and go home, she told herself, hurrying down the stairs and up the street, past the bombed-out tenement. I hope they’ll be all right.
She stopped short, remembering the vicar’s letter. Oh, no, she’d forgotten to give it to Mrs. Hodbin. She rummaged through her handbag, found it, and started back toward the Hodbins’, and then stopped again, trying to decide what to do. It was dangerous here in Whitechapel, but far more dangerous on board the City of Benares, and Mrs. Hodbin had looked as if she’d be glad to be rid of Alf and Binnie. If she took them to the Overseas Programme office today or tomorrow, they’d almost certainly end up on the City of Benares.
You don’t know that, she told herself. You don’t even know that she’d want them to go. She grabbed for those ration books awfully quickly. And Alf and Binnie could just as easily be killed here. But here they’d have a chance. In the dark waters of the Atlantic… Besides, if she did go back, Mrs. Hodbin might not even open the door. And she didn’t have time. She had to get to Oxford Street before Padgett’s closed.
Eileen put the envelope in her handbag, caught the tube to Marble Arch, walked to Padgett’s, and began searching it. Without Alf and Binnie to deal with, she should be able to check the floors and ask her questions much more quickly.
But by the time the closing bell rang, she’d only completed the main floor, the mezzanine, and the first floor. For a terrified moment she thought that the closing bell was a siren, and her first panicked instinct was to hurry back to Stepney and the Anderson, but she’d so hoped to be safely back in Oxford by tonight. She forced herself to go to the staff entrance at the side of the store and stand there watching the shopgirls coming out, chattering. But Polly didn’t appear, and no one she asked knew her.
The sirens went while Eileen was on her way to Marble Arch. There were people camping out in the tunnels and on the platform, and she was tempted to join them. That way she might be able to catch Polly on her way to work, but she was already too mussed and her clothes too wrinkled for the posh stores. She decided to go back to Stepney where she could tidy up, and set out again early in the morning.
But the raids damaged two of the main streets in Stepney, so that she had to walk nearly two miles to catch the bus in the morning, and just as she reached Oxford Circus, the sirens went, and she had to spend a cramped three-quarters of an hour in the basement shelter of Peter Robinson’s.
She didn’t reach Padgett’s till nearly noon. She walked purposefully in past the doorman, took the lift to the third floor, and then the stairs to the fifth and began working her way down, checking each department before she asked for Polly, in case she’d remembered her name wrong.
By half-past twelve, she’d worked her way down to the ground floor, and still hadn’t found her. If Polly’s not on this floor, I’ll have to try Selfridges, she thought, walking toward the stationery department. But as she was asking the shopgirl if Polly Sebastian worked there, two saleswomen emerged chattering from the stairwell, obviously just back from lunch, and the one behind the stationery counter began putting on her hat.
It’s lunchtime, Eileen thought. She hadn’t seen everyone after all. She’d have to search the store again after they were all back from lunch. And she might have missed Polly at John Lewis as well. She’d have to search it again, too.
But there was no sign of her at either store, and no one who knew her. That left Selfridges, which stretched for miles, with all sorts of pillars and alcoves and recesses that made it impossible to see more than one department at a time. By closing time she’d only finished searching two of its six floors and wasn’t convinced she’d seen every part of those two. She went out to find Selfridges’ staff entrance, but by the time she did, employees were already streaming out and obviously had been for some time.
A siren began its up-and-down whine nearby. I want to go home, Eileen thought, then smiled ruefully, thinking, You sound just like Theodore. At least she wouldn’t have to put up with this for weeks on end, as