Read The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories for Free Online Page B

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 placesettings.”
    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 postersas I went down the escalator. And
Les Miz.
    The Tempest
and the Hayley Mills thing,
Endgames
, were both at theatres 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 downmy 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 theold days, I thought grimly, Cath would have been at my side, making rapid calculationsto 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 straightto 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 tomake 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 steps and down the passage, glancing at my watch as I walked.
    Nine-thirty. I’d make it to the conference in plentyof 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. Deathlycold. 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 charnelhouse.
    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 thereon 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