King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  ‘It took me a year to get over the accident,’ he said. ‘I couldn't face going back. I couldn't have faced studying.’

  ‘I know' that,’ she said. ‘You were living here. Had you forgotten you were living here?’

  He had. It came to him for the first time that she was displeased with him.

  ‘That was over a year ago, Tom. While you were here you told me that when you were better you'd apply to go back to college.’

  ‘How could I?’ he said, with as much bitterness as he could muster. ‘Do you know what they make you do? I was nearly at the end of my second year but they'd have made me start at the beginning of my second year and do it all over again. And you don't suppose they'd have given me another grant, do you?’

  He had underrated her. It had never occurred to him that she might have made it her business to find out these things.

  ‘Of course I suppose it, Tom. That's just what I do suppose. It works like this, you apply and they'll give you a grant for your final year. Once you're into that you apply again or your head of department does: in your case he or she would explain how you'd been ill and say what a good student you were, and the chances are, the very good chances, Tom, that they'd give you a grant for your second year as well. I went into all this after you left here a year ago. I thought I should. I expected you back, you see, only you didn't come back.’

  He muttered that he was sorry. He took courage, looked at her and said he had hoped, using a circumlocutory phrase, that she would finance him.

  ‘But you don't need me to do that,’ she said. ‘You'll get a grant.’

  ‘That's not quite what I meant. I'm not going back to college. It's too late.’ In spite of her cold stare, her increasing look of incredulity, he told her about his street orchestra, his need for amplifying equipment, for a studio, for auditioning and engaging musicians. He told her about Alice, who was going to be a great violinist, but needed money for her studies.

  His grandmother was silent. He had the impression she had too many things to say, that her head was full of inquiries and reproaches and expressions of doubt and bewilderment, but that she sensed it would be useless to say them. She was too old and too tired to say them. The one thing she did say was really all that was necessary for both of them.

  ‘What makes you think I've got money, Tom? I haven't any money. I've just enough to live on.’

  He blurted it out. ‘But you told me you were leaving me everything in your will!’

  ‘Everything is this house.’

  ‘You made me think – well, I had the impression, I mean, I thought you were rich, well-off, whatever you call it.’

  She got up and cleared the table. She carried things piece by piece to the sink without using a tray. When she came back the third time and lifted up the cheese board, she said, ‘I've left you this house in my will. I don't approve of will-shaking. You've treated me very badly, you've used this house as an hotel, you came in one day and said you were taking your things, you were moving out but you'd be in touch, but you never got in touch. I'm eighty-three years old and I shan't live long, but I don't intend to change my will because I doubt if at this stage I'd find a beneficiary much better than you. Admittedly, it would be hard to find one much worse.’

  He had gone red. He knew he had behaved badly to her and he said he was sorry, but he had not been well, he often did not know what he was doing, he was not well now.

  ‘Well enough to expect me to sell my house to pay the costs of setting up a street band,’ she said.

  Tom denied it. He was genuinely upset and filled with unaccustomed guilt. He felt that he had behaved badly and could not justify it, that she was right, had the whole of right on her side, and there was nothing he could say but repeat that he was sorry. If he could have had the time over again he would have acted differently. It is rarely that we feel like this, very seldom indeed that we actually feel, without making excuses for ourselves, without inner justification or compensatory reasons, that we have done wrong. For it is such an unpleasant feeling, this negation of the complacent ego, that we seem for a moment to be looking into a black pit where all nastiness is possible and into which we may so easily fall, to squirm there among the rest of wicked humanity.

  Tom's grandmother told him he could not afford a taxi back to the station and she drove him herself. She drove slowly, pausing too long at road junctions, reacting sluggishly to hazards, as very old people do. He kissed her but she did not move her face while he did so. Although she nodded and even managed a small smile when he said he would phone her, he thought they both knew they would never see each other again.

  Axel was waiting for her in the alley. Alice started at the sight of him. She was excited and strangely horrified, for she had not seen him for a long time, only heard his movements above her head while she lay awake at night. He looked steadily at her, smiled slowly, then turned his face to the door from which she had come. A single lamp at the far end lit the alley.

  ‘So this is where you work?’

  She said, and she thought what she said was stupid, ‘It's not very interesting.’

  ‘That depends on what interests you.’

  Did he mean herself?

  ‘We'll have a taxi.’

  ‘All the way home?’ she said, appalled at the cost of it.

  ‘I'm not so wedded to the subterranean as your Tom is. I think I told you I go into it only for a purpose.’

  She had no idea what he meant. A taxi came when she was beginning to think it was hopeless. She knew that when they were in it he would manoeuvre her into one corner of the seat and put himself into the other so that there was a yard between them, she was certain of that, so that when he sat close to her and took one of her hands in both his, she felt herself begin to tremble.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  She shook her head.

  He closed the glass partition between them and the driver, resumed his seat pressed up against her. That austere face, Slavic, pale and dark, white and black, was redeemed by the eyes that were as blue as some pretty blonde girl's eyes. His should have been brown, sombre and brooding, but they were cornflower blue.

