King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  When a railway policeman came to move them on, an officious, spiteful man, Tom thought, they went two stations down the Central Line to Holborn. The best pitch was free from 3.30 onwards. Peter suggested keeping on until half an hour into the rush hour but no longer as it looked like being particularly crowded today. Someone who put 20p into the guitar case also left his Evening Standard, possibly as part-payment or just to be rid of it.

  Huge type on the front page announced a bomb disaster in west London. Tom read just enough of it to see that it was a long way from West Hampstead and no one he knew had been killed or injured. The IRA perhaps or some Middle Eastern group, there were plenty of them. Looking about him at the great press of people, the escalator that was a river of people flowing on and on, the crowds that streamed down the stairs so that if a train was held up there would be room for no more to squeeze on to the platform, he wondered why a terrorist group had never thought of putting a bomb in the tube.

  Perhaps they had and it had been kept dark. Tom turned his eyes from the paper and started singing the song from Don Giovanni that is always called the Champagne Aria. It was very fast and wild and Peter and Jay, laughing, gave up their attempts at accompanying him.

  In another part of Oxford Circus, a station where three lines converge, where there are fourteen escalators, four and a half miles of passages and platforms and through which nearly 200,000 passengers pass each day, a man was taking photographs.

  People do not like being photographed on their way to or from work. They are not on holiday on a beach. Most of them did nothing about it but hurried on, some scowling, one, a child, making a face at the camera, holding up his hands as if they were big ears and waggling his fingers.

  The photographer was a dark young man with a beard and very blue eyes. He was dressed in black – black jeans and sweater. He began handing cards to some of the people who had let him take their picture. The cards had nothing on them but apparently meaningless hieroglyphics and they were thrown to the ground to add to the litter that so distresses London Transport.

  He turned his lens on a man who came striding through the concourse, his collar turned up, his hat pulled well down. Hat and collar together were insufficient to hide an exceptionally ugly face, among other unattractive features a spoonbill nose and inadequately repaired harelip.

  The man went up to the photographer.

  ‘I want that film.’

  The photographer smiled. He seemed pleased, satisfied, relieved.

  ‘I said I want that film.’

  ‘You don't want your lovely face on record?’

  ‘That's right. Now give me that film, please.’

  People passing turned to look. This was more interesting than being snapped and given a card.

  ‘I'm at least as strong as you,’ the photographer said, and thoughtfully, ‘maybe stronger. But I'll give you the film gladly on one condition. That you'll come up and have a drink with me.’

  He opened the camera, took out the film and handed it with another smile to the man with the spoonbill nose.

  7

  The identity of her children's fathers was unknown to Tina Darne. She knew they had different fathers and she knew that in each case there was only a certain number of possibilities, but beyond that all was obscure. It was her big secret. Tina had no moral sense about this question, no feeling that children ought to know who their fathers were or should be fathered by the men their mothers lived with or were married to. This seemed to her so much humbug. The reason for her secrecy was that if Brian thought there was any doubt about Jasper and Bienvida's paternity he might stop paying her the £50 a week child support.

  One of those who must never never know was Tina's mother. Tina regarded her mother as a kind of insurance policy and her house as a bolthole. Finding out the truth about Jasper and Bienvida might finally militate against Cecilia Darne's view that a child should always be able to find a home with its parents. Tina had found a home with her parent, her father having died when she was fifteen, on every occasion when other roofs had failed her. The last time was for the three months before she encountered Jarvis in Fawley Road. Brian had thrown her out for what he inaccurately called adultery.

  Tina had never been married, though her mother had never given up hope, and did not give it up now, that a wedding would one day take place. Cecilia Darne had loved Brian. He was the first responsible man her daughter had ever known. She thought it quite wonderful that this kind man, who was not married, who had a job, who was on Lambeth Council's housing list, actually wanted Tina to go and live with him. It was the first step, she believed, in the direction of marriage, for Mrs Darne – necessarily with a daughter like Tina – had moved with the times. Those views she had been taught in the twenties while a young girl, that men do not love or respect, still less marry, women who have ‘given themselves’ to them, she had been obliged to revise. She saw it happening all around her. She read about it and saw it on television.

