Cath had put her hand up to her mouth as if she were in pain.
“What is it?”
She said, “Sara canceled 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 theater, 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.
“You thought I was the one who was having an affair with Sara,” I said.
She nodded numbly.
“You thought I was having an affair with Sara?” I said. “How could you think that? I love you.”
“And Sara loved Elliott. People cheat on their spouses, they leave each other. Things …”
“… fall apart,” I murmured.
And the air down here registered it all, trapped it belowground, distilled it into an essence of death and destruction and decay.
Cath was wrong. It was the Blitz after all. And the girl crying on the train to Balham, and the arguing American couple.
Estrangement and disaster and despair. I wondered if it would record this, too, Cath’s fear and our unhappiness, and send it blowing through the tunnels and tracks and passages of the Tube to hit some poor unsuspecting tourist in the face next week. Or fifty years from now.
I looked at Cath, still standing against the opposite wall, impossibly far away.
“I’m not having an affair with Sara,” I said, and Cath leaned weakly against the tiles and started to cry.
“I love you,” I said and crossed the passage in one stride and put my arms around her, and for a moment everything was all right. We were together, and safe. Love conquers all.
But only till the next wind—the results of the X-ray, the call in the middle of the night, the surgeon looking down at his hands, not wanting to tell you the bad news. And we were still down in the tube tunnels, still in its direct path.
“Come on,” I said, and took her arm. I couldn’t protect her from the winds, but I could get her out of the Tube. I could keep her out of the inversion layer. For a few years. Or months. Or minutes.
“Where are we going?” she asked as I propelled her along the passage.
“Up,” I said. “Out.”
“We’re miles from our hotel,” she said.
“We’ll get a taxi,” I said. I led her up the stairs, around a curve, listening as we went for the sound of a train rumbling in, for a tinny voice announcing, “Mind the Gap.”
“We’ll take taxis exclusively from now on,” I said.
Down another passage, down another set of stairs, trying not to hurry, as if hurrying might bring another one on. Through the arch to the escalators. Almost there. Another minute, and I’d have her on the escalator and headed up out of the inversion layer. Out of the wind. Safe for the moment.
A clot of people emerged abruptly from the Circle Line tunnel opposite and jammed up in front of the escalator, chattering in French. Teenagers on holiday, lugging enormous backpacks and a duffel too wide for the escalator steps, stopping, maddeningly, to consult their tube maps at the foot of the escalator.
“Excuse me,” I said, “Pardonnez-moi,” and they looked up, and, instead of moving aside, tried to get on the escalator, jamming the too-wide duffel between the rubber handholds, mashing it down onto the full width of the escalator steps so no one could get past.
Behind us, in the Piccadilly Line tunnel, I could hear the faint sound of a train approaching. The French kids finally, finally, got the bag onto the escalator, and I pushed Cath onto the bottom step, and stepped onto the one below her.
Come on. Up, up. Past posters for Remains of the Day and Forever, Patsy Cline and Death of a Salesman. Below us, the rumble of the train grew louder, closer.
“What do you say we forget going back to our hotel? We’re not far from Marble Arch,” I said to cover the sound. “What say we call the Royal Hernia and see if they’ve got an extra bed?”
Come on, come on. Up. King Lear. The Mousetrap.
“What if it’s not still there?” Cath said, looking down at the depths below us. We’d come almost three floors. The sound of the train was only a murmur, drowned out by the giggling students and the dull roar of the station hall above us.
“It’s still there,” I said positively.
Come on, up, up.
“It’ll be just like it was,” I said. “Steep stairs and the smells of mildew and rotting cabbage. Nice wholesome smells.”
“Oh, no,” Cath said. She pointed across at the down escalators, suddenly jammed with people in evening dress, shaking the rain from their fur coats and theater programs. “Cats just got out. We’ll never find a taxi.”
“We’ll walk,” I said.
“It’s raining,” Cath said.
Better the rain than the wind, I thought. Come on. Up.
We were nearly to the top. The students were already heaving their backpacks onto their shoulders. We would walk to a phone booth and call a taxi. And what then? Keep our heads down. Stay out of drafts. Turn into the Old Man.
It won’t work, I thought bleakly. The winds are everywhere. But I had to try to protect Cath from them, having failed to protect her for the last twenty years, I had to try now to keep her out of their deadly path.
Three steps from the top. The French students were yanking on the wedged duffel, shouting, “Allons! Allons! Vite!”
I turned to look back, straining to hear the sound of the train over their voices. And saw the wind catch the gray hair of the old woman just stepping onto the top step of the down escalator. She hunched down, ducking her head as it blew down on her from above. From above! It flipped the hair back from the oblivious young faces of the French students above us, lifted their collars, their shirttails.
“Cath!” I shouted and reached for her with one hand, digging the fingers of my other one into the rubber railing as if I could stop the escalator, keep it from carrying us inexorably forward, forward into its path.
