King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  It came back always to this: she loved Tina and the children, but she could hardly bear having Tina live with her. Why were human beings made this way, that they did not want to be – or did not want constantly to be – with the people they loved best? Except when they were in love, of course.

  Cecilia, clearing away the tea things, closing the window because the evenings were cool, was visited by a faint memory of being in love. She was dancing with Frank Darne, wearing a backless dress which her own mother had not approved of and into which she had inserted a cover-up panel of silk. It was to be a long time before she and Frank were married, they had been engaged for years, and by the time of their marriage she had grown very used to him, was very find of him and secure with him. The bed part she had not much cared for, though as long as it did not hurt it was bearable. But at that dance, all those years before, as she felt his hand on her bare shoulder and saw the soft strange expression in his eyes, she had had such an odd thought: be mine, she had thought, come to me so that I am you and you are me, let us be lost in each other.

  After all this time she remembered it. She often remembered it. But it had not lasted long, nor come again. And of course she had not spoken those words aloud. Theirs had not been a passionate relationship, or she supposed not, having known no other to judge by. He had been good to her, a good husband and father.

  Cecilia looked at the grandfather clock which had belonged to Frank's mother. A quarter to six. It was Daphne's turn to phone. She put on the news just to get the headlines and sure as fate, regular as clockwork, the phone rang at two minutes past. While she had been waiting she wondered what everyone would say to the preposterous idea of her moving out of this house, leaving it to Tina, and going to live in Willesden with Daphne.

  Because a light was on up in the gallery but not downstairs, the electrolier cast its spider shadow on the vestibule floor. A window open somewhere caused the chain of the electrolier to vibrate ever so little and this kept the spider on the move, creeping across the floorboards, sometimes making a little sideways jump, crab-fashion.

  Bienvida did not much like it, she had not liked the way the spider feet ran across her own as she went across the vestibule. The cloakroom, even on her own, was preferable, even though she expected to see a ghost.

  She had made up her mind what it would be like, an old man with a white beard, a kind of Father Christmas in mourning, for its garments would be dark and diaphanous. It might have a noose slung lightly about its neck and, although she could not think where she had got hold of this idea, a scythe in its hand. Waiting for Jasper, sitting inside her sleeping bag and with a blanket round her, she trembled with a fear that was not entirely unpleasurable.

  It was dark outside the little high window with its clear panes and its single ruby pane, and there was no light in the cloakroom. There was no bulb holder and only a piece of frayed flex coming out of the ceiling. Bienvida had brought pillows and cushions, two candles and a box of matches, two chocolate bars called Twirls and a doll named Caroline. She had wanted to be called Caroline for as long as she could remember and, failing to persuade anyone to call her this, had bestowed the name on the doll.

  It was late, nearly a quarter to eleven, and Jasper had promised to be there by 10.30. It would be the first night they had spent in the cloakroom, having decided it would be wisest to wait for an evening when Tina had gone out. Tina would come back very late, creep into the Headmaster's Flat and avoid going near their bedrooms for fear of waking them. Bienvida had told her grandmother that Tina always came to look at them before she went to bed, but Cecilia, though longing to believe it, did not really do so.

  It was hours since she had seen Jasper. While it was still light he had gone down to West End Lane, to the Indian shop on West End Lane bridge, to buy two cans of Coke and a comic. The Indian would most likely refuse to sell him cigarettes, or Bienvida hoped so. She disliked the smell of tobacco smoke in her bedroom. It was now totally dark, but for the square shape of moonlight cast on the floor from the small window high up in the wall. Bienvida lit one of her candles and placed it in the neck of a milk bottle. The light made the room more creepy, not less. Before, she had not been able to see the darkness but now she could, she could see the big dark spaces that looked solid, that looked like black crouching furry things, where the light did not reach.

  Jasper came into the cloakroom before things got too bad. He had a torch he had ‘borrowed’ from Tom's now unoccupied room and a camera that was Jarvis's. Both children were getting into the habit of stealing things, here in the School and outside. They stole and were not found out, so it seemed easier the next time. Jasper had paid for his Coke at the shop on the bridge but not for the Smarties which he took from the counter while the Indian man had his back to him at the till.

  Though in some ways this was a good opportunity, it was too dark in the cloakroom to show Bienvida his tattoo. It was also rather too cold to take his clothes off. He got into his sleeping bag, peeled the tops off the Coke cans and passed one to his sister.

  ‘If we see anything,’ he said, ‘it will probably be at midnight and it'll be a sort of bundle hanging from a rope in the middle there.’

  ‘I don't want to see it,’ said Bienvida.

  ‘Yes, you do. You want to see it. I'm going to take a photograph of it. It should come out all right with the flash. Shall I tell you where I went sledging today?’

  ‘Yeah, OK, where did you?’

  ‘I went on top of the train from West Hampstead to Finchley Road.’

  Bienvida said nothing. The idea of riding on the tops of tube trains did not attract her, nor was she altogether sure that she believed everything Jasper said. She helped herself to Smarties, or rather she picked out four orange Smarties. Those were the only kind she liked. Bienvida had noticed that the orange ones had milk chocolate inside them and tasted of orange whereas all the other kinds, though of different colours, red, green, mauve, yellow, brown, tasted the same and only of the plain chocolate in their centres. It was one of the mysteries of life that exercised her mind.

