Blackout - Connie Willis

“I never,” Binnie said indignantly. “I don’t even like her. She can go this minute for all I care.”

I would if I could, Eileen thought, but while she’d been intent on taking care of her evacuees, Samuels had boarded up all the doors except the one in the kitchen, moved his chair in front of that, and nailed shut the windows in every room but the ballroom, which was always full of children. And she only had ten more days. If no one else came down with the measles.

But if they did, surely Oxford would attempt to pull her out. She was surprised they hadn’t already. Now that most of the children had recovered and Binnie was out of danger, Una and Mrs. Bascombe could easily handle the situation, but there was no sign of the retrieval team and no message from them. “No letters have come for me, have they?” she asked Samuels.

“No,” he said. Which must mean the quarantine was nearly over, and none of the other children were going to get the measles. Eileen began counting the days.

Two days before the quarantine was to be lifted, Lily Lovell came down with a roaring case, and ten days later Ruth Steinberg, and two weeks after that Theodore. “At this rate, we’ll still be quarantined at Michaelmas,” Samuels grumbled.

Eileen wasn’t sure she could make it. Alf nearly fell out of the window trying to identify a plane, and Binnie began holding air-raid drills standing at the top of the main stairway and giving her imitation of an air-raid siren. “That ain’t the siren for air raids, you slowcoach,” Alf told her. “You’re doin’ the all clear. This is the air raid,” and let loose a bloodcurdling up-and-down yowl that Eileen thought would break Lady Caroline’s crystal.

“They simply must go outside and run off some of their energy before they wreck the house,” she told Mrs. Bascombe. “It wouldn’t be breaking quarantine if they stayed on the front lawn. If anyone came we could come inside straightaway.”

Mrs. Bascombe shook her head. “Dr. Stuart will never allow it-”

There was an unearthly wail from the stairway. “Air raid!” Theodore shrieked, giggling, and the children thundered through the kitchen toward the cellar steps, knocking a pan full of cakes off the table and onto the floor where Alf, wearing his ARP armband and a colander-helmet, stepped in the middle of it.

“Exactly how many more days is it till the end of quarantine?” Mrs. Bascombe asked, helping Eileen pick up cakes.

“Four,” Eileen said grimly, reaching for one that had gone under the flour bin.

“All clear!” Binnie shouted from the cellar door, and the children roared back through the kitchen and up the stairs again, shrieking.

“No running!” Mrs. Bascombe called futilely after them. “Where’s Una got to? Why isn’t she watching them?”

“I’ll go find her,” Eileen said, dumping the last of the trampled cakes onto the baking pan and going upstairs. Knowing Alf and Binnie, she might be tied to a chair or locked in a closet.

She wasn’t. She was lying on Peggy’s cot in the ballroom. “I think I’ve caught the measles,” she said. “I feel so hot, and I have an awful headache.”

“You said you’d had them.”

“I know. I thought I had. I must have been wrong.”

“Perhaps it’s only a cold,” Eileen said. “Oh, Una, you can’t have the measles!”

But she did. Dr. Stuart confirmed it on his visit, and Una broke out the next day. Mrs. Bascombe, determined not to let the quarantine be prolonged yet another month by Eileen’s catching them, took over Una’s nursing herself and forbade Eileen to go anywhere near her, which was just as well. She might have throttled her.

The children had to be kept quiet so as not to disturb Una-a nearly impossible task. Eileen tried telling fairy stories to the children, but Alf and Binnie interrupted constantly and questioned every aspect of the story. “’Ow come they didn’t just lock the door when the bad fairy tried to come to the christenin’?” they asked when she attempted to tell “Sleeping Beauty,” and “’Ow come the good fairy couldn’t undo the whole spell ’stead of makin’ ’er sleep a ’undred years?”

“Because she came too late,” Eileen said. “The spell was already cast. She didn’t have the power to undo it.”

“Or p’raps she weren’t very good at spells,” Alf said.

“Then how come she’s the good fairy?” Binnie demanded.

“Rapunzel” was even worse. Binnie wanted to know why Rapunzel hadn’t cut off her hair herself and climbed down it, and Binnie promptly tried to demonstrate on Rose’s braids.

Why did I wish she was her old self again? Eileen thought and announced they were going to do lessons instead.

“You can’t!” Binnie protested. “It’s summer!”

