King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  They could of course be following on the next train. Jasper went up the steps. He had no ticket to hand in and no money and the ticket collector was at the barrier. But so was a line of people. Jasper joined the queue, and to his relief, more people came to stand behind him. He hoped very much for a passenger in front to get in an argument with the ticket collector and divert his attention. His luck held and the woman two in front of him produced an out-of-date travel pass. The ticket collector scrutinized it, Jasper darted to the side of the man in front, under the woman's arm, and ran. Bellows of ‘Come back here!’ pursued him.

  He hid in the Indian's shop. They would not keep up the hunt for more than seconds. The ticket collector couldn't leave his post. Jasper contemplated a shelf of cereals, another of cat food. He could smell the chocolate laid out on the counter where the till was and his mouth filled with saliva. The Indian was watching him with hatred, with a longing for revenge, as one of his prize unproven shoplifters.

  Jasper sauntered out. More people were coming out of the station. They might have come off the train from Stanmore or the train from Embankment. You couldn't tell. Axel Jonas and Ivan No-name were not among them. But suppose he had missed them? Suppose they had come off a train he knew nothing about while he was in the Indian's shop? Jasper was almost positive they had not, that there had been no intervening train. But he experienced, perhaps for the first time in his life, that feeling of irrational unease when we know something cannot have happened, we are ninety-nine per cent sure it cannot have, it is against all reason and nature and probability, and yet we are anxious, we dread, we shiver for that one per cent.

  Jasper turned down Blackburn Road and went over the bridge. From there he had an excellent hawk's-eye view of both platforms. A train came down from Kilburn and almost at once another up from Finchley Road. They were not among the passengers getting off but Jasper was still wary. He came off the bridge through the little brick alley and began a circuitous way home via Priory Road and Compayne Gardens.

  He did not know, in any form of words or any mental picture, that his grandmother's house was a sanctuary for him but it was so. His body knew it and his instincts, the animal part of him that is drawn to its warren or its dray. Consciously, Jasper knew only that he would be safe there and get something nice to eat.

  When Jed went down to Kent to take the falconry course they had not told him the hawk would shriek all day. It stopped when he fed it. In the night it was silent while he was out with the Safeguards. It was silent when it perched upon his wrist in the jesses and he walked it up to the Heath or, as had once happened, he took it in the train up to the countryside beyond Barnet. Once back on its perch, unfed because when well-fed it would not wish to fly and hunt, the shrieking resumed.

  That it might disturb his fellow residents did not trouble Jed. He had an inner conviction that they did not hear it as he did. Once, fifteen years before, he had been a respectable householder, married and with a small child. The night crying of the child had been terrible to him. He had never been able to let her cry but had picked her up and walked her and fed her, in spite of his wife's admonition, his wife's anger. The crying pierced his soul. But he knew that others, everyone but himself and his wife, were unmoved by the sound. One dreadful night of crying his mother was staying with them. She slept through it, she heard nothing. In the morning she was cheerful, happy, astonished to hear that her grandchild had not slept peacefully through the night.

  So it was with the others, he was sure. They did not hear it. Only he heard it. When he came home from work at five he keyed himself up as he approached the house, he prayed that there would be silence, that at last the hawk had understood, had complied, had resigned itself. But there was never silence. From a long way off he heard the thin shrieking like a whistle of wind on the air. And he thought of that phrase of his, absurd in the circumstances, melodramatic, meaningless really: it pierces my soul.

  How greedily it fed! He felt he was starving it, he was depriving it of the one thing that made life liveable. A few minutes after he had gone indoors again, the shrieking began. Jed sat in his room, in Upper Six, in his smelly jacket where meat juice, blood, had stained the pockets and the lining, in the smelly room where there was no refrigerator and the day-old chicks, yellow, a little slimy, festered in their bowl, and thought how he loved the hawk. Abelard. He loved no one now but he loved Abelard. He was starving the thing he loved and submitting it to a slow torture.

