The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (10 page)

“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.

“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 below-ground, 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 tunnels. 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 on the one below her.

Come on. Up, up. Past a poster 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
London on $40 a Day
and
newlyweds holding hands on the platform. Of Elliott and Sara and Cath and I, 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 second-hand 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.

“Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?” Mr. Mowen said. He was looking
gloomily out the window at the distant six hundred-foot-high smokestacks.

“I don’t know, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. She sighed. “Do you want me to tell them to wait again?”

The sigh was supposed to mean, it’s after four o’clock and it’s getting dark, and you’ve already asked Research to wait three times, and when are you going to make up your mind? but Mr. Mowen ignored it.

“On the other hand,”
he said, “what about diapers? And all those babies that would have been stuck with straight pins if it hadn’t been for the safety pin?”

“It is supposed to help restore the ozone layer, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. “And according to Research, there won’t be any harmful side effects.”

“You shoot a
bunch of hydrocarbons into the stratosphere, and there won’t be any harmful side effects. According to
Research.” Mr. Mowen swiveled his chair around to look at Janice, nearly knocking over the picture of his daughter Sally that sat on his desk. “I stuck Sally once. With a safety pin. She screamed for an hour. How’s that for a harmful side effect? And what about the stuff that’s left over after all this ozone is formed? Bicarbonate of soda, Research says. Perfectly harmless. How do they know that?
Have they ever dumped bicarbonate of soda on people before? Call Research.,.” he started to say, but Janice had already picked up the phone and tapped the number. She didn’t even sigh. “Call Research and ask them to figure out what effect a bicarbonate of soda rain would have.”

“Yes, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. She put the phone up to her ear and listened for a moment. “Mr. Mowen…” she said hesitantly.

“I suppose Research says it’ll neutralize the sulfuric acid that’s killing the statues and sweeten and deodorize at the same time.”

“No, sir,” Janice said. “Research says they’ve already started the temperature-differential kilns, and you should be seeing something in a few minutes. They say they couldn’t wait any longer.”

Mr. Mowen whipped back around in his chair to look out the window. The
picture of Sally teetered again, and Mr. Mowen wondered if she were home from college yet. Nothing was coming out of the smokestacks. He couldn’t see the candlestick-base kilns through the maze of fast-food places and trailer parks. A McDonald’s sign directly in front of the smokestacks blinked on suddenly, and Mr. Mowen jumped. The smokestacks themselves remained silent and still except for their
blinding strobe aircraft lights. He could see sagebrush-covered hills in the space between the stacks, and the whole scene, except for the McDonald’s sign, looked unbelievably serene and harmless.

“Research says the kilns are fired to full capacity,” Janice said, holding the phone against her chest.

Mr. Mowen braced himself for the coming explosion. There was a low rumbling like distant fire,
then a puff of whitish smoke, and finally a deep, whooshing sound like one of Janice’s sighs, and two columns of blue shot straight up into the darkening sky.

“Why is it blue?” Mr. Mowen said.

“I already asked,” Janice said. “Research says visible spectrum diffraction is occurring because of the point eight micron radii of the hydrocarbons being propelled—”

“That sounds
like that damned press
release,” Mr. Mowen said. “Tell them to speak English.”

After a minute of talking into the phone she said, “It’s the same effect that causes the sunsets after a volcanic eruption. Scattering. Research wants to know what staff members you’d like to have at the press conference tomorrow.”

“The directors of the project,” Mr. Mowen said grumpily, “and anyone over at Research who can speak English.”