King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  Moved, Cecilia said, ‘You know you can always come back to me to live, Tina. You know that, don't you? It's always your home.’

  ‘Don't push your luck,’ said Tina. ‘I just might do that one day.’

  Walking towards the station, having promised to bring back with her all sorts of expensive food items Tina had requested from Selfridges’ Food Hall, Cecilia thought how much she liked living on her own and that at seventy-six she was too old to have Jasper and Bienvida running around her, fond of them as she was, not to mention Tina's boyfriends and the odd hours she kept and her lying in bed till noon. It embarrassed her to meet men – to herself she called them ‘strange men’ – coming down her stairs in the middle of the morning, putting their heads round the door and saying ‘hi’ to her. But she would put up with all that to make Tina happy and give the children a secure childhood. She would smile and be lighthearted and welcome them all back and have a bathroom put in on the top floor.

  There was only one person she could have happily shared her home with and that was Daphne Bleech-Palmer. But Daphne had her own house in Willesden, a house Cecilia was sure she would not be willing to leave, though it was far less nice than Cecilia's own, being part of an ugly white brick terrace. It was a measure of Cecilia's character that, unlike most people, she experienced no schadenfreude about this, felt no secret pleasure in the superiority of her circumstances over her friend's, but sincerely regretted Daphne's inferior home and reduced income.

  Cecilia went down the steps at West Hampstead station and stood on the lefthand platform waiting for the train to come down from Kilburn. She did not need Jarvis to tell her of the phenomenon of the shivering platform at West Hampstead as a train approaches, that and the singing of the rails, because she was accustomed to the point of no longer noticing it. The half-erased graffiti on the silver train she did notice, without being able to identify it as man-made. Cecilia attributed the marks to some kind of metal fatigue or rust.

  A notice inside tube trains reads as follows:

  In an emergency assistance can be provided more quickly if you operate the red alarm when the train is at a station. Only operate the red alarm between stations if it is essential to stop the train immediately.

  There is a basic misunderstanding of human psychology here, for it is only between stations that you would wish to press the red alarm at all. Surely, if the train were in a station when the emergency occurred, you would get out and run away as fast as possible.

  The trains on the Jubilee Line, at least beyond the confines of inner London, are seldom crowded at midday during the week. Only three other people shared the car with Cecilia. One sat at the extreme righthand end of the car, another at the extreme lefthand end and the third in the middle by the doors, facing the platform. Tina would have plumped herself down in the nearest seat even if this had been next to a passenger but Cecilia, conforming to usage, sat in the emptiest area of the coach, on the platform side with her back to the window. Having no book or magazine with her, she read from the opposite wall an advertisement for duty-free goods obtainable at Heathrow, one for travelling very cheaply by boat to Holland, another was deciphering an invitation to office temps couched in a kind of code, when the train drew into Finchley Road.

  Only two passengers got into the car, a man and a bear.

  Cecilia saw the bear and thought for about five seconds that it was real. Then she saw the man's face through the open mouth and immediately turned her head away so that she appeared to be looking at something of consuming interest outside the window. Anything of that sort, people in fancy dress, people in obvious disguise, caused her intense embarrassment.

  The train started and soon plunged into the tunnel. There was no longer anything to pretend to look at out of the window. Cecilia turned somewhat fearfully back and saw that the man and the bear had gone to the far end of the coach where a woman not much younger than herself sat alone. The bear was in front of this woman and half-squatting, its paws raised, in the attitude of a begging dog.

  Cecilia could see that the man with the bear held it by a chain looped round its neck. He was a young, dark-haired man with a short dark beard and he was curiously dressed in a black overcoat that came nearly to his ankles. It was the kind of coat her father had worn all those years ago to go to business. She thought that she would leave the train at the next station, Swiss Cottage, even if this made her late for her meeting with Daphne, due to take place at one.

