And now, Commander, Mike thought, you’d better show up today.
He didn’t. A steady stream of visitors-girlfriends, mothers, men in uniform-came that day and the next to sit beside patients’ beds, but no Commander.
I shouldn’t have jumped the gun, Mike thought, watching Sister Carmody as she shooed visitors out. “Are they going to transfer me to another hospital?” he asked her.
“You mustn’t worry,” she said. “Try to rest.”
Which means yes, he thought, and spent the night trying to think of ways to keep that from happening. And imagining all the things that could have happened to his letter. The postmistress had given it to the barmaid to give to the Commander, and she’d stuck it behind the bar and forgotten it. The Commander’d dropped it in the water in the hold. Or lost it among the charts and pilchards on that mess of a table.
“Still no letter?” Mrs. Ives tsk-tsked when she brought him his Herald Monday morning. “I do hope nothing’s happened,” which set off a whole new fit of worrying. The train carrying the letter had been bombed. Saltram-on-Sea had been bombed. The retrieval team had been bombed-
This wasn’t doing any good. Mike picked up the Herald and opened it to the crossword. Even trying to figure out ridiculous riddles was better than squirrel-caging.
One across was “sent to a place where no message can get out.” Ten down was “the calamity one feared has arrived.” Mike flipped back to the front page. “Invasion Thought Imminent,” the headline read. “German buildup along the English Channel indicates-”
Sister Carmody plucked it out of his hands. “You’ve a visitor,” she said. “A young lady.”
It’s the retrieval team, he thought, relief washing over him so violently he could hardly hold the comb and mirror the nurse handed him “to tidy up for her” with. He’d been expecting a male historian, but a female made more sense. Nobody would think to question a young woman coming to see a patient. Maybe it’s Merope, he thought hopefully. Thank God Fordham’s down for X-rays again. We won’t have to talk in code.
The nurse took the mirror and comb from him, helped him into a maroon bathrobe, smoothed his blanket, and went to get his visitor. The doors swung open and a young woman in a green dress and jauntily angled hat came into the ward.
It wasn’t Merope. It was a brunette with swept-up hair, rouged cheeks, and very red lipstick. With her open-toed shoes and short-skirted dress, she looked just like the other wives and girlfriends who’d visited, but she was definitely one of the retrieval team. She was carrying a cardboard box with a string handle that had to be a gas mask, and, in spite of all the historical accounts describing the contemps carrying them, he hadn’t seen a single one since he got here.
I hope it doesn’t attract attention, he thought, but the only kind of attention she was getting was whistles as she proceeded through the ward. “Oh, please say it’s me you’ve come to visit!” the soldier three beds up from Mike called to her as she walked past his bed, and she paused, looking back over her shoulder to smile flirtatiously at him.
It’s the barmaid, Mike thought. He hadn’t recognized her with her hair up and all that makeup. It’s Doris or Dierdre or whatever the hell her name is. Not the retrieval team. And she must have seen the disappointment in his face, because her own face fell.
“Dad said I shouldn’t come, that I should write you a letter, but I thought…” Her voice faltered.
“No, no,” Mike said, trying to look pleased to see her. And to remember her name. Deborah? No, it had an “e” at the end. “I’m glad you came, Dierdre.”
She looked even more disappointed. “Daphne.”
“Daphne. Sorry, I’ve been kind of fuzzy since the-”
She looked immediately sympathetic. “Oh, of course. The nurse told me about the shock making you lose your memory and how you’ve only just got it back, and how badly injured you were, your foot… how is…?” she stammered, glancing at the outline of his foot under the covers and then away. “You said in your letter you’d had surgery on it. Were they able to-?” she began, and then stopped, biting her lip.
“My foot’s healing well. The bandages are supposed to come off next week.”
“Oh, good.” She thrust the cardboard box at him. “I brought you some grapes. I wanted to bake you a cake, but it’s so difficult to get sugar and butter, what with the rationing-”
“Grapes are just what the doctor ordered. Thanks. And thank you for coming such a long way to see me,” he said, trying to figure out a way to bring the conversation around to asking her if anyone had come into the pub inquiring about him. “Did you come by bus?”
“No, Mr. Powney took me to Dover, and I took the train from there,” she said, taking off her gloves and laying them across her lap.
Mr. Powney. So he’d finally shown up.
“I couldn’t come before because of the pub being busy on the weekend. Dad wanted me to write, but I didn’t like to, you being injured and all.” She picked up her gloves again and twisted them. “I thought it would be better to tell you in person.”
The retrieval team had been there. What story had they told her? That they were looking for him because he was AWOL? Was that why the Commander hadn’t told them where he was? “Tell me what?” he asked.
“About the Commander and his grandson Jonathan,” she said, twisting the gloves in her hands.
“What about them? Daphne?”
She looked down at the tortured gloves. “They were killed, you see. At Dunkirk.”
We cannot tell when they will try and come. We cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all.
London-21 September 1940
POLLY LOOKED PAST MARJORIE AT THE SPIRE OF ST. Martin-in-the-Fields. Beyond it lay Charing Cross. And Trafalgar Square. You’re wrong, she thought. It won’t come out right in the end. Not for me. Another siren, to the south, began to wail, and then another, their sound filling the dark street where they sat on the steps.
“There’s the siren,” Marjorie said unnecessarily. “We shouldn’t stay here.”
I can’t do anything else, Polly thought. My drop’s broken, and the retrieval team didn’t come.
“The bombers will be here any minute. Can you walk, do you think, Polly?” Marjorie asked, and when she didn’t answer, “Shall I try to find someone to help?”
And expose them to the dangers of the raid that would begin in a few minutes? Polly was already endangering Marjorie, who was selflessly trying to help her. And the bomb that had destroyed St. George’s wasn’t the last one that would be dropped. There would be more parachute mines and HEs and deadly shrapnel tonight. And the next night. And the next.
And Marjorie and Miss Snelgrove and the old man who sat me down on the curb at St. George’s are in as much trouble as I am. The only difference is that they don’t know the date of their deaths. The least she could do was not get them killed for trying to help. “No,” she said, forcing her voice to sound steady, “I’m all right.” She got up from the steps. “I can make it to Charing Cross. Which way is it?”
But when Marjorie pointed down the darkened street and said, “That way. We can cut through Trafalgar Square,” she had to clench her fists and hold them tightly at her sides to keep from grabbing Marjorie’s arm for support.
You can do this, she told herself, willing her legs to support her. You saw it before, on the way to St. Paul’s. But she hadn’t known then that she was trapped here.
You have to do it.
It won’t look anything like it did that night.