He hadn’t been following Eileen or looking for the retrieval team. He had gone to Houndsditch to interview a firespotter for a story he was writing on home-front heroes for the Daily Express. It wasn’t her fault. He hadn’t been killed attempting to save them.
She had thought that knowledge would be a comfort, but it wasn’t, and she realized that she had been hoping as much as Eileen that there was some mistake, some other explanation. That he wasn’t truly dead. But he was.
And if he was dead, then no one was coming to rescue them. She might have been able to convince herself that Mr. Dunworthy would have allowed Mike to be left here with an injured foot and her here with a deadline, but there was no way he would have allowed one of them to be killed if he could help it.
Which meant he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t get them out. And it scarcely mattered if the reason was slippage or their having altered events or some catastrophe in Oxford. Mike was dead. “Mike Davis, 26, died suddenly. Of enemy action.”
She took Mike’s things back to Mrs. Rickett’s, and put them in a drawer of the bureau, then took out the half-charred print of The Light of the World she had retrieved from the floor of St. Paul’s, unfolded it, and sat there on the bed, looking at it—at Christ’s hand, still raised to knock on the door though the door had burned away to nothing, and at his face. It held no expression at all.
“Would you care for me to make arrangements for a memorial service for your friend, Miss Sebastian?” the rector asked her on Friday. “I should be glad to officiate.
I’ve arranged with the rector of St. Bidulphus’s to have Mr. Simms’s funeral there, and I could speak to him about a service for Mr. Davis.”
But Eileen wouldn’t hear of it. “He isn’t dead,” she insisted, and when Polly showed her the entry in his notebook, she said, “That doesn’t say the eleventh. It says the seventeenth. Or the seventh. Look how the water’s blurred the numbers. And even if it does say the eleventh, it doesn’t mean he kept the appointment.”
On Tuesday, Polly went to Mr. Simms’s funeral. She had attempted to persuade Eileen to go, too, but she’d refused to leave her post at the foot of the escalator. “I might miss Mike,” she said, looking hopefully up at the people descending.
The entire troupe was at St. Bidulphus’s, including Nelson. Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard both wore black-veiled hats and carried black-edged handkerchiefs.
Sir Godfrey recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech: “ ‘They shall not speak of this, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.’ ”
And the rector, giving the eulogy, said, “Mr. Simms was no less a soldier than the men in Henry the Fifth’s army, and no less a hero.”
So was Mike, Polly thought, and it didn’t matter what he had been doing when he died any more than it mattered whether an RAF pilot was killed in a dogfight or while he was on leave. Mike had still died trying to get them out. He had devoted every moment since he’d found them to doing that. And it didn’t matter that he’d failed either. History was full of failed attempts—Thermopylae, Scott’s trek back from the South Pole, the siege of Khartoum. He was still a hero.
After the funeral, the rector asked Polly again about scheduling a service. “I could speak to the Reverend Mr. Unwin now, or perhaps you’d like to have it in some other church.”
Yes, Polly thought, St. Paul’s. It’s where all the heroes are: Wellington and Lord Nelson and Captain Faulknor. Mike should be there as well, though she knew they’d never allow it.
But she asked Mr. Humphreys anyway, and, to her surprise, he said that they could hold a small private service in the Chapel of St. Michael and St. George. “I am so sorry about Mr. Davis,” Mr. Humphreys said. “It’s difficult sometimes to see God’s plan in all this violence and death, but with His help, it will all come right in the end.”
He asked Polly what day she’d like to have the service, and she told him about Eileen. “People often find death difficult to accept,” he said, shaking his head,
“particularly when it is sudden. Is there someone she’s close to who could help her through this? Her mother or father, perhaps, or a friend from school?”
None of them has been born yet, Polly thought, going to Oxford Circus to attempt to persuade Eileen to return to Mrs. Rickett’s and get some sleep. Things couldn’t go on this way. Eileen was eating almost nothing and sleeping scarcely at all. There were dark hollows under her eyes and a driven, distracted look about her.
Like Mike had, Polly thought. She must get through to her somehow.
But Eileen wouldn’t listen to her. And there’s no one else here she’s close to, Polly thought, and then realized that wasn’t true. She wrote to the vicar in Backbury, and when she didn’t hear back from him after several days, went in search of Alf and Binnie Hodbin.
