King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  She had given him the keys.

  She fretted about the ugliness of the room, the sordidness of the whole business, all these prevarications and illicit keys, and she asked herself again why a hotel room would have been sordid but this was not. Perhaps Axel could not afford a hotel room, but she did not think this was the case, she thought he could afford it. Sometimes she thought that Axel was, secretly, rich.

  There were people that she had read of who found that a sordid element added an extra thrill. She did not know if Axel was one of them, but it would not have surprised her to find that he was. It might of course be only the slight danger of being here that excited him. This skulking in an office building, praying for people to go home, watching the street from windows, making up that bed with bed-linen others had used, all this seemed to her of a desire-killing squalor. But it did not kill desire.

  He was late. She had known he would be late but was no less fearful for knowing it. Already she knew he was the kind of person who would enjoy keeping someone who longed for him waiting. She might be indifferent to keeping Tom waiting, but she never enjoyed it or gloated over it.

  She went down to the bottom in the lift and walked back up the stairs, leaving the lift down there for him. It was a way of passing the time. At the top, in the bedroom where the twice-used sheet was carefully folded back on the bed, she thought about Catherine. Her child seemed very remote to her, a tiny doll at the far end of a tunnel. At the same time she felt there was something unreal about her ever having had a child. She had dreamed it and dreamed her short marriage.

  Alice put the sheet back and pulled up the duvet. The bold invitation offered by that open bed shamed her. Besides, if she covered up the bed, closed the door, abandoned hope, he might come. She went downstairs again, looked at the open doors of the waiting lift, returned up the stairs. I won't wait for ever, she thought, I'll wait no more than another half-hour, but she knew she would wait, she would wait all night.

  At the top she thought she heard footsteps above her, someone moving about. It did not occur to her then that it might be Axel, that he, like her, might have used the stairs. She knew no one had used the lift, she had seen it down there, she would have heard it come up.

  Outside the room she stood listening. All the lights downstairs were out, she had turned them out as she came up. She thought, love should never be like this, planned for, arranged, contrived for, but spontaneous, a natural consequence of loving. He won't come anyway, I shall never see him again.

  And then he walked out of the dark passage. He came from the one direction she did not expect.

  ‘Well, and there was I thinking we'd missed each other,’ he said. ‘After all the trouble we've been to.’

  He was not the sort of man to kiss a woman when he met her. He never will, she thought. She closed the door of the emergency room and locked it. There was nothing to say and she had meant to keep silence. She expected him to be grave and deliberate, intense as he had once been, but he was talkative, he was laughing, not as if he anticipated some great happiness but as if it had already taken place.

  He had seen Tom. Coming from the Covent Garden direction, he had actually seen Tom through the window of a café. Perhaps Tom was on his way here.

  ‘He has never been here. He doesn't know where it is.’

  ‘I'll fight him if I must but I'd rather not.’

  She thought of saying something then about not understanding, about thinking he respected Tom. Wasn't that why they were here and not at home in his room or hers? But she did not say that. He had sat down beside her on the bed and, no longer laughing, no longer euphoric, but grave and speculative, had taken her face in his hands.

  She said the words she had once thought she would never say.

  ‘I love you.’

  He stroked her heavy hair, drew his fingers along the curve of her jaw, one long, cool forefinger across her throat and down to the parting between her breasts. He parted her blouse and lifted it away from her body.

  ‘So you told me before. Would you like to prove it?’

  The London Underground is not an enclosed complex, accessible only by way of the stations. Apart from the stations, nearly 300 of them, there are ways in and ways out.

  The ways out, mostly, are ventilation shafts to let out bad air and let in good. Travellers would feel like passengers in an aircraft do when their ears pop if there were no vents in the tunnel to release pressure.

  Blowholes covered with a grating were once a way of providing passengers with relief from sulphurous air. The Central Line put in ‘ozonizers’ that sucked air into the stations, but the salty tang which was the result clung to travellers' clothes and made them smell as if they had come from the seaside at Southend instead of Oxford Circus.

  In modern times spent air is fanned out and fresh air let in through station entrances and staircase shafts. Fresh air is pumped through shafts enclosed in staircase wells and through special shafts, sunk for the purpose. In the long stretch on the Central Line between Mile End and Stratford, the Old Ford fan shaft has a spiral staircase inside. If the power failed between these stations, the distance might be too great for the train to coast to the nearest platform. In such a case the passengers could be led through the train and into the tunnel and up the staircase in the shaft.

  It comes out in the street. Late one night in 1969 sixty people escaped up the shaft when the power failed.

  The round tower at Regent's Park on the Bakerloo is the top of an escape shaft. On another long stretch, the Victoria Line between Tottenham Hale and Seven Sisters, is the Nelson Road fan shaft. This too contains a spiral staircase.

  A stairway shaft, no longer in use for climbing up or down, was extended to the roof of an office block over the station site at Notting Hill Gate. Such shafts pass up through the centre of many office buildings in London. Their purpose is ventilation. All these office blocks belong to London Transport.

