"Donald, you don't understand." Susan walked over to him. She seemed to have forgotten their previous dialogue. "It was absolutely terrifying. It's not as bad up here in town, but along the coast- the seas are coming right over the front, the beach road out to the villa isn't there any more. That's why we couldn't get anyone to come and help us. There are pieces of concrete the size of this room moving in and out on the tide. Peter had to get one of the farmers to tow us across, the field with his tractor."
Maitland looked at his watch. It was 6 o'clock, time for him to be on his way if he were to find a hotel for the night-though it looked as if most London hotels would be filled up.
"Strange," he commented. He started to move for the door but Susan intercepted him, her face strained and flat, her long dark hair pushed back off her forehead, showing her narrow temple bones. "Donald, please. Don't go yet. I'm worried about it. And there's all this dust."
Maitland watched it settling toward the carpet, filtering through the yellow light like mist in a cloud chamber. "I wouldn't worry, Susan," he said. "It'll blow over." He gave her a weak smile and walked to the door. She followed him for a moment and then stopped, watching him silently. As he turned the handle he realized that be bad already begun to forget her, his mind withdrawing all contact with hers, erasing all memories.
"See you some time," he managed to say. Then he waved and stepped into the corridor, closing the door on a last glimpse of her stroking back her long hair, her eyes turning to the bar.
Collecting his suitcases from the service room on the floor above, be took the elevator down to the foyer and asked the porter to order a taxi. The streets outside were empty, the red dust lying thickly on the grass in the square, a foot deep against the walls at the far end. The trees switched and quivered under the impact of the wind, and small twigs and branches littered the roadway. While the taxi was coming he phoned London Airport, and after a long wait was told that all flights had been indefinitely suspended. Tickets were being refunded at booking offices and new bookings could only be made from a date to be announced later.
Maitland had changed all but a few pound notes into Canadian dollars. Rather than go to the trouble of changing it back again, he arranged to spend the next day or two until he could book a passage on one of the transatlantic liners with a close friend called Andrew Symington, an electronics engineer who worked for the Air Ministry.
Symington and his wife lived in a small house in Swiss Cottage. As the taxi made its way slowly through the traffic in Park Lane- the east wind had turned the side streets into corridors of highpressure air that rammed against the stream of cars, forcing them down to a cautious fifteen or twenty miles an hour-Maitland pictured the siy ribbing the Symingtons would give him when they discovered that his long-expected departure for Canada had been abruptly postponed.
Andrew had warned him not to abandon his years of work at the Middlesex simply to escape from Susan and his sense of failure in having become involved with her. Maitland lay back in his seat, looking at the reflection of himself in the plate glass behind the driver, trying to decide how far Andrew had been right. Physiognomically he certainly appeared to be the exact opposite of the emotionally-motivated cycloid personality. Tall, and slightly stooped, his face was thin and firm, with steady eyes and a strong jaw. If anything he was probably overresolute, too inflexible, a victim of his own rational temperament, viewing himself with the logic he applied in his own laboratory. How far this had made him happy was hard to decide…
Horns sounded ahead of them and cars were slowing down in both traffic lanes. A moment later a brilliant catherine wheel of ffickering light fell directly out of the air into the roadway in front of them.
Braking sharply, the driver pulled up without warning, and Maitland pitched forward against the glass pane, bruising his jaw viciously. As he stumbled back into the seat, face clasped in his hands, a vivid cascade of sparks played over the hood of the taxi. A line of power cables had come down in the wind and were arcing onto the vehicle, the gusts venting from one of the side streets tossing them into the air and then flinging them back onto the hood.
Panicking, the driver opened his door. Before he could steady himself the wind caught the door and wrenched it back, dragging him out onto the road. He stumbled to his feet by the front wheel, tripping over the long flaps of his overcoat. The sparking cables whipped down onto the hood and flailed across him like an enormous phosphorescent lash.
Still holding his face, Maitland leaped out of the cabin and jumped back onto the pavement, watching the cables flick backward and forward across the vehicle. The traffic had stopped, and a small crowd gathered among the stalled cars, watching at a safe distance as the thousands of sparks cataracted across the roadway and showered down over the twitching body of the driver.
An hour later, when he reached the Symingtons', the bruise on Maitland's jaw had completely stiffened the left side of his face. Soothing it with an icebag, he sat in an armchair in the lounge, sipping whiskey and listening to the steady drumming of the wind on the wooden shutters across the windows.
"Poor devil. God knows if I'm supposed to attend the inquest. I should be on a boat within a couple of days."
"Doubt if you will," Symington said. "There's nothing on the Atlantic at present. The _Queen Elizabeth_ and the _United States_ both turned back for New York today when they were only fifty miles out. This morning a big supertanker went down in the channel and we couldn't get a single rescue ship or plane to it."
"How long has the wind kept up now?" Dora Symington asked. She was a plump, dark-haired girl, expecting her first baby.
"About a fortnight," Symington said. He smiled warmly at his wife. "Don't worry, though, it won't go on forever."
"Well, I hope not," his wife said. "I can't even get out for a walk, Donald. And everything seems so dirty."
"This dust, yes," Maitland agreed. "It's all rather curious."
Symington nodded, watching the windows pensively. He was ten years older than Maitland, a small balding man with a wide round cranium and intelligent eyes.
When they had chatted together for about half an hour he helped his wife up to bed and then came down to Maitland, closing the doors and wedging them with pieces of felt.
"Dora's getting near her time," he told Maitland. "It's a pity all this excitement has come up."
With Dora gone, Maitland realized how bare the room seemed, and noticed that all the Symingtons' glassware and ornaments, as well as an entire wall of books, had been packed away.
"You two moving house?" he asked, pointing to the empty shelves.
Symington shook his head. "No, just taking a few precautions. Dora left the bedroom window slightly open this morning and a flying mirror damn near guillotined her. If the wind gets much stronger some really big things are going to start moving."
Something about Symington's tone caught Maitland's attention.
"Do they expect it to get much stronger?" he asked.
"Well, as a matter of interest it's increasing by about five miles an hour each day. Of course it won't go on increasing indefinitely at that rate or we'll all be blown off the face of the earth-quite literally-but one can't be certain it'll begin to subside just when our particular patience has been exhausted." He filled his glass with whiskey, tipped in some water and then sat down facing Maitland, examining the bruise on his jaw. The dark swelling reached from his chin cleft up past the cheekbone to his temple.
Maitland nodded, listening to the rhythmic batter of the shutters above the steady drone of the wind. He realized that he had been too preoccupied with his abortive attempt to escape from England to more than notice the existence of the wind. At the airport he had regarded it as merely one facet of the weather, waiting, with the typical impatient optimism of every traveler, for it to die down and let him get on with the important business of boarding his aircraft.