The Best of Connie Willis (36 page)

I waded toward them through the crush, grabbing a glass of wine off a tray as I went, but it wasn’t the Old Man. It was the people who’d been at lunch. They were discussing, of all things, the Beatles, but at least it wasn’t the Decline and Fall.

“The three of them were talking about a reunion tour,” McCord was saying. “I suppose that’s all off now.”

“The Old Man took us on a Beatles tour,” I said. “Has anybody seen him? He insisted we re-create all the album covers. We nearly got killed crossing Abbey Road.”

“I don’t think he’s coming down from Cambridge till tomorrow,” McCord said. “It’s a long drive.”

The Old Man had driven us four hundred miles to see London Bridge. I peered over their heads, trying to spot the Old Man. I couldn’t see him, but I did spot Evers, which meant Sara and Elliott were still here. Cath was over by the door with Marjorie.

“It was just so
sad
about Linda McCartney,” the Disney woman said.

I took a swig of my wine and remembered too late this was a sherry party.

“How old was she?” McCord was asking.

“Fifty-three.”

“I know three women who’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer,” the Gap woman said. “
Three
. It’s dreadful.”

“One keeps wondering who’s next,” the other woman said.

“Or
what’s
next,” McCord said. “You heard about Stewart, didn’t you?”

I handed my sherry glass to the Disney woman, who looked at me, annoyed, and started through the crowd toward Cath, but now I couldn’t see her, either. I stopped, craning my neck to see over the crowd.

“
There
you are, you handsome thing!” Sara said, coming up behind me and putting her arm around my waist. “We’ve been looking all over for you!”

She kissed me on the cheek. “Elliott’s been fretting that you were going to make us all go see
Cats
. He loathes
Cats
, and everyone who comes to visit drags us to it. And you know how he frets over things. You didn’t, did you? Get tickets for
Cats
?”

“No,” I said, staring at her. She looked the same as always—her dark hair still tucked behind her ears, her eyebrows still arched mischievously.

This was the same old Sara who’d gone with us to
Kismet
, to Lake Havasu, to Abbey Road.

Cath was wrong. She might pick up subliminal signals about other people, but this time she was wrong. Sara wasn’t acting guilty or uneasy, wasn’t avoiding my eyes, wasn’t avoiding Cath.

“Where
is
Cath?” she asked, standing on tiptoe to peer over the crowd. “I have something I’ve got to tell her.”

“What?”

“About her china. We couldn’t find it today, did she tell you? Well, after I got home, I thought, ‘I’ll wager they have it at Selfridge’s.’ They’re always years behind the times. Oh, there she is.” She waved frantically. “I want to tell her before we leave,” she said, and took off through the crowd. “Find Elliott and tell him I’ll only be a sec. And tell him we aren’t seeing
Cats
,” she called back to me. “I don’t want him stewing all night. He’s over there somewhere.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the door, and I pushed my way between people till I found him, standing by the front door.

“You haven’t seen Sara, have you?” he said. “Evers is bringing his car round.”

“She’s talking to Cath,” I said. “She said she’ll be here in a minute.”

“Are you kidding? When those two get together—” He shook his head indulgently. “Sara said they had a wonderful time today.”

“Is the Old Man here yet?” I said.

“He called and said he couldn’t make it tonight. He said to tell you he’ll see us tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. We’ve scarcely seen him since he moved to Cambridge. We’re down in Wimbledon, you know.”

“And he hasn’t swooped down and kidnapped you to go see Dickens’s elbow or something?”

“Not lately. Oh, God, do you remember that time Sara mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle, and he dragged us up and down Baker Street, looking for Sherlock Holmes’s missing flat?”

I laughed, remembering him knocking on doors, demanding,
“What have you done with 221B, madam?” and deciding we needed to call in Scotland Yard.

“And then demanding to know what they’d done with the yard,” Elliott said, laughing.