  In the shed in the garden it continued to utter its regular piercing cries.

  Jarvis, in Remove, typed the last line of the first half of his history of the London Underground. He could leave it now and return to it in three months. In two weeks' time he was going to Russia. It was not a very good time of the year to go to Russia, for winter had arrived. But Jarvis, in pursuit of metro systems, had been in Washington in August and Helsinki in January, and was not deterred by the prospect of snow and low temperatures.

  Among other things, he was looking forward to seeing the Pushkinskaya station in Moscow where chandeliers hang from the ceiling in the low-level concourse. One thing only was making him anxious, and, sitting in Remove at his typewriter, feeling the faint tremor of the floor as a train passed by, he fretted at the prospect of being refused permission to see the work in progress on the new Underground in Omsk. He must see it. At the moment he had no proof that such a system was even being built in Omsk. It might be only a rumour and his Intourist friend could not – or would not – confirm or deny. At least, he must go there and find out.

  Bienvida came home from school and entered by the back door. Abelard was shrieking. She knew Jed was in because she could smell the smoke of his cigarette. She had seen Jarvis through the window in Remove. But she felt alone, she felt the empty spaces of the house, indifference to whether she was there or not breathed through those spaces.

  Bienvida changed her clothes. She put on a dress. Everyone wore jeans or tracksuit trousers at school and Tina said she would feel out of it if she had a skirt on, so Bienvida wore jeans. But she liked dresses, she felt more comfortable in them, and the one she put on, of green and blue plaid with a white collar, had been bought for her in Marks and Spencer's while she was out shopping in Oxford Street with her grandmother and Auntie Daphne. Over this she put on her school coat and she carried a pink plastic shoulder bag that had been Jasper's birthday present and which he had stolen from a department store at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. She was going to her grandmother's.

  The first thing she said when she got there was that Tina was at home doing the ironing. It was an invention she had arrived at on the way to Lilac Villa, having dismissed ‘having a cup of tea with two ladies’ as a fiction too incredible to be swallowed by anyone who knew her mother. She was pleased to see Jasper. While Cecilia went to make sandwiches for them Jasper said, ‘Shall I tell you what happened to me today?’

  ‘OK, if you want.’

  ‘It's very frightening.’

  ‘I quite like being frightened sometimes.’

  ‘I thought I'd died,’ said Jasper.

  ‘Yes, but you hadn't.’

  He told her about the sledging and the bear who turned out to be a man and turned into Ivan without-a-surname and about Axel Jonas. Both children had seen the film version of The Phantom of the Opera and Jasper said that must be what the Phantom's face was like when he took the mask off for the girl to see: like Ivan's. He said that Axel Jonas was a vampire with those funny sort of teeth.

  ‘What's a vampire?’

  ‘Like Dracula.’

  ‘What, like Dracula sticking his teeth in a person's neck and eating their blood?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Jasper, ‘only you don't eat blood, you drink it or suck it.’

  Bienvida shrieked like Abelard. Jasper, quite recovered from his experiences, enjoying himself, started laughing. In the kitchen, Cecilia heard them, heard what she thought of as their happiness, their merriment, and told herself all things were well, all t
hings worked together for good, Tina was settling down, was a good woman, was being a good mother at last, all would be well.

  After 6.30, after she had watched the early evening news, she would make her phone call to Daphne and tell her of the children's visit. She would tell her, if she could slip it in without sounding like one ridiculously occupied by trivia, of Tina's dutiful attention to the ironing. And then listen to poor Daphne's recital of Peter's latest doings, how he was ‘being silly again’.

  The two of them were in the cloakroom when the doorbell rang. Tina had not yet come back. Jasper and Bienvida now used the cloakroom as a den. They had accumulations of bedding there, Jasper's radio, a kind of mini ghetto-blaster Brian had given him, some bags of Japanese rice crackers neither of them much liked but which Jasper had stolen from the Indian shop, candles, matches, Jasper's cigarettes and a bottle of Lucozade, half-empty, Jed had put out with the rubbish. Bienvida had rescued this as a present for Jasper because someone at school had told her it had cocaine in it.