  Indeed, it now seemed to be the case that men did not marry women unless they had had sexual relations with them beforehand. Brian would marry Tina, it was only a matter of time. Perhaps he would wait until a baby was on the way, for Mrs Darne had not failed to notice that these days extramarital pregnancy, once a horrible disgrace, was often the loudly publicized occasion for a wedding, with the bride, far from ashamed of herself, carrying all proudly before her.

  Brian Elphick had been on Lambeth's housing list for twelve years, having insinuated himself on to it when engaged to a woman he never married. Now he lied to the housing department about having lived all that time with an old aunt, since dead, and got a friend who kept a garage in the dead woman's street to swear to having seen him there daily. The flat he was offered was in a nasty area and in a tower block but neither he nor Tina minded about that. Cecilia Darne was very happy for Tina.

  She had never heard of Peggy Guggenheim, nor of her boast that she had slept with every man she had ever known. If she had discovered that Tina could have said much the same she would have been deeply upset. Tina might have told her mother this, during one of their evenings of confidences, but it had never occurred to her, she being neither proud nor ashamed of it, nor even thinking it very out of the ordinary.

  Thus Jasper's father might have been the man who was painting the flats and who came in for a cup of tea, or the old lover whom she happened to run into in Denmark Hill, or the neighbour who was moving out of Flat 16 and who came up to say goodbye while his girfriend was packing their furniture into the rented van. The only certainty was that it was not Brian, for Brian had been away during that crucial week of Tina's cycle, doing an electrical job in Aberdeen.

  For Brian to be certain he was the father of any child of Tina's, for anyone to know he was the father of any child of Tina's, he would have had to keep her for months on an island inhabited only by the pair of them. Brian wasn't even away when Bienvida was conceived, but ill with flu and not inclined for sexual activity. He begged her not to miss the party they were invited to on his account, so she made him a hot drink, turned on the TV and, making no bones about it, said she would be back in the morning.

  Tina got drunk and remembered very little of what happened after midnight. She woke up in bed with a man with a red beard, but from the snide remarks and sideways looks of those fellow guests who were still there in the morning gathered that he had not been her only partner of the night. Bienvida had red hair when she was born but later on it turned dark, so that told her very little. Brian never seemed to notice that the children were very odd-looking to be the son and daughter of a pair of fair-haired blue-eyed ectomorphs. Nor did he draw any obvious conclusions when he kept on coming on Tina in bed with other men. But after three such encounters he said he realized this was because after eight years she had stopped loving him and he made his famous remark about adultery.

  Tina went back to mother. There was nowhere else to go.

  The only woman Peter Bleech-Palmer had ever slept with was Ti
na Darne. It might be truer to say that Tina slept with him. They were very good friends, which neither Daphne nor Cecilia could really understand, though for some time, especially before the advent of Brian, both mothers had hopes of their ‘making a match of it’. Peter was a pianist, had a job as a pianist, and always seemed to have money, which made Cecilia see him as a potentially good husband. She was unaware that the job was in a ‘gay and/or straight’ bar in Frith Street.

  When Tina and the children moved into the School, Cecilia felt both dismay and guilty relief. Had she driven poor Tina away by hesitating about paying for the installation of a bathroom? What would happen with Jarvis? Cecilia did not dislike Jarvis, she did not dislike anybody, but she feared and distrusted him as a bachelor with no regular job, no real income and a home which she was convinced would be sold to the property developers.

  Notwithstanding experience and observation, she was still somewhere inside her convinced that if a man and a woman lived under the same roof, even if the roof covered a very large area, they would soon be cohabiting in a sexual sense. She was not to know that Tina, sticking to her principles, had long ago slept with her cousin Jarvis. Just once. Neither of them had any desire to repeat the experience. Cecilia could also vividly remember Tina's first venture at the School and the founding of the commune, the reputation it earned in a place which, after all, was only a stone's throw – within easy bell-sound – of her own house.

