King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  It was not long before Jasper made contact with the boy who wrote the sickness notes. Damon could copy anyone's handwriting and had been told by their class teacher, in a burst of anger, that he would go far, perhaps as far as the Scrubs for forgery. But she never seemed to make the connection between these skills and the sickness notes, apparently in parents' hands, which her pupils brought to school after prolonged absences of two or three weeks. She was busy and tired and underpaid and fed up.

  Damon had given Jasper measles, glandular fever, two bouts of flu and two colds since Easter. He and Jasper and others, schoolfellows or street acquaintances, spent their days on the streets or in the Underground. At first they had taken to the Underground because it was warm, later for other reasons. Jasper thought of a way of smoking in the trains.

  They clutched each other and fell about, it made them laugh so much. Jasper laughed until he thought he was going to be sick. Prudently, they had got into the Jubilee Line train at Finchley Road, in case someone they knew might be on the platform at West Hampstead.

  In the train, in a car with only two other people in it, Jasper held up his cigarette in the middle of the space where the doors would meet when they drew together, and let them close on it. The cigarette was held in place quite tightly with the end outside and filter tip towards him. When the train started Jasper put his mouth over the tip and realized he couldn't light the cigarette because the end was outside. This was what started him laughing.

  There were five of them. They laughed and pushed each other about. A boy called Lee fell over and rolled about on his back with his legs in the air like a dog. Damon rubbed Lee's stomach with his foot the way you would a dog's and Lee screamed because it tickled. All the while the cigarette was in between the doors, being carried along with them to Swiss Cottage.

  In the station Jasper forgot for a moment that the doors were the kind that need to be opened by pressing the button and wondered why they didn't open. He had his cigarette firmly between his lips because he didn't want it falling on the floor, or worse, on to the track. Damon pressed the button, the doors parted and Jasper, making sure no one was watching, lit his cigarette. He held it up there in his fingers and let the doors close on it. In order to stop it going out he drew hard on it and exhaled billows of smoke into the car.

  They were hysterical and hiccupping with so much laughter. Of the two passengers, both women, one had turned and given them a glare, the other pretended nothing was going on. Jasper knew she was pretending, though he could not have said how he knew. Damon and Lee lit up cigarettes of their own at St John's Wood, which they placed between the doors, and Chris and Kevin were going to do the same at Baker Street. But there a braver adult, entering and pushing them aside, saw what was going on and drove them out of the train.

  All five of them had tickets. It might just be possible to get past the ticket collector at West Hampstead without paying but at Finchley Road there was a nearly impenetrable barrier of ticket gates. Jasper and his companions were of a size to creep under gates and had done this until they were caught. They walked along the platform and made their way to the Metropolitan Line, thus entering, though they did not know it, the oldest part of the system.

  The London Underground is the second largest metro system in the world. Its length of 422 kilometres is exceeded – just exceeded – only by New York's network.

  The Metropolitan Line grew fast in the 1860s and 1870s, the District Line joined it and it spread its branches out into the open countryside to the north-west of London. But it was still a steam railway and remained so until after the turn of the century.

  These were cut-and-cover railway systems. By 1890 a different kind of underground railway, a tube, had been tunnelled out through the green and yellow clay (incidentally providing materials for millions of bricks), and this first line passed under the river from King William Street to Stockwell. It was known at first as a subway, a name thought of as an American term for an underground system, but later on was named the City and South London Railway and became the first tube railway in the world.

  Another remarkable thing about it was that the trailer cars were pulled by electric engines. Although the passengers in the ‘sardine box railway’ had to sit facing each other on long benches in light too dim to read a newspaper, they could breathe. The days of fear of a subterranean death from suffocation, at least if you lived in south London, were past.

  The buskers were at Leicester Square, deep down at the level of the Piccadilly Line. Peter had borrowed a xylophone from a dying patient at the hospice and with Alice on the violin and Tom with his trumpet, they were attempting the foxtrot from a Shostakovich jazz band suite.

  Alice was learning how to make a receptacle out of a scarf and had folded a cheap silk square into a bonnet shape. It had started filling with coins when they played the popular Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. This odd Russian jazz, rendered on unsuitable instruments, was nearly as successful. She could not see how much was in the scarf, only that there were a lot of pound coins among the others.

  Tom was exultant. He kept saying how their fortunes had taken a turn for the better from the moment Alice began playing with the group.

  ‘It's you, you're magic. You're our lucky charm.’

  She smiled at him but pulled away when he tried to kiss her. Kissing in public, holding each other, even holding hands, was not something she would ever consent to. But she was starting to feel that making music underground might not be too unacceptable a way of living, it might be preferable to certain compromises, when an unpleasant thing happened.

  For a while people had dropped coins into the scarf in passing but since Tom began to sing, starting on his Mozart opera repertoire, a small crowd lingered. Among them was a boy of about fifteen, who suddenly bobbed down, snatched the scarf and ran.

  Alice could not go on playing. The bow flagged in her hand and she heard herself exclaim. Tom gave chase. He went running off after the boy down the tunnel, dodging people and cannoning into others. After a moment or two Peter followed him. They came back empty-handed. What had happened was what always seemed to happen when there was trouble underground. A train – which, as Peter said, the law-abiding might wait ten minutes for – arrived and bore the boy away in the nick of time.

  Alice burst into tears, she could not help herself. Anyway, she knew, and perhaps Tom knew too, that it was not just this theft which had made her cry, not only this isolated setback.

  ‘We've got to have money,’ she told Tom as they went home together in the Jubilee train. ‘We'll need money for our educations.’ She surprised herself, the words came out, she had not thought about them or thought at all about this subject. But now they were spoken she knew she had been right. This was what they had to do.

  ‘What educations?’

  ‘We've got to go on, you and I. You said I'd save you and that's the way I'm going to do it. I'm going to see you get more education. And I've got to have violin lessons. I've got to find a teacher because I'm just not good enough, I'm utterly out of practice and I need help. You have to finish your degree and you know you say what stops you is money.’

  ‘We make money playing in the tube.’

  ‘We've just lost everything we've made.’

  ‘It's never happened before.’

  ‘We never make very much, Tom.’

  He took it as a personal reproach. She saw him blush, the way Mike might have done if someone told him his salary at the bank was inadequate. And as Mike also might have spoken, crossly and defensively, he said, ‘It'll get better. I've got plans.’

  ‘We need real money,’ she said. ‘I think I'm going to have to get a job.’ She corrected herself, ‘Well, we're going to have to get jobs. I've got to do what I set out to do, Tom. I've given up too much just to let it go.’

  ‘You can be what you like,’ he said. ‘You can be anything you like. I wish I had untold thousands to give you. I love you.’

  She never knew what to answer when he said t
hat. It made her feel awkward and she looked away.

  The Metropolitan and District Lines, though hugely expanded, still operated by steam in 1895, the date of Conan Doyle's The Bruce-Partington Plans. This story depends for its interest and a good deal of its plot on the existence of the District Line.

  It would no longer be possible to do as Oberstein and Colonel Walter did and place a dead man on the top of a train from a window in west London. The train carrying the body of Cadogan West gave a lurch as it passed over the points and the curve in the rails just before Aldgate Station. The body was thrown off on to the track and the investigators with the exception of Sherlock Holmes were deceived into believing it had fallen from a carriage. It could not happen today. This was at Gloucester Road, or near it, and though the tall buildings are very close to the line here, they are not close enough for anyone inside to reach or even touch a passing train.

  Illustrations from Sherlock Holmes stories decorate the platforms at Baker Street, but The Bruce-Partington Plans is not among them.

  Can this be because London Transport was afraid it might give passengers ideas?

  The cars in Underground trains have a door at each end as well as the double- and single-leaf doors for passenger use. The end doors, with sliding glass-panel window for ventilation, are not for passenger use. Notices attached to them make this plain. Above all, they are not to be used when the train is in motion.

  It is here, where the doors are, that cars are linked together. The linkage is tight and the space between the doors is a few inches. Outside the train, at the foot of each door, is a step or running board, again no more than inches wide. On the body of the car, on each side of the door and on what might be called the architrave, are two handles. The roofs of the cars are ellipses, the curves somewhat shallower than in the days of Charles Tyson Yerkes or, come to that, Sherlock Holmes.

  At Ladbroke Grove a boy called Dean Miller, whom the rest of them knew and had teamed up with on the platform at Royal Oak, opened the door at the end of the car and climbed up on to the roof.

  There was no purpose in this. If Dean had a motive for doing it he did not say what it was. But they had no need of motive or purpose. It was enough to do it.

  This is a very old part of the Metropolitan, called the Hammersmith Line, nearly 130 years old, the line running out in the open via Latimer Road, Shepherd's Bush and Goldhawk Road to Hammersmith. There are no tunnels and no low bridges to encounter on the train's journey to Latimer Road. As Ladbroke Grove is left behind, the chimney of the old brick kiln at the now demolished Ruston Mews can be seen, the street once called Rillington Place where Christie the multiple murderer lived, killed women and immured them in his garden and the cupboards of his house.

  But this was unknown to Dean Miller, it having happened twenty-seven years before he was born. Spreadeagled on the roof of the car in a scissors or St Andrew's Cross position, he concentrated on holding on and not losing his balance as the train gathered speed under the shadow of the Westway and rocked past the desolate terraces of north Kensington. He had done this before, but not here. He had done it on one of the western stretches of the Central Line from North Acton to Ealing Broadway, a rather more hair-raising experience than this. For one thing, it had begun to rain as soon as he had climbed on to the car. The train had halted for a full five minutes on the western side of West Acton and all that time Dean had been lying on the roof in the rain. He heard later that a suicide had thrown himself on to the line.

  It was not raining this time and the train went through to Latimer Road unhindered. Dean climbed off the roof and let himself into the car the way he had come. Surrounded by the others who made a protective wall between him and the rest of the passengers, he stood there brushing himself down.

  Jasper said, ‘What was it like?’

  ‘It was OK,’ said Dean.

  ‘Would you do it on one of the underground bits?’

  ‘Would you?’

