King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  This was unfair as Alice had never uttered a word of criticism of Tom in anyone else's presence, but all she said was, ‘You don't even know if he'll come.’

  She was sure he would not. A man who had refused to make love to her under the same roof as her accredited lover, even when he was not present under that roof, would hardly start going out to have matey drinks with him. So she was very surprised when she heard Axel's voice as he and Tom passed down the stairs together, surprised and chagrined. If Axel was going out with Tom, would it not have been natural for him to come in here and speak to her first, just say hallo to her? She could not bear not to see him. As she heard the front door close she went across the passage into the big, empty, unfurnished Staff Common Room and watched the two men from the window.

  It was too dark to see much. The light from a street lamp showed them both to her at the gate. She gazed at Axel, as if concentrating like this would photograph him and keep his picture with her. They disappeared into the dark and Axel's retinal image with him. Alone, she thought of him, as she always thought of him when alone, of his face and the things he said, but not of their love-making because that would be more than she could stand thinking of. It was as if doing that would make something swell and explode inside her or she would collapse or begin screaming the way the hawk had once screamed.

  After that Tom and Axel saw each other constantly. She had always suspected that Tom, in spite of his love for her, a love which if they were married would have been called uxoriousness, was nevertheless what is known as a ‘man's man’. He was the kind of man who preferred men's society and would like nights out with the boys. He would never be unfaithful because the life he enjoyed would not take him into the company of women. But none of that accounted for Axel's friendship with him. She could have asked Axel but she did not. She watched them go out together, down to the pub or to some club of which Axel was a member, and she was jealous. She envied Tom because he was out with Axel.

  Another strange thing was that Axel seemed to have forgotten all about his principle of no love-making under Tom's roof. They had met twice more in Alice's office building and then Axel, taking her home in a taxi, had said, ‘We won't do that again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ A small hoarse croak of a voice like a very old woman's.

  ‘What do I mean?’

  She thought he was going to force her to explain. She shook her head, feeling sick.

  He laughed. He took her face in his hand and looked into her eyes and touched her nose with his nose. ‘Oh, Alice, not that. I only meant, home is best.’

  ‘But you said you wouldn't…’

  He shook his head, pointed to the back of the driver's head, though the glass panel was closed. With a shrug, he said, ‘Needs must when the devil drives.’

  She did not know what he meant.

  ‘That place, your office, I shouldn't like to be – caught.’

  She was surprised, for without much evidence for this she had thought him afraid of nothing. But she had not argued, she was too happy that what she had feared for that appalling moment was not true. He wanted her, he still wanted her. Although they had only just made love, had indeed made love twice, the idea that this would now take place at home, in her room or the Art Room or in Five, filled her with excitement. It would be more frequent, it would be more spontaneous, it would happen as the result of chance encounter and rapturous impulse. From clandestine sex, it would become what she wanted, a love affair.

  He seemed to have forgotten about the taxi driver, or was only interested in what the man might hear, for he took her in his arms and began kissing her passionately. It seemed strange, after what had happened, their extremely uninhibited, astonishing love-making, to think that this was the first passionate kiss he had ever given her, the first kiss of true feeling. But so it was. It was quite different from those sensuous and lascivious teasings with lips and tongue that she expected from him. She abandoned herself to him, as if she could be one with him, as if she could lose herself. She grew weak, yet a great energy and power possessed her.

  The only television set in the School was Tina's. It was an old black and white set, which was why it was seldom watched, even by the children. Tom and Alice never watched television or bought newspapers and it would not have crossed Jed's mind to do these things. The bomb attached to the underside of the car which went off and killed the MP who was driving it, they knew nothing about. Bienvida and Jasper might have seen news coverage of the car exploding in the Mall if they had been able to watch their grandmother's television, in which case Jasper would certainly have recognized the face of the man who had been arrested. But Cecilia was not at home. Cecilia was in Willesden staying with Daphne.

  ‘It sounds awful,’ Cecilia had once said, had said in the days when this staying in each other's houses began, ‘it sounds awful but I sometimes wish we didn't live quite so near each other. Then, if you see what I mean, we'd have more reason for going away to stay.’

  This was said soon after Tina had made that suggestion about her and Daphne. It was during the time when Cecilia nervously believed that everyone they knew must be thinking things.

  ‘I shouldn't worry,’ said placid Daphne. ‘Look at the young, they're always staying in each other's places. Peter's more often away than he's at home and as often as not it's with someone in the next street.’

  Cecilia was comforted, though she knew she was not young and Daphne was not and different things were expected of them. But she had gone on staying with Daphne and Daphne had gone on coming to stay at Lilac Villa. It was so nice, it was something she would have missed bitterly in spite of what Tina said. They looked after each other. Daphne looked after Cecilia in Willesden and Cecilia looked after Daphne in West Hampstead. And as the years passed this looking after became a more and more important part of the staying in each other's houses, so that Peter, looking in one day while his mother was with Cecilia, called it ‘intensive care’.

  Daphne had been sitting in front of the television and Cecilia had just put a cushion behind her head and brought her a cup of tea and two biscuits on a plate. She had put a small table at Daphne's elbow. The pills Daphne took for her blood pressure were in a coffee saucer and there was a small medicine glass of water beside them. This was because Cecilia had read somewhere that you should never swallow pills with any liquid but water.

  Peter said, ‘I didn't know my mum was in intensive care.’

  ‘You should see how she looks after me when I stay with her.’

  Cecilia had been in Willesden since Saturday and would go home on Wednesday. She and Daphne called it a long weekend. She had the bedroom that was known as ‘hers', just as Daphne when at Lilac Villa had her room. Daphne had bought daffodils, forced ones with elongated stems, and put them in a vase by her bed. Another thing she did was to creep into Cecilia's room just before they watched the nine o'clock news, turn down the bed, arrange Cecilia's nightdress on top with the sleeves spread out and the waist nipped, and place a chocolate in a paper case on the pillow. It was usually a white chocolate because Daphne had once heard Cecilia express a preference for this kind, which she could remember when it first came in, and remember too how surprised she had been to find that chocolate did not have to be brown to taste like chocolate.

  They made a point of listening carefully to what the other said with regard to tastes and preferences so that they would know what to buy for presents and how to give surprises. Sitting down to watch the news, they had, not tea this evening, but a small whisky and water each because Cecilia said it helped her to sleep. They had the magazines they had bought that day, She and Country Living, though they were too old for one and too urban for the other, and Where Angels Fear to Tread which Cecilia was reading but not enjoying half as much as A Passage to India.

  The first item on the news was the arrest of a man for the Mall bombing. Yesterday they had shown the sort of bomb it was, not Semtex this time, as in the case of the ‘Bayswater Bomb’, but a kind of
gunpowder. The powder was called magnesium flash, which was tightly packed into a tin and set off by a match-head fuse. The tin was linked to the car's petrol tank to cause a tremendous fire as well as the explosion. