The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (2 page)

He’s even good at screwball comedy. Which brings us to:

SCREWBALL COMEDIES

I am addicted to movies of all kinds, from
A Beautiful Mind
to
The Searchers
to
The Others.
But my absolute favorite genre is the romantic comedy. I love the snappy bantering movies of the thirties and forties—
It Happened One Night
, and
My Favorite Wife
and
Bachelor Mother
and
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. His Girl Friday
is my favorite. Cary Grant’s line, “Maybe Bruce will let us stay with him,” is the funniest thing in any comedy ever, though the loon calling in
Bringing
Up Baby
and the nightclub scene in
The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer
are close seconds.

But I’m not a purist. I also love the new stuff:
While You Were Sleeping
and
Notting Hill
and
French Kiss
and
Return to Me
and
Love, Actually.
I even like the remake of Sabrina better than the original. (I know, heresy.) And, of course, I love
Father Goose
and
Walk, Don’t Run
and
How to Steal a Million.

What
I love about them (besides the fact that they occasionally seem to mirror my own life) is that they manage to be inventive and fun within a highly-structured form. They’re like sonnets, sort of, with happy endings, and I only wish there were more of them.

Since there
aren’t, I’ve had to write my own, and luckily, science fiction’s the perfect genre for screwball comedies. That’s because they’re
both very cutting-edge and very old-fashioned. (And Shakespearean—he invented the genre with Beatrice and Benedick in
Much Ado About Nothing.)
The screwball comedy takes place in a very modern world (gyroplanes, online dating, corporate committee meetings, L-5 space colonies), there’s lots of social commentary,
lots
of unintended consequences, and a general air of craziness that seems to fit the
future, but at its heart, it’s an old-fashioned love story. The first story I sold (except for some confessions stories and “The Secret of Santa Titicaca,” a story so bad no genre would willingly claim it) was a screwball comedy titled, fittingly enough, “Capra Corn,” and I’ve been writing (and living) them ever since. Which brings us to:

MY OWN BIZARRE LIFE

Writers are supposed to live exciting
lives, and I have: in the wilds of suburbia. I have sat on bleachers during gymnastics meets, attended Tupperware parties, made casseroles for potluck suppers, and sung in church choirs. The entire range of human experiences is present in a church choir, including but not restricted to jealousy, revenge, horror, pride, incompetence (the tenors have never been on the right note in the entire
history of church choirs, and the basses have never been on the right page), wrath, lust, and existential despair.

I have taken cats to the vet, watched my friends have their colors done, changed diapers, and chaperoned junior proms. All of this has given me a definite advantage when writing stories about strange worlds and alien intelligences. And everything else I got from:

AGATHA CHRISTIE

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha. She’s the master of misdirection, red, green, and blue herrings, making you feel like a complete idiot that you didn’t see who the murderer was, and, most of all, making you underestimate her. The reason
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
works is not that she brilliantly plants her clues in plain sight (which she does) or plays on our assumptions
about detective novels (which she also does, and not only in that book), but that she makes us think we’re reading a harmless English country house mystery, complete with a rich squire, a sinister butler, a nosy old maid, and an eccentric detective. In other words, we underestimate the book the same way her characters underestimate fussy Hercule Poirot or sweet old Miss Marple. Or Agatha herself.

My first introduction
to her was through the movie,
Murder on the Orient Express
, at which I disgraced myself by saying disgustedly about halfway through, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, they can’t all have done it!” I then raced to the library to read
The ABC Murders, Death on the Nile, After the Funeral, The Moving Finger, 4:50 from Paddington
, and the one that made everybody so mad:
The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd.
Critics, authors, and readers declared that she’d cheated (she hadn’t) and that she’d broken all the rules of civilized mystery writing (she had.) S.S. Van Dine was so incensed, he wrote up a list of rules, including “There shall be no romance,” and “Only one person shall have committed the murder,” rules which I believe Agatha tacked up above her desk and then proceeded to break, one
after the other.