  Having brushed the most obvious dirt off his clothes, Dean sat down. He broke off and ate a piece of Mint Crisp from out of the platform chocolate machine Kevin offered him as a tribute to his prowess.

  ‘You couldn't do it where it's, you know, really tube. Not unless you're less than nine inches through. You'd get your head knocked off.’

  This led to an attempt by Chris to measure the chest depth and head size of the others. But since he had no tape measure he could only estimate, by a very rough and ready method, that Lee being the thinnest was the only one to qualify. Lee gave him a shove, there was some pushing and tripping up, Kevin fell over into Dean's lap and a woman at the other end of the car shouted that if they didn't behave themselves she'd find someone at Goldhawk Road who would make them.

  The easiest course was to leave the car, which they did by the end doors, and they were still walking in single file through the train when it came into Hammersmith. The Metropolitan has a different station here from that used by the District and Piccadilly Lines. They made the changeover and came back into London on a District Line train from Richmond. At West Kensington Lee wanted to get out on to the roof and sledge to Gloucester Road but Dean, who had assumed the position of expert adviser, said he wasn't sure about the tunnels. He thought you would have to keep well over to one side of the car roof to avoid being struck by the side of the tunnel arch as the train came into Gloucester Road.

  But which side? He found it hard to remember whether you had to position yourself on the left or the right side. They all got out at Gloucester Road and tried to check it out. Chris said it was obvious you would have to be on the right side. Not if you were in a Circle train though, Kevin said. Then it would be the left.

  No one felt like risking an attempt on Gloucester Road to South Kensington. They changed platforms for the Circle going clockwise and, told by Dean that it was a safe stretch, at Gloucester Road both Chris and Damon climbed out on to the roof of the car. The train stood a long time in Gloucester Road station, for no apparent reason. Passengers went to the open doors and looked up and down the platform, trying to make out why they were stuck there, but no one looked up on to the roof of the car. No one ever does.

  Before the train started Damon came down. He didn't say anything. He just shook his head.

  ‘Chicken,’ said Dean.

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘I was not chicken. I was cold. It's cold up there.’

  Jasper thought of going up in his place. He immediately felt excited. Then he felt sick. Once he had thought of it he knew he would have to do it. If not now, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, next week. He would have to do it. But he wasn't going to climb up there now and once up there see some obstruction ahead, some tunnel rim that might be just too low, so that he had to get down again and come back in like Damon had. And get called chicken by the expert.

  He wished the train would start. When the train had started he wouldn't be able to go up there. It felt dead, marooned, abandoned, as if it would never move. As the chugging of the motors began, on a sudden unexpected surge, he felt as relieved as any forty-year-old traveller in a hurry to keep an appointment. The doors gave their preliminary sigh and closed. Jasper knelt up on the seats with the rest of them to observe out of the window their progress to Kensington High Street.

  There was not much to see. The train immediately entered the tunnel – a tunnel cut just beneath the surface, of course, not the deep tube. There was probably a space eighteen inches deep or more between the roof of the car and that of the tunnel. It was dark but not black-dark as inside the tube. You could see the dirty brown cables strung along the walls. Where the Circle runs through the cut-and-cover, in most stretches of it, are open shafts for ventilation. There are two of these on the stretch between Gloucester Road and Kensington High Street and, as the train passed under the first one, they all cheered. Daylight suddenly burst upon them, sunlight, and up there for a moment blue sky and white clouds and a tall whitish building.

  The darkness m
ade this a more hazardous stretch than that undertaken by Dean Miller, or if not more hazardous, more frightening. ‘Scary’ was Kevin's word for it, an American word he said, and they all agreed that, yes, it was scary. You could never be absolutely sure, Jasper thought, that up there in the tunnel roof there wouldn't be some great iron bar or post sticking down to within an inch or two of the top of the car. You wouldn't be able to see, or avoid it if you could see.

  They cheered again when the train passed under the next, much bigger shaft, again the sunshine came flooding in and again you could see the sky and brickwork and even trees. A moment or two of renewed darkness and then the train was coming into Kensington High Street. Covered in dirt, Chris came quickly back into the car, showing no pride in his achievement, but giving Damon a glare of contempt.

  ‘What got into you? Were you chicken?’

  ‘I was not,’ said Damon.

  ‘You were scared,’ said Chris. ‘There's nothing to be scared about. It was OK. It was great.’

  ‘I was not scared.’

  ‘Chicken, chicken, chicken,’ said Dean.

  Damon hit him. They rolled on to the floor. Someone down the car said it was a disgrace and the school holidays were too long and someone else said, pity the poor teachers. At Notting Hill Gate, as they were leaving the car, they found their way impeded by a uniformed official of London Transport Underground that the woman who said the holidays were too long had got hold of and was complaining to.

  The official was saying, ‘Now wait a minute, you just wait a minute,’ and put his arm out right across the open doorway. Jasper ducked underneath it and started running. They all knew there were no television cameras here. It would have been a different matter at Oxford Circus, say. Damon and Chris followed him. None of them looked back to see what happened but galloped for the interchange to the Central Line.