  ‘I'm getting into training for the going-through-the-tunnel part,’ said Jasper.

  ‘You could get killed. You could get your head chopped off.’

  ‘I said I was getting into training. It's a matter of keeping your head.’

  Jasper laughed immoderately at his own joke and then repeated it in case Bienvida had missed the point. She had but she wasn't going to say so and smiled obediently. They ate the Twirls and finished the Coke. Jasper said it was two minutes to twelve and time to blow the candles out. Nothing would be seen by candlelight. He had his camera at the ready but all that happened at midnight was the entry into the house of Jarvis, Tina and an old friend of Tina's from the past.

  By the time Jarvis had gone into Remove to make himself a cup of tea with the electric kettle he kept there and Tina and her friend had said good-night to him and gone into the Headmaster's Flat, both children were asleep. Tina was careful not to make a noise but she did not look into the children's rooms.

  The Church of St Mary Woolnoth in King William Street was built in 1727. A Roman temple of Concord once stood on the site. The name of the church had nothing to do with wool but was a distortion of that of Wulfnoth, a Saxon prince, who had erected a timber church here and dedicated it to St Mary of the Nativity.

  A later building was badly damaged by the Great Fire of 1666. Nicholas Hawksmoor built the present church. Its ceiling is painted blue with stars to resemble the night sky as it must have been when the Romans looked up from the open space of an atrium.

  The first tube tunnel, in those days called the City and South London, was tunnelled through beneath here. The Company had parliamentary sanction to demolish St Mary Woolnoth and would have done so but for the great public outcry. Bowing at last to pressure, they underpinned the foundations of the church and built Bank station on top of them.

  An angel's head over the station entrance commemorates the saving of the c
hurch.

  A recorded voice warns you, as Central Line trains come into Bank, ‘Mind the gap, mind the gap, mind the gap, mind the gap, stand clear of the doors, please.’ The gap yawns at your feet but it is not the only one in the system. There is quite a wide gap between car and platform at Holborn on the northbound Piccadilly Line, but no warning voice.

  It is true that the gap at Bank is the result of the curve the line must make, but not that it describes this curve to avoid passing under the vaults of the Bank of England.

  Tina and Jarvis had gone out together some three hours before to a pub in St John's Wood. The purpose of Jarvis's visit to this pub was to meet a man who worked at Intourist and who had very nearly guaranteed him an investigative trip to the Soviet Union where, rumour had it, there was a metro boom and eight new systems were either being built or planned. The purpose of Tina's visit was pleasure.

  The Russian was late. Before he arrived Tina had spotted someone she knew standing at the bar. This was a neatly made, dark-haired man of medium height, aged perhaps forty. She introduced him to Jarvis as Daniel, whom she had last seen ten years ago when she happened to run into him on Denmark Hill. Jarvis noticed particularly Daniel's eyes, which were a very dark violet-brown, the colour of the heart of a pansy. They reminded him of someone else's eyes but he could not remember whose.

  After he had drunk two vodkas and found fault with the brand provided by the pub, the Intourist man began whetting Jarvis's appetite with a description of the new little metro at Kuibyshev and the possibility of a visit to the earthquake-resistant system at Tashkent.

  ‘In the Soviet Union we have the best metros in the world. All of them conform to the high technical standards of the Moscow system.’

  Jarvis was not sure that he believed this, or even that the Moscow technical standards were high. He wanted to see for himself.

  ‘In Erevan, for example,’ said the Intourist man, ‘the tunnels have been designed to withstand earthquake up to force ten on the Richter Scale.’

  Jarvis thought the same could have been said of the Bay Area Rapid Transport in San Francisco. The next time he caught sight of Tina she was up to what he had once or twice before seen her engaged in, a kind of courtship ritual. She and Daniel were sitting on opposite sides of a small round table, holding right hands in the manner of people performing the move called the cobra in arm-wrestling and who are about to perform a trial of strength, but not doing this, not tense or combative but relaxed and absorbed in each other, their eyes held in unblinking contact, their lips slightly parted. While he watched, their mouths met in a kiss and drew away.

  When the pub closed and the Russian had gone, they returned together in one of the last tubes to run northwards that night. It took a long time to get to St John's Wood station because Daniel kept stopping to kiss Tina under the street lamps.

  While they waited on the platform Jarvis told them about King Solomon's carpet. This magic carpet of green silk was large enough for all the people to stand on it. When ready, Solomon told it where he wanted to go and it rose in the air and landed everyone at the station they wanted. He said the tube reminded him of this carpet and elaborated his theme, but they were not listening.

  In a double seat, they held each other in a clinch from St John's Wood to Swiss Cottage, to Finchley Road, to West Hampstead. They walked to Cambridge School with their arms round each other. Jarvis, who was not much troubled by sexual feelings, who was celibate for months or even years on end, eyed them tolerantly and with about as much interest as he accorded to photographs of such efficient but relatively unexciting metro systems as those of Brazil.

