King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  She reminded him that they had no food in the house, they had to go out and buy food.

  ‘We can eat in that Chinese place.’

  He said it indifferently. He said it as might that up-and-coming businessman he sounded like, a man who was succeeding in his career and making money hand over fist. Alice told herself not to remind him, as she longed to do, that she was earning £800 a month and he, if he was lucky, eighty. The music school application forms remained as they were when they arrived, unopened, untouched.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I'm getting up the nerve to ask my grandmother for a loan to buy the necessary equipment.’

  They had come out on to the landing or gallery at the top of the first flight of stairs. It was one of the colder days of a mild winter. Tom was one of those men who never wrap up, who always wear a short jacket, simply turning up the collar in the wintertime. Alice, very glad these days that she had brought it with her, wore her winter coat. She had jeans on, boots, a woolly hat and gloves, and round her shoulders the big blue and red shawl she had bought, her sole extravagance. Her bright brown curly hair fell down her neck and over this shawl like some additional warming garment, a cape or veil.

  Tom had begun talking about what he called, in an awful pun, the second string to his bow. He had discovered a course, taking place in Cambridge, where they taught violin-making. Making violins would not only be lucrative, but therapeutic. He could imagine the feelings of peace and serenity and accomplishment working quietly at this splendid and useful craft would bring him.

  Alice had put her hand through his arm but withdrew it when she saw who was coming up the stairs. Her heart expanded and slowly turned over. It was not a feeling she had ever had before. It did not exactly hurt but it was on the edge of hurting. Once more in its rightful place, her heart began to beat with heavy drumstick blows.

  He was coming up slowly, his head lifted, his eyes turned towards her. He wore his long dark overcoat and with it a black scarf, long enough to measure his own height twice. It was not tied round his neck but its two ends hung over his shoulders and down to his feet like some kind of vestment.

  Alice did not know what to do. There passed through her mind the idea that he had come to find her, perhaps even to take her away. Or, worse, not to take her away. She thought, suppose he comes up to me and kisses me in Tom's presence. Axel stopped and looked at them before mounting the second flight. That is, he looked at both of them. His eyes had not left Alice's since she first saw him there.

  He said, ‘I'm Axel Jonas, a friend of Jarvis's. I've come to live here.’

  Holding out his hand, Tom went towards him. He said his own name, then hers, looking over his shoulder at her. They were shaking hands, Axel's eyes continuing to meet hers blankly, without recognition, without apparent recognition.

  She took his hand. It was cold, she could feel the cold through her woolly glove. A shiver went through her, a strong galvanic movement he must have felt pass between their joined hands. Alice took hers away. She felt Tom must see what had taken place, for it seemed to her a small silent drama, the air around them thick with concentrated tension, with Axel's studied control, her suppressed fear and, yes, her longing.

  But Tom was smiling pleasantly. ‘We were just going out to eat,’ he said.

  Axel inclined his head.

  ‘Don't hesitate to ask, will you, if there's anything you want to know. About the place, I mean. Well, about anything you have problems with.’

  ‘I won't hesitate,’ Axel said, and Alice thought he said it meaningfully, she thought there was a special meaning underlying those words that referred to her. He would not hesitate, not now, he would not delay.

  He passed on up the second flight, and Tom, halfway across the vestibule, looked back and up the two flights and up the two galleries to see which door he opened. Alice was now reluctant to go out. From being fearful and rather shocked, she had become excited. The idea was inescapable that Axel had come here for her, had moved in for her sake, to be near her, under the roof she was under.

  She could not eat. She fidgeted to be back. While they were in the restaurant and on the way home she hoped Tom would mention Axel, just say something about him, even that his arrival was unexpected, even something disparaging about his appearance. She was already afraid to speak of him first. But Tom was uninterested. Tom only wanted to talk about his musical projects and their future.

  ‘Is there any future in busking?’ she said at last, awaiting the explosion, the anger.

