The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories by Connie Willis
“Look,” I said, wishing there weren’t all these people around. “Something peculiar happened to me in Charing Cross Station yesterday. You know the winds that blow through the tunnels when the trains come in?”
“I certainly do. Dreadful drafty places—”
“Exactly,” I said. “It’s the drafts I want you to see. Feel. They—”
“And catch my death of cold? No, thank you.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “These weren’t ordinary drafts. I was heading for the Northern Line platform, and—”
“You can tell me about it at lunch.” He turned back to the others. “Where shall we go?”
He had never, ever, in all the years I’d known him, asked anybody where to go for lunch. I blinked stupidly at him.
“How about the Bangkok House?” Elliott said.
The Old Man shook his head. “Their food’s too spicy. It always makes me bloat.”
“There’s a sushi place round the corner,” one of the admiring circle volunteered.
“Sushi!” he said, in a tone that put an end to the discussion.
I tried again. “Yesterday I was in Charing Cross Station, and this wind, this blast hit me that smelled like sulfur. It—”
“It’s the damned smog,” the Old Man said. “Too many cars. Too many people. It’s got nearly as bad as it was in the old days, when there were coal fires.”
Coal, I thought. Could that have been the smell I couldn’t identify? Coal smelled of sulfur.
“The inversion layer makes it worse,” the admirer who’d suggested sushi said.
“Inversion layer?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, pleased to have been noticed. “London’s in a shallow depression that causes inversion layers. That’s when a layer of warm air above the ground traps the surface air under it, so the smoke and particulates collect—”
“I thought we were going to lunch,” the Old Man said petulantly.
“Remember the time we tried to find out what had happened to Sherlock Holmes’ address?” I said. “This is an even stranger mystery.”
“That’s right,” he said. “221B Baker Street. I’d forgotten that. Do you remember the time I took you on a tour of Sir Thomas More’s head? Elliott, tell them what Sara said in Canterbury.”
Elliott told them, and they roared with laughter, the Old Man included. I half expected somebody to say, “Those were the days.”
“Tom, tell everybody about that time we went to see Kismet,” the Old Man said.
“We’ve got tickets for Endgames for the five of us for tomorrow night,” I said, even though I knew what was coming.
He was already shaking his head. “I never go to plays anymore. The theatre’s gone to hell like everything else. Lot of modernist nonsense.” he smacked his hands on the arms of the easy chair. “Lunch! Did we decide where we’re going?”
“What about the New Delhi Palace?” Elliott said.
“Can’t handle Indian food,” the Old Man, who had once gotten us thrown out of the New Delhi Palace by dancing with the Tandoori chicken, said. “Isn’t there anywhere that serves plain, ordinary food?”
“Wherever we’re going, we need to make up our minds,” the admirer said. “The afternoon session starts at two.”
“We can’t miss that,” the Old Man said. He looked around the circle. “So where are we going? Tom, are you coming to lunch with us?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I wish you’d come with me. It would be like old times.”
“Speaking of old times,” the Old Man said, turning back to the group, “I still haven’t told you about the time I got thrown out of Kismet. What was that harem girl’s name, Elliott?”
“Lalume,” Elliott said, turning to look at the Old Man, and I made my escape.
An inversion layer. Holding the air down so it couldn’t escape, trapping it belowground so that smoke and particulates, and smells, became concentrated, intensified.
I took the tube back to Holborn and went down to the Central Line to look at the ventilation system. I found a couple of wall grates no larger than the size of a theatre handbill and a louvered vent two-thirds of the way down the west-bound passage, but no fans, nothing that moved the air or connected it with the outside.
There had to be one. The deep stations went down hundreds of feet. They couldn’t rely on nature recirculating the air, especially with diesel fumes and carbon monoxide from the traffic up above. There must be ventilation. But some of these tube stations had been built as long ago as 1880s, and Holborn looked like it hadn’t been repaired since then.