  He said, ‘That building we were in, your office, is anyone there in the evenings?’

  She was astonished. She thought, in a moment I am going to be cruelly hurt, punished, humiliated. I am going to learn the secret of him, why he came to Cambridge School and got to know me. There is something in that building that he needs, some document or object or instrument, and that was the whole purpose of knowing me, to get his hands on that.

  ‘Do you have a key?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do I ask?’

  ‘Yes, what is it you want?’

  He began to laugh. She watched him stonily. ‘Oh, Alice, Alice,’ he said, ‘what are you thinking? What plots and secrets do you suspect me of now? Your face tells me you think I'm going about things in this clumsy way because I'm desperate to lay my hands on the papers.’

  That he could have read her mind so thoroughly made her blush. She turned her face from him like an offended child. He took hold of her chin in that way he had and turned her face to him.

  ‘I want to be alone with you. I want to make love to you, didn't you know that?’

  The driver's head was unmoving, shielded from them by the glass panel. She had heard somewhere or read that it was illegal for taxi drivers to have the means of seeing the back seat.

  ‘Don't you want to make love to me?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was very low.

  He lifted her chin again. ‘We have nowhere else to go.’

  She did something she had never done before to anyone, took hold of his hand and bringing it to her mouth, covered it with kisses.

  The man who had shaken Chris and Kevin and admonished Jasper did not seem to know the purpose of Damon's exit from the carriage. Jasper was not sure that Chris and Kevin knew. They might all simply have thought he was getting away from them, sneaking into
the next car. Jasper knew he had climbed out on to the roof.

  It was the best thing he could have done, in Jasper's opinion. The ride to Swiss Cottage accomplished, he would have overcome his fear of sledging and at the same time have put an end to further taunts from the others. The only drawback, from his point of view, was that Damon would take up the stop time at Swiss Cottage in climbing back into the car and the two of them, instead of getting off, would have to go on to St John's Wood.

  Jasper went and stood by the end door, looking up through the glass panel at the roof of the car ahead. He could see nothing, not even Damon's feet. The train had now been standing in the station at Finchley Road for five minutes and seemed stuck there. The doors were closed but they opened once more and half a dozen people got into the car. They got in but they all avoided the end at which Jasper and Chris and Kevin were.

  ‘He's not chicken,’ Jasper said, and Chris said, ‘OK, he's not.’

  Kevin said nothing but took from his pocket the eight-ounce Dairy Milk chocolate bar, the comfort of which he had been saving for just such a moment as this, and began tearing off the wrapping.

  Once more the doors closed. As the train left the station it would enter the tunnel and remain underground all the way to the terminus at Embankment. Jarvis could have told Jasper a lot of things about the construction of the various lines in this area of the Metropolitan, Jubilee and erstwhile Bakerloo, the feats of engineering, the threading in and out of tunnels, the displacement of subterranean tracks and insertion of others, but Jarvis had never talked to Jasper about the London Underground, he did not think he would be interested. And Jasper, though he certainly travelled on the Jubilee Line more than on any other, though this was the way he came every time he went to inner London, had not noticed – the average passenger does not notice – what Jarvis remarked every time he made this journey, that here the train must run downhill as it begins its descent under the Metropolitan line to the deep level.

  Jasper sat down. He had a low opinion of people who ate chocolate bars without offering pieces of them round and he gave Kevin a contemptuous look. The train started. Jasper knew that the tunnel roof here was reasonably high above the roof of the cars, but it was a tube, not a subsurface cutting. Just the same, Damon should be safe enough all the way to the river, though Jasper hoped, just for the sake of getting home, that he would come down before that.

  The mouth of the tunnel received them, and for the first time Jasper was aware of the downward gradient, that the train was descending. Perhaps he noticed it because he was concentrating so hard on everything to do with the train, the behaviour of the train, because he was so aware of Damon, who was unpractised and had been afraid, on top of the car ahead.

  He was concentrating but he was unprepared for what happened. Everyone in the car was unprepared. The train braked and gave one of those shuddering lurches which, if people are standing, are enough to knock them over. No one was standing in their car but at the second lurch they had to hang on to the seat arms to avoid being thrown on to the floor. One of the women cried out.

  Time seemed to cease and there was silence. It endured and it did not. This might have been ten seconds which passed or ten hours. Afterwards, Jasper could not have said, except that the former was more likely. He was petrified by the silence, a silence that seemed outside this world and beyond time. His hands had fastened themselves to the arms of the seat and he had grown numb, his whole body was numb, but his brain raced.

  From outside, up ahead somewhere, suddenly, came a scream, the like of which Jasper had never heard before. All the terror of every frightening thing in the world was in it. And it went on and on. The people in the car jumped up. Jasper stayed where he was. Jasper saw. He saw it come past the window, a mass of something dark and twisted, fighting the side of the car and screaming. He saw a foot stamp at the glass as the train tore it away and plunged on down into the deep, leaving the dying scream behind.

