“The kids are fine,” she said.
“But something happened,” I said. “The taxi you and Sara took had an accident.”
She shook her head. “Nothing happened,” and then, still looking down at her hands, “Sara’s having an affair.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
“She’s having an affair.”
“Sara?” I said, disbelieving. Not Sara, affectionate, loyal Sara.
Cath nodded, still looking at her hands.
I sat down on my bed. “Did she tell you she was?”
“No, of course not,” Cath said, standing up and walking over to the mirror.
“Then how do you know?” I asked, but I knew how. The same way she had known that the kids were getting chicken pox, that her sister was engaged, that her father was worried about his business. Cath always noticed things before anybody else—she was equipped with some kind of super-sensitive radar that picked up on subliminal signs or vibrations in the air or something. And she was always right.
But Sara and Elliott had been married as long as we had. They were the couple at the top of our “Marriage Is Still a Viable Institution” list.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“I’m sure.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew, but there wasn’t any point. When Ashley had gotten the chicken pox, she’d said, “Her eyes always look bright when she has a fever, and, besides, Lindsay had it two weeks ago,” but most of the time she could only shake her short blond hair, unable to say how she’d reached her conclusion.
But she was always right. Always right.
“But—I saw Elliott today,” I said. “He was fine. He didn’t—” I thought back over everything he had said, wondering if there had been some indication in it that he was worried or unhappy. He had said Sara and Cath would spend a lot of money, but he always said that. “He sounded fine.”
“Put your tie on,” she said.
“But if she— We don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I said.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No. No, we have to go.”
“Maybe you misinterpreted—”
“I didn’t,” she said and went into the bathroom and shut the door.
We had trouble getting a taxi. The Connaught’s doorman seemed to have disappeared, and all of the black boxy London cabs ignored my frantic waving. Even when one finally stopped, it took us forever to get to the party. “Theatergoers,” the cabbie explained cheerfully of the traffic. “You two plan to see any plays while you’re here?”
I wondered if Cath would still want to go to a play, convinced as she was that Sara was having an affair, but as we passed the Savoy, its neon sign for Miss Saigon blazing, she asked, “What play did you get tickets for?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I ran out of time.” I started to say that I intended to get them tomorrow, but she wasn’t listening.
“Harrods didn’t have my china,” she said, and her tone sounded as hopeless as it had telling me about Sara. “They discontinued the pattern four years ago.”
We were nearly an hour and a half late for the party. Elliott and Sara have probably long since left for dinner, I thought, and was secretly relieved.
“Cath!” Marjorie said as we walked in the door and hurried over with her nametag. “You look wonderful! I have so much to tell you!”
“I’m going to go look for the Old Man,” I said. “I’ll see if he wants to go to dinner afterward.” He would probably drag us off to Soho or Hampstead Heath. He always knew some out-of-the-way place that had eel pie or authentic English stout.
I set off through the crowd. You could usually locate the Old Man by the crowd of people gathered around, and the laughter. And the proximity to the bar, I thought, spotting a huddle of people in that direction.
I waded toward them through the crush, grabbing a glass of wine off a tray as I went, but it wasn’t the Old Man. It was the people who’d been at lunch. They were discussing, of all things, the Beatles, but at least it wasn’t the Decline and Fall.
“The three of them were talking about a reunion tour,” McCord was saying. “I suppose that’s all off now.”
“The Old Man took us on a Beatles tour,” I said. “Has anybody seen him? He insisted we re-create all the album covers. We nearly got killed crossing Abbey Road.”
“I don’t think he’s coming down from Cambridge till tomorrow,” McCord said. “It’s a long drive.”
The Old Man had driven us four hundred miles to see London Bridge. I peered over their heads, trying to spot the Old Man. I couldn’t see him, but I did spot Evers, which meant Sara and Elliott were still here. Cath was over by the door with Marjorie.
“It was just so sad about Linda McCartney,” the Disney woman said.
I took a swig of my wine and remembered too late this was a sherry party.
“How old was she?” McCord was asking.
“Fifty-three.”
“I know three women who’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer,” the Gap woman said. “Three. It’s dreadful.”
“One keeps wondering who’s next,” the other woman said.
“Or what’s next,” McCord said. “You heard about Stewart, didn’t you?”
I handed my sherry glass to the Disney woman, who looked at me, annoyed, and started through the crowd toward Cath, but now I couldn’t see her, either. I stopped, craning my neck to see over the crowd.
“There you are, you handsome thing!” Sara said, coming up behind me and putting her arm around my waist. “We’ve been looking all over for you!”
She kissed me on the cheek. “Elliott’s been fretting that you were going to make us all go see Cats. He loathes Cats, and everyone who comes to visit drags us to it. And you know how he frets over things. You didn’t, did you? Get tickets for Cats?”
“No,” I said, staring at her. She looked the same as always—her dark hair still tucked behind her ears, her eyebrows still arched mischievously. This was the same old Sara who’d gone with us to Kismet, to Lake Havasu, to Abbey Road.
Cath was wrong. She might pick up subliminal signals about other people, but this time she was wrong. Sara wasn’t acting guilty or uneasy, wasn’t avoiding my eyes, wasn’t avoiding Cath.