  ‘Not cocaine, caffeine,’ said Jasper. ‘You'd better tell your friend so she doesn't make the same mistake again. But I'll drink it. I quite like the taste.’

  Bienvida could read perfectly well but she liked Jasper reading aloud to her. What Jasper was reading to her was a book he had found under his mother's bed, on Daniel Korn's side, Count Oxtiern by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, in the mistaken belief (understandable in the light of the cover illustration) that it was a treatise on vampirism.

  They heard the doorbell ring and someone go to answer it. The footsteps sounded like Alice's. From the cloakroom a conversation on the doorstep or even in the front vestibule could not be heard. Jasper drank some Lucozade and resumed his reading.

  Whoever was at the door had come in. Jasper could hear Alice's voice and he heard her speak his mother's name, he heard her say ‘Tina’. Then the man with her spoke. He spoke in the voice of Axel Jonas and Jasper, falling silent, felt another strange new sensation, the illusion of his bones turning to water, as if his legs had melted.

  13

  At Hammersmith station Tom was waiting for her in the ticket hall. He had suggested they play there for an hour and he had brought her violin. He handed it to her as if they had made some prior arrangement.

  Alice resented Tom's bringing her violin. It seemed to her an act of possession. She imagined him going into her room and looking for the violin, opening the cupboard, finding it there and lifting it out, touching her things, pushing things about to find the case, then carrying the violin about with him, leaving it on the dirty floor in the Underground concourse with his and Peter's jackets and the flute case. She resented his taking for granted that she would want to go back to being a busker.

  ‘Why do you want me to?’ she said. ‘We won't make much. We'll be lucky if we make as much as your fare home.’

  ‘You used to like it.’

  ‘I didn't exactly like it. It was all there was.’

  They had walked about for a while, arguing. Alice thought Tom ought to get a real job, though she did not say so. She said she would not be very pleased if someone from the office saw her playing her violin down there. That made Tom laugh.

  ‘You've got very respectable all of a sudden, darling.’

  Alice hated being called ‘darling’. It was what her father sometimes called her mother. She thought of it as a possession word, an ownership word, exclusive to wives or wives designate, besides being old-fashioned. But again she did not say so. Even as she did not say so, she realized there were many things, an increasing number of things, she did not say to Tom. When they first met she had told him everything.

  She did as he wanted and went down into the underpass with him. Using her violin case as a receptacle for their takings seemed a sullying, a desecration, but he nodded and smiled encouragingly at her when she put it in front of them, so she left it there. The underpass was dark and dirty and there were stains and patches of grease on the floor that she shuddered to look at too closely. Footsteps echoed hollowly from a long distance away.

  ‘I'll tell you why it's a good place to play,’ Tom said. ‘Women are scared of going through here. Seeing us here will reassure them. They'll feel more confident, they'll be grateful and their gratitude will make them generous.’

  But there were no women. All the passers-by for a long while were young men who behaved as if Alice and Tom were not there, as if they were no more than the concrete uprights, the peeling walls of this dark underground passage. For a long time only one coin was dropped into the violin case. When Alice peered at it she saw that it was foreign, a Dutch guilder.

  She would not have believed it possible to recognize a hand. One man's hand is surely very much like another's. But the only other hand to drop money into the case that evening she thought she recognized, a man's left hand, with a wedding ring on it.

  Tom was singing love songs, an artia from Falstaff and then ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from The Magic Flute. She looked up and the bow became motionless in her hand. The man who had dropped the money was walking away, his back to her. Around that back were the straps of a baby harness. It was Mike.

  Alice's heart felt as if it had ceased to beat. It started again with a sensation in her chest like nausea. He had not seen her. He had dropped the money into the case because, perhaps, he always did this when he passed buskers. How would she know? She had never known him well, had forgotten most of what she knew.