My grabbing for her had knocked her off balance. She half-fell off her step and into me. I turned her toward me, pulled her against my chest, wrapped my arms around her, but it was too late.
“I love you,” Cath said, as if it was her last chance.
“Don’t—” I said, but it was already upon us, and there was no protecting her, no stopping it. It hit us full blast, forcing Cath’s hair across her cheeks, blowing us nearly back off the step, hitting me full in the face with its smell. I caught my breath in surprise.
The old lady was still standing poised at the top of the escalator, her head back, her eyes closed. People jammed up behind her, saying irritatedly, “Sorry!” and “May I get past, please!” She didn’t hear them. Head tilted back, she sniffed deeply at the air.
“Oh,” Cath said, and tilted her head back, too.
I breathed it in deeply. A scent of lilacs and rain and expectation. Of years of tourists reading England on $40 a Day and newlyweds holding hands on the platform. Of Elliott and Sara and Cath and me, tumbling laughingly after the Old Man, off the train and through the beckoning passages to the District Line and the Tower of London. The scent of s
pring and the All Clear and things to come.
Caught in the winding tunnels along with the despair and the terror and the grief. Caught in the maze of passages and stairs and platforms, trapped and magnified and held in the inversion layer.
We were at the top. “May I get past, please?” the man behind us said.
“We’ll find your china, Cath,” I said. “There’s a secondhand market at Portobello Road that has everything under the sun.”
“Does the Tube go there?” she said.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said. “Sorry.”
“Ladbroke Grove Station. The Hammersmith and City Line,” I said, and bent to kiss her.
“You’re blocking the way,” the man said. “People are trying to get through.”
“We’re improving the atmosphere,” I said and kissed her again.
We stood there a moment, breathing it in—leaves and lilacs and love.
Then we got on the down escalator, holding hands, and went down to the eastbound platform and took the Tube to Marble Arch.
Afterword for “The Winds of Marble Arch”
My favorite place in London is of course St. Paul’s, but my second favorite is not a place, exactly. It’s the whole vast network of the London Underground. It has these wonderful wooden-slatted escalators that go all the way down to the center of the earth, and ceramic-tiled platforms, and on every available post and pillar and wall is posted the tube map, the best map ever drawn.
And just as the Tube isn’t exactly a place, the tube map’s not exactly a map, either. It’s more like a circuit diagram (or a scar on Professor Dumbledore’s knee), and it was designed, believe it or not, by an Underground employee, Harry Beck, in his spare time. It’s a work of genius. It’s ridiculously easy to read and understand, and it’s beautiful in its own right, with all those lovely blue and purple and green lines. It should be hanging in the Tate Gallery, and the Underground should be on the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest. I mean, Charing Cross Station stands on the site of the blacking factory where Charles Dickens worked as a kid. Petula Clark got her start singing in the Tube during the Blitz. Actors like Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness and Dame Edith Evans gave impromptu performances in Leicester Square Station as the bombs fell, and hundreds of the British Museum’s treasures were stored in the blocked-off tunnels of Chancery Lane. Two men were assigned to guard them, and they lived, cooked, and slept there surrounded by wooden crates full of Pharaohs, Caesars, and Grecian urns.
I discovered the delights of the Underground on my very first trip to London and have adored it ever since, so much so that I was delighted that my novel Blackout / All Clear and “The Winds of Marble Arch” made it necessary for me to spend hours in the Tube taking notes, and I’m ridiculously happy whenever I see it in a movie or on an episode of Dr. Who or the new Sherlock. The TV series Primeval used the old deserted tunnels under the Aldwych, complete with bunks from the Blitz days, in one of its episodes (it was infested with giant bugs from the Carboniferous Era), and the Underground is in lots of great movies, from Hanover Street to Love Actually to Billy Elliott.
My favorite, though, has to be Sliding Doors, in which catching a train—or missing it—takes on cosmic significance.
Just as it should. This is, after all, the Underground.
ALL SEATED ON THE GROUND
I’d always said that if and when the aliens actually landed, it would be a letdown. I mean, after War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, and E.T., there was no way they could live up to the image in the public’s mind, good or bad.
I’d also said that they would look nothing like the aliens of the movies, and that they would not have come to A) kill us, B) take over our planet and enslave us, C) save us from ourselves à la The Day the Earth Stood Still, or D) have sex with Earthwomen. I mean, I realize it’s hard to find someone nice, but would aliens really come thousands of light-years just to get a date? Plus, it seemed just as likely they’d be attracted to warthogs. Or yucca. Or air-conditioning units.