  In those days there had been no children. Cecilia worried about those children. Another old belief of hers and one which died hard, which refused to die, was that no man will willingly take on another man's children.

  ‘I worry about the children,’ she said to Daphne.

  ‘Do you know what they call them in America?’ asked Daphne. ‘They call them grandbabies.’

  ‘Well, yes, kiddies, grandbabies, I worry about them. They run about so and they make a lot of noise, you know how children do, and I'm afraid Jarvis will get tired of it. I mean it isn't exactly his house but it's more his than anyone else's, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Except his mother,’ said practical Daphne. ‘Jarvis Stringer isn't that sort. I don't suppose he notices. He's always got his head in the clouds or down a tunnel.’

  ‘I've never liked that house, that school, whatever they call it. It should have been pulled down after my brother died. Do you believe violent death leaves a kind of surge of energy behind it which is really what's meant by ghosts?’

  ‘No,’ said Daphne.

  ‘Perhaps you're right. I know I always feel uncomfortable there. I always feel something's going to jump out on me from behind a door.’

  Daphne laughed. ‘That something would be Jasper or Bienvida.’

  ‘I don't like going there,’ said Cecilia. ‘It's partly on account of the bell. Wouldn't you think my niece Elsie would have had it taken away? Jarvis never does anything that isn't to do with trains but I can't understand Elsie. And that's another thing. It's bad enough with the trains where I live but the whole house – the School, I mean – it shakes when the trains go by. It's like an earthquake, or what I imagine an earthquake would be like.’

  But she continued to go there regularly, somewhat more often than she went up to Willesden to see Daphne. To go past the School and over the railway bridge was one of the ways of going shopping in West End Lane. Cecilia had passed Cambridge School several thousand times and been inside it several hundred times but she had never got over her feelings of loathing it. She had an obscure feeling that other passers-by would not notice the bell up there in the shadowy interior of the bell chamber. It was almost concealed by the small columns which held up the campanile roof, merely a shinier darkness in the dark. She told herself that if she did not look up she would not need to see it and after a while this not-looking would become habitual, but in the event she could not prevent her eyes from turning up to the campanile.

  As she walked along, passing the blocks she still thought of as the ‘new’ flats, she caught sight of her grandson Jasper disappearing, in company with three other boys of similar age, into the narrow alley which led to the railway bridge. Jasper, at nine, was a sturdy, broad-shouldered, dark-haired boy, very handsome, with strong regular features and eyes of a curious shade of dark violet-brown.

  Cecilia thought it remarkable, an instance of the inexplicable ways of nature, that a child could be so unlike his parents, but she thought no more than that. Reflecting in her vague kindly way that it was very nice for Jasper to have friends of his own age to play with in the holidays, a lot better than in the days when he had lived in that tower block in Walworth, she was still thinking along these lines as she entered the gateless gateway and found her eyes irresistibly turning upwards to the bell. It must have been the bell, a school bell, which brought into her mind the realization that this was still term-time, not holidays. Why was Jasper not at school?

  Cecilia was about to let herself in when the young woman called Alice, who had been there when she heard the bomb go off, opened the door to her. Alice, Cecilia had often thought, was the prettiest girl she had ever seen. She put her in mind of a favourite painting her father had possessed, a portrait of Mary Zambaco by Burne-Jones, and which had hung in the hall of the family home in Hendon. It had passed to Evelina in the days when a Burne-Jones was not worth twopence and goodness knew what Evelina had done with it. Alice had the same swanlike neck, delicate features and full soft mouth, only her hair instead of red was a dark chestnut-brown.

  ‘I'll just go and tap on Tina's door,’ she said to Alice.

