The Best of Connie Willis (34 page)

“It’s been twenty years,” she said, coming over to the bed and deftly pulling my tie out of the mess. “There are probably thousands of rats down there now.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Good luck presenting your paper.” She grabbed up an umbrella. “You take the Tube,” she said, going out the door. “You’re the one who’s crazy about it.”

“I intend to,” I called after her, but the lift had already closed.

In spite of Cath’s dire predictions, the Tube was exactly the same as it had been twenty years ago. Well, maybe not exactly. There were ticket machines now, and automated stiles that sucked up my five-day pass and spat it out to me again. And most of the escalators were metal now instead of wooden. But they were as steep as ever, and the posters for
musicals and plays that lined them had hardly changed at all.
Kismet
and
Cats
had been playing then. Now it was
Showboat
and
Cats
.

Cath was right—I did love the Tube. It’s the best underground system in the world. Boston’s “T” is old and decrepit, Tokyo’s subway system is a sardine can, and Washington’s Metro looks like it was designed as a bomb shelter. The Métro’s not bad, but it has the handicap of being in Paris. BART’s in San Francisco, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

The Tube goes everywhere, all the way to Heathrow and Hampton Court and beyond, to obscure suburban stops like Cockfosters and Mudchute. There’s a stop at every tourist attraction, and it’s impossible to get lost.

But it isn’t just an efficient way of getting from the Tower to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. It’s a place in itself, a wonderful underground warren of tunnels and stairs and corridors, as colorful as the billboard-sized theater posters on the walls of the platforms, as the maps posted on every pillar and wall and forking of the tunnels.

I stopped in front of one, studying the crisscrossing green and blue and red lines. Charing Cross. I needed the gray line. What was that? Jubilee.

I followed the signs down a curving platform and out onto the eastbound platform. A train was pulling out. An LED sign above the tracks said
NEXT TRAIN 6 MIN
. The train started into the narrow tunnel, and I waited for the blast of wind that would follow it, pushing the air in front of it as the train disappeared.

It came, smelling faintly of diesel and dust, ruffling the hair of the woman standing next to me, rippling her skirt. N
EXT TRAIN 3 MIN
., the sign said.

I filled the time by watching a pair of newlyweds holding hands and reading the posters on the tunnel walls for
Sunset Boulevard
and
Sliding Doors
and Harrods. “A Blast from the Past,” the one on the end said. “Experience the London Blitz at the Imperial War Museum. Elephant and Castle Tube Station.”

“Train approaching,” a voice said from nowhere, and I stepped forward to the yellow line.

The familiar
MIND THE GAP
sign was still painted on the edge of the platform. Cath had always refused to stand anywhere near the edge. She had stood nervously against the tiled wall as if she expected the train to suddenly leap off the tracks and plow into us.

The train pulled in. Right on time, shining chrome and plastic, no gum on the floor, no unknown substances on the orange plush seats.

“I beg your pardon,” the woman next to me said, shifting her shopping bag so I could sit down.

Even the people who rode the Tube were more polite than people on any other subway. And better read. The man opposite me was reading Dickens’s
Bleak House
.

The train slowed. “Regent’s Park,” the flat voice announced.

Regent’s Park. The last time we were here, the Old Man had shouted “To the head!” and vaulted off the train at this station.

He had been taking us on a riotous tour of Sir Thomas More’s body. We had gone to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels, and Cath, reading her Frommer’s
England on $40 a Day
while we stood in line, had said, “Sir Thomas More is buried in the church here. You know,
A Man for All Seasons
,” and we had all trooped over to see his grave.

“Want to see the rest of him?” the Old Man had said.

“The rest of him?” Sara had asked.

“Only his body’s buried there,” the Old Man had said. “You need to see his head!” and had led us off to London Bridge, where More’s head had been stuck on a pike, and the Chelsea garden, where his daughter Margaret had buried it after she took it down, and then off to Canterbury, with the Old Man turned around and talking to us as he drove, to the small church where the head was buried now.

“Thomas More’s Remains: The World Tour,” he had said, driving us back at breakneck speed.

“Except for Lake Havasu,” Elliott had said. “Isn’t that where the
original London Bridge is?” And when the annual conference was in San Diego, the Old Man had roared up in a rental car and hijacked us all on an overnight jaunt to Arizona to see it.

I couldn’t wait to see him. There was no telling what wild sightseeing he had in mind this time. This was, after all, the man who had gotten us thrown out of Alcatraz.

He hadn’t been at the last four conferences—he’d been off in Nepal for the first one and finishing a book the last three—and I was eager to hear what he’d been up to.

“Oxford Circus,” the flat voice said. Two more stops to Charing Cross.

I leaned out to look at the station as we stopped. Each station has its own distinctive design, its own identifying color: St. Pancras green edged with navy, Euston Square black and orange, Bond Street red. Oxford Circus had a blue chutes and ladders design that was new since the first time we’d been here.

The train pulled out, picked up speed. I would be there in five minutes and to the Adelphi in ten, a lot faster than Cath in her taxi, and at least as comfortable.

I was there in eight, up the escalators and out in the rain, up the Strand to the Adelphi in twenty. It would have been fifteen, but I had to wait ten (huddled under an awning and wishing I’d taken Cath’s advice about an umbrella) to cross the Strand. Black London taxis, bumper to bumper, and double-decker buses, and minis, all going nowhere fast.

Ragtime
was sold out. I got a theater map from the rack in the lobby and looked to see where the Duke of York was. It was over on Shaftesbury, with the nearest tube stop Leicester Square. I went back to Charing Cross, and went down the escalator and into the passage that led to the Northern Line. I still had half an hour, which would be cutting it close, but not impossible.

I started down the left-hand tunnel toward the trains, keeping pace with the crowd, straining to hear the rumble of a train pulling in over the muffled din of voices, the crisp clatter of high heels.

People began to walk faster. The high heels beat a quicker tattoo. I got the tube map out of my back pocket. I could take the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington and change to the District and—

The wind hit me like the blast from an explosion. I reeled back, nearly losing my balance. My head snapped back sharply like I’d been punched in the jaw. I groped wildly for the tiled wall.

The IRA’s blown up a train! I thought.

But there was no sound accompanying the sudden blast of searing air, only a dank, horrible smell.

Sarin gas, I thought, and reflexively put my hand over my nose and mouth, but I could still smell it. Sulfur and a wet earthy smell, and something else. Gunpowder? Dynamite? I sniffed at the air, trying to identify it.

But whatever it was, it was already over. The wind had stopped as abruptly as it had hit me, and so had the smell. Not even a trace of it lingered in the dry, stuffy air.

And it must not have been an explosion, or poison gas, because no one else had even slackened their steps. The sound of high heels retained its brisk, even clatter down the tiled passage. Two German teenagers with backpacks hurried past, giggling, and a businessman in a gray topcoat, the
Times
tucked under his arm, and a young woman in floppy sandals, all of them oblivious.

Hadn’t any of them felt it? Or was it a usual occurrence in Charing Cross Station and they were used to it?

How could anybody possibly get used to a blast like that? They must not have felt it.

Had
I
felt it?

It was like an earthquake back home in California, a jolt, and then before you could even register it, it was over, and you weren’t sure it had really happened. The only way you could tell for sure was by asking Cath or the kids, “Did you feel that?” or by the picture tilted on the wall.

The only pictures on the walls down here were pasted on, and the
German students, the businessman, had already told me the answer to “Did you feel that?”

But I did feel it, I thought, and tried to reconstruct it.

Heat, and the sharp tang of sulfur and wet dirt. But that wasn’t what had made me lose my balance, what had sent me staggering against the wall. It was the smell of panic and of people screaming, of a bomb going off.

But it couldn’t be a bomb. The IRA was in peace negotiations with the British, there hadn’t been an incident for over a year, and bombs didn’t stop in mid-blast. There had been bombs in the Tube before—the mechanical voice would be saying, “Please exit up the escalator immediately,” not “Mind the gap.”