I’ve also always thought A) and B) were highly unlikely, since imperialist invader types would probably be too busy invading their next-door neighbors and being invaded by other invader types to have time to go after an out-of-the-way place like Earth, although you never know. I mean, look at Iraq. And as to C), I’m wary of people or aliens who say they’ve come to save you, as witness Reverend Thresher. And it seemed to me that aliens who were capable of building the spaceships necessary to cross all those light-years would necessarily have complex civilizations and therefore more complicated motives for coming than merely incinerating Washington or phoning home.
What had never occurred to me was that the aliens would arrive and we still wouldn’t know what those motives were after almost nine months of talking to them.
Now, I’m not talking about an arrival where the UFO swoops down in the Southwest in the middle of nowhere, mutilates a few cows, makes a crop circle or two, abducts an extremely unreliable and unintelligent-sounding person, probes them in embarrassing places, and takes off again. I’d never believed the aliens would do that, either, and they didn’t, although they did land in the Southwest, sort of.
They landed their spaceship in Denver, in the middle of the DU campus, and marched—well, actually marched is the wrong word; the Altairi’s method of locomotion is somewhere between a glide and a waddle—straight up to the front door of University Hall in classic “Take me to your leader” fashion.
And that was it. They (there were six of them) didn’t say, “Take us to your leader!” or “One small step for aliens, one giant leap for alien-kind” or even “Earthmen, hand over your females.” Or your planet. They just stood there.
And stood there. Police cars surrounded them, lights flashing. TV news crews and reporters pointed cameras at them. F-16s roared overhead, snapping pictures of their spaceship and trying to determine whether A) it had a force field or B) weaponry or C) they could blow it up (they couldn’t). Half the city fled to the mountains in terror, creating an enormous traffic jam on I-70, and the other half drove by the campus to see what was going on, creating an enormous traffic jam on Evans.
The aliens, who by now had been dubbed the Altairi because an astronomy professor at DU had announced they were from the star Altair in the constellation Aquila (they weren’t), didn’t react to any of this, which apparently convinced the president of DU they weren’t going to blow up the place à la Independence Day. He came out and welcomed them to Earth and to DU.
They continued to stand there. The mayor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Denver. The governor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Colorado, assured everyone it was perfectly safe to visit the state, and implied the Altairi were just the latest in a long line of tourists who had come from all over to see the magnificent Rockies, though that seemed unlikely since they were facing the other way, and they didn’t turn around, even when the governor walked past them to point at Pikes Peak. They just stood there, facing University Hall.
They continued to stand there for the next three weeks, through an endless series of welcoming speeches by scientists, State Department officials, foreign dignitaries, and church and business leaders, and an assortment of weather, including a late April snowstorm that broke branches and power lines. If it hadn’t been for the expressions on their faces, everybody would have assumed the Altairi were plants.
But no plant ever glared like that. It was a look of utter, withering disapproval. The first time I saw it in person, I thought, Oh, my God, it’s Aunt Judith.
She was actually my father’s aunt, and she used to come over once a month or so, dressed in a suit, a hat, and white gloves, and sit on the edge of a chair and glare at us, a glare which drove my mother into paroxysms of cleaning and baking whenever she found out Aunt Judith was coming. Not that Aunt Judith criticized Mom’s housekeeping or her cooking. She didn’t. She didn’t even make a face when she sipped the coffee Mom served her or draw a white-gloved finger along the ma
ntelpiece, looking for dust. She didn’t have to. Sitting there in stony silence while my mother desperately tried to make conversation, her entire manner indicated disapproval. It was perfectly clear from that glare of hers that she considered us untidy, ill-mannered, ignorant, and utterly beneath contempt.
Since she never said what it was that displeased her (except for the occasional “Properly brought-up children do not speak unless spoken to”), my mother frantically polished silverware, baked petits fours, wrestled my sister Tracy and me into starched pinafores and patent-leather shoes and ordered us to thank Aunt Judith nicely for our birthday presents—a card with a dollar bill in it—and scrubbed and dusted the entire house to within an inch of its life. She even redecorated the entire living room, but nothing did any good. Aunt Judith still radiated disdain.
It would wilt even the strongest person. My mother frequently had to lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead after a visit from Aunt Judith, and the Altairi had the same effect on the dignitaries and scientists and politicians who came to see them. After the first time, the governor refused to meet with them again, and the president, whose polls were already in the low twenties and who couldn’t afford any more pictures of irate citizens, refused to meet with them at all.
Instead he appointed a bipartisan commission, consisting of representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, the House, the Senate, and FEMA, to study them and find a way to communicate with them, and then, after that was a bust, a second commission consisting of experts in astronomy, anthropology, exobiology, and communications, and then a third, consisting of whoever they were able to recruit and who had anything resembling a theory about the Altairi or how to communicate with them, which is where I come in. I’d written a series of newspaper columns on aliens both before and after the Altairi arrived. (I’d also written columns on tourists, driving with cell phones, the traffic on I-70, the difficulty of finding any nice men to date, and Aunt Judith.)
The Best of Connie Willis Page 31
