only for an instant, and then a group of GIs pushed in front of Eileen, blowing on noisemakers, hiding Polly from sight.
Eileen had thought she’d lost her, but she hadn’t. Polly was still there, moving steadily toward the tube station and her drop and Oxford. Where she’ll see me walking to Oriel and she’ll tell me I must get a driving authorization first and I’ll tell her Colin’s in love with her and we’ll go to Balliol and stand talking to Michael Davies in the sunlit quad.
“Goodbye!” she called after Polly, over the sound of a brass band which had struck up “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” “Don’t be frightened. Everything will work out all right in the end.” She stood there, looking after her, oblivious to the music, the noise, the people shoving and jostling against her, till Polly was out of sight.
Then she turned to go look for Alf and Binnie, though she had no idea at all how to find them in this solid mass of people.
There was a whoosh and a boom from over by the National Gallery, followed by screams. Alf’s fireworks. She started toward the fountains, hoping to climb up on the rim and get a better look, pushing her way through the crowd past several tipsy soldiers and a man enthusiastically selling Churchill buttonhole badges, toward an elderly man in a black suit who was attempting to go in the same direction she was. If she could follow in the opening he made, she might be able to—
“Mr. Humphreys!” she called, recognizing him. She caught hold of his sleeve, and he turned to see who had grabbed him.
“Hello!” she said, shouting over the din.
“Miss O’Reilly!” he shouted back, and then, as if he was greeting her at the door of St. Paul’s, “How nice to see you!”
He looked around at the swirling, shoving mob. “I’m attempting to get to St. Paul’s. Dean Matthews rang me up and said there are hundreds gathering at the cathedral already, and I thought I’d best go see if I could assist.”
He beamed at her. “This is a wonderful night, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, looking around at the crowd. She had wanted to come here, to see this, ever since she was a first-year student. She’d been furious when she’d found out Mr. Dunworthy had assigned it to someone else.
But if she’d come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She’d have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she’d have had no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens.
She’d have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what it had cost to bring this day to pass—the lives of all those soldiers and sailors and airmen and civilians. And of Mike and Mr. Simms and Mrs. Rickett and Sir Godfrey, who’d been killed two years ago on his way home from entertaining the troops. She’d have had no idea what this meant to Lady Denewell, who’d lost her husband and her only son, or to Mr. Humphreys and the rest of the fire watch, who’d worked so hard to save St. Paul’s and who, hopefully, would never know what had eventually happened to it.
“I feared this day would never come,” Mr. Humphreys was saying.
“I know,” she said, thinking of all those dark days after Mike died, when she’d thought that no one was coming for them and that Polly was going to be killed, of the even darker days when she’d thought she and Alf and Binnie had lost the war.
“But it has all come right in the end,” Mr. Humphreys said, and there was a whoosh and a boom over by the bonfire. Pigeons wheeled frantically up over the square.
“I think I’d best go look for Alf and Binnie,” she said. Before they kill someone.
“And I’d best get to St. Paul’s,” he said, and in his best verger manner, “We’re having a service of thanksgiving tomorrow. I do hope you and your children will come.”
“We will,” she promised. If Alf’s not at the Old Bailey.
Mr. Humphreys pushed off through the crowd toward the Strand, and she started for the National Gallery, guided by further booms, an outraged “You hooligan!”
and a shower of sparks. A harried-looking mother with three little girls, all eating ice creams, went by. A conga line snaked past her, kicking.
She waited for it to pass, craning her neck, looking for the flare of fireworks, for Binnie’s blonde head. “Alf!” she called. “Binnie!” She would never find them in this crowd.
“Were these what you were looking for, madam?” a man’s voice said behind her, and she turned to find an Army chaplain with both children in tow, one hand on Binnie’s shoulder and the other firmly gripping Alf’s collar.
“Look who we found!” Alf said happily. “The vicar!”
He had a two-day stubble of beard and looked exhausted. His chaplain’s uniform was covered in mud, and he was terribly thin.
“Mr. Goode,” Eileen said, unable to take in the fact that he was here and well and safe. “What are you doing here?”
“The war’s over,” Alf said.
“They flew us over this afternoon,” the vicar said. “Thank you for your letters. I wouldn’t have made it through without them.”
And I wouldn’t have made it through without yours, she thought.
“Aren’t you going to tell him welcome home?” Binnie prompted.
“Welcome home,” Eileen said softly.
“What sort of welcome’s that?” Binnie hooted, and Alf said, “Ain’t you gonna kiss him or nothin’? The war’s over!”
“Alf!” Eileen said reprovingly. “Mr. Goode—”
“No, he’s right. Kissing’s definitely in order,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her.
“I told you,” Binnie said to Alf.
“I didn’t think I had a hope of finding you in this crush,” the vicar said after he’d released her, “and then I spotted Guy Fawkes here.” He gave Alf’s shoulder a shake. “Though it’s a miracle I recognized either of them, they’ve changed so much. Alf’s a foot taller, and Binnie’s nearly grown.”
“Do you want to come with us?” Alf asked him. “We’re goin’ to Piccadilly Circus.”
“We are not,” Binnie said. “Mum said we’re goin’ to supper.”
“I think you’ll find they haven’t changed all that much,” Eileen said dryly.
“Good. I got through many a bad period by thinking of the time they painted blackout stripes on Farmer Brown’s cattle.”
“Remember the time you came to the station and helped Mum get Theodore on the train?” Binnie asked.
“I do,” Eileen said. She looked at the vicar. “You came to rescue me just in the nick of time.”
“If we don’t go to Piccadilly Circus now,” Alf whined, “they’ll have turned off the lights!”
“How about supper in Piccadilly Circus?” the vicar said.
“Are you certain you want to go with us?” Eileen asked him. He looked ready to drop. “Perhaps Mr. Goode would like to go home and get some rest.”
“And miss VE-Day?” He smiled at Eileen. “Absolutely not.”
“This ain’t the real VE-Day,” Alf said. “The real one’s tomorrow.”
“Then we’ll have to do that, as well,” the vicar said, and took Eileen’s arm. “What all’s happening tomorrow, do you know?”
Continued rationing, she thought, and such serious food shortages the Americans will have to send us care packages, and then Hiroshima and the Cold War and the oil wars and Denver and pinpoint bombs and the Pandemic. And the Beatles and time travel and colonies on the Moon. And nearly fifty more Agatha Christie novels.