“Did you tell him we’re all going to a play together Saturday?”

“Yes. You didn’t get tickets for
Cats
, did you?”

“I didn’t get tickets for anything,” I said. “I ran out of time.”

“Well,
don’t
get tickets for
Cats
. Or
Phantom
.”

Sara came running up, flushed and breathless. “I’m sorry. Cath and I got to talking,” she said. She gave me a smacking kiss on the lips. “Good-bye, you adorable hunk. See you Saturday.”

“Come
on
,” Elliott said. “You can kiss him all you like on Saturday.” He hustled her out the door. “And not
Les Miz
!” he shouted back to me.

I stood, smiling after them. You’re wrong, Cath, I thought. Look at them. Not only would Sara never have kissed me like that if she were having an affair, but Elliott wouldn’t have looked on complacently like that, and neither of them would have been talking about china, about
Cats
.

Cath had made a mistake. Her radar, usually so infallible, had messed up this time. Sara and Elliott’s marriage was fine. Nobody was having an affair, and we’d all have a great time Saturday night.

The mood persisted through the rest of the evening, in spite of Marjorie’s latching onto me and telling me all about the Decline and Fall of her father, who she was going to have to put in a nursing home, and our finding out that the pub that had had such great fish and chips the first time we’d been here had burned down.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cath said, standing on the corner where it had been. “Let’s go to the Lamb and Crown. I know it’s still there. I saw it on the way to Harrods this morning.”

“That’s on Wilton Place, isn’t it?” I said, pulling out my tube map. “That’s right across from Hyde Park Corner Station. We can take—”

“A taxi,” Cath said.

Cath didn’t say anything else about the affair she thought Sara was having, except to tell me they were going shopping again the next day. “Selfridge’s first, and then Reject China …” and I wondered if she had realized, seeing Sara at the party, that she’d made a mistake.

But in the morning, as I was leaving, she said, “Sara called and canceled while you were in the shower.”

“They can’t go to the play with us Saturday?”

“No,” Cath said. “She isn’t going shopping with me today. She said she had a headache.”

“She must have drunk some of that awful sherry,” I said. “So what are you going to do? Do you want to come have lunch with me?”

“I think it’s someone at the conference.”

“Who?” I said, lost.

“The man Sara’s having an affair with,” she said, picking up her guidebook. “If it was someone who lived here, she wouldn’t risk seeing him while we’re here.”

“She’s
not
having an affair,” I said. “I saw her. I saw Elliott. He—”

“Elliott doesn’t know.” She jammed the guidebook savagely into her bag. “Men never notice anything.”

She began stuffing things into her bag—her sunglasses, her umbrella. “We’re having dinner with the Hugheses tonight at seven. I’ll meet you back here at five-thirty.” She picked up her umbrella.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “They’ve been married longer than we have. She’s crazy about Elliott. Why would somebody with that much to lose risk it all by having an affair?”

She turned and looked at me, still holding the umbrella. “I don’t know,” she said bleakly.

“Look,” I said, suddenly sorry for her, “why don’t you come and have lunch with the Old Man and me? He’ll probably get us thrown out like he did at that Indian restaurant. It’ll be fun.”

She shook her head. “You and Arthur will want to catch up, and I don’t want to wait on Selfridge’s.” She looked up at me.

“When you see Arthur—” She paused, looking the way she did when she was thinking about Sara.

“You think he’s having an affair, too, oh Madame Knows-All, Sees-All?”

“No,” she said. “He was older than us.”

“Which was why we called him the Old Man,” I said, “and you think he’ll have gotten a cane and grown a long white beard?”

“No,” she said, and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I think if they have my china at Selfridge’s, I’ll buy twelve place settings.”

She was wrong, and I would prove it to her. We would have a great time at the play, and she would realize Sara couldn’t be having an affair. If I could get the tickets.
Ragtime
had been sold out, which meant
The Tempest
was likely to be, too, and there weren’t a lot of other choices, since Elliott had said no to
Sunset Boulevard
. And
Cats
, I thought, looking at the theater posters as I went down the escalator. And
Les Miz
.

