King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  Concerned, Jed began walking towards this tree, and as he approached, summoned the hawk. He felt a tremor of anxiety. But as Abelard flew towards him, came unerringly to his hand, he saw with relief the un-crippled, sure winging, the smooth flight of a strong young bird.

  Each time the phone rang Alice expected it to be Axel Jonas. He knew Jarvis, so he must have the phone number of this house. He had told her they would meet again. She began answering the phone, running downstairs when she heard it ring. It never was Axel. The only calls she got were from her mother.

  Her mother was ‘coming up’ to London, to do Christmas shopping. She wanted Alice to meet her for a talk

  Alice expected some kind of trap. Her mother would not be alone, would have Mike with her, or even Catherine. She was glad now that Mike had not recognized her when she and Tom were in the underpass at Hammersmith. It was a wonder to her that she had ever fancied she missed him or could return to him. Music was all-important. Even Tom took second place to that, and Axel Jonas was nothing to her, just a man she had allowed to kiss her because she was in a disturbed state and hardly knew what she was doing.

  The day before the meeting with her mother, on her way to work in the morning, she saw a man she could have sworn was Axel Jonas in the crowd on Holborn station behind her. But when she looked back again he was gone and she thought she must have been mistaken. That evening she had a lesson at the house in Netherhall Way. Alice was nervous and could not concentrate. They had tea and Madame Donskoy talked about Anne-Sophie Mutter and then she said, ‘I find it very amusing how some people want success without the ability to reach it.’

  Madame Donskoy always said she found the kind of thing amusing that others would say they found tragic.

  ‘Are you talking about me?’ Alice asked.

  ‘We have a saying in Russia that if the hat fits you, wear it.’

  ‘We have a saying in England like that too.’

  Tom did not ring the doorbell when her time was up. She had not mentioned going to her lesson, but he was waiting under the tree just outside the gate and the man's figure, stepping out in front of her, made her jump.

  ‘Carry your fiddle for you, lady?’

  ‘Oh, Tom.’

  ‘I worry myself sick to think of you out alone in the dark.’

  She did not say it would soon be dark at the time she came home from work, for that would be to re-open the question of his meeting her. They walked back through the dusky shadowy Hampstead streets, overhung with trees, pale lamps showing between autumn leaves, Tom's arm round her waist.

  ‘I'm meeting my mother tomorrow,’ she said. ‘In the perfumery department of Dickens and Jones.’

  ‘I don't believe it.’

  He said that rather too often and it had begun to irritate her.

  ‘She wants us to have a talk.’

  ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘Alice, don't let her make you go back. Don't let her talk you into anything.’

  The intensity in his voice made her shiver. His voice was like a weight laid on her shoulders.

  ‘Who would want me back?’ she said lightly.

  ‘Anyone would want you.’

  The meeting with her mother was not happy for either of them. They had lunch together in the restaurant of a department store where a young woman sat on a small dais, playing a violin. Alice thought she played rather well, too well, and would have preferred to be made to wince and cover her ears. She told her mother about the violin lessons to show she was serious about what she was doing. She thought of adding a fiction about Madame Donskoy advising her to apply to the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh for a fortnight's intensive course with some great virtuoso, but decided against it. She did not want to tell lies to her mother as well as to Tom.

  ‘Things are all working out very nicely for you, then.’

  ‘Things are working out.’

  ‘Don't you want to know how your baby is?’

  ‘It's better if I don't know, isn't it? It's better to cut myself right off.’

  ‘Don't you think you did a wicked thing, walking out like that? Couldn't you have explained your feelings, talked about it?’

  ‘If I'd done that I never would have gone. I'd not have had the courage.’

  ‘I've seen Mike a few times,’ her mother said. ‘He never mentions you, it's too painful for him. He's thinking of selling the flat and moving in with Julia and her husband. Catherine and Julia's baby are nearly the same age. She'll soon forget she had any other mother, if she hasn't forgotten by now. Julia's a wonderful girl, she's a wonderful mother; she may not be much to look at, but where do looks get you?’

  Alice felt like saying, to Oxford Street listening to someone playing Tchaikovsky better than she did. Marcia said that with her looks she'd probably found herself someone else by now. Or had there been someone else before she left?

  ‘I'd like to have a bet on with you.’

  Her mother had never offered to bet on anything before and Alice was surprised.

  ‘I'd be willing to bet a great deal of money, a thousand pounds, say, that you never make it to the concert platform. No, I'll take that back. That you never make it into any orchestra. There you are, that's fair. A thousand.’

  When at last Axel Jonas phoned her it was at work. She was in her office next to James Christianson's. She could hardly believe it when he said who it was. Her mouth dried but she managed to ask him how he got this number. He said it was from someone who knew them both and she guessed that was Jarvis. Axel refused to be more specific. He suggested a meeting at a pub in West Hampstead, the Railway or the Black Lion, he seemed to know all about it.

  ‘That would be too near home.’ It was her first step on the road of deceit.

  The silence which greeted this seemed to her to be full of laughter. It was silence, but somehow warm with mirth. Then he said very lightly that they could go to this place in Kensington, near where he lived.

