“Yes—”
“And you’re saying we waltzed in, tightened a few nuts and bolts, and won the war?” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Historians as Little Miss Fix-Its? My dear, history’s a chaotic system. It’s far more complicated than—”
“I know it’s complicated. I’m not saying we won it. And I’m not saying your Wren or Hardy or Sir Godfrey or Alf and Binnie or whoever it is they and Eileen treated on the twenty-ninth was who won it either. Or even that saving them was what tipped the balance. It may have been something else altogether—Marjorie’s deciding to become a nurse, or one of the FANYs I worked with borrowing my dance frock, or Mike’s nearly colliding with Alan Turing. Or something we don’t even know we did—our stepping ahead of someone onto an escalator or hailing a taxi or asking for directions. Mike might have done something in hospital, or Eileen might have affected one of her evacuees. Or I might have taken too long to wrap a customer’s parcel and delayed her five minutes, so that she missed her bus, or got caught in the tube when the sirens went.”
“But you think whatever that action was, one of us did it,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “And it was one of us who won the war.”
“No,” she said, frustrated. “I’m not saying that either. No one person or thing won the war. People argue over whether it was Ultra or the evacuation from Dunkirk or Churchill’s leadership or fooling Hitler into thinking we were invading at Calais that won the war, but it wasn’t any one of them. It was all of them and a thousand, a million, other things and people. And not just soldiers and pilots and Wrens, but air-raid wardens and planespotters and debutantes and mathematicians and weekend sailors and vicars.”
“Doing their bit,” Mr. Dunworthy murmured.
“Yes. Canteen workers and ambulance drivers and ENSA chorus girls. And historians. You said no one can be in a chaotic system and not affect events. What if your—our—coming to the past added another weapon to the war, a secret weapon like the French Resistance or Fortitude South?”
“Or Ultra.”
“Yes,” Polly said. “Like Ultra. Something which operated behind the scenes, and which, combined with everything else, was enough to avert disaster, to tip the balance.”
“And win the war,” Mr. Dunworthy said softly.
There was a long silence, and then he said, almost longingly, “But there’s no proof …”
No, she thought, except that so many lives saved and so many sacrificed— so much courage, kindness, endurance, love—must count for something even in a chaotic system.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t any proof.”
There was a knock, and Eileen leaned in the door, her red hair windblown and her cheeks rosy. “What are you two doing sitting here in the dark?” she said, and switched on the light. “You look as if you could both do with some tea. I’ll put the kettle on.”
“No, wait,” Polly said. “Did you find out who the man you saved was?”
“Yes.” She took off her hat. “The admitting nurse wouldn’t tell me anything, and neither would the matron, so then I hit on the idea of going to the men’s ward and telling the nurse that Mrs. Mallowan had sent me to find out.”
“Mrs. Mallowan?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“That’s Agatha Christie’s married name.” She unbuttoned her green coat. “The nurse and I chatted a bit about Murder in the Calais Coach, and I told her about Agatha Christie’s new book, which hasn’t come out yet. It’s all right, Polly, I told her I had an editor friend who’d let me look at it. And as a result, she let me look at the ambulance log.”
“And the man you saved was—?”
“There were three people, actually, or at any rate the nurse said she doubted they’d have survived if they hadn’t been brought immediately to hospital. I wrote them down,” Eileen said, taking a sheet of paper out of her handbag and reading from it. “Sergeant Thomas Brantley, Mrs. Jean Cuttle—that was the ambulance driver—
and Captain David Westbrook.”
Mr. Dunworthy made an involuntary sound.
“Do you know who Captain Westbrook is?” Polly asked him.
Mr. Dunworthy nodded. “He was killed on D-Day, after single-handedly holding a critical crossroads till reinforcements arrived.”
For there is nothing lost that may not be found, if sought.
—EDMUND SPENSER, THE FAERIE QUEENE
London—Spring 1941
“SO YOU’RE TELLING ME ALF AND BINNIE ARE WAR HEROES?” Eileen said after Polly and Mr. Dunworthy had explained Polly’s theory to her.
“Yes,” Polly said. “You were right about their being a secret weapon. Only they’re on our side. Their jumping out in front of you when you were chasing John Bartholomew and delaying you was what was responsible for your being forced into driving the ambulance that night, so that you were able to save Captain Westbrook’s life—”
“And they delayed the train.”
“Train?” Polly said.
“When we came to London. They chased a headmistress out of our compartment, and she tried to have us thrown off the train, and it made us late leaving the station. And later we found out the railway bridge ahead of us had been bombed, and Alf said, ‘It was a good thing we was late.’ ” She looked up at Polly wonderingly. “They saved my life. And the headmistress’s.”
“And you saved Captain Westbrook’s.”
“And you two and Mike and I won the war?” Eileen said.
“Helped to win the war,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Tipped the balance.”
“But I don’t understand. If they’d lost the war before we came, then how could you have been at VE-Day? There wouldn’t have been a VE-Day, would there?”
“Yes,” Polly said, “because by 1945, you’d already saved Captain Westbrook’s life and I’d already saved Sir Godfrey—”
“But you hadn’t done that when you were at VE-Day,” Eileen said, hopelessly confused. “You hadn’t even come to the Blitz yet.”
“Yes, I had,” Polly said patiently. “I came to the Blitz in 1940, and I went to Trafalgar Square on VE-Day five years later, in 1945.”
“But what about all those years before any of us came here, before time travel was even invented? The war was lost then, wasn’t it?”
“No,” Polly said. “It was always won because we had always come. We were always here. We were always a part of it.”
“The past and the future are both part of a single continuum,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and launched into a long and involved explanation of chaos theory.
“But I still don’t understand—”
“Don’t understand what?” Binnie asked, coming in and announcing that from now on she wished to be called Florence—“Like Florence Nightingale”—and become a nurse, which put an end to the conversation.
But the next morning after Alf and Binnie had gone to school, Eileen brought up the subject again. “So because Mr. Dunworthy ran into the Wren and Mike untangled the propeller and you saved Sir Godfrey, it changed things just enough that we won the war, is that right?”
“Yes,” Polly said.
“Then there’s no reason to keep us here,” she said, “and we can go home.”
“Eileen—”
“Mr. Dunworthy, you said every historian who’s come here has altered events, and they all went back to Oxford. And after you ran into the Wren, you went back to Oxford. So now that we’ve done what we were supposed to do, they should be able to come and fetch us, shouldn’t they? Or our drops should begin working again.”
She looked expectantly from Polly to Mr. Dunworthy and back again. “We need to go check them.”
“I’ll go to the drop in St. Paul’s this morning,” Mr. Dunworthy promised.
But after Eileen had elicited a promise that Polly would check her drop on her way to the theater and had left to drive General Flynn, he said to Polly, “She may, of course, be right about the drops—”