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 conference 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 Leicester Square 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 between us 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 aboveground?
But that was the problem, staying aboveground. 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 was 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 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 toowide 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 c
ould 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 spring 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.