“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Eileen asked as they hurried to Oxford Circus after work. “It means there won’t be any raids.”

It also meant that getting Mike a coat was more urgent than ever and that the benzene was increasingly overpowering when Eileen’s coat got wet. “Miss Snelgrove said the odor would fade,” Eileen said, “but it doesn’t seem to, does it?”

“No,” Polly said. It was a good thing there was a ban on smoking in the shelters. A stray flicked match and they’d both go up in flames.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about our having to volunteer,” Eileen said as they got on the train. “Perhaps I could volunteer to be an ambulance driver at St. Bart’s. When I took the ambulance back, Dr. Cross said if I hadn’t got those passengers to hospital when I did, they’d have died.”

“What passengers?”

Eileen told her about the unconscious ambulance driver and the Army lieutenant. Thank goodness Mike isn’t here to hear this, Polly thought. The last thing he needed was to begin worrying all over again about the possibility of their having altered the course of the war.

We couldn’t have, she told herself. We won the war. And the twenty-ninth went just like it was supposed to. But after Mike and Eileen were asleep, she stole away to look at a discarded newspaper and make certain.

The Guildhall had burned just as it had in the historical records, and so had St. Bride’s and St. Mary-le-Bow. But All Hallows by the Tower had burned, too. She’d thought it had been only partially destroyed. And the Evening Standard said the Germans had dropped fifteen thousand incendiaries instead of eleven thousand.

But those could easily be errors in reporting, she thought, crawling back under Eileen’s reeking coat. We won the war. Eileen and I were both there on VE-Day.

But the discrepancies haunted her all the next day, and on her lunch break she bought the Herald and the Daily Mail to check and then went up to the book department to tell Eileen not to say anything to Mike about her possibly driving an ambulance for St. Bart’s. “Or about what Dr. Cross said. He’d think driving an ambulance was too dangerous.”

“That’s true,” Eileen said absently, much more concerned with getting Mike a coat.

“It’s supposed to snow tonight,” she said, and an hour later she came down to report that she’d persuaded her supervisor to let her leave an hour early to go to the Assistance Board. She asked what size coat Mike wore and said, “I’ll try to get you a hat as well, Polly. Tell Mrs. Rickett I won’t be in to supper. And you needn’t wait for me. I’ll meet you at Notting Hill Gate. Have you a rehearsal tonight?”

“I’m not certain,” Polly said. “The troupe’s still arguing over what play to do next.”

And when she arrived, she found them discussing whether to do another play at all, given the fact that the intermittency of the raids and the winter weather were causing people to stay at home instead of using the shelter.