And yet, in spite of that little episode, in spite of being knighted and writing the longest-running play in the history of the theater and making it onto the bestseller list even after she was dead (twice) and being involved in a personal mystery (she vanished without a trace and then turned up two weeks later at a hotel in Harrogate) which has never been solved, she remains
underestimated.

A good trick and one, like all of her tricks, that should be emulated whenever possible.

Note: I also love Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, particularly
Nine Tailors
and the Harriet Vane books:
Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night
, and
Busman’s Honeymoon
(to be read in that order), but Dorothy’s doing something totally different from Agatha. Her mystery plots
are hopeless, bogging down in train schedules, circumcisions, and omelets, but that’s because she’s no more interested in them than Agatha is in doing characters. What Dorothy’s interested in is writing comedies of manners and chronicling one of the great love stories of literature.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressible tourists. They yawned at
Balliol’s quad, T.E. Lawrence’s and Churchill’s portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc
²
on. Then the tour guide said, “And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,” and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

Finally, my biggest and most important influence has been:

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

I was
born into a
family that didn’t read and that didn’t own many books. My mother had a movie edition of
Gone with the Wind
, my grandmother subscribed to
Redbook
and
The Saturday Evening Post
, and the girl across the street had a copy of
A Little Princess
, and that was about it. Consequently, pretty much everything I read came from the public library, and I spent as much time there as I could.

It
was there that I discovered science fiction and
Anne of Green Gables
and Lenora Mattingly Weber and H.V. Morton’s
London
, which was where I first read about the St. Paul’s fire watch in World War II sleeping in the crypts of the cathedral during the day and putting out incendiaries on the roofs at night. I wrote
Doomsday Book
in the public library, and “Chance” and “A Letter from the Clearys,”
and I researched
Passage
and “Fire Watch” and “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know” there. The public library was where I read about the Hindenburg and Emily Dickinson and the curse of Tutankhamen.

When I was eleven, I decided to read my way through the library alphabetically just like Francie in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, and, in doing so, found James Agee’s
A Death in the Family
and Jane Austen
and Peter Beagle’s
A Fine and Private Place
before stumbling onto science fiction. And it was in the library that I found all sorts of things I wasn’t looking for at all—books on chaos theory and literary criticism, an article on body sniffers in the Blitz and one about Aberfan in Wales, where all the children had been killed when the coal tip slid down on the school, and scientific articles about
the EPR paradox and the effect of large particulates on the color of the stratosphere.

I couldn’t have
become a writer—or anything—without the public library, and it appears in some guise or other in every one of my stories. And quite a few of those stories are in this book. I hope you enjoy them.

Connie Willis
March 3, 2007

Cath refused to take the tube.

“You loved
it the last time
we were here,” I said, rummaging
through my
suitcase for a
tie.

“Correction.
You
loved it,” she said, brushing her short hair. “I thought it was dirty and smelly and dangerous.”

“You’re thinking of the New York subway. This is the London Underground.” The tie wasn’t there. I unzipped the side pocket and jammed
my hand down it. “You rode the tube the last time we were here.”

“I also carried my suitcase up five flights of stairs at that awful bed and breakfast we stayed at. I have no intention of doing that either.” She wouldn’t have to. The Connaught had a lift
and
a bellman.

“I
hated
the tube,” she said. “I only took it because we couldn’t afford taxis. And now we can.”

We certainly could. We could
also afford a hotel with carpet on the floor and a bathroom in our room instead of down the hall. A far cry from the—what was it called? It had had brown linoleum floors you hadn’t wanted to walk on in your bare feet, and you had to put coins in a meter above the bathtub to get hot water.

“What was the name of that place we stayed at?” I asked Cath.

“I’ve repressed it,” she said. “All I remember
is that the tube station had the name of a cemetery.”

“Marble Arch,” I said, “and it wasn’t named after a cemetery. It was named after the copy of the Roman arch of Constantine in Hyde Park.”