I went out into the large room containing the escalators and stood, looking up. It was open all the way to the ticket machines at the top, and the station had wide doors on three sides, all open to the outside.
Even without ventilation, the air would eventually make its way up and out onto the streets of London. Wind would blow in from outside, and rain, and the movement of the people hurrying through the station, up the escalators, down the passages, would circulate it. But if there was an inversion layer, trapping the air close to the ground, keeping it from escaping—
Pockets of carbon monoxide and deadly methane accumulated in coal mines. The tube was a lot like a mine, with its complicated bendings and turnings of its tunnels. Could pockets of air have accumulated in the train tunnels, becoming more concentrated, more lethal as time went by?
The inversion layer would explain why there were winds but not what had caused them in the first place. An IRA bombing, like I had thought when I felt the first one? That would explain the blast and the smell of explosives, but not the formaldehyde. Or the stifling smell of dirt in Charing Cross.
A collapse of one of the tunnels? Or a train accident?
I made the long trek back up to the station and asked the guard next to the ticket machines, “Do these tunnels ever collapse?”
“Oh, no, sir, they’re quite safe.” He smiled reassuringly. “There’s no need to worry.”
“But there must be accidents occasionally,” I said.
“I assure you, sir, the London Underground is the safest in the world.”
“What about bombings?” I asked. “The IRA—”
“The IRA has signed the peace agreement,” he said, looking at me suspiciously.
A few more questions, and I was likely to find myself arrested as an IRA bomber. I would have to ask the Old—Elliott. And in the meantime, I could try to find out if there were winds in all the stations or just a few.
“Can you show me how to get to the Tower of London?” I asked him, extending my tube map like a tourist.
“Yes, sir, you take the Central Line, that’s this red line, to Bank,” he said, tracing his finger along the map, “and then change to the District and Circle. And don’t worry. The London Underground is perfectly safe.”
Except for the winds, I thought, getting on the escalator. I got out a pen and marked an X on the stations I’d been to as I rode down. Marble Arch, Charing Cross, Sloane Square.
I hadn’t been to Russell Square. I rode there and waited in the passages and then on both platforms through two trains. There wasn’t anything at Russell Square, but on the Metropolitan Line at St. Pancras there was the same shattering blast as at Charing Cross—heat and the acrid smells of sulfur and violent destruction.
There wasn’t anything at Barbican, or Aldgate, and I thought I knew why. At both of them the tracks were above-ground, with the platform open to the air. The winds would disperse naturally instead of being trapped, which meant I could eliminate most of the suburban stations.
But St. Paul’s and Chancery Lane were both underground, with deep, drafty tunnels, and there was nothing in either of them except a faint scent of diesel and mildew. There must be some other factor at work.
It isn’t the line they’re on, I thought, riding toward Warren Street. Marble Arch and Holborn were on the Central Line, but Charing Cross wasn’t, and neither was St. Pancras. Maybe it was the conversion of th
Those are the stations I should be checking, I thought, the ones where multiple lines meet, the ones honeycombed with tunnels and passages and turns. Monument, I thought, looking at the circles where green and purple and red lines converged. Baker Street and Moorgate.
Baker Street was closest, but hard to get to. Even though I was only two stops away, I’d have to switch over at Euston, take the Northern going the other way back to St. Pancras, and catch the Bakerloo. I was glad Cath wasn’t here to say, “I thought you said it was easy to get anywhere on the tube.”
Cath! I’d forgotten all about meeting her at the hotel so we could go to dinner with the Hughes.
What time was it? Only five, thank God. I looked hastily at the map. Good. Northern down to Leicester Square and then the Piccadilly Line, and who says it isn’t easy to get anywhere on the tube? I’d be to the Connaught in less than half an hour.
And when I got there I’d tell Cath about the winds, even if she did hate the tube. I’d tell her about all of it, the Old Man and the charnel-house smell and the old man in the plaid jacket.
But she wasn’t there. She’d left a note on the pillow of my bed. “Meet you at Grimaldi’s. 7 p.m.”
