The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “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 Gap 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 gap 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’ 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?” 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. “Goodbye, 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 cancelled 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 like 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 b
uy 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 theatres 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 steps 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 charnelhouse.

  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 children, 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 blonde 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 the 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.

  I bounded onto the nearest car as the doors whooshed shut and stood there just inside the door, waiting for the next station. As soon as the doors opened I jumped out, holding onto the edge of the door, to see if he got off. He didn’t, or at the next station, and Bond Street was easy. Nobody got off.

  “Marble Arch,” the disembodied voice said, and the train pulled into the tiled station.

  What the hell was at Marble Arch? There had never been this many people when Cath and I stayed at the Royal Hernia. Everybody on the train was getting off.

  But was the old man? I leaned out from the door, trying to see if he’d gotten off.

  I couldn’t see him for the crowd. I stepped forward and was immediately elbowed aside by an equally large herd of people getting on.

  I headed down the platform toward his car, craning my neck to spot his plaid jacket, his grizzled head in the exodus.

  “The doors are closing,” the voice of the tube said, and I turned just in time to see the train pull out, and the old man sitting inside, looking out at me.

  And now what? I thought, standing on the abruptly deserted platform. Go back to Holborn and see if it happened again and somebody else felt it? Somebody who wasn’t getting on a train.

  Certainly nothing was going to happen here. This was our station, the one we had set out from every morning, come home to every night, the first time we were here, and there hadn’t been any strange winds. The Royal Hernia was only three blocks away, and we had run up the drafty stairs, holding hands, laughing about what the Old Man had said to the verger in Canterbury when he had shown us Thomas More’s grave—

  The Old Man. He would know what was causing the winds, or how to find out. He loved mysteries. He had dragged us to Greenwich, the British Museum, and down into the crypt of St. Paul’s, trying to find out what had happened to the arm Nelson lost in one of his naval battles. If anybody could, he’d find out what was causing these winds.

  And he should be here by now, I thought, looking at my watch. Good God. It was nearly one. I went over to the tube map on the wall to find the best way over to the conference. Go to Notting Hill Gate and take the District and Circle Line. I looked up at the sign above the platform to see how long it would be till the next train, so that when the wind hit, I didn’t have time to hunch down the way the old man had, to flinch away from the blow. My neck was fully e
xtended, like Sir Thomas More’s on the block.

  And it was like a blade, slicing through the platform with killing force. No charnelhouse smell this time, no heat. Nothing but blast and the smell of salt and iron. The scent of terror and blood and sudden death.

  What is it? I thought, clutching blindly for the tiled wall. What are they?

  The Old Man, I thought again. I have to find the Old Man.

  I took the tube to South Kensington and ran all the way to the conference, half-afraid he wouldn’t be there, but he was. I could hear his voice when I came in. The usual admiring group was clustered around him. I started across the lobby toward them.

  Elliott detached himself from the group and came over to me.

  “I need to see the Old Man,” I said.

  He put a restraining hand on my arm. “Tom—” he said.

  He looked like Cath had, sitting on the bed, telling me Sara was having an affair.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Nothing,” he said, glancing back toward the lounge. “Arthur—nothing.” He let go of my arm. “He’ll be overjoyed to see you. He’s been asking for you.”

  The Old Man was sitting in an easy chair, holding court. He looked exactly the same as he had twenty years ago, his frame still lanky, his light hair still falling boyishly over his forehead.

  See, Cath, I thought. No long white beard. No cane.

  He broke off as soon as he saw us and stood up. “Tom, you young reprobate!” he said, and his voice sounded as strong as ever. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here all morning. Where were you?”

  “In the tube,” I said. “Something happened. I—”

  “In the tube? What were you doing down in the tube?”

  “I was—”

  “Never use the tube anymore,” he said. “It’s gone completely to hell ever since Tony Blair got into office. Like everything else.”

  “I want you to come with me,” I said. “I want to show you something.”

  “Come where?” he said. “Down in the tube? Not on your life.” He sat back down. “I loathe the tube. Smelly, dirty—”

  He sounded like Cath.