“Well, it sounded like a cemetery.”

“The Royal Hernia!” I said, suddenly remembering.

Cath grinned. “The Royal
Heritage.”

“The Royal Hernia of Marble Arch,” I said. “We should go visit it, just for old
times’ sake.”

“I doubt if it’s still there,” she said, putting on her earrings. “It’s been twenty years.”

“Of course it’s still there,” I said. “Scummy showers and all. Do you remember those narrow beds? They were just like coffins, only at least coffins have sides so you don’t roll off.” The tie wasn’t there. I started taking shirts out of the suitcase and piling them on the bed. “These aren’t
much better. It makes you wonder how the British have managed to reproduce all these years.”

“We seemed to manage all right,” Cath said, putting on her shoes. “What time does the conference start?”

“Ten,” I said, dumping socks and underwear onto the bed. “What time are you meeting Sara?”

“Nine-thirty,” she said, looking at her watch. “Will you have time to pick up the tickets for the play?”

“Sure,” I said. “The Old Man won’t show up before eleven.”

“Good,” she said. “Sara and Elliott can only go Saturday. They’ve got something tomorrow night, and we’ve got dinner with Milford Hughes’s widow and her sons Friday night. Is Arthur going with us to the play? Did you get in touch with him?”

“No, but I know the Old Man’ll want to go. What are we seeing?” I asked, giving up on the tie.

“
Ragtime
, if we can get tickets. It’s at the Adelphi. If not, try to get
The Tempest
or
Sunset Boulevard
, and if they’re sold out,
Endgames.
Hayley Mills is in it.”

“
Kismet
isn’t playing?”

She grinned again. “
Kismet
isn’t playing.”

“Which tube stop does it say for the Adelphi?”

“Charing Cross,” she said, consulting the map. “
Sunset Boulevard’s
at the Old Vic, and
The Tempest’s
at the Duke of
York. On Shaftesbury Avenue. You could get the tickets through a ticket agent. It would be a lot faster than going to the theaters.”

“Not on the tube, it won’t,” I said. “It’s a snap to go anywhere. And ticket agents are for tourists.”

She looked
skeptical. “Get third row if you can, but not on the sides. And no farther back than the dress circle.”

“Not the balcony?” I asked. The farthest,
highest seats had been all we could afford the first time we were here, so high up all you could see was the tops of the actors’ heads. When we’d gone to
Kismet
, the Old Man had spent the entire time leaning forward to look down the well-endowed Lalume’s Arabian costume through a pair of rental binoculars.

“
Not
the balcony,” Cath said, sticking an umbrella and the guidebook in her bag. “Put it
on the American Express, if they’ll take it. If not, the Visa.”

“Are you sure the third row’s a good idea?” I said. “Remember, the Old Man nearly got us thrown out of the upper balcony the last time, and there wasn’t even anybody else up there.”

Cath stopped putting things in her bag. “Tom,” she said, looking worried. “It’s been twenty years, and you haven’t seen Arthur in over five.”

“And
you think the Old Man will have grown up in the meantime?” I said. “Not a chance. This is the guy who got us thrown out of Graceland five years ago. He’ll still be the same.”

Cath looked like she was going to say something else, and then began putting stuff in her bag again. “What time is the cocktail party tonight?”

“Sherry party,” I said. “They have sherry parties here. Six. I’ll meet you
back here, okay? Or is that enough time for you and Sara to buy out the town and catch up on—what is it?—three years’ gossip?”

I’d seen Elliott and Sara last year in Atlanta and the year before that in Barcelona, but Cath hadn’t come with me to either conference. “Where are you doing all this shopping?” I asked.

“Harrods,” she said. “Remember the tea set I bought the first time we were here?
I’m going to buy the matching china. And a scarf at Liberty’s and a cashmere cardigan, all the things we couldn’t afford last time.” She looked at her watch again. “And I’d better get going. The traffic’s going to be bad in this rain.”