  ‘I don't have your curious passion for travelling great distances to get a drop of brandy.’

  She wondered why she wanted to meet a man who made her feel foolish. There was no way of explaining to him that she did not want Tom to know without implying that she expected more from their encounter than he intended. And did she? What did she expect? At least she could find out why he wanted to meet her.

  ‘It's not usual to ask a man that when he invites a woman out.’

  He said it coldly, in a tone of reproof. It was as if she had committed some breach of good manners. After he put the phone down she decided not to go. She did not know the man, she had barely spoken to him. What was a kiss? Her mother's generation might take a kiss seriously, but not hers.

  It was very hard to be free of Tom, who wanted to be with her in all her waking and sleeping hours. Alice contrived a lie about mending the breach and visiting her mother and father in Chelmsford.

  ‘I'll come with you,’ Tom said. ‘I'd like to meet your parents.’

  ‘It's bad enough for them that I've left Mike,’ Alice said. ‘Have you any idea how they'd react if I turned up with another man?’

  ‘They're going to have to get used to it, aren't they?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, hardly knowing what she meant by that.

  Tom had broken out with one of those bursts of temper. This time he smashed a plate. When she flinched and gave a cry, he flung out his arms and swept the dishes off the table. She tried to get out of the room and he barred her way, accusing her of not caring for him, of treating him the same way as she had treated her husband. Alice told him she did care for him, which was true in a way, and he denied it and raged some more, then collapsed in tears, in her arms, something which had not happened before.

  She had an urge to discuss Axel Jonas with someone. If she talked about him to Tom that would be the end of it. Mention him to Tom and there would be no meeting in a Kensington pub, no going miles for a drop of brandy. He was Jarvis's friend. She thought of talking about him to Jarvis, but when one evening on her r
eturn from work she encountered him in the vestibule, she realized she would have to explain how she had met Axel, how she had admitted him to Remove in Jarvis's absence and, above all, why she had not mentioned this before.

  Instead she said, when he asked her if she found the journey very bad from Holborn in the rush, ‘I didn't know you knew where I worked.’

  He looked at her inquiringly, as well he might. ‘Tina told me.’

  ‘Ah. Of course.’

  ‘I was interested,’ he said, ‘because your building's next to the one with the shaft coming up inside it. It's a big shaft that used to have a staircase in it to the Central Line. When they put the escalators in they took out the stairs and extended the shaft for ventilation. You could see that shaft opening from your office roof if you looked.’

  She should have remembered his obsession with underground trains, his general lack of interest in anything else. He answered her inquiry without knowing he had done so, but left her even more in the dark as to how Axel knew the phone number of Angell, Scherrer and Christianson. She went upstairs. Lights were on in the galleries but not in the vestibule below, and when she looked down she saw Jarvis still standing there, as if caught in the toils of a monstrous spider, where the unlit electrolier cast its shadow.

  She had made up her mind quite definitely not to meet Axel. There were enough complications in her life without this. She would not go and, in case he phoned her at the office again, she would ask the girl who ran the switchboard not to put him through. He would not come to the School again, she would never see him again. In a week or two he would be forgotten.

  On the Saturday she got to the pub in Cheval Place before Axel did. He kept her waiting for fifteen minutes. She had bought herself a glass of wine, drunk it, was on the point of leaving. She was almost relieved he hadn't come. Now there would be no more deception, decision-making, doubts, inner inquiries, resolutions.

  When he arrived he made no apology. He said, ‘Oh, hallo,’ as if they had known each other all their lives, met here every week at this time.

  He wore the same shabby, narrow black overcoat that came nearly to his ankles. His beard had been trimmed, his face was very pale. The thick black, slightly wavy hair was tied back with a piece of thin black ribbon. Alice thought he looked like some peripheral character in a television drama about Freud. He bought her another glass of wine and himself a brandy. She noticed he wore a heavy, solid ring, made of alternating bands of white and red gold, on the forefinger of his left hand. He had not been wearing that ring when first they met, she was sure of that. Alice felt strange about it. She thought it was all right for men to wear rings but not sometimes to wear them and sometimes not, and not on the forefinger.

  He asked her, astoundingly, how Jarvis was. She did not know what answer to make him.

  ‘He's going to Russia next week,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, the secret agent.’

  ‘He's going to see underground railways.’

  ‘The man who watched the trains go by.’

  ‘Yes, you could put it like that. He'll be away a long while. He's going to look at new metro systems.’

  ‘Good old Jarvis.’

  She drank some wine. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I'm a photographer. Oh, and I'm a bear-leader.’

  ‘I don't believe it,’ she said, like Tom. Why did she pick up men's speech patterns?

  He started laughing. ‘Which bit don't you believe? I'm a psychologist by training really, only I've never practised. As a matter of fact, I've never been a breadwinner.’

  ‘That I believe. What did you mean by a bear-leader?’

  ‘I and this dancing bear did an entertainment in the tube. Not a real bear, you understand. A man dressed up.’

  ‘But I saw you!’ she cried. ‘I was part of a group busking in the tube and I saw you!’