  The woman whom the man and the bear were tormenting – for this was how Cecilia saw it, as torment – at least had the good fortune to be possessed of a magazine, which she was now pretending to read while the bear cavorted in front of her. It was pretence, Cecilia knew, for no one could help feeling an embarrassment so deep as to amount to actual dumb fear in the face of such a performance. Well, not exactly no one, she corrected herself, for she knew Tina would not be embarrassed or afraid. Tina would very likely laugh and clap or even stroke the bear.

  This was what the bear-leader seemed to be asking of the passenger he now approached, the man who sat in the seat next to the doors. The man, middle-aged, wearing a suit, complied with a nervous smile. He put out a hand and smoothed the bear's shaggy head, giving it embarrassed pats, while looking up at the bear-leader as if to say, Is that all right? Is that enough? Will you leave me alone now?

  The bear sprang at him with a growl. It was what an unreliable dog does when stroked by someone who is afraid of it. The man jerked backwards with a cry. Cecilia heard herself gasp and at once put her hand up to her mouth. The bear-leader gave a tug on the chain, pulling it until the bear nearly fell over backwards.

  ‘I can't bear it,’ he said to the passengers, his eyes swivelling the length and breadth of the coach. ‘I knew there was trouble brewin'. Geddit? Brewin? Bruin?’

  The train, to Cecilia's extreme relief, drew into Swiss Cottage. She began to get up but by now the man and the bear had moved themselves into the open area of the coach between the pairs of doors. They had in fact stationed themselves in front of the doors which were the kind which open only if you press a button either from outside or inside. There was no one on the platform, or no one in front of the doors of this car. In order to open the doors she would have to get past the bear, say ‘excuse me’ to it, or actually push it. She dropped the inch or two down into her seat again as the train began to move.

  Embarrassment had now been succeeded by fear. Embarrassment, she thought, was fear but of a very reduced kind, just as they say an itch is pain to a very mild degree. This new feeling was real fear, not so much of physical injury as of humiliation, that being most easily provoked in someone of her age and sex. It had not escaped Cecilia's notice that to many people, even today, old women are objects of ridicule. Her heart began to beat fast and heavily. She could hear it, as if it were not in her chest but something outside herself.

  The man and the bear, who had had their backs to her, now turned round and the bear began a clumsy lolloping in her direction. Cecilia, with pounding heart, opened her handbag in a desperate effort to find something with which apparently to occupy her eyes. She could find only her chequebook and the small, leather-bound directory Jasper had given her for Christmas and into which, to gratify the child, she had painstakingly copied the addresses and phone numbers of friends accumulated throughout a lifetime. But it was as if her grandson had saved her life with his gift. She busied herself with putting on her glasses. The bear was in front of her now, dropping down into that squatting or begging position it had adopted to torment the other woman passenger. Cecilia opened the small red book and the first name she saw was Bleech-Palmer. The handwritten words swam before her eyes and her heart thudded.

  The bear growled and grunted. Cecilia turned the pages of her address book, she turned them slowly, she scrutinized them as if they fascinated her. All the time she was resolving not to raise her eyes, not to look at the bear. The other passengers took no notice. She did not blame them. She had appeared to take no not
ice when they were persecuted, she had not intervened. If the bear attacked her they would very likely even then not intervene. Her hands had begun to shake and now her whole body trembled. The bear laid a paw on her knee.

  Cecilia did not scream. Afterwards she wondered how she had kept silent, holding her breath, listening to the drumming of her heart. Through the tweed of her skirt, her pure silk lace-bordered slip and the nylon stockings she wore, she felt the hairy thing, hot-heavy and disgusting. She could not move, she could no longer turn the pages, but she kept her eyes down. Her flesh shrank away from the paw's touch, as if gathering and compressing itself on to the bone.

  She supposed afterwards that the bear-leader took pity on her, or had grown bored. Instead of jerking on the lead, he gave a mighty push to the bear's head and the man-animal rolled over backwards. It rolled over with its paws and hind legs in the air, showing the dirty leather pads under its splayed feet. Cecilia found she had clenched her fists and was driving her nails into the palms of her hands. The bear began picking itself up as the train came into St John's Wood.