  He only grinned. ‘Oh, we shan't be busking for ever. Or not in the way you mean. When we've made ourselves famous down there we'll come up into the light. Jay's got a good contact with a journalist who's going to do a piece on us for the Evening Standard. What would you say if I told you we could be the resident trio in Covent Garden in a year's time?’

  She said nothing. On the way back, just outside the front door, she said, ‘What did you make of that man we met when we were coming out?’

  ‘What man?’

  He had forgotten or had never cared.

  Alice lay awake a long while, thinking about how Axel must have come for her. One of his rooms was directly above the Headmaster's Study, the other above and at the front of the house. She listened for a movements overhead, heard nothing. In the morning the house was silent, there was no one about. It was a Friday and her last day at work before Christmas.

  Now that Axel had come and had seen her she expected him to phone her at her office, but he did not phone. Tom was in Holborn tube station when she went down there and they travelled home together. He had had a good day, attracting discerning travellers with less well-known Christmas carols, singing ‘Lullay, lullay’ and ‘Personent Hodie’ and ‘Love Came Down at Christmas’, his personal takings amounting to over £10.

  Alice had convinced herself Axel would be in the vestibule when she arrived. He would be standing as he had done that first day they met, reading those old-fashioned girls’ names engraved on the pitch-pine panel. The hall was empty, the whole house felt empty. She and Tom ate their meal in the Headmaster's Study, listened to a new recording she had bought of a Brahms concerto. They often listened to music together, but never after eleven at night and were always discreet about the sound. Alice had never worried she might be disturbing anyone but now she thought of Axel, half-expecting him to come to their door and ask them to turn the stereo down. From that evening she could date her perpetual thinking about Axel, from that evening he was never really absent from her thoughts. He was the air she breathed, the sounds she heard, his face superimposed on the faces of others, he figured in the dreams she dreamed.

  There was nothing she could do about it. He was there in her head. That he was not there in the flesh was a perpetual burning, trembling anxiety. He might as well not have been in the house, perhaps he was not in the house. Her thoughts narrowed to a point that contained one tiny seed of purpose: to go to the door of Five or the door of the Art Room, to knock and open the door and go in and find him. She never did this, only thought incessantly of doing it.

  Among the things left behind in Underground cars have been: a brace of pheasants, several Christmas turkeys, £1,500 in cash and a suitcase containing a full set of Masonic regalia.

  Travellers tend to leave more things behind at Christmas time. At Liverpool Street last year four bags of Christmas groceries were handed in as lost property as well as a baker's wooden tray of sandwiches.

  Every train is cleaned at night. On the Central Line every train is litter picked at the end of each journey. At Oxford Circus eighty sackfuls of rubbish are collected each day. This is mostly made up of takeaway boxes and freebie magazines. But what clutters the tunnels is human hair, shed softly, imperceptibly, invisibly, by the millions who use the system.

  The fluffers go into the tunnels by night when the power is off. Their task is to pick clean the spaces between the rails. It is not a hazardous occupation, but tedious, sinister and sometimes frightenin
g. There can be no trains running on those tracks, for the power is off. You know for certain no trains can run. But if a train passed through the tube there would be no more than nine inches space between its sides and its roof and the tunnel wall.

  Imagine you hear a train coming. There is nowhere to go, no escape. And you do hear trains coming. What you hear are the driverless Post Office mail trains running along their own parallel tunnels, and you know it, but do you suppose you always know it when you are in the tunnel in the depths of the night?

  In the Tokyo underground staff are employed exclusively to collect into baskets sleeves torn from passengers’ clothes in the crush and the shoes they have left behind.

  On the evening before Christmas Eve Jed took Abelard to the vet. The vet heard about the trouble Abelard was having with his flying, how he seemed not always to be able to succeed in reaching the highest branches, how he had lost feathers from his right wing, and made an appointment for Jed to see a specialist bird vet at a veterinary college. He stressed how important it was to keep the hawk warm.