  The coldness returned to his voice. It was a low soft voice that could be very warm or very chilly. ‘I imagine thousands did,’ he said. Cold now, his voice dull, ‘I'm mad, you know.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘No, you don't think I'm serious. But I mean it. I am mad. I am insane.’

  ‘They say,’ she said lightly, ‘that if you know it you're not.’

  ‘I'm afraid that's not true. It's the worst thing, being mad and knowing you are.’

  He was looking very hard at her. She thought, with an inward shiver, he's right, he is, he is mad. I'll go, she thought, I'll get up and run out of here. He laughed, a warm, delightful, reasonable laugh.

  ‘Come, let's go, I'm going to give you lunch.’

  She expected a cafeteria, or at best a wine bar. He took her to an exclusive restaurant in Walton Street where the management, with extreme politeness, offered him a choice from a selection of ties before they were shown to their table. Axel chose one, not exactly meekly, but with a bland smile. Alice felt insufficiently well-dressed, was very conscious of her jeans, her shabby blouse and cardigan.

  They had champagne, then more wine. When she was halfway through it Alice understood this was going to be the most expensive meal she had ever eaten. She remembered how she had reproved Tom for spending money on Chinese takeaway.

  He talked to her about Jarvis. They had met through Ivan, ‘the bear’, with whom Axel shared a flat, and who had been at university with Jarvis. His manner was conversational, interested, quite gentle. He asked her about the house, about Cambridge School, how long she had lived there, who else lived there. He had, he explained, no idea that Jarvis had become a landlord.

  ‘It's how he lives,’ she said. ‘It's where he gets his income.’

  She told him about the rooms, with their classroom names or numbers still on the doors, and about who lived where. He listened. Then he seemed to lose interest. He talked about her. She must tell him about her music, about her ambitions.

  While she spoke he watched her closely. Being analysed must be like this, thought Alice. Axel seemed to listen and weigh every word, sometimes his lips moved into a half-smile, sometimes the extreme gravity of his expression returned. She was again struck by his priestly look, the contemplative gaze, the visionary's eyes. What he had said about being mad now seemed absurd. When the meal was finished, when he had paid with an American Express gold card – another surprise – she began to wonder about this priestliness, this casual coldness. What would they do now? What would he expect of her?

  He had told her he had a flat ‘just round the corner’. The man called Ivan lived there too but might not be there now. Alice, who had once thought she could handle this kind of thing, simply did not know what she would do if Axel looked at her in a certain way and spoke in a certain tone and asked her if she would like to come back with him to where he lived. She remembered the kiss. But the man who was walking beside her up Beauchamp Place might not have been the same man as he who had taken her face in his hand and brought her mouth to his mouth.

  Still, she supposed they were walking in the direction of his flat. She walked. He no longer spoke to her. At the top, in Brompton Road, he stopped, turned and looked at her and she was mesmerized. Her legs had grown weak. She was staring at him, her hand up to her mouth.

  It all happened very quickly. She hardly took it all in. He had hailed a taxi, opened the door for her and as she stepped in, instead of following, was instructing the driver to take her to the street where Cambridge School was in West Hampstead, and pressing a fiver into his hand. She sat back in the cab, shaken. He must have said goodbye, she must have said something, but what it was she could not recall. It had been a shock, yet what had she expected?

  A promise of some kind of future, an arrangement made for another meeting. He walked off without looking back and she knew she would never hear from him again.

  He phoned her at work the following Thursday. She had rehearsed what she would say if this happened, but by Thursday she had abandoned hope or fear. Already she did not know whether in connection with Axel she felt hope or fear. Sh
e had intended to say no, it's impossible, I'm sorry, I can't, but said instead, yes, all right. They were to meet in the same place, the same pub.

  That second Saturday she awoke very early. It was deeply dark. Jarvis's leaving for Russia had awakened her, his soft and careful closing of the front door. No taxis for Jarvis. He would take the Jubilee Line train from West Hampstead to Green Park and the Piccadilly Line that goes all the way into the terminal at Heathrow. The British Airways flight BA 872 departed for Moscow at 9.15.

  Alice wondered what she would wear for Axel. She had nothing, she possessed no nice clothes. Her best were what she wore for work. It humiliated her that she cared, that she even concerned herself with how she looked for this man who teased her, who used her, who would turn up late in a shirt without a tie and a coat a derelict might wear for begging in a tube entrance.

  Tom slept quietly beside her. He was so handsome, it was a pleasure to look at him. No woman who could have Tom would look twice at Axel. Alice got up and quietly drew back the curtains to let in the grey light of a winter dawn. Tom slept on. Light never woke him. She began working through her poor wardrobe, trying to find something flattering to wear for Axel.

  This time he was early, he was there when she arrived. His brandy was on the table in front of him and for her was a glass of champagne. He got up and took both her hands in his and she felt the heavy red and white gold ring on his forefinger bite into her palm.

  Almost the first words he said to her were, ‘I wish we could meet later in the day. I rather dislike making love in the afternoon.’

  She blushed. The blood did not just come into her face and heat it but rushed there and beat. She took her hands away from him and sat down.

  He was laughing at her, again making her feel foolish.