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.