  Jed brought Abelard indoors and put him on the perch in Upper Six with the oil heater on. He went out at eight to meet three other Safeguards, a man and two women, on the northbound Northern Line platform at Tottenham Court Road. All was quiet on the first run up to High Barnet and back again, but on their second time out a crowd of teenage boys came ‘steaming’ through the train. They kicked a woman's bag out of their way, emptied the contents of a suitcase over the floor and pushed an elderly man over when he tried to stop them. Jed got out and alerted the driver who put a phone call through and two London Transport police officers were waiting to board the car the boys had reached at Kentish Town.

  There was peace after that until one of the women Safeguards, Maria, found a suspicious carrier-bag left in a corner of the second car. They speculated it might be a bomb before turning it over to the assistant station-manager at Tottenham Court Road, but Jed thought it was most likely a Christmas turkey someone had forgotten.

  Abelard was sleeping on his perch when he got home and the room was warm and cosy.

  Tina took the children to her mother's house late on the morning of the 25th. She did not go on the Eve because she was out celebrating with Daniel Korn until some time in the small hours of Christmas morning. At Cecilia's for lunch were Tina, Jasper and Bienvida, Brian Elphick, Daphne Bleech-Palmer, Peter Bleech-Palmer and Jay Rossini.

  It was a real sacrifice on Brian's part as he had been invited with his girlfriend to spend the day with her sister and brother-in-law at their house in Chigwell. But he was a nice man with old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes duty and obligation. Bienvida and Jasper knew all about the girlfriend and had often met her but Jasper was not specially interested and, like the majority of males, though not all, hardly ever talked about people to other people. Bienvida on the other hand had been very interested, but had lived up to her well-known reputation for discretion and never mentioning anything that might cause trouble. She had not said a word about Brian's girlfriend to Cecilia and had even prepared herself to deny this woman's existence in the unlikely event of her grandmother's inquiring.

  Tina had a hangover and cold, which combined to make her morose. It put an unfortunate blight on things, Tina's cold, because Jay became inordinately distressed about it, fretting that Peter might catch it, even suggesting that they should not stay for lunch. Daphne could take only so much of this before saying, ‘It wouldn't be the first cold he's had, I'm sure. He used to be very prone to colds when he was small. You want to worry about Cecilia catching it, she's the one who gets bronchitis.’

  But Jay persisted. Peter had to sit as far from Tina as possible and every sneeze provoked an exclamation of dismay from him. Anyone but Tina would have been made to feel uncomfortable. Jay took Peter away in a taxi as soon as lunch was over.

  The London Underground does not run on Christmas Day.

  Brian had his car and ran Tina and the children home in it. The distance was very short but they had their presents to carry and Tina's head was killing her, as much from drink the night before as from her cold. They met Axel Jonas coming out with a man in a hood pulled down to hide his face but, not knowing them, they concluded they must be friends of Alice and Tom.

  When they had picked up the wrapping paper and folded the best bits for use again next year – if there was a next year, as both of them these days mentally reserved – when they had wrapped the turkey in clinging plastic and put it into the fridge, Cecilia and Daphne sat side by side on Cecilia's sofa and watched a video. It was A Passage to India. They did not say much to each other. Like a long-married couple, they had said it all and there was not much left. To say something kind, pay a small compliment to the other, was the wish of each as it was on most days when they met. Accordingly, Daphne said what a dear little girl Bienvida was and how pretty she was going to be, and Cecilia said how much better Peter was looking.

  Cecilia had read the book. She found her thoughts wandering a little. On the whole she felt very happy. It was always a joy to have Daphne to stay, to bring her morning tea in bed, knowing exactly how she liked it without having to ask, a very little milk, one level teaspoonful of sugar, to draw back the curtains, ask the question out of which long ago Daphne had made a joke that had become a ritual for them: ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘On my left side, dear, and under your very nice warm quilt.'

  Cecilia turned her attention back to Mrs Moore and the Marabar Caves.