  Every station in the central area of the Central Line has disused tunnels and shafts. The lighted stations, busy with people, bright with advertising, noisy with the roar of trains, are surrounded by dark, disused passages and ranges of shafts.

  Some of these shafts once contained lifts, now replaced by escalators, some staircases. You can look up through the inside of these enormous cylinders and see in the dimness the old Edwardian tiling, a yellow and brown design, spiralling the circular walls, following the course of what was once a staircase.

  Among the passages are signals and communications rooms. The automatic signalling systems are safe and efficient. Passengers on London Underground are safer by comparison than on any other form of transport.

  According to London Transport Underground.

  It would not have been possible to keep Damon's death from Cecilia. It was in all the newspapers, it was a front page story. Besides, Cecilia watched television. The secret they hid from her was that he had been Jasper's friend and that Jasper had been there when he died, had been in the train from which he fell.

  Two officials of London Transport Underground went to see Tina. One of them was the group manager of the relevant stations on the Jubilee Line. They were sore and resentful because Kevin's mother, whom they had called on first, blamed them and told them things should be managed so that children could not climb on to the roofs of trains. Tina did not blame anyone. It would not have occurred to her to blame herself and as to Jasper, she said that boys were boys and that was all there was to it. She knew it was wrong of her to say so when that poor woman who was Damon's mother had lost her son, but all she could think about was her relief that it was not Jasper.

  An inquest was held. There was to be an inquiry. Bienvida said, if Jasper had to appear at the inquiry would his name be in the papers? Having tea at Cecilia's, the doll called Caroline on her lap, she had told her grandmother firmly (without being asked) and irrelevantly that Damon was no friend of Jasper's.

  ‘He never goes in tubes,’ she said. ‘He doesn't ride on the tops of train
s and he doesn't know anyone who does.’

  Cecilia understood with a sinking heart that the reverse of all this must be true.

  The gale blew part of the roof off the bicycle shed, so Jed brought the hawk back into the house. Abelard was no longer capable of flying any distance. Jed did not know what to do about him. He worried about the bird's weight, that if he did not fly he would gain weight and perhaps never fly again, so he restricted his food even further and Abelard screamed. Sometimes Jed thought he could see misery and despair in the hawk's eyes, a desperate craving for food, as if there passed through his small, limited avian mind a knowledge that all there was in life for him was food and if he could not have it, or have enough of it, the stretching years ahead would be a slow, unrelieved torture.

  The day of the appointment with the eminent bird specialist at the veterinary college came and Jed took Abelard up to Cambridge. Abelard perched in his jesses on Jed's wrist and the dignity with which he sat there filled Jed with pride. The other passengers in the Underground to Liverpool Street and then in the British Rail train could not see that he was incapacitated, that his wing would let him down as soon as he was released into the air. After a while Jed hooded him because he was afraid Abelard might start to scream. He was always afraid Abelard would start to scream.

  The wing was X-rayed. The eminent bird vet handled Abelard very gently. He looked at the X-rays. He examined the wing again and this time it did not seem to Jed that he was gentle, but probing and pushing among the striated brown feathers with hard, searching fingers, though the hawk made no protest.

  Abelard was once more on Jed's wrist and once more hooded and the bird vet said, ‘It's bad news, I'm afraid.’

  ‘He's not going to fly again?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  The explanation which came was of a virus that had affected the wing, that had damaged the muscles and nerves beyond repair. ‘It's no one's fault. It's nothing you've done, just one of those things.’ The bird vet astonished Jed because he showed that he had not understood at all. ‘They're expensive birds, you'll have paid a lot of money for this one. Seven hundred? Eight hundred? It looks like money down the drain.’

  ‘Isn't there anything to be done? I mean, an operation, anything.’

  ‘It's gone too far for that. Mind you, I doubt if it would ever have been possible. There's only one thing to be done. I can do it for you if that would be easier. You just leave him here with us.’

  ‘Thank you, but I'll take him back.’ Jed thought that if he did not go quickly he might break into tears. ‘I can take him to my local man.’

  ‘That's all right, then. It won't hurt. I mean, it won't hurt keeping him a bit longer, he's not in pain; he'll never be in pain, he simply won't fly again.’

  Jed had to give them a cheque before he left the building. He hoped he had enough in his thin bank account to cover it. Once out in the street he took the hood from Abelard's head and they walked along together to catch the bus to the station.

  Death had visited Jasper, had camped beside him and looked him in the face. He had not believed in death before, had not known it existed except as a remote incredible concept, more distant and less real than ghosts, less explicable than God.

  Until now he had known that there were dead people in his past but he had not known anyone who had died. Brian's parents were alive and well, were not really old yet, and his grandfather Darne was dead long before he was born. Jasper had not thought people did not die, he knew they did, he had been told so, but not the people he knew. They could not die. They might confront something that people called death but at the decisive moment it would be averted, it would be deflected as in films and dreams. It was as if, at the moment of their extremest, most fearful danger, some force would put out its arms and grab them and sweep them to safety.