  Back at the School he offered them tea but they were too deeply entranced with each other even to answer him. He put on a light in Remove but soon turned it off, filled his kettle by moonlight, and watched from the open door the shadow of the electrolier hopping and tripping across the vestibule floor. Presently it became still and he knew that the open window somewhere had been closed.

  The last train had passed along the line to Finchley Road and the last one had gone up to Kilburn and all was still and silent. Jarvis thought of how, with luck, he would soon be in Leningrad where the tunnels have been bored through the clay nearly as deeply as those under Hampstead Heath.

  11

  During the Second World War the London tube became a deep shelter.

  Heavy raids began on 7 September 1940. People bought low-value tickets and refused to leave the Underground until the all-clear had sounded. During that October an average of 138,000 people sheltered in the system and sheltering was eventually allowed in all seventy-nine deep tube stations.

  The station now named Archway was formerly called Highgate. The opening of a new Highgate station at the top of the Archway Road, a very deep one, was delayed after the outbreak of war so that it could be used solely as an air-raid shelter. It is one of the deepest in the system. Passengers in trains rushing through non-stop from Archway to East Finchley on the Northern Line saw whole families sleeping on the platform.

  Shelterers sleeping on the platform at Russell Square on the Piccadilly Line heard during the nights a soft, continuous roar coming through the tunnel. This was the snoring of sleepers on the platforms at Holborn, next station down the line.

  The British Museum hid its treasures in the tunnel between Holborn and Aldwych.

  The worst wartime disaster was at Balham on the Northern Line at eight in the evening of 14 October 1940. A bomb penetrated the northbound station tunnel at its northern end, rupturing water mains and sewers. Water and gravel rushed into a station by then plunged in darkness.

  Those still alive were evacuated through emergency escape hatches. Sixty-four shelterers and four railwaymen died. Later, when it was all past, seven million gallons of water were pumped out of the hole the bomb had made.

  The day before Balham, nineteen people were killed and fifty-two injured by a bomb at Bounds Green on the Piccadilly Line. The day before that, a bomb killed seven people at Trafalgar Square on the Bakerloo Line, and on the day after one person died after a bomb fell on Camden Town on the Northern Line.

  At the Bank, on the evening of 11 January 1941, fifty-six people were killed and sixty-nine injured when a bomb cut through the concourse just below the street. The station collapsed and was closed for three months. A story, widely believed, that a hundred people trapped inside were never brought to the surface but walled up in a subterranean chamber, is almost certainly not true.

  They were a legal firm who occupied the two top floors of a building to the north of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The brass plate on the façade of the house proclaimed them as Angell, Scherrer and Christianson, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, and an incised arrow pointed in the direction of a narrow alley where the entrance door was.

  Holborn was the nearest station, a few minutes' walk away. Alice took the Jubilee Line to Bond Street and the Central back to Holborn. She started work as secretary to James Christianson, whose room was on the top floor.

  Tom became very angry when she told him she had got the job.

  ‘I didn't think you meant it.’

  ‘Of course I meant it. I need the money. You need money too. We've said we'd help each other with money and you've helped me. I'm very grateful that you've helped me pay for my lessons. Now I want to help you, I want to make you some return.’

  They were in her room, the Headmaster's Study, finishing their evening meal. Tom had bought a bottle of wine, which Alice did not think they could afford. It was painfully clear they could not afford luxuries, yet Tom bought wine almost every night. He had emptied his third glass of it and in a sudden, unexpected and violent gesture, hurled the glass against the wall. Alice gasped with fright. It was the first instance she had seen of his temper.

  ‘I don't want your fucking gratitude,’ he shouted at her.

  ‘I'm sorry, I only meant we agreed to sort of share things and do things together.’

  ‘Is that what you call going off and ge
tting this job? Doing things together? Sharing things means making music together, it means doing what we've always done, how we found each other. Do you remember how we found each other?’

  The way he put it she found embarrassing. ‘Of course I do, Tom.’

  ‘It was at Holborn. In the station. I'll never forget it, I'll remember it all my life. You'll go through there on your way to this job of yours and you won't even think of it.’

  She was picking up the pieces of broken glass. She went to the bathroom for water to try to wipe the wine trickle off the old wallpaper. When she came back he appalled her by falling on his knees at her feet and begging her to forgive him.

  ‘I love you so much.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I want to do everything for you. It drives me mad that I do hardly anything, I feel so frustrated and impotent.’

  ‘Hardly that.’

  She wished she had not made that remark, a cheap crack, the kind of thing Mike used to say. It resulted in his taking her in his arms, urgently demanding that they make love. With Mike, Alice had often agreed to love-making for the sake of peace, though she might not feel like it and knew she would not enjoy it. When she left she resolved never to live like that again, yet here she was taking off her clothes and getting into bed with Tom, returning his kisses, running her hands over his body and even simulating sounds of pleasure and excitement.

  Not doing so would mean being alone in the nights, without Tom to hold her. Waking in the night was still an awful thing. She thought about Catherine and she thought about failure at her music, what would become of her if she could not make it any further, if it turned out after all that she was only fit to become a teacher of children taking their first violin lessons.