King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ said Jasper. ‘What's got into you? D'you want them to hear you down there?’

  But the music must have drowned Bienvida's cry. Jasper looked out of the window and down into the candlelight. No upturned face met his eyes. His sister clutched his arm.

  ‘I put my hand into something horrible.’ She talked in her ghoul voice. He could see the whites of her eyes and the big dark pupils rotating. Both children were always asking each other: Shall I tell you? Shall I? Shall I tell you what happened, what I saw, did, shall I? ‘Shall I tell you what it was I put my hand into, Jas?’

  ‘Yeah, OK, what was it?’

  ‘A dead person's stomach. Like he'd been cut open and died and I put my hand in all among his intestines.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Jasper. He had found the cigarettes and matches with them, up at the end of the windowsill between a pile of books and a plant pot. A cigarette between his lips, he struck a match, lit it and held the lighted match up inside the open cupboard.

  ‘It's not a dead person's stomach, it's those day-old chicks he gives Abelard. They're all messed up together in a bowl.’

  ‘Yuck,’ said Bienvida. ‘They're dead, aren't they?’

  ‘Of course they're dead. Shall I tell you what happened in the cloakroom, Bee?’

  ‘Yeah, OK, what was it?’

  They returned to the landing and sat on the stairs. ‘One day I'm going to ring that bell,’ said Jasper, puffing away.

  ‘What happened in the cloakroom?’

  ‘An old man that wasn't our grandfather but something like that hung himself. In the cloakroom. I heard Tina telling Tom about it. He hung himself from the bellrope. It came all the way down there then. Jasper extended his narrow brown neck in which the Adam's apple had not yet appeared and in the near-dark clasped his hands round his throat. The throttling sound he made, accompanied by a frenzied rolling of the eyes, expelled the cigarette from his mouth and sent it halfway down the stairs.

  It took them a few moments to find it. By then the fleur-de-lis patterned linoleum which covered the stairs was singed and smelling. Bienvida had started giggling and clutching at Jasper, alternately nervous and hopeful, terrified of the corpses and ghosts he fed her, but always hungry for more. Holding hands, they came down the stairs in an exaggerated parody of the grown-ups' dancing, shaking skinny hips, flicking their free hands, the glowing end of Jasper's cigarette describing parabolas in the darkness.

  Below them the vestibule was lit, dimly, by the electrolier, in which only two candles had bulbs in them. Someone must have come indoors to turn that light on. Jasper laid a finger to his lips and tried the cloakroom door. It was not locked, as he had feared it might be. Taking Bienvida by the hand, he drew her inside. Absolute darkness and a new smell in here, not rotting meat or burning lino but something sour and cold. If a wet stone could smell it would smell like this.

  They had been inside no more than thirty seconds, Bienvida trembling all over the way she did from terror and excitement, when they heard the voices of Peter, Tom and Alice, as these three people crossed the hall and went upstairs together. Jasper dropped his cigarette end on to the floor and trod it out.

  ‘We'll sleep in here,’ he said. ‘We'll get our sleeping bags and a torch and things and sleep in here.’

  ‘Not tonight.’ Bienvida's voice was faint with the horrifying enormity of it. ‘Not now.’

  Jasper said impatiently, ‘Of course not now. I'm not planning on going to bed yet.’

  In quest of further adventures, experiments, discoveries, he emerged from the cloakroom, his sister behind him and holding on to him, and padded along the passage towards the long disused kitchen regions and the cellar stairs.

  Dancing with Tom, Alice nearly told him what had happened that day. He was kind and understanding. He had asked her to talk to him about the things that troubled her, but she could not. People were enjoying themselves, Tom was laughing, she was afraid of casting a blight. Now was not the time to tell him how she had tried to phone her mother, had dialled the number and her father answered. Bravely, Alice made herself say who it was and her father put the phone down. That had unnerved her. She phoned her mother again at a time her father could not be there; she had to know about Mike and Catherine, what was happening.

  ‘Mike's sister's looking after her, what's-her-name, Julia.’

  ‘Mike's not going to let her adopt Catherine?’

  ‘What do you care?’ said Marcia Anderson. ‘You've made it pretty clear you couldn't care less.’

  ‘Would you like me to give you my address, Mother?’

  ‘Suit yourself. I can't say I know of anyone who wants to write to you.’

  She told herself she deserved it, but that did not make the punishment less. She held Tom close and pressed her cheek to his. After a while she drew away again, determined not to seem inviting, and they danced in silence. They were to be friends, not lovers, she had made up her mind to that.

  The mosquitoes broke up the party. They came in a singing swarm. Peter was the first to say he was going indoors; he took one of his bottles of wine with him and Alice and Tom followed. He came up with them to Four on the first floor, Tom's room. This irritated Alice. Peter might have supposed that they were lovers from Tom's ardour and her acquiescence, might have thought it not just tactful but a requirement to leave them alone together. If she and Tom had been two men he would have been discretion itself, she thought. He behaved sometimes as if heterosexual love were an improper or even immoral exercise and if his presence could disrupt it, so much the better.

  Still, they were not lovers and never would be. She had drunk very little, a small glass of wine while they were eating and another ten minutes before they came in. Mike had once called her a natural non-drinker, one who enjoyed neither the taste nor the effect. But in Tom's room, when Peter had poured the wine into two mugs and an inch into a glass for her and she had tasted it, she found she liked this wine that had a taste of how elderflowers smell, reversed her decision and asked him to do as he had offered and fill her glass. It was a Riesling from Yugoslavia. She was experiencing no unwelcome change of consciousness, no lightness in the head. They talked. Peter sat in the armchair, she and Tom on the bed. A corn-coloured moon climbed up the sky outside the closed window and Tom turned off his lamp so that there was no competition for the warm moonlight.

  Peter picked up the wine bottle and looked at her and this time she didn't put her hand over the top of the glass. Tom said he had had enough so she and Peter drank it. Peter kept looking at his watch because he was on duty at midnight. Since giving up playing the piano in the Soho bar, he had had a job as a receptionist and switchboard operator in a hospice in Kilburn. When he had had a few drinks, though not otherwise, Peter talked about how he knew he ought to have the test to find out if he was HIV negative, as he hoped, as he desperately hoped, but he had not had it yet.

  At a quarter to twelve he left. Alice was drunk. There were two conflicting thoughts in her mind. One was that it was horrible and she would always regret it if she made love to Tom only because she was drunk, the other that here was the opportunity to get it over, make a start, break the ice. She was drunk, so she didn't care. She wanted to, she quite wanted to, she might as well.

  Tom didn't expect it. She watched him. He was so handsome, probably the best-looking man she had ever seen, anyway the best-looking that she knew, fair, tanned, slim, features like an actor in a Western, like the hero. He had got over expecting her to turn to him, pull him close to her, lie beside him. Sometimes he said he knew it would happen one day. He would wait. Love did marvellous things, he said, and one day love would do that.

  He must expect her to get up off the bed and kiss his cheek, say good-night, see you in the morning, go out quickly and close the door behind her. She did get up. She was not very steady on her feet and she kept thinking how she had resolved not to do this, but her thought processes were blurred and hazy.

  She started to take he
r clothes off. He made a sound behind her, an intake of breath, nothing more. She took off her clothes and turned round in the moonlight. Tom was quite still, looking at her. Because of the way he was looking, his parted lips, his wondering eyes, she felt desire, a flicker of it, the first sign, the first time for months, a movement like a string being plucked where she thought her womb was.

  The bad thing was that when she woke in the morning she could remember nothing about it. She had woken in the night, she could remember that, and at first not known where she was. She was lying on the edge of the bed far from Tom and had not known it was Tom's bed and Tom's room or that she was not alone, but had been cast at once, as usual, into that incredulous panic where she was asking herself, how could I have left Mike? How could I have abandoned Catherine? I can't have done that, I can't – how could I? And then Tom had moved. His hand had reached for her and a sigh of relief at finding her had come from him and she had turned deeply into his arms to let him hold her there. The panic was absorbed by his warmth, the hard resilient muscles of his body, absorbed and drawn and sucked out of her.

  But the morning – in the morning there was nothing. There was mild headache and muzziness but no memory. It sickened her that she could have made love with Tom and be able to remember nothing of it. She only knew that they had made love at all by the sticky wetness in between her thighs and on the bedsheet.

  Birds were singing in the garden trees. It must be a blackbird she could hear in the pear tree. Her room was not far from Tom's and on the same side of the house, but she could not remember hearing birds before. The dawn chorus, her mother called it, though it was not dawn but nearly eight.

  Tom was awake and watching her. She turned her face to him and smiled, feeling pain as she moved her head. Her massy hair, which she usually plaited at night or at least tied back, was all over the pillow and herself and him, covering his shoulders as well as her own. She felt a different kind of guilt. She was so ashamed of not remembering what had happened that she felt she must compensate him in some way, so she kissed his mouth and stroked his cheek.

  A little breeze blew in. At some point he must have got up and opened the window. That was why she could hear that thrush, that blackbird, that cuckoo.

  He said softly, ‘I love you so much. You've made me very happy.’

  She said she was glad. If only she could remember.

  ‘You know how I said you could save me and only you. Well, it's starting. I can feel it. I'm starting to feel like I used to.’

  ‘I couldn't save anyone, Tom. I can't even save myself.’

  ‘Perhaps it's easier to save someone else.’

  She put up her arms to him and he began to make love to her very gently and slowly. She thought about Mike. Thinking about Mike now was wrong, was disgusting, but she could not help herself. She thought how rough they had been with each other, how savage almost, sometimes in an odd way wanting to be done so that they could begin all over again. Tom made love like he played the flute, with slow, studied precision. He was patient and controlled. She put aside the guilty thought that he made love as if he had studied it as he had told her he once studied keyboard fingering and Bach's Innovations. It was strange that an impulsive, warm person could be such a calculating lover.

  His care was wasted. It made her impatient. She kept her eyes open, looking at him, though his were closed. He was so good-looking, wonderfully handsome and young and sweet, and that should have been enough, but it was not. She smiled at him when it was over because there was nothing else she could do.

  The birds went on singing. He began talking to her about birdsong, about bird music, really. After a while he made tea and brought it back to bed and they talked in a way she never could have with Mike, or anyone she knew, about Garstang's book on the songs of birds and about Haydn's Bird Quartet and Wagner's bird music in Siegfried. Tom had perfect pitch and a wonderful recall and he could sing whole passages from Boccherini's aviary music.

  This was having something in common with your lover, she thought, remembering the way it had been with Mike, who was interested only in banking and golf and what he called making a home for one's family. She seemed to see a distant future in which she and Tom were together in their own home, a house where music was made, and with perhaps their own children. But that idea killed the vision and she could only put her arms round him again and hide her face against his chest.

  Jed would have been at the party if it had not been his duty evening with the Safeguards. They were a group of three men and a woman, patrolling the Central Line trains westbound from Oxford Circus. By the time the train reached Ealing Broadway they had been in and out of every car and as the train returned they followed the same routine.

  The woman had a car at Ealing in which she would drive them all home after the last train was gone. They rode in five westbound trains and four eastbound trains, observing how the crowds began to thin, especially in those heading for inner London, encountering no trouble beyond some pushing and shoving by teenage boys and a smoker in the third car who put out his cigarette without protest when one of them asked him. The smoker was black. The only other black person in the car accused them of being racist, which made one of the other men indignant and started an argument.