  Where was he going? What was he doing in Hammersmith? She followed him with her eyes, watching him hungrily as he walked away through the underpass. A feeling of relief came to her that she had not seen Catherine, but it was immediately succeeded by a longing to see the baby, by an impulse to run after him.

  Tom stopped singing. ‘What happened to my accompanist?’

  She must tell him. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  Mike had gone, had disappeared up the steps. He must be on holiday, visiting some friend he had made since her departure. She said to Tom, ‘Let's go.’

  ‘We've only been here for twenty minutes.’

  ‘It's a bad place. No one's going to give us anything. Let's go home.’

  In the train he took her hand. ‘Something's upset you. What is it, darling?’

  ‘I don't want to play down there any more,’ she said. ‘Not anywhere in the tube. It damages me. Every time I do it, I play worse.’

  ‘You once called it your element.’

  He was angry and when they got home he went to his room and she to hers. Alice tried to put Mike out of her head by thinking of Brussels, of going to Brussels to study when she had enough money. Then she began to think of Tom. The money she was making would send him back to university to do his final year. He would be here and she would be in Brussels. She thought of the money she had earned as buying off Tom, or paying him off like a redundancy payment or love's golden handshake.

  When the doorbell rang she did not at first consider going down. Others were surely in the house, Jarvis perhaps, Tom certainly, Tina and the children, though in the Headmaster's Flat you could not always hear the bell. It rang again and Alice thought, as she had done once or twice before at the sound of the bell, it could be Mike, it could be Mike come to find me. A rapid fantasy showed him recognizing her after he had passed, following her home.

  Did she want him to come? She supposed that, perversely, she was hurt by his not wanting her, though she did not want him. No letter from him had ever come, no phone call, no message even. It was galling to have discovered that his indifference to her was as great as hers to him. The worst was his passing her by this evening, not knowing her, not recognizing her playing nor her hands, nor her body, nor bent head.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Alice went downstairs. The front door had stained-glass panels in it and through them you could see a caller's height and shape. She could see enough to tell it was not Mike. Disappointment dropped through her, as if her heart had lost its balance and falle
n. How could she be disappointed not to see the husband she had left with such relief?

  She opened the door. The man who stood on the doorstep was tall and thin and dark. His face was like a monk in one of El Greco's paintings. Alice, who knew nothing about painting, had once told a friend who was an art student that all the young men in El Greco's paintings had the same face. The art student had been cross and said that was nonsense, that was ignorance, but still Alice saw them as all the same, all narrow and pale, with dark eyes, with dark pointed beards and dark hair and expressions of controlled hunger.

  This man had that face and expression. He looked at her for a moment in silence and she stood looking at him, feeling that he might do some sudden violent thing.

  Instead he said, ‘Is Tina in?’

  Alice said, ‘I don't know. I'll see.’

  She left him standing there, went down the passage to the front door of the Headmaster's Flat. There was no bell, no knocker. She banged on the door with her fist. While she waited she thought, he might have said that to get into the house and steal something, and when she went back, having got no answer from Tina, he was in the hall. He was standing with his back to her reading the list of names incised into the pitch pine panelling, the Ediths and Dorothys with their pathetic Matriculations.

  Turning round to face her, he said, ‘Are you a teacher here?’

  She shook her head. ‘It's not a school any more.’ She felt a little afraid now that he was inside. He had closed the front door behind him. ‘Tina's not in. Can I give her a message?’

  For some reason that made him smile. ‘You can give her this.’

  It seemed to be a letter. The envelope was not sealed.

  ‘Jarvis not in either?’ he said, and added, ‘My name is Axel Jonas.’

  She was relieved. He was not an intruder, there was nothing sinister in his behaviour, he was a friend of Jarvis. He knew Tina. Yet his knowledge did not extend to awareness that the School was no longer a school. He surprised her by reading her thoughts.