“Where is Cath?” she asked, standing on tiptoe to peer over the crowd. “I have something I’ve got to tell her.”
“What?”
“About her china. We couldn’t find it today, did she tell you? Well, after I got home, I thought, ‘I’ll wager they have it at Selfridge’s.’ They’re always years behind the times. Oh, there she is.” She waved frantically. “I want to tell her before we leave,” she said, and took off through the crowd. “Find Elliott and tell him I’ll only be a sec. And tell him we aren’t seeing Cats,” she called back to me. “I don’t want him stewing all night. He’s over there somewhere.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the door, and I pushed my way between people till I found him, standing by the front door.
“You haven’t seen Sara, have you?” he said. “Evers is bringing his car round.”
“She’s talking to Cath,” I said. “She said she’ll be here in a minute.”
“Are you kidding? When those two get together—” He shook his head indulgently. “Sara said they had a wonderful time today.”
“Is the Old Man here yet?” I said.
“He called and said he couldn’t make it tonight. He said to tell you he’ll see us tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. We’ve scarcely seen him since he moved to Cambridge. We’re down in Wimbledon, you know.”
“And he hasn’t swooped down and kidnapped you to go see Dickens’s elbow or something?”
“Not lately. Oh, God, do you remember that time Sara mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle, and he dragged us up and down Baker Street, looking for Sherlock Holmes’s missing flat?”
I laughed, remembering him knocking on doors, demanding, “What have you done with 221B, madam?” and deciding we needed to call in Scotland Yard.
“And then demanding to know what they’d done with the yard,” Elliott said, laughing.
“Did you tell him we’re all going to a play together Saturday?”
“Yes. You didn’t get tickets for Cats, did you?”
“I didn’t get tickets for anything,” I said. “I ran out of time.”
“Well, don’t get tickets for Cats. Or Phantom.”
Sara came running up, flushed and breathless. “I’m sorry. Cath and I got to talking,” she said. She gave me a smacking kiss on the lips. “Good-bye, you adorable hunk. See you Saturday.”
“Come on,” Elliott said. “You can kiss him all you like on Saturday.” He hustled her out the door. “And not Les Miz!” he shouted back to me.
I stood, smiling after them. You’re wrong, Cath, I thought. Look at them. Not only would Sara never have kissed me like that if she were having an affair, but Elliott wouldn’t have looked on complacently like that, and neither of them would have been talking about china, about Cats.
Cath had made a mistake. Her radar, usually so infallible, had messed up this time. Sara and Elliott’s marriage was fine. Nobody was having an affair, and we’d all have a great time Saturday night.
The mood persisted through the rest of the evening, in spite of Marjorie’s latching onto me and telling me all about the Decline and Fall of her father, who she was going to have to put in a nursing home, and our finding out that the pub that had had such great fish and chips the first time we’d been here had burned down.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cath said, standing on the corner where it had been. “Let’s go to the Lamb and Crown. I know it’s still there. I saw it on the way to Harrods this morning.”
“That’s on Wilton Place, isn’t it?” I said, pulling out my tube map. “That’s right across from Hyde Park Corner Station. We can take—”
“A taxi,” Cath said.
Cath didn’t say anything else about the affair she thought Sara was having, except to tell me they were going shopping again the next day. “Selfridge’s first, and then Reject China . . .” and I wondered if she had realized, seeing Sara at the party, that she’d made a mistake.
But in the morning, as I was leaving, she said, “Sara called and canceled while you were in the shower.”
“They can’t go to the play with us Saturday?”
“No,” Cath said. “She isn’t going shopping with me today. She said she had a headache.”
“She must have drunk some of that awful sherry,” I said. “So what are you going to do? Do you want to come have lunch with me?”
“I think it’s someone at the conference.”
“Who?” I said, lost.
“The man Sara’s having an affair with,” she said, picking up her guidebook. “If it was someone who lived here, she wouldn’t risk seeing him while we’re here.”
“She’s not having an affair,” I said. “I saw her. I saw Elliott. He—”
“Elliott doesn’t know.” She jammed the guidebook savagely into her bag. “Men never notice anything.”
She began stuffing things into her bag—her sunglasses, her umbrella. “We’re having dinner with the Hugheses tonight at seven. I’ll meet you back here at five-thirty.” She picked up her umbrella.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “They’ve been married longer than we have. She’s crazy about Elliott. Why would somebody with that much to lose risk it all by having an affair?”
She turned and looked at me, still holding the umbrella. “I don’t know,” she said bleakly.
“Look,” I said, suddenly sorry for her, “why don’t you come and have lunch with the Old Man and me? He’ll probably get us thrown out like he did at that Indian restaurant. It’ll be fun.”
She shook her head. “You and Arthur will want to catch up, and I don’t want to wait on Selfridge’s.” She looked up at me.
“When you see Arthur—” She paused, looking the way she did when she was thinking about Sara.
“You think he’s having an affair, too, oh Madame Knows-All, Sees-All?”
“No,” she said. “He was older than us.”
“Which was why we called him the Old Man,” I said, “and you think he’ll have gotten a cane and grown a long white beard?”