  He had been afraid for Damon, but not he now knew afraid that Damon would die. That had been too big for him to think of. He did not know any longer what he had thought might happen instead – injury, perhaps, or simply retribution. And when he thought back to those minutes before the accident, remembering it with a kind of cringing misery, he felt stupid that he had not known, had not anticipated, he felt as much of a fool as he had one day when he turned round in a crowd to speak to Bienvida only to find he was addressing some quite different girl.

  There was no one to talk to about it. Soon after it happened a woman came to the School to see Tina; she was from the social services or London Transport or somehow both, Jasper didn't know, and he heard her telling his mother he might need something called counselling. He was not asked. Tina said, perhaps, why not? – it might be a good idea.

  ‘It's a very viable concept in cases of accident witnesses,’ the woman said.

  Jasper thought counselling might mean being taken into the care of the council. There was someone in his class at school who was in care because his father had left, his mother could not cope and his brother had been killed in an accident. It did not seem too far removed from his own situation. But when he asked Tina, all she said was, ‘I never heard such a load of crap. Where do you get this stuff from?’

  There was no one he could talk to. He doubted if he could talk about it to Kevin and Chris even if he got to see them, but he did not get to see them, they were separated from him either by chance or by adult design, he did not know which. Their surnames, their addresses, he had never known. They were lost, swallowed up by London somewhere, and he knew he would never see them again.

  He would never again go in a tube train. Well, perhaps one day when he was old, after years and years. He did not even like seeing the silver trains from the back windows as they rattled down to London and up to Stanmore. The feel of them vibrating the house was disquieting. It was funny, but he had lost the taste for smoking too. Was it because he had had a cigarette just before it happened, the one that had fallen out on to the line? Perhaps he was meant to give up smoking before it really took hold. Everyone said it was best to give up young.

  He spent a lot of time in the cloakroom, sitting and thinking. Tina thought he was at school, but he went to school no more now than he had done in the old sledging days. He sat in the cloakroom with the electric fire on and blankets round him. Nothing had been done about the bell, though when a new rope was attached to the existing length it would pass through the trap in the dark part of the passage by the old Science Lab where no one but Jarvis went, and Jarvis was still in Russia. Tina had had a postcard from him with a picture of the Kremlin, posted five weeks before. She looked at it and said every postcard she had ever seen from Russia was a picture of the Kremlin and she did not believe there was any other kind.

  Jasper always thought of the accident and Damon's death as it. He found that if he made himself think about it before he went to sleep at night, remember Kevin and Chris flapping about chicken-like, the man who shook them, Damon's quiet escape, the entry of the train under the tunnel portal and, last and continuously terrible, that cry and that thing passing the window. If he thought hard about all that last thing at night, he would not dream about it, this was an infallible method for stopping dreams. When he dreamed, he woke up yelling. If Tina heard him she never came in, and on the whole he was glad she did not, as he would have been ashamed. But he had no one to talk to.

  Bienvida had covered up her ears and said if he mentioned it again she would scream so that she couldn't hear. She was round at their grandmother's, telling Cecilia with perfect truth that Tina had no boyfriend at present, so Cecilia of course believed she probably had two.

  The newspaper story, when it appeared, was not just a disappointment to Tom, it was a shock.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Alice said.

  ‘Not a send-up. I didn't expect a send-up, which is what this is. That woman who came to interview me gave me the impression she was going to write a serious article.’

  ‘They say all publicity is good publicity.’

  ‘I don't see how it can be if something says, or impl
ies, you're only playing in the Underground or the street because you can't play anywhere else, and says you've no qualifications and insults you. What's an auto-didact anyway?’

  ‘Someone who's self-taught.’

  ‘You see? It isn't even accurate. I'm not self-taught, I just didn't take my degree. And why does she say those sort of snide things about Peter and Jay being gay, it's just perpetuating old homosexual persecution, as if it isn't just as OK to be gay as straight. You see where she implies I'm gay too, by association with them I suppose. I wonder if that's libel; I wonder if I could sue her for libel.’

  ‘If you think being gay's OK why is it libel for her to say you're gay?’

  It seemed he had expected the article to bring money in. At least the writer had taken pains to find out how much the wireless system he wanted would cost and had precisely itemized it. With misgivings, Alice saw him await the post, expecting it to bring him cheques sent care of the newspaper. His paranoia had become very marked. He thought everyone was against him. Everyone, that is, but Peter and Jay – and Axel. To Alice's astonishment and vague dismay, Tom had struck up a tremendous friendship with Axel.

  It began one evening after one of their quarrels. The subject was the usual one, Alice persisting he return to college and in her determination to go on to a conservatoire, Tom retorting that she was trained enough, she should apply for an audition with some northern orchestra while he found, as he would soon find, a way to make big money. When he had told her she did not love him, if she loved him she would go back to busking with him, return to the way they had been when they were so happy, and she had been without a single answer to that, he jumped up and said he was going to knock on ‘the new guy's’ door. He was sure he was lonely up there, and he was going to take him out for a drink.

  Alice was appalled. ‘I won't come.’

  ‘No, don't. I'd rather you didn't. I don't want you sitting there making sarcastic remarks about my ignorance and apathy and any other of my inadequacies that may come to mind.’