But if it wasn’t a bomb, what was it? And where had it come from? I looked up at the roof of the passage, but there wasn’t a grate or a vent, no water pipes running along the ceiling. I walked along the tunnel, sniffing the air, but there were only the usual smells—dust and damp wool and cigarette smoke, and, where the passage went up a short flight of stairs, a strong smell of oil.

A train rumbled in somewhere down the passage. The train. There had been one pulling in when it hit. It must be causing the wind somehow. I went out onto the platform and stood there looking down the tunnel, half-hoping, half-dreading it would happen again.

The train pulled in and stopped, and a handful of people got off. “Mind the gap!” the computerized voice said. The doors whooshed shut, and the train pulled out. A wind picked up the scraps of paper on the track and whirled them into the side walls, and I braced myself, my feet apart, but it was just an ordinary breeze, smelling of nothing in particular.

I went back out in the passage and examined the walls for doors, felt along the tiles for drafts, stood in the same place as before, waiting for another train to come in.

But there was nothing, and I was in the way. People going around me murmured “Sorry” over and over, which I have never been able to
get used to, even though I know it’s merely the British equivalent of “Excuse me.” It still sounded like they were apologizing, when I was the one blocking traffic. And I needed to get to the conference.

And whatever had caused the wind, it was probably just a fluke. The passages connecting the trains and the different lines and levels were like a rabbit warren. The wind could have come from anywhere. Maybe somebody on the Jubilee Line had been transporting a carton of rotten eggs. Or blood samples. Or both.

I went up to the Northern Line, caught a train that had just pulled in, and made it to the conference in time for the eleven o’clock session, but the episode must have unnerved me more than I’d admitted to myself. As I stood in the lobby pinning on my registration badge, the outside door opened, letting in a blast of air.

I flinched away from it and then stood there, staring blindly at the door, until the woman at the registration table asked, “Are you all right?”

I nodded. “Have the Old Man or Elliott Templeton registered yet?”

“An old man?” the woman said, bewilderedly.

“Not
an
old man,
the
Old Man,” I said impatiently. “Arthur Birdsall.”

“The morning session’s already started,” she said, looking through the ranked badges. “Have you looked in the ballroom?”

The Old Man had never attended a session in his life.

“Mr. Templeton’s here,” she said, still looking. “No, Mr. Birdsall hasn’t registered yet.”

“Daniel Drecker’s here,” Marjorie O’Donnell said, descending on me. “You heard about his daughter, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said, scanning the room for Elliott.

“She’s in an institution,” she said. “Schizophrenia.”

I wondered if she was telling me this because she thought I was acting unbalanced, too, but she added, “So, for heaven’s sake, don’t ask him about her. And don’t ask Peter Jamieson if Leslie’s here. They’re separated.”

“I won’t,” I said and escaped to the first session. Elliott wasn’t in the audience, or at lunch. I sat down next to John McCord, who lived in London, and said, without preamble, “I was in the Tube this morning.”

“Wretched, isn’t it?” McCord said. “And
so
expensive. What’s a day pass now? Two pounds fifty?”

“While I was in Charing Cross Station, there was this strange wind.”

McCord nodded knowingly. “The trains cause them. When they pull out of a station, they push the air in front of them,” he said, illustrating the pushing with this hands, “and because they fill the tunnel, it creates a slight vacuum in the train’s wake, and air rushes in behind to fill the vacuum, and it creates a wind. The same thing happens in reverse as trains pull into the station.”

“I know,” I said impatiently. “But this one was like an explosion, and it smelled—”

“It’s all the dirt down there. And the beggars. They sleep in the passages, you know. Some of them even urinate on the walls. I’m afraid the Underground’s deteriorated considerably in the past few years.”

“Everything in London has,” the woman across the table said. “Did you know there’s a Disney store in Regent Street?”

“And a Gap,” McCord said.

“Mind the Gap,” I said, but they were off on the subject of the Decline and Fall of London. I said I needed to go look for Elliott.

He was nowhere to be found. The afternoon session was starting. I sat down next to John and Irene Watson.

“You haven’t seen Arthur Birdsall or Elliott Templeton, have you?” I said, scanning the ballroom.

“Elliott was here before the morning session,” John said. “Stewart’s here.”