  16

  The only one of them to catch Tina's cold was Tom. Alice went back to work after the Christmas holiday with a sense of freedom because he was not down in the Holborn concourse when she left for home. A man with drums, a man with a guitar and a girl singing Tammy Wynette songs were there instead.

  She was thinking, as usual, about Axel Jonas, seeing his face in every crowd, on every Underground platform, in photographs when she looked in a newspaper. The man himself she had never seen since that meeting at the top of the stairs, but she had heard his footsteps above her head, and the previous evening had heard him behind the closed door of Remove. Tom was in bed in Four, his own room, nursing his cold. It was late but there was a shop open all night in West End Lane. Alice went out to buy aspirins and coming back saw through the big bay window a faint light, like the moving beam of a torch.

  It went out and she could almost have deceived herself that she had imagined it. In the hall she listened outside the door of Remove. She could hear sounds from within, not footsteps but of objects being moved, papers pushed across a wooden surface, wood sliding on wood. Or she imagined that was what she heard, she was not sure.

  That it must be Axel she knew. Neither Tina nor Jed would take any interest in the contents of Jarvis's room. But if it were Tina or Jed she would have opened that door and asked them what they were doing. She thought of walking in upon Axel in the dark and knew she was afraid to do that, she was simply afraid of what might happen. Instead she went quickly upstairs, turning off the lights behind her. Making a hot drink for Tom, dissolving aspirins in a glass of water, she thought, but it's all right, he's Jarvis's friend, Jarvis has given him permission to be in there, though she knew this was not at all what was worrying her.

  Later, she heard him come upstairs. To reach the second flight he had no need to pass her door but might have gone straight on up. His footsteps came along the gallery and stopped outside her door. She knew he would try the door and, finding it unlocked, come in. Her breath held, she waited, rigid with fear, she did not think she had ever in her life been so frightened. Never in her life had she hoped so much.

  He stood there for a long time. It must have been a whole minute he stood there, and a minute can be very long, before moving away to the upper flight of stairs. She heard his door close above her head and a sweat broke out over her body. She could not have said if she was relieved or bitterly disappointed and she had no idea what she had been frightened of.

  Not for the fir
st time she went over in her mind the conversation they had had in which he said he was mad. He had said it quite seriously and calmly, as someone else might have said he was asthmatic or accident-prone. And now she was inclined to think, as she had not at first, that he had used the expression as people do when they mean wild or eccentric or quixotic.

  He had said he believed in love. She remembered his expression as savage when he said that, but perhaps it had not been, perhaps that was the invention of her own memory. He believed in everlasting love, love beyond death. Why had he told her if he had not meant he could come to love her like that?

  Contrary to what most people think, there is not much crime in the London Underground.

  For instance, Brixton police deal with three times as many robberies as London Transport Police.

  The commonest crime is ‘dipping’, another name for stealing wallets and handbags and picking pockets.

  The Countess Teresa Lubienska, a Polish woman of seventy-three, was stabbed in a descending lift at Gloucester Road in 1957 It was quite late at night, a Friday in summer. In 1983 a booking clerk at Balham was murdered with a sawn-off shotgun. It was not shot or a bullet which killed him, but wadding propelled from the gun. Twenty-three suspects were interviewed but the killer was not found.

  In the same year a vagrant called Kiernan Kelly tried to push someone under a train. He was charged with attempted murder and while locked in a police cell at Clapham with two others, garrotted one of his companions with the man's own shoelaces. Kelly claimed he was guilty of many murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984.

  Most assaults on the Underground are caused by drinking. Telling someone to put out a cigarette may result in getting knocked down.

  The man who rushes about crowded platforms trying to push people off on to the line is known to the police, with a sad lack of inventiveness, as the Wild Man from Borneo. His hair is long and bushy and his clothes dirty. One of his victims fell over the edge but came to no harm. The ‘juice’ runs through a rail on the wall side.