The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “Sounds like an excellent idea,” Elliott said. “I don’t mean to sound like the Old Man, but if this is any indication, plays truly have gone to hell! I mean, we’re expected to believe that Hayley Mills’ husband is so blind that he can’t see his wife’s in love with—the other one—what’s his name—?”

  “Pollyanna,” Cath said. “I’ve been trying to remember it all through the first two acts. The name of the little girl who always saw the positive side of things.”

  “Sara,” I said, “are there any hospitals near Holborn?”

  “The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. That’s the one James Barrie left all the money to,” she said. “Why?”

  The Great Ormond Street Hospital. That had to be it. They had used it as a temporary morgue, and the air—

  “It’s so obvious,” Elliott said, still on the subject of infidelity. “The excuses Hayley Mills’s character makes for where she’s been—”

  “She looks wonderful, doesn’t she?” Cath said. “How old do you suppose she is? She looks so young!”

  The end-of-intermission bell chimed.

  “Let’s go,” Cath said, setting her wine down. “I don’t want to have to crawl over all those people again.”

  Sara swallowed her wine at one gulp, and we went back down the aisle. We were too late. The people on the end had to stand up and let us past.

  “But don’t you agree,” Elliott said, sitting down, “that any normal person—?”

  “Shhh,” Cath said, leaning all the way across Sara and me to shut him up. “The lights are going down.”

  They did, and I felt an odd sense of relief, as if we’d just avoided something terrible. The curtain began to go up.

  “I still say,” Elliott said in a stage whisper, “that nobody could have that many clues thrown at him and not realize his wife’s having an affair.”

  “Why not?” Sara said, “You didn’t,” and Hayley Mills came onstage.

  Beside me, in the dark, Elliott was applauding like everyone else, and I thought, it’s as if nothing happened. Elliott will think he didn’t really hear it, like the wind in the tube, over so fast you wonder if it was really real, and he’ll decide it wasn’t, he’ll lean across me and say, “What do you mean? You’re not having an affair, are you?” and Sara will whisper, “Of course not, you idiot. I just meant you never notice anything,” and it won’t all have blown up, it won’t all—

  “Who is it?” Elliott said.

  His voice echoed in the space between two of Hayley Mills and her husband’s lines, and a man in front of us turned around and glared.

  “Who is it?” Elliott said again, louder. “Who are you having an affair with?”

  Cath said, in a strangled voice, “Don’t—”

  “No, you’re right,” Elliott said, standing up. “What the hell difference does it make?” and pushed his way out over the people on the aisle.

  Sara sat an endless minute, and then she plunged past us too, tripping over my foot and nearly falling as she did.

  I looked over at Cath, wondering if I should go after Sara. I had the ticket for her coat and scarf in my pocket. Cath was staring stiffly up at the stage, her coat clutched tightly around her.

  “This can’t go on,” Hayley Mills said, looking now fully as old as she was, but still going gamely on with her lines, “I want a divorce,” and Cath stood up and pushed past me, me following clumsily after her, muttering, “Sorry, sorry,” over and over to the people on the aisle.

  “It’s over,” Hayley said from the stage. “Can’t you see that?”

  I didn’t catch up to Cath till she was halfway through the lobby.

  “Wait,” I said, reaching for her arm. “Cath.”

  Her face was white and set. She pushed unseeingly through the glass doors and out onto the pavement, and then stood there, looking bewildered.

  “I’ll get a taxi,” I said, thinking, At least we don’t have to compete with the end-of-the-play crowd.

  Wrong. People were streaming out of the Apollo, and farther down the street, Miss Saigon, and God knew what else. There were swarms of people on the curb and at the corner, shouting and whistling for taxis.

  “Wait here,” I said, pushing Cath back under the Lyric’s marquee, and plunged out into the melee, my arm thrust out. A taxi pulled toward the curb, but it was only avoiding a clot of people, newspapers over their heads, ducking across the street. The driver put his arm out and gestured toward the “in use” light on top of the taxi.

