Locust. "But we're not underground at all," complains Helen.
"Patience is a virtue," murmurs Colonel Anderson, handing the ladies into the first-class compartment.
White walls, mahogany and mirrors, a good carpet; the carriage is an impersonation of a drawing-room, thinks Fido. The gas globes hanging from the ceiling give off a light that's wan but bright enough to read by, and a peculiar fume.
Helen leans against Fido and shivers pleasurably. "I should think it must be fearfully hazardous to combine fumes and sparks in an enclosed tunnel."
The tone amuses Fido; Helen's always delighted in even a slim possibility of danger. "I suppose one must trust in the scientists."
"If there should be an explosion, I'll carry you out in a trice," Anderson tells Helen. "Both of you," he corrects himself, "under my arms, like twin battering rams!"
Fido can't stop her eyebrows shooting up.
"Beg pardon, my imagination rather ran away with me there." His whiskers look more like a spaniel's ears than ever.
"You must excuse the colonel," murmurs Helen, laughing in Fido's ear. "We're a dreadfully lax lot on Malta; the sun evaporates all our Anglo proprieties."
But Helen, after childhood in Calcutta and adolescence in Florence, is the most un-English of Englishwomen; she's always waltzed her way around the rules of womanhood. It's a quality that Fido relished even when she was young, long before she ever did any hard thinking about the arbitrariness of those rules.
Helen is staring at a label on the window that bears a picture of a heart, and inside it, in Gothic lettering, The Dead Heart.
"It's a play," Fido tells her.
"Ah." A sigh. "I've been gone so long, I'm quite behind the times."
"The whole city's pockmarked with these irksome labels," Anderson mutters. "Really, advertising has had its day; the public can't be fooled anymore."
"At the theatre, by the by, don't you hate women who're afraid to laugh?" Helen asks Fido.
"Awfully," she says, grinning back at her. It's the surges of familiarity that she's finding strangest: as if the friends haven't been apart for a moment.
A piercing whistle makes Fido jump, and the carriage sways into move ment. All at once her dress feels soaked in the armpits and the small of the back. Her chest's a little tight; she makes herself take long breaths of the metallic air. The wheels start to thunder, the engine screams. The carriage is filling up with vapour, and she coughs violently; Anderson stands and wrestles with the window catch. "Breathe it in deeply," says Helen, one hand caressing Fido's shoulder blade.
The smoke feels poisonous, but then medicines often do; she does her best to fill her lungs and hold it in. The train's been swallowed up by darkness, and the gaslight flares up greenly. At this speed, there's a peculiar vibration, a sort of undulation of the thundering machine. Above them, she knows, there's more than twenty feet of packed London earth. How do the thirdclass passengers bear it in their open wagons? This isn't like a railway tunnel, because it shows no sign of coming to an end.
"More than a little oppressive, no?" she remarks, but the others show no sign of hearing her over the shrieking demons, and she shouldn't have spoken because now she's hacking so hard her lungs are on fire. Between the coughs, the wheezing is getting worse. She fumbles in her bag, claws the lining.
"Let me, let me," shouts Helen, taking the bag from her. "Is this little bottle—"
Fido undoes it with spasmodic fingers and puts it to her nose. The camphor and menthol make her eyes water, and she gasps. She takes a long drink that burns like vitriol. But already she can feel the laudanum calming her lungs a little. She finds a folded handkerchief and douses it in the mixture. Holding it to her face, she makes herself do nothing but breathe.
The train's stopped. Anderson is speaking in her ear, something about King's Cross, can she manage a little longer or should they alight here? She shakes her head, unable to speak. Her wretched lungs!
Another few minutes of jolting and shrieking, and then the train halts again: Euston. Anderson's helping her to her feet, and Helen's holding her other elbow. Up a long, twisting staircase—they all three stop whenever Fido's overtaken by a coughing fit. A male passenger's voice behind mutters a complaint, and Anderson turns to snap something about the lady's being unwell.
Finally they emerge on Gower Street. The sun's gone behind a thick veil of cloud, and it seems a little cooler.