No explanation. Not even a signature, and the note looked hasty, scribbled. What if Sara called? I wondered, a thought as chilly as the wind in Marble Arch. What if Cath had been right about her, the way she’d been right about the Old Man?
But when I got to Grimaldi’s, it turned out she’d only been shopping. “The woman in the china department at Fortnum and Mason’s told me about a place in Bond Street that specialized in discontinued patterns.”
Bond Street. It was a wonder we hadn’t run into each other. But she wasn’t in the tube station, I thought with a flash of resentment. She was safely above-ground in a taxi.
“They didn’t have it either,” she said, “but the clerk suggested I try a shop next door to the Portmerion store which was clear out in Kensington. It took the rest of the day. How was the conference? Was Arthur there?”
You know he was, I thought. She had foreseen his having gotten old, she’d tried to warn me that first morning in the hotel, and I hadn’t believed her.
“How was he?” Cath asked.
You already know, I thought bitterly. Your antennae pick up vibrations from everybody. Except your husband.
And even if I tried to tell her, she’d be too wrapped up in her precious china pattern to even hear me.
“He’s fine,” I said. “We had lunch and then spent the whole afternoon together. He hadn’t changed a bit.”
“Is he going to the play with us?”
“No,” I said and was saved by the Hugheses coming in right then, Mrs. Hughes, looking frail and elderly, and her strapping sons Milford Junior and Paul and their wives.
Introductions all around, and it developed that the blonde with Milford Junior wasn’t his wife, it was his fiancé. “Barbara and I just couldn’t talk to each other anymore,” he confided to me over cocktails. “All she was interested in was buying things, clothes, jewelry, furniture.”
China, I thought, looking across the room at Cath.
At dinner I was seated between Paul and Milford Jr., who spent the meal discussing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.
“And now Scotland wants to separate,” Milford said. “Who’s next? Sussex? The City of London?”
“At least perhaps then we’d see decent governmental services. The current state of the streets and the transportation system—”
“I was in the tube today,” I said, seizing the opening. “Do either of you know if Charing Cross has ever been the site of a train accident?”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Milford said. “The entire system’s a disgrace. Dirty, dangerous—the last time I rode the tube, a thief tried to pick my pocket on the escalator.”
“I never go down in the tube anymore,” Mrs. Hughes put in from the end of the table where she and Cath were deep in a discussion of china shops in Chelsea. “I haven’t since Milford died.”
“There are beggars everywhere,” Paul said. “Sleeping on the platforms, sprawled in the passages. It’s nearly as bad as it was during the Blitz.”
The Blitz. Air raids and incendiaries and fires. Smoke and sulfur and death.
“The Blitz?” I said.
“During Hitler’s bombing of London in World War II, masses of people sheltered in the tubes,” Milford said. “Along the tracks, on the platforms, even on the escalators.”
“Not that it was any safer than staying above-ground,” Paul said.
“The shelters were hit?” I said eagerly.
Paul nodded. “Paddington. And Marble Arch. Forty people were killed in Marble Arch.”
Marble Arch. Blast and blood and terror.
“What about Charing Cross?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Milford said, losing interest. “They should pass legislation keeping beggars out of the Underground. And requiring cabbies to speak understandable English.”
The Blitz. Of course. That would explain the smell of gunpowder or whatever it was. And the blast. A high-explosive bomb.
But the Blitz had been over fifty years ago. Could the air from a bomb blast have stayed down in the tube all those years without dissipating?
There was one way to find out. The next morning I took the tube to Tottenham Court Road, where there was a whole street of bookstores, and asked for a book about the history of the Underground in the Blitz.
“The Underground?” the girl at Foyle’s, the third place I tried, said vaguely. “The Tube Museum might have something.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
She didn’t know, and neither did the ticket vendor back at the tube station, but I remembered seeing a poster for it on the platform at Oxford Circus during my travels yesterday. I consulted my tube map, took the train to Victoria, and changed for Oxford Circus, where I checked five platforms before I found it.