  The place was a lot cleaner than in commune days. It did not look too bad. The smell was gone. From somewhere in the back Cecilia could hear that sound she had never been able to identify and had not liked to ask about, a regular screeching as made by a bird in a zoo. In this house, since commune days, she had always felt shy. She liked to go quietly, not ask too many questions, never to interfere. She was conscious of being a misfit, and that was a great understatement. It was partly her age, of course, she was an old woman by anyone's standards, but her attitude to life too and her clothes, her grey tweed skirt and green Viyella blouse and green and grey check cardigan, her stockings and ‘court’ shoes, the powder on her nose, lipstick on her thin old lips and the perm in her hair.

  In the passage she encountered the man who always smelt of meat on the turn. Cecilia could clearly remember the days before refrigerators were in general use – she did not have one until 1952 – and remember too the smell of the joint by Sunday lunchtime if you had been imprudent enough to buy it on Friday. This man smelt far worse than that. Celilia, saying good morning to his ‘hi’, wondered if he had some dreadful disease.

  She tapped on Tina's door. It was ten past twelve. Cecilia always left coming to Tina's until noon was past because she did not want to find her daughter in bed. Had she done so she would not have said a word, would not have looked a word, would simply have sat on the bed and talked to Tina for ten minutes instead of the two of them sitting opposite each other in armchairs. But if she came and found Tina up she could pretend to herself that Tina had been up for hours, and was a normal person and a proper mother.

  What she in fact found Tina doing pleased her greatly. In Ernest and Elizabeth's awful old kitchen, which had last had a re-fit in 1926 and in which Cecilia herself would not have so much as peeled a potato, though nothing would have made her say so, Tina was baking a birthday cake for Bienvida. Cecilia would have been very surprised indeed if she had been wearing anything but jeans and a sweater or T-shirt, and she was not. What pleased her enormously was that over these garments Tina actually wore one of the patchwork aprons she had made and given her years before, with little hope of their ever being used.

  The radio was on, whatever it was that shrieked was at it full-blast, and from somewhere upstairs came music that sounded as if it proceeded from a violin. Someone was hammering in the cellar. As Cecilia sat down she felt the earthquake rumblings that came when a train passed by.
r />   ‘Where are you off to then?’ said Tina, laying a rather floury hand on Cecilia's sleeve.

  Cecilia had nearly got over feeling embarrassed when she mentioned Daphne. ‘I'm meeting Daphne for lunch in D. H. Evans.’

  ‘My God, can you still do that? I remember you taking me there to lunch when I was small and I threw up in the lift.’

  Cecilia remembered it too. That word ‘small’ reminded her of her grandson. She was always careful while here to cast her inquiries in the form of statements and she said, choosing her words meticulously, ‘I expect Jasper was a bit off-colour this morning so you felt it wiser not to send him to school. I'm glad he's well enough to be out with his friends.’ As she uttered these words she thought they sounded snide and insinuating, sarcastic even, though she had not meant them like that. She had only wanted to know without seeming to criticize.

  However they sounded, Tina took them in the spirit they were intended, laughed loudly and said Jasper must be playing hookey in his lunch hour.

  ‘Do they let them do that?’

  It had occurred to Cecilia as soon as the words were out of her mouth that five minutes to twelve, which was the time when she had seen Jasper, was rather early for a lunch hour to begin. Indeed, it would have had to have begun much earlier, her grandchildren's school being a good fifteen minutes' walk away, on the other side of West End Lane. But of this she said nothing, watched Tina putting her cake into the filthiest, blackest, greasiest oven she had ever seen, while waiting for an answer to one of her rare inquiries. By the time it came she had almost forgotten what the question was.

  ‘Oh, it's an awful school. They let them do anything, they can't control them. The kids hate it but what can I do? The teachers are always on strike and I don't blame them, poor things.’ These statements, terrible to Cecilia's ears, were made in tones of the utmost placidity.

  Her anxiety must have shown in her face. Tina uttered another peal of happy laughter, put her arms round her mother's shoulders, squeezing her, and using the pet name Cecilia loved, treasured and secretly longed to hear, said, ‘Don't you worry, little mum, my kids'll always be all right, that's the way they are, they're like me. Off you go and have your nice lunch with Auntie Daphne and give her my love.’