  By this time Cecilia had forgotten all about not pushing past the bear to press the button and get out. She would have pushed past anything, a snake, a Rottweiler, a sabre-toothed tiger. In the event she had to step over one of its feet. The bear-leader laughed, a throaty giggle. She clutched her shopping bag and her handbag. As she reached the doors they came open, the button pressed by two people outside. Cecilia got on to the platform. She could see only through a watery mist and realized after a moment's panic that she still had her reading glasses on.

  The train moved away, taking bear and bear-leader with it. Cecilia was shaking all over. She sat down on one of the grey bucket seats to calm herself, to get her breath, but instead she began to cry.

  8

  The birthday party was of a kind which Cecilia would have wondered at, had she been invited to it, for although a few of Bienvida's classmates were present in its early stages, by seven it had become a celebration for the grown-ups. Bienvida and Jasper were of course still there. No one noticed that Bienvida, her grandmother's granddaughter more than her mother's child, had at some stage gone back to the Headmaster's Flat and changed into dungarees to keep her Oxfam dress of nylon organza from getting dirty. She was a tall, very thin child with the dark curly hair, aquiline features and wild poetical eyes of the Irishwoman. Jasper, her elder brother, had refused from the first to dress up for this party and wore his school jeans and Western shirt, though school had not seen him that day.

  Bottles of wine were produced just after seven. Jed had provided some of it, Peter brought the Beaujolais Nouveau and the rest came from Tina's current boyfriend, who worked in the Grog Blossom shop. None of the children had wanted birthday cake, which Tina had mistakenly made with fruit and nuts in it, so they ate it as their second course.

  It was a fine warm evening, vermilion streaks of sunset even reaching this eastern skyline. Jarvis had set up a trestle table on that terrace where pupils had once assembled for the annual school photograph. Around it sat Peter Bleech-Palmer, Jay Rossini, Tom, Alice, Billy the Grog Blossom man, Tina and himself.

  From their feet stretched away the plain of shaggy grass, a wild lawn of weeds, buttercups, dandelions and lady's smock in full bloom. All the trees, so large now as to enclose this garden, excluding the sight of other houses, so that but for the complex of railway lines it might have been in the country, were in late summer leaf. The soft twittering hum came from birds going to roost. There were more birds in this London sanctuary than many country gardens and the cries of the hawk had not yet driven them away. The trains, running up and down from London to Stanmore and back, could only be seen through the foliage as a series of silver flashes, but their singing rattle made a constant background music.

  There was no wind. The air was still enough for candles to be lit. In the fading light Tina, wearing greenish-blue Indian cotton with silver alloy chains of Kabul turquoises and coral round her neck, began lighting yellow wax candles set in saucers. As the wicks burned, a strong perfume of sandalwood came from them. But this was not enough to keep away mosquitoes, which started to arrive and drift towards the flames. Peter had brought his guitar and he and Tom began to play. When Tina and Billy began to dance Jarvis asked Alice but she shook her head, smiling at him. She was beginning to feel committed to Tom, she wanted to dance with no one but him.

  The children's seats at the table had long been empty. Jarvis's train set, the one which had diverted him from his mother's grief on the day her father hanged himself, was laid out on the floor in Lower Six, a classroom on the top floor, and Jarvis had told Jasper he could play with it whenever he liked. Jarvis still occasionally played with it himself. Jasper, while dimly understanding that this was a very generous offer on Jarvis's part, considered himself too sophisticated for train sets. But he went up there now, with Bienvida trailing behind him, from an obscure feeling that he ought to show Jarvis this offer was appreciated. He was also bored. Jasper knew he was allowed extreme latitude in almost everything he did. He also knew ‘allowed’ was not exactly the word but that it was more a question of not bothering. No one kept an eye on him. Sometimes this pleased him and sometimes it made him feel frightened, though he could not have said why.