Covent Garden. The London Transport Museum. I checked the map again, took the Central Line across to Holborn, transferred to the Piccadilly Line, and went to Covent Garden.
And apparently it had been hit, too, because a gust of face-singeing heat struck me before I was a third of the way down the tunnel. There was no smell of explosives, though, or of sulfur or dust. Just ash and fire and hopeless desperation that it was all, all burning down.
The scent of it was still with me as I hurried upstairs and out into the market, through the rows of carts selling T-shirts and postcards and toy double-decker buses, to the Transport Museum.
It was full of T-shirts and postcards, too, all sporting the Underground symbol or replicas of the tube map. “I need a book on the tube during the Blitz,” I asked a boy across a counter stacked with “Mind the Gap” placemats and playing cards.
“The Blitz?” he said vaguely.
“World War II,” I said, which didn’t evoke any recognition either.
He waved a hand loosely to the left. “The books are over there.”
They weren’t. They were on the far wall, past a rack of posters of tube ads from the Twenties and Thirties, and most of what books they had were about trains, but I finally found two histories of the tube and a paperback called London in Wartime. I bought them all and a notebook with a tube map on the cover.
The Transport Museum had a snack bar. I sat down at one of the plastic tables and began taking notes. Nearly all the tube stations had been used as shelters, and a lot of them had been hit—Euston Station, Aldwych, Monument. “In the aftermath of the bombing, the acrid smell of brick dust and cordite was everywhere,” the paperback said. Cordite. That was what I had smelled.
Marble Arch had taken a direct hit, the bomb bursting like a grenade in one of the passages, ripping tiles off the walls as it exploded, sending them slicing through the people sheltered there. Which ex
I looked up Holborn. There were several references to its having been used as a shelter, but nothing in any of the books that said it had taken a hit.
Charing Cross had, twice. It had been hit by a high-explosive bomb, and then by a V-2 rocket. The bomb had broken water mains and loosed an avalanche of dirt down onto the room containing the escalators. That was the damp earthiness I’d smelled—mud from the roof collapsing.
Nearly a dozen stations had been hit the night of May tenth, 1941: Cannon Street, Paddington, Blackfriars, Liverpool Street—
Covent Garden wasn’t on the list. I looked it up in the paperback. The station hadn’t been hit, but incendiaries had fallen all around Covent Garden, and the whole area had been on fire. Which meant that Holborn wouldn’t have to have taken a direct hit either. There could have been a bombing nearby, with lots of deaths, that was responsible for Holborn’s charnelhouse smell. And the fact that there had been fires all around Covent Garden fit with the fact that there hadn’t been sulfur, or concussion.
It all fit—the smell of mud and cordite in Charing Cross, of smoke in Cannon Street, of blast and blood in Marble Arch. The winds I was feeling were the winds of the Blitz, trapped there by London’s inversion layer, caught belowground with no way out, nowhere to go, held and recirculated and intensified through the years in the mazelike tunnels and passages and pockets of the tube. It all fit.
And there was a way to test it. I copied a list of all the stations I hadn’t been to that had been hit—Blackfriars, Monument, Paddington, Liverpool Street. Praed Street, Bounds Green, Trafalgar Square and Balham had taken direct hits. If my theory was correct, the winds should definitely be there.
I started looking for them, using the tube map on the cover of my notebook. Bounds Green was far north on the Piccadilly Line, nearly to the legendary Cockfosters, and Balham was nearly as far south on the Northern Line. I couldn’t find either Praed Street or Trafalgar Square. I wondered if those stations had been closed or given other names. The Blitz had, after all, been fifty years ago.
Monument was the closest. I could get there by way of the Central Line and then follow the Circle Line around to Liverpool Street and from there go on up to Bounds Green. Monument had been down near the docks—it should smell like smoke, too, and the river water they’d sprayed on the fire, and burning cotton and rubber and spices. A warehouse full of pepper had burned. That odor would be unmistakable.