covered for the night. Polly dived behind the nearest counter and crouched there, watching the door to the stairs. After a moment, it opened and she could hear footsteps. She pressed closer behind the counter, holding her breath, and the footsteps retreated and the door closed.
She waited another long minute, listening. She couldn’t hear anything but the hum of the planes, still distant but moving steadily closer. She looked over at the lift. She could operate it—she’d watched the lift boys at Townsend Brothers do it—but the dial above its door said it was on Ground. It couldn’t come up to first without an operator. And if she went back to the stairs, and the guard had gone on up the stairwell, she’d run straight into him.
She ran across the floor, hoping there was another stairway on the far side, and there was. She darted up them, counting floors. One and a half. Two. No, mezzanine. Mezzanine and a half. Two. Why couldn’t Merope have worked on the ground floor?
The drone of the planes was substantially louder. She hoped the sound was being somehow magnified by the narrow stairwell. If it wasn’t… Two and two-thirds… three. She opened the door silently and peered out onto the floor. She couldn’t see any sign of the guard. Or of Merope anywhere on the darkened floor. The sound of the planes was less loud here than in the stairwell, but only marginally, and far off to the east Polly could hear the faint crump of a bomb.
She slipped through the door and started across the floor, looking for the notions department. “Merope!” she called. “Where are you?”
No answer. Polly remembered her saying she hadn’t recognized Polly calling her name that day in Oxford, and if anyone else was here, they’d know her by the name Eileen, too. “Eileen!”
Still no answer. She’s not here, Polly thought, running through the linen department. Or the planes are drowning out my voice. “Eileen!” she shouted more loudly. “Eileen O’Reilly!”
A hand clamped on her arm. Polly whirled, trying to think what excuse to give the guard. “I know you said the store was closed, but—” She stopped, her mouth open in astonishment.
It wasn’t the guard. It was Michael Davies.
In view of the present situation, all parents whose children are still in London are urged to evacuate them without delay.
—GOVERNMENT NOTICE, SEPTEMBER 1940
London—25 October 1940
“I DO BELIEVE THAT EVERY SINGLE UNPLEASANT PERSON in London has decided to shop in Padgett’s today,” Miss Peterson whispered to Eileen in the stockroom, and Eileen had to agree. She’d spent all afternoon waiting on Mrs. Sadler and her wretched son Roland, who was being belatedly evacuated to Scotland on Thursday.
And it’s too bad it’s not Australia, Eileen thought, bringing out yet another blazer for Roland to try on. He refused to extend his arm so she could get it into the sleeve and, when his mother turned away to look at the waistcoats, he kicked Eileen hard in the shins. “Ow!”
“Oh, did I knock into you?” Roland said sweetly. “I beg your pardon.”
And I thought Alf and Binnie were bad, Eileen thought. They were angels compared to Roland. “How is this, madam?” she asked Mrs. Sadler after she’d finally managed to force the jacket onto him.
“Oh, yes, the fit’s much better,” Mrs. Sadler said, “but I’m not certain of the color. Do you have it in blue?”
“I’ll see, madam.” Eileen limped into the curtained storeroom, her ankle throbbing, to fetch the blazer in blue and then brown, and wrestle them onto the resisting Roland.
Why am I always stuck dealing with horrible children? she thought. I should never have let them transfer me up here from Notions, shorthanded or not. And now it was perfectly obvious why they’d been shorthanded in Children’s Wear. When I get back to Oxford, I am never doing another assignment involving children. Even if it means giving up VE-Day.
“This blue is much nicer,” Mrs. Sadler said, fingering the lapels, “but I’m afraid it won’t be warm enough. Scotland’s winters are very cold. Have you something in wool?”
The first four blazers he tried on, Eileen thought. “I’ll see, ma’am,” she said and made another trip to the storeroom, thinking, Why couldn’t I have searched the stores on the other side of Oxford Street first? If she had, she wouldn’t have missed Polly. She’d still have been at Townsend Brothers when she went there, and they could have gone through to Oxford together. Instead, Polly was gone, and she was stuck