Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“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 was 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 an affair with?” and 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 standing 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 the 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 charnel house 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. They walked bent nearly double against a wind which blew all the time.