  He could have wandered unchecked all over north London if he had had a mind to it, but this was supposed to be Bienvida's party and he and Bienvida were supposed to be there. It had, of course, gone the way of all their parties he could remember and turned into an excuse for grown-up drinking, talk, dancing and all that cuddling and kissing stuff he inescapably associated with his mother.

  He and his sister went into Lower Six and contemplated the train set in silence. It was just a train set, indefinably old-fashioned. They looked out of the window and down on the merrymakers. Peter had taken the flute from Tom, Tom was dancing with Alice and Jarvis capering with Jay, while Tina and Billy were half under the table in a clinch so tightly intertwined as to seem to make one person of them.

  ‘Shit,’ said Jasper. ‘She's off again.’

  Bienvida, being two years his junior, asked wistfully if he thought she would ever go back to Brian. If she had been speaking to a school friend she would have called Brian Daddy but this was not acceptable to Jasper. Early in life he had put away childish things.

  ‘I doubt it. Don't put that idea into her head, Bee. I like it here. There are things I specially like about living here, never you mind what they are, they're just things I like. So don't go telling her she ought to go back to that dump in the sky.’

  Bienvida said nothing, though her wild and wary eyes looked wilder.

  ‘They will be all over gnat bites,’ said Jasper.

  His duty done – that Jarvis would never know one way or the other made no difference in Jasper's estimation – he went back on to the landing which by now was in darkness. Faint light from the open doors of Five, Lower Six and Upper Six made it possible to see, shedding pale blurry patches on to the corridor floor. Bienvida pressed the light switch but the bulb was long used-up and no one had replaced it. The skylight in the ceiling looked as if covered by a dark purple cloth. Up here once, Bienvida had seen the full moon appear in that purple square and a pointed cloud cut a segment from it like an eclipse. Since then she had sometimes looked for the moon again in that dark, usually empty space but had never seen it.

  Jasper stood looking at the bell rope which came out of a small square aperture at what was the base of the campanile. The end of the rope was wound round a cleat high up on the wall above the door to what had once been the Science Lab. It was far out of the reach of grown-ups as well as children, except that Jasper did not really think anything was out of his reach.

  ‘There must be a hole in the floor under here,’ he said to his sister, scuffing with his toes at the worn grey and red runner which one of the commune people had laid along this corridor. ‘And there must be another hole in the floor outside the Handwork Room.’

 
‘Why must there?’

  Jasper had got down on to the floor and was grubbing about under the carpet. His fingers felt the division between the old floorboards and then the cross-cut which marked the edge of a trapdoor. He scraped with his thumbnail the metal hinge. ‘Because the rope used to come down through here so they could ring it in the cloakroom. They never did ring it but they meant to. Shall I tell you why they never did?’

  ‘I don't know where the cloakroom is,’ said Bienvida.

  ‘It's that room no one ever goes in. Down the bottom between the way out to the veranda and the toilets. Shall I tell you why no one ever goes in?’

  ‘Not if it's very frightening.’

  Once more on his feet and staring up at the bell rope, Jasper said, ‘D'you know what I'd like? I'd really like a cigarette.’

  ‘You'll get lung cancer.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of anybody of nine getting lung cancer?’

  Jasper opened the door of Upper Six and looked inside. Putting the light on would be too risky, but the curtains were drawn back and by now their eyes had become accustomed to a darkness in which could be made out the shapes of furniture and smaller objects, a darkness of monochrome and black spaces and faintly gleaming edges. Jed's room had a raunchy, hot, savage smell. So might smell the den of some great carnivore, thought Jasper, where the floor was stickily carpeted in dried blood and littered with licked bones.

  He fumbled about on the table, felt in the pockets of the odorous hawk-training jacket which hung on the back of the door, told his sister to try the cupboard. She opened the door a little fearfully, but giggling now. Her giggles became a scream, a short sharp shriek like the sound the hawk made.