The Tempest
and the Hayley Mills thing,
Endgames
, were both at theaters close to Leicester Square. If I couldn’t get tickets at either, there was a ticket agent in Lisle Street.

The Tempest
was sold out, as I’d expected. I walked over to the Albery.

Endgames
had five seats in the third row center of the orchestra. “Great,” I said, and slapped down my American Express, thinking how much things had changed.

In the old days I would have been asking if they didn’t have anything in the sherpa section, seats so steep we had to clutch the arms of our seats to keep from plummeting to our deaths and we had to rent binoculars to even see the stage.

And in the old days, I thought grimly, Cath would have been at my
side, making rapid calculations to see if our budget could afford even the cheap seats. And now I was getting tickets in third row center, and not even asking the price, and Cath was on her way to Selfridge’s in a taxi.

The girl handed me the tickets. “What’s the nearest tube station?” I asked.

“Tottenham Court Road,” she said.

I looked at my tube map. I could take the Central Line over to Holborn and then a train straight to South Kensington. “How do I get there?”

She waved an arm full of bracelets vaguely north. “You go up St. Martin’s Lane.”

I went up St. Martin’s Lane, and up Monmouth, and up Mercer and Shaftesbury and New Oxford. There clearly had to be closer stations than Tottenham Court Road, but it was too late to do anything about it now. And I wasn’t about to take a taxi.

It took me half an hour to make the trek, and another ten to reach Holborn, during which I figured out that the Lyric had been less than four blocks from Piccadilly Circus. I’d forgotten how deep the station was, how long the escalators were. They seemed to go down for miles. I rattled down the slatted wooden rungs and down the passage, glancing at my watch as I walked.

Nine-thirty. I’d make it to the conference in plenty of time. I wondered when the Old Man would get there. He had to drive down from Cambridge, I thought, going down a short flight of steps behind a man in a tweed jacket, which was an hour and a—

I was on the bottom step when the wind hit. This time it was not so much a blast as a sensation of a door opening onto a cold room.

A cellar, I thought, groping for the metal railing. No. Colder. Deathly cold. A meat locker. A frozen food storage vault. With a sharp, unpleasant chemical edge, like disinfectant. A sickening smell.

No, not a refrigerated vault, I thought, a biology lab, and recognized the smell as formaldehyde. And something under it. I shut my
mouth, held my breath, but the sweet, sickening stench was already in my nostrils, in my throat. Not a biology lab, I thought in horror. A charnel house.

It was over, the door shutting as suddenly as it had opened, but the bite of the icy air was still in my nostrils, the nasty taste of formaldehyde still in my mouth. Of corruption and death and decay.

I stood there on the bottom step taking shallow, swallowing breaths, while people walked around me. I could see the man in the tweed jacket, rounding the corner in the passage ahead. He
must
have felt it, I thought. He was right in front of me. I started after him, dodging around a pair of children, an Indian woman in a sari, a housewife with a string bag, finally catching up to him as he turned out onto the crowded platform.

“Did you feel that wind?” I asked, taking hold of his sleeve. “Just now, in the tunnel?”

He looked alarmed, and then, as I spoke, tolerant. “You’re from the States, aren’t you? There’s always a slight rush of air as a train enters one of the tunnels. It’s perfectly ordinary. Nothing to be alarmed about.” He looked pointedly at my hand on his sleeve.

“But this one was ice-cold,” I persisted. “It—”

“Ah, yes, well, we’re very near the river here,” he said, looking less tolerant. “If you’ll excuse me.” He freed his arm. “Have a pleasant holiday,” he said and walked away through the crowd to the farthest end of the platform.

I let him go. He clearly hadn’t felt it. But he had to, I thought. He was right in front of me.