  The last train going westwards disgorged its passengers at Queensway and Notting Hill Gate, five only at Shepherd's Bush and one lonely traveller at White City.

  ‘I believe we're the only ones left,’ said Jed as they stopped at East Acton, a rather dark little station that looked as if it might be out in the country.

  At Ealing Broadway they found they had been. Walking along the empty platform, away from the empty train, they felt like the four last people on earth.

  9

  An American was responsible for electrifying the London Underground.

  He was a monopoly capitalist from Chicago called Charles Tyson Yerkes. (The name should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘turkeys’.) He came into control of the District Underground Railway in 1900 but he had no particular interest in trains or the tracks they run on. He was interested in making money.

  Yerkes had been an embezzler in the United States and had served a prison sentence. He was thrown out of Chicago and fled to New York where he built a palace and filled it with Old Masters. In London he gradually took over the Underground system and came to control every line except the Metropolitan. But first he had built his own power station at Lots Road in Chelsea, and another at Neasden, and electrified the District Line.

  London Transport Underground still draws its power from Lots Road, the vast elegant power station that overshadows Chelsea Harbour.

  In no other British rail system are the sections of a train called cars. They are variously named coaches, carriages or compartments. But cars are what they are called on the London Underground, just as they are in all American trains. Were they dubbed cars by Yerkes, the crooked tycoon from Chicago?

  When Yerkes died in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel his empire was taken over by the son of a Derbyshire coach-maker, Albert Henry Stanley. He had been President of the Board of Trade in the 1914–18 War and was later created Lord Ashfield. He was godfather to a child born in a Bakerloo Line train and gave her a silver christening mug when she was named Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor. T.U.B.E.

  ‘I hope people will not make a habit of this,’ said Lord Ashfield, ‘as I am a busy man.’

  When Jarvis first rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART, in San Francisco, there were carpets on the floors of cars and closed circuit television in operation. He had never seen anything like it before and he was astonished. This was in the early seventies, when he was very young.

  The massive car in which he sat was twenty-five yards long. The whole system had been constructed to stand up to earthquake pressures. But Jarvis's greatest pleasure came from knowing that this line, whose builders had had to work in compressed air because of the high water-table in downtown San Francisco, passed through the rock under the deepe
st bay in the world.

  In those days he had been a smoker. On leaving Powell Street he had lit a cigarette and within seconds a disembodied voice was booming at him to extinguish it and at the next station put it out the door on to the track. Jarvis had complied. So entranced was he by all this technology that he half expected the same voice to thank him.

  Jasper smoked for show. He didn't much enjoy it, but enjoyment was irrelevant. It was something people of his age were not supposed to do and that was enough for him. Another thing he was not supposed to do was be tattooed. His tattoo had been done the previous winter by a Chinese man in Harlesden, who specialized in non-fade colours, fluorescents and airbrush fantasy.

  No one ever saw Jasper naked, since he skived off going swimming with his school and Tina was never present when he bathed, but he intended, one day, as a treat or reward, to show the tattoo to Bienvida. It was on his back, between his shoulder blades. The Chinese man had wanted to do a Celtic torque in plain black, very fashionable at the time, but Jasper's wish was for something less austere. He chose a lion done in tawny red, prowling among turquoise palm trees and blue and purple flowers. He could only see it himself by standing with his back to one mirror and looking in another. He was very interested in discovering whether the tattoo would grow as he grew and he thought he already detected some enlargement. Having it done had been painful and quite expensive. When he got a passport of his own, if they still had the sort Jarvis had by that time, he was going to write ‘lion tattoo on back’ under ‘distinguishing marks’.

  Jasper often went to school but nearly as often did not. His school was a big red-brick Victorian building to the east of Kilburn. There were not enough teachers, those there were harassed almost beyond bearing and driven from pillar to post, and no one ever seemed to know who Jasper was, still less remember his name. A great many obscure languages were spoken and some children remained silent because no one else spoke their language.