  18

  It was on the top floor of the building, under the flat roof, a small room with one small window, containing a single bed, a sofa that would make into a second bed, an electric fire, a small mirror on the wall, a piece of worn carpet fitted to the floor, a blanket in the cupboard and two pillows and two duvets encased in Tesco covers. It was known as the emergency room. Down the passage was a kitchen, small, with not much in it but a kettle and a gas ring, pots and pans, cutlery. A fridge and an oven had been considered unnecessary luxuries.

  London is full of such rooms in its offices. They are for the use of those executives who live in the far reaches of the Home Counties and who cannot get home when British Rail is on strike or incapacitated by storms. Two directors of the company Alice worked for shared the emergency room on the night at the end of January when a gale hit London and trains stopped running into Surrey and Sussex. Martin Angell slept on the single mattress on the floor and James Christianson on the bed base. Late in the evening James Christianson went out to buy bread and coffee and Martin Angell had to let him in again because he had no keys. It was found that only two complete sets of keys to the building were in existence. James Christianson, foreseeing another such emergency, entrusted Alice with the keys to get two more sets cut.

  Alice had three more sets cut.

  It was not the kind of thing she did. She had never done anything like it before. She knew that she was mad. Reason, morality, ethical behaviour, all that was lost, was thrown to the winds. The amount she was learning about herself, what she was capable of, made her tremble. It was almost a criminal thing to do, this making extra copies of keys given her by someone who trusted her. She wondered what criminal thing she would stop at. Was there anything?

  If he said, steal that, she would steal it. If he said, kill Tom, would she do that? He wouldn't say it. She clung to that. She thought, this is the way people are who fall under the spell of some murderer and join with him to do murder, just because he says to do it. It was not quite the condition they called folie à deux because that implied that each obsessed partner affected the other. She did not think that what she did, thought or wished affected Axel at all.

  She had almost forgotten Mike and Catherine. They had become shadows in her past she had left behind. Tom was still there, like an unwanted husband. That was how she had begun to think of him. He thought she rejected him because of all his failures, his refusal to go back to college, to get a job, his inability to get money from his grandmother, his lack of money. It was better for him to think like that than to be faced with the truth.

  She asked herself if she was in love? Was this being in love or was it an obsession, and what was the difference? It had one good effect on her. She was playing better.

  Madame Donskoy did not utter any of those laudatory remarks made by foreign female music teachers in books. She did not say, I have taught you all I know, now it is in your hands. Or, it is you who should be teaching me. Nor did she enter that other familiar scenario, take her own violin and play so exquisitely that Alice was stunned and shamed and able to see the hopelessness of her own aspirations.

  What she did say was, ‘That was not so bad.’

  It was praise. Perhaps it stimulated Alice to do better, or perhaps it was the reverse of what happened to poor Sibyl Vane when she lost the ability to act as a consequence of falling in love with Dorian Gray. Whatever it was, she thought she played faultlessly, but when the lesson was at an end, and it was the last but one, Madame Donskoy only talked about Yehudi Menuhin and some recording he had made with Stephan Grappelli of music from the twenties and thirties.

  Alice wrote off to the Britten–Pears School about the chances of being accepted on a two-week course.

  On the night of the storm, when the Underground trains ceased to run and Tom, caught with his flute on an escalator that stopped halfway up, had to walk home, she played her violin for Axel in the Art Room. He invited her. It was cold and the wind howled outside, rattled the windows and tore branches off the trees. Something crashed
through one of the windows in Remove and in the morning Tina, going in there, found it was a tile blown off the roof of the flats opposite. Axel ignored the wind. He behaved as if it were a normal calm evening.

  When she came to the door of the Art Room she hesitated and then she knocked. He laughed because she had knocked on the door.

  ‘What did you think I would be doing?’

  She never said much to him. She had begun to find it hard to speak to him. He took her in his arms, or rather, in his hands. It was the first time she had seen him without that long overcoat. His extreme thinness surprised her. She felt his bones against her as he ran his hands down her body and an erectness hard as bone pushing against her belly. It had become a commonplace that her desire was often strong enough to make her feel sick.

  Why was he in such control, smiling, casual? She had believed self-control was harder for men and he was obviously excited. He only laughed, shifted her away from him and opening her violin case, handed the violin to her.

  ‘Play for me.’

  ‘I don't know what to play.’

  He gave her one of those strange sidelong looks of his, the blue eyes shining. ‘Something romantic.’

  There was an arrangement she had once made and learned of the Great Waltz from Rosenkavalier. He knew the piece. She saw him mouthing words, the line about no night being too long with him. ‘Mit mir, mit mir, keine nacht ist zu lang.’ It was too apt. Her unsure fingers shook. She heard the discord, saw him wince, and wanting to weep, kept her self-control but ceased to play.

  ‘I'm not on form tonight.’

  He uttered a devastating monosyllable. ‘No.’

  There was a little love-making after that. He touched her and kissed her and smoothed her body and laughed and sent her away on the usual grounds that more must not take place under the same roof with Tom, even though Tom was not under it just at the moment.