“No,” she said, and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I think if they have my china at Selfridge’s, I’ll buy twelve place settings.”
She was wrong, and I would prove it to her. We would have a great time at the play, and she would realize Sara couldn’t be having an affair. If I could get the tickets. Ragtime had been sold out, which meant The Tempest was likely to be, too, and there weren’t a lot of other choices, since Elliott had said no to Sunset Boulevard. And Cats, I thought, looking at the theater posters as I went down the escalator. And Les Miz.
The Tempest and the Hayley Mills thing, Endgames, were both at theaters close to Leicester Square. If I couldn’t get tickets at either, there was a ticket agent in Lisle Street.
The Tempest was sold out, as I’d expected. I walked over to the Albery.
Endgames had five seats in the third row center of the orchestra. “Great,” I said, and slapped down my American Express, thinking how much things had changed.
In the old days I would have been asking if they didn’t have anything in the sherpa section, seats so steep we had to clutch the arms of our seats to keep from plummeting to our deaths and we had to rent binoculars to even see the stage.
And in the old days, I thought grimly, Cath would have been at my side, making rapid calculations to see if our budget could afford even the cheap seats. And now I was getting tickets in third row center, and not even asking the price, and Cath was on her way to Selfridge’s in a taxi.
The girl handed me the tickets. “What’s the nearest tube station?” I asked.
“Tottenham Court Road,” she said.
I looked at my tube map. I could take the Central Line over to Holborn and then a train straight to South Kensington. “How do I get there?”
She waved an arm full of bracelets vaguely north. “You go up St. Martin’s Lane.”
I went up St. Martin’s Lane, and up Monmouth, and up Mercer and Shaftesbury and New Oxford. There clearly had to be closer stations than Tottenham Court Road, but it was too late to do anything about it now. And I wasn’t about to take a taxi.
It took me half an hour to make the trek, and another ten to reach Holborn, during which I figured out that the Lyric had been less than four blocks from Piccadilly Circus. I’d forgotten how deep the station was, how long the escalators were. They seemed to go down for miles. I rattled down the slatted wooden rungs and down the passage, glancing at my watch as I walked.
Nine-thirty. I’d make it to the conference in plenty of time. I wondered when the Old Man would get there. He had to drive down from Cambridge, I thought, going down a short flight of steps behind a man in a tweed jacket, which was an hour and a—
I was on the bottom step when the wind hit. This time it was not so much a blast as a sensation of a door opening onto a cold room.
A cellar, I thought, groping for the metal railing. No. Colder. Deathly cold. A meat locker. A frozen food storage vault. With a sharp, unpleasant chemical edge, like disinfectant. A sickening smell.
No, not a refrigerated vault, I thought, a biology lab, and recognized the smell as formaldehyde. And something under it. I shut my mouth, held my breath, but the sweet, sickening stench was already in my nostrils, in my throat. Not a biology lab, I thought in horror. A charnel house.
It was over, the door shutting as suddenly as it had opened, but the bite of the icy air was still in my nostrils, the nasty taste of formaldehyde still in my mouth. Of corruption and death and decay.
I stood there on the bottom step taking shallow, swallowing breaths, while people walked around me. I could see the man in the tweed jacket, rounding the corner in the passage ahead. He must have felt it, I thought. He was right in front of me. I started after him, dodging around a pair of childr
en, an Indian woman in a sari, a housewife with a string bag, finally catching up to him as he turned out onto the crowded platform.
“Did you feel that wind?” I asked, taking hold of his sleeve. “Just now, in the tunnel?”
He looked alarmed, and then, as I spoke, tolerant. “You’re from the States, aren’t you? There’s always a slight rush of air as a train enters one of the tunnels. It’s perfectly ordinary. Nothing to be alarmed about.” He looked pointedly at my hand on his sleeve.
“But this one was ice-cold,” I persisted. “It—”
“Ah, yes, well, we’re very near the river here,” he said, looking less tolerant. “If you’ll excuse me.” He freed his arm. “Have a pleasant holiday,” he said and walked away through the crowd to the farthest end of the platform.
I let him go. He clearly hadn’t felt it. But he had to, I thought. He was right in front of me.
Unless it wasn’t real, and I was experiencing some bizarre form of hallucination.
“Finally,” a woman said, looking down the track, and I saw a train was approaching. Wind fluttered a flyer stuck on the wall and then the blond hair of the woman standing closest to the edge. She turned unconcernedly toward the man next to her, saying something to him, shifting the leather strap of her bag on her shoulder.
It hit again, an onslaught of cold and chemicals and corruption, a stench of decay.
He has to have felt that, I thought, looking down the platform, but he was unconcernedly boarding the train, the tourists next to him were looking up at the train and back down at their tube maps, unaware.
They have to have felt it, I thought, and saw the elderly black man. He was halfway down the platform, wearing a plaid jacket. He shuddered as the wind hit, and then hunched his gray grizzled head into his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.
He felt it, I thought, and started toward him, but he was already getting on the train, the doors were already starting to close. Even running, I wouldn’t reach him.
Time is the Fire Page 27