  I stepped off the curb, scanning the mess for a taxi that didn’t have its light on, jerking back again as a motorbike splashed by.

  Cath tugged on the back of my jacket. “It’s no use,” she said. “Phantom just let out. We’ll never get a taxi.”

  “I’ll go to one of the hotels,” I said, gesturing up the street, “and have the doorman get one. You stay here.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she said. “We can take the tube. Piccadilly Circus is close, isn’t it?”

  “Right down there,” I said, pointing.

  She nodded and put her purse uselessly over her head against the rain, and we darted out onto the sidewalk, through the crowd, and down the steps into Piccadilly Circus.

  “At least it’s dry in here,” I said, fishing for change for a ticket for her.

  She nodded again, shaking the skirt of her coat out.

  There was a huge crush at the machines and an even bigger one at the turnstiles. I handed her her ticket, and she put it gingerly in the slot and yanked her hand back before the machine could suck it away.

  None of the down escalators were working. People clomped awkwardly down the steps. Two punkers with shaved heads and bad skin shoved their way past, muttering obscenities.

  At the bottom there was a nasty-looking puddle under the tube map. “We need the Piccadilly Line,” I said, taking her arm and leading her down the tunnel and out onto the jammed platform. The LED sign overhead said, “Next train 2 min.”

  A train rumbled through on the other side and people poured onto the platform behind us, pushing us forward. Cath stiffened, staring down at the “Mind the Gap” sign, and I thought, all we need now is a rat. Or a knifing.

  A train pulled in, and we pushed onto it, crammed together like sardines. “It’ll thin out in a couple of stops,” I said, and she nodded. She looked dazed, shell-shocked.

  Like Elliott, staring blindly at the stage, saying in a flat voice, “Who are you having the affair with?,” stumbling blindly over people’s feet, people’s knees, trying to get out of the row, looking like he’d been hit by a blast of sulfurous, deadly wind. Everything fine one minute, sipping wine and discussing Hayley Mills, and the next, a bomb ripping the world apart and everything in ruins.

  “Green Park,” the loudspeaker said, and the door opened and more people pushed on. “You better watch out!” a woman with matted hair said, shaking a finger in Cath’s face. Her fingertip was stained blue-black. “You better! I mean it!”

  “That’s it,” I said, pushing Cath behind me. “We’re getting off at the next stop.” I put my hand on her back and began propelling her through the mass of people toward the door.

  “Hyde Park Corner,” the loudspeaker said.

  We got off, the door whooshed shut, and the train began to pull out.

  “We’ll go up top and get a taxi,” I said tightly. “You were right. The tube’s gone to hell.”

  It’s all gone to hell, I thought bitterly, starting down the empty tunnel, Cath behind me. Sara and Elliott and London and Hayley Mills. All of it. The Old Man and Regent Street and us.

  The wind caught me full in the face. Not from the train we had just gotten off of, from ahead of us somewhere, farther down the tunnel. And worse, worse, worse than before. I staggered back against the wall, doubling up like I’d been punched in the stomach. Disaster and death and devastation.

  I straightened up, clutching my stomach, unable to catch my breath, and looked across the tunnel. Cath was s
tanding with her back against the opposite wall, her hands flattened against the tiles, her face pinched and pale.

  “You felt it,” I said, and felt a vast relief.

  “Yes.”

  Of course she felt it. This was Cath, who sensed things nobody else noticed, who had known Sara was having an affair, that the Old Man had turned into an old man. I should have gone and gotten her the first time it happened, dragged her down here, made her stand in the tunnels with me.

  “Nobody else felt them,” I said. “I thought I was crazy.”

  “No,” she said, and there was something in her voice, in the way she stood huddled against the green-tiled wall, that told me what should have been obvious all along.

  “You felt them that first time we were here,” I said, amazed. “That’s why you hate the tube. Because of the winds.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s why you wanted to take a taxi to Harrods,” I said. “Why didn’t you say something that first time?”

