“Oh, good, you’re back,” Miss Laburnum said, coming down the escalator. “Has Sir Godfrey told you we’re doing The Admirable Crichton?” and before Polly could answer, “How is your dear mother?”
Mother? Polly thought blankly and then remembered that was where she was supposed to have gone. “Much better, thank you. It was only a virus.”
“Virus?” Miss Laburnum said, bewildered.
Oh, God, hadn’t viruses been discovered in 1940? “I…”
“Virus is a variety of influenza,” Sir Godfrey said. “Isn’t that right, Viola?”
“Yes,” she said gratefully.
“Oh, dear,” Miss Laburnum said. “Influenza can be dreadfully serious.”
“So it can,” Sir Godfrey said, “but not with the proper medicine. Have you given Miss Sebastian her script?”
Miss Laburnum fluttered off through the crowd to fetch it. “If she asks you what sort of medicine,” Sir Godfrey whispered to Polly, “tell her gin.”
“Gin?”
“Yes. A most efficacious remedy. Tell her your mother came to so fast she bit the bowl off the spoon.”
Which was from Shaw’s Pygmalion and meant that he knew perfectly well that she’d lied about going to see her mother. She braced herself for his asking where she had been, but Miss Laburnum was back with a stack of small blue clothbound books.
She handed one to Polly. “Alas, I was unable to locate sufficient copies of Mary Rose to enable us to perform it,” she said, leading them out to the platform, “though I’m certain I saw several in the bookshops only last week.”
They reached the group. “Miss Sebastian’s mother is much improved,” she announced, and went over to give the rector his copy.
“I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I’ve made for you,” Sir Godfrey whispered to Polly. “I spent three pounds ten buying up every copy of Mary Rose on Charing Cross Road to save you from sentimental claptrap like ‘Goodbye, little island that likes too much to be visited.’”
Polly laughed.
“Attention, everyone,” Mrs. Wyvern said, clapping her hands. “Does everyone have a script? Good. Sir Godfrey is to play the title role, Miss Sebastian is to be Mary—”
“Mary?” Polly said.
“Yes, the female lead. Is there a problem?”
“No, it’s only… I didn’t think we were doing Mary Rose.”
“We’re not. We’re doing The Admirable Crichton. You are playing Lady Mary.”
Sir Godfrey said, “Barrie was inordinately fond of the name Mary.”
“Oh,” Polly said. “I’m not certain I should be given such a large part, with my mother and everything. If I were to have to leave suddenly…”
“Miss Laburnum can act as your understudy,” Sir Godfrey said. “Go on, Mrs. Wyvern.”
Mrs. Wyvern read the rest of the cast list. “Sir Godfrey has also kindly agreed to direct. The play is about Lord Loam, his three daughters, and their fiancés. They and their servants are shipwrecked—”
Shipwrecked, Polly thought. How appropriate.
“—on a desert island. And the only person among them with any survival skills at all is their butler, Crichton, so he becomes their leader. And then, when they’ve resigned themselves to remaining on the island forever, they’re rescued—”
Resigning myself’s not an option, Polly thought. I can’t afford to sit here and wait for rescue. If I’m not off the island when my deadline arrives…
But there was nothing to do but sit and wait for the retrieval team to come. Or for her drop to open. If the problem was a divergence point, then the drop might not have been damaged, and its failure to open was only temporary. If so, the retrieval team might not have come because it wasn’t necessary. She could go home on her own.
So when the all clear went the next morning, Polly stayed behind, saying she wanted to learn her lines. She gave them half an hour to get home and then went to the drop.
Workmen had begun clearing the site, so the passage was even more visible from Lampden Road, but there was no one about. The passage and the well looked just as they had the night she’d waited there except for a heavy coat of plaster dust, no doubt churned up by the work going on outside. There weren’t any footprints in the dust, so none of the men clearing the site had discovered the passage, which was lucky, but there weren’t any footprints on the steps leading down to the drop either, or any other sign that the team had come through the drop.
Polly sat down on the steps to wait, staring at the peeling black door and thinking about The Light of the World. And about Marjorie. It seemed so unlike her to have left when she’d