“These are the lessons you missed when you were ill,” Eileen said. She made the vicar bring their schoolbooks, and he must have sensed she was near the breaking point, because he brought her a basket of strawberries and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

“I thought it might prevent The Murder of Alf and Binnie Hodbin,” he said. He also brought the post. And the war news. “The RAF’s holding its own, but the Luftwaffe has five times their number of planes, and now the Germans have begun attacking our airfields and aerodromes.”

She passed that on to Alf and got nearly an entire week of calm out of it. Then she caught him hanging out the sitting room window looking through Lady Caroline’s opera glasses, which he promptly hid behind his back, dropping them in the process. “I was only trying to see if it was a Stuka,” he said as she picked them up. There was an ominous tinkle of glass. “It was your fault. If you hadn’t scared me, I wouldn’t have dropped them.”

Six more days, Eileen thought, hoping the manor wouldn’t be reduced to a pile of rubble by then. But finally Dr. Stuart proclaimed everyone clear, and had Samuels unboard the doors and take down the notices.

Five minutes later, Eileen was on her way to the drop. She didn’t even set out the letter from her ailing mother in Northumbria. Mrs. Bascombe would assume she simply hadn’t been able to take any more, which was close to being true.

It was raining hard, but she didn’t care. I can dry off in Oxford, she thought. Somewhere where there are no children. She walked swiftly to the road and cut into the woods. The trees were in full leaf and daisies and violets bloomed at their feet.

I hope I can find the drop, she thought, momentarily bewildered by the lush greenery, but there was the clearing and the ash tree. It was overgrown, and ivy and woodbine trailed everywhere. Eileen brushed the raindrops off the face of her watch, checked the time, and sat down to wait.

An hour went by and then another. By noon it was clear it wasn’t going to open, but she sat there in the wet till nearly two, thinking, Perhaps they didn’t realize the quarantine was lifted this morning.

At a quarter after two the rain became a torrent, and she was forced to give up. She slogged back to the road and the manor. Binnie was standing in the kitchen door waiting for her. “You’re all wet,” she said helpfully.

“Really?” Eileen said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“You look just like a drowned rat Alf caught once,” she said, and then accusingly, “This ain’t your ’alf-day out.”

My half-day out, Eileen thought. That’s why it didn’t open. They’re assuming I won’t come through till Monday.

But the drop didn’t open on Monday either, even though Eileen had waited till the children were all inside having their tea so they couldn’t follow her, and taken a roundabout route just to be certain.

The lab must not know the quarantine’s over, Eileen thought, though the date it had ended would be in the Ministry of Health archives. But the lab might have sent through a retrieval team and they’d seen a notice that hadn’t been taken down yet and concluded the manor was still under quarantine-though when she checked, all the notices had been removed.

And if the team had come to the manor, they’d have seen unmistakable signs that it had been lifted: children playing outside, cots being fumigated on the lawn, the grocer’s boy going in and out of the kitchen. The retrieval team could easily have waylaid him on his way home and asked him about it.

And the evacuees’ parents had all known the moment the quarantine had been lifted. Some of them had sent for their children the very next day, even though the Battle of Britain was in full cry, airfields and oil depots were being bombed, and the wireless was warning of invasion.

So were Alf and Binnie. “’Itler’s sendin’ over parachutists to get ready for it,” Alf eagerly told the vicar, who’d come to take Eileen and Lily Lovell to the station. “They’re ’ere to cut telephone wires and blow up bridges and things. I wager they’re ’idin’ in the woods this very minute,” and even the vicar confided he feared the attack might come very soon.

But none of the invasion talk had any effect on the evacuees’ parents. They were determined to have their children “safely at home”-which presumably was a reference to their having sent them away only to have them catch the measles-and they couldn’t be persuaded to leave them where they were. Eileen worried over what would happen to them in London.

When she wasn’t worrying about where the retrieval team was. Since this was only her first assignment, she didn’t know how long they waited before coming to get someone. Ten days? A fortnight? But this was time travel. Once they realized she was late, they’d have come through immediately.

There must be something wrong. It must be something else, a breakdown or something. Alf and Binnie broke the drop, she thought. Or they’d followed her and kept it from opening. She asked the vicar to resume Binnie’s driving lessons so she could go to the drop without being observed. But it still didn’t open.

Alf and Binnie aren’t the only ones who could be watching, she thought. The Home Guard might be patrolling the woods for Alf’s German parachutists, or the soldier Alf and Binnie’d seen talking to Una still might be hanging about.

In which case the lab would eventually realize that the drop wasn’t going to open and send the retrieval team through somewhere else. Till then, she had more than enough to keep her occupied. Not only did she have the departing evacuees to deal with, but they had to clean and prepare the house for Lady Caroline, who’d written saying she was coming home.

And repair the damage the children had done. “Oh, when she sees the library ceiling!” Una said.

And the Louis Quinze hat stand, and the opera glasses, Eileen thought, and prayed the retrieval team would arrive before Lady Caroline returned, but they didn’t.

Lady Caroline had written that her son Alan would be accompanying her, but she arrived without him, and when Mrs. Bascombe asked when he’d be coming, Lady Caroline told her he’d enlisted in the RAF and was training to be a pilot.

“He’s doing his part to win this war,” she said proudly, “and so must we,” and set the staff to learning the St. John’s Ambulance Emergency Medical Care manual from cover to cover. Which meant Eileen had to sandwich in the memorizing of “Shock: the shutting down by the body of peripheral systems in an attempt to survive,” between attempting to keep the evacuees quiet, apologizing to Mr. Rudman, Miss Fuller, and Mr. Brown for Alf and Binnie’s latest crimes, and taking children to the train.

Georgie Cox went home to Hampstead, in spite of the fact that a nearby aerodrome had been bombed, Edwina and Susan’s grandfather came from Manchester to fetch them, and Jimmy’s aunt in Bristol sent for him, which made Eileen hope that a relative-preferably one who didn’t know them-would send for the Hodbins, but they didn’t. The Hodbins I shall have with me always, she thought resignedly.

Sending the children off took nearly all of Eileen’s time. She had to pack their things, walk them to the railway station, and wait on the platform with them, often for hours. “It’s all the troop trains,” Mr. Tooley said, “and now these air raids. The trains have to halt till they’re over.”

The vicar kindly gave Eileen and the children lifts to the railway station when he could, but he was often busy attending the Invasion Preparedness meetings Lady Caroline had organized. Eileen didn’t mind. Walking back gave her the opportunity to check the drop. When she could escape the Hodbins’ watchful eyes, which wasn’t often.

But today, seeing Patsy Foster off, Alf and Binnie had grown bored with waiting and left, and moments later the train had arrived, so Eileen was able to not only go to the clearing but spend the afternoon there on the off-chance the drop was only opening every hour and a half or two hours.

It wasn’t, and there was still no sign that the retrieval team-or Una’s soldier, or a German parachutist-had been here. What was keeping them? She thought suddenly of the train’s being late and wondered if there was something going on in Oxford, the equivalent of troop trains or air raids, which was causing the delay.

If that was the case, then they might show up at the manor anytime, and she’d better be there. She hurried back through the woods. As she neared the lane, she caught a glimpse of someone standing on the other side of the lane. Eileen ducked behind a tree, and then peered cautiously out to see who it was.

It was Alf. I knew it, she thought. He and Binnie have been spying on me. That’s why it won’t open, but he wasn’t looking into the woods. He was gazing up the lane in the direction of the manor as if waiting for someone. And when she stepped out onto the lane, he jumped a good foot. “What are you doing here, Alf?” she demanded.

“Nuthin’,” he said, putting his hands behind his back.

“Then what have you got in your hand?” Eileen said. “You’ve been setting out tacks again, haven’t you?”

“No,” he said, and oddly, it had the ring of truth. But this was Alf.

“Show me what you have there,” she said, holding out her hand.

Alf backed up against a bush, there was a suspicious thunk, and he held out both hands, empty. “You’ve been throwing rocks at cars,” she said, but even as she said it, she was remembering that Alf had been gazing toward the manor, clearly waiting for a car to come from there, and it couldn’t be Lady Caroline’s Bentley. She was at a Red Cross meeting in Nuneaton, and the vicar had gone with her, so it couldn’t be the Austin. “Alf, who’s at the manor?” she asked.

He frowned at her, trying to decide if this was a trick question. “I dunno. Strangers.”

Finally, Eileen thought. “Who did they come to see?”

“I dunno. I just seen ’em drive by.”

“In a car?”

He nodded. “One like Lady Caroline’s. But I wasn’t goin’ to throw rocks at it, I swear, only clods. I was practicin’ for when the jerries invade. Me’n Binnie’s gonna throw rocks at their tanks.”

She wasn’t listening. A car like Lady Caroline’s. A Bentley. The retrieval team could have practiced on one in Oxford, just as she’d done, and then come through, hired one, and driven it here to fetch her. She took off for the manor at a run.