  “We didn’t have enough money for taxis,” she said, “and you didn’t seem to be aware of them.”

  I wasn’t aware of anything, I thought, not Cath’s obvious reluctance to go down into the tube stations, nor her flinching back from the incoming trains. She was watching for the next wind, I thought, remembering her peering nervously into the tunnel. She was waiting for it to hit.

  “You should have told me,” I said. “If you’d told me, I could have helped you figure out what they were so they wouldn’t frighten you anymore.”

  She looked up. “What they were?” she repeated blankly.

  “Yes. I’ve figured out what’s causing them. It’s because of the inversion layer. The air gets trapped down here, and there’s no way out. Like gas pockets in a mine. So it just stays here, year after year,” I said, unbelievably glad I could talk to her, tell her.

  “People used these tube stations as shelters during the Blitz,” I said eagerly. “Balham was hit, and so was Charing Cross. That’s why you can smell smoke and cordite. Because of the high-explosive bombs. And people were killed by flying tiles at Marble Arch. That’s what we’re feeling—the winds from those events. They’re winds from the past. I don’t know what this one was caused by. A tunnel collapse, maybe, or a V-2—” I stopped.

  She was looking the way she had sitting on the narrow bed in our hotel room, right before she told me Sara was having an affair.

  I stared at her.

  “You know what’s causing the winds,” I said finally. Of course she knew. This was Cath, who knew everything. Cath, who had had twenty years to think about this.

  I said, “What’s causing them, Cath?”

  “Don’t—” she said, and looked down the passageway, as if hoping somebody would come, a sudden rush of people, hurrying for the trains, pushing between us, cutting her off before she could answer, but the tunnel remained empty, still, no air moving at all.

  “Cath,” I said.

  She took a deep breath, and then said, “They’re what’s coming.”

  “What’s coming?” I repeated stupidly.

  “What’s waiting for us,” she said, and then, bitterly, “Divorce and death and decay. The ends of things.”

  “They can’t be,” I said. “Marble Arch took a direct hit. And Charing Cross—”

  But this was Cath, who was always right. And what if the scent wasn’t of smoke but of fear, not of ashes but of despair? What if the formaldehyde wasn’t the charnelhouse odor of a temporary morgue but of a permanent one, Death itself, the marble arch that waited for us all? No wonder it had reminded Cath of a cemetery.

  What if the direct hits, shrapnel flying everywhere, slashing through youth and marriage and happiness, weren’t V-2s, but death and devastation and decline?

  The winds all, all smelled of death, and the Blitz hardly had a monopoly on that. Look at Hari Srinivasau. And the pub with the great fish and chips.

  “But all of the stations where there are winds were hit,” I said. “And in Charing Cross there was a smell of water and dirt. It has to be the Blitz.”

  Cath shook her head. “I’ve felt them on BART, too.”

  “But that’s in San Francisco. It might be the earthquake. Or the fire.”

  “And on the Metro in D.C. And once, at home, in the middle of Main Street,” she said, staring at the floor. “I think you’re right about the inversion layer. It must concentrate them down here, make them stronger and more—”

  She paused, and I thought she was going to say “lethal.”

  “More noticeable,” she said.

  But I hadn’t noticed. Nobody had noticed except Cath, who noticed everything.

  And the old, I thought, remembering the white-haired woman in South Kensington Station, her coat collar clutched closed with a blue-veined hand, the stooped old black man on the platform in Holborn. The old feel them all the time, I thought. They walked bent nearly double against a wind which blew all the time.

  Or stayed out of the tube. I thought of the Old Man saying, “I loathe the Underground.” The Old Man, who had run us merrily all over London on the tube after adventure, on at Baker Street and off at Tower Hill, up escalators, down stairs, shouting stories over his shoulder the whole time. “Horrible place,” he had said, shuddering, yesterday. “Filthy, smelly, drafty.” Drafty.

  He felt the winds, and so did Mrs. Hughes. “I never go down in the tube anymore,” she had said at dinner. Not, ‘I never take the tube.” I never go down in the tube. And it wasn’t just the stairs or the long distances she had to walk. It was the winds, reeking of separation and loss and sorrow.

  And Cath had to be right. They had to be the winds of mortality. What else would blow so steadily, so inexorably, on the old and no one else?

  But then why had I noticed them? Maybe the convention was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled plays and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

  And a feeling of time running out, that made you go shoving down escalators and racing through corridors, frantic to catch the train before it pulled out. A feeling of panic, that it might be the last one. “The doors are closing.”

  I thought of Sara, running up out of Piccadilly Station, her hair windblown, her cheeks unnaturally red, of her pushing past my knees in the theater, desperate, pursued.

  “Sara felt them,” I said.

  “Did she?” Cath said, her voice flat.

  I looked at her, standing there against the far wall, braced for the next wind, waiting for it to hit.

  It was funny. This very passage, this very station had been used as a shelter during the Blitz. But there weren’t any shelters that could protect you from this kind of raid.

  And no matter what train you caught, no matter which line you took, they all went to the same station. Marble Arch. End of the line.

  “So what do we do?” I said.

  She didn’t answer. She stood there looking at the floor as if it had “Mind the Gap” written on it. Mind the Gap.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally.

  And what had I thought she would say? That it wouldn’t be so bad as long as we had each other? That love conquers all? That was the whole point, wasn’t it, that it didn’t? That it was no match for divorce and destruction and death? Look at Milford Hughes Senior. Look at Daniel Drecker’s daughter.

  “They didn’t have my china at any of the shops in Chelsea,” she said bleakly. “It never occurred to me it might be discontinued. All those years, I—it never occurred to me it wouldn’t still be there.” Her voice broke. “It was such a pretty pattern.”

  And the Old Man was so funny and so full of life, the pub was always jam-packed, Sara and Elliott had a great marriage. But even that couldn’t save them. Divorce and destruction and decay.

  And what could anybody do about any of it? Button up your overcoat? Stay above-ground?


  But that was the problem, staying above-ground. And somehow getting through the days, knowing the doors were closing and it was all going to go smash. Knowing that everything you ever loved or liked or even thought was pretty were all going to be torn down, burned up, blown away. “Gone with the wind,” I said, thinking of the woman on the train.

  “What?” Cath said, still in that numb, hopeless voice.

  “The novel,” I said ruefully. “Gone With the Wind. There was a woman on the train to Balham today reading it. When I was tracking down the winds, trying to find out which stations had them, if they were stations that had been hit during the Blitz.”

  “You went to Balham?” she demanded. “Today?”

  “And Blackfriars. And Embankment. And Elephant and Castle. I went to the Transport Museum to find which stations had been hit, and then to Monument and Balham, trying to see if they had winds.” I shook my head. “I spent the whole day, trying to figure out the pattern of the—what is it?”

  Cath had put her hand up to her mouth as if she were in pain.

  “What is it?”

  She said, “Sara cancelled again today. After you left. I thought maybe we could have lunch.” She looked across at me. “Nobody knew where you were.”

  “I didn’t want anybody to know I was running around London chasing winds nobody else could feel,” I said.

  “Elliott told me you’d disappeared the day before, too,” she said, and there was still something I wasn’t getting here. “He said he and Arthur wanted you to have lunch with them, but you left.”

  “I went back to Holborn, to try to see what was causing the winds. And then to Marble Arch.”

  “Sara told me she and Elliott had to go take Evers and his wife sightseeing, that they wanted to see Kew Gardens.”

  “Elliott? I thought you said he was at the conference?”

  “He was. He said Sara had a doctor’s appointment she’d forgotten about,” she said. “Nobody knew where you were. And then at the theatre, you and Sara—”

  Had shown up together, late, out of breath, Sara’s cheeks flaming. And the day before I had lied about lunch, about the afternoon session. To Cath, who could sense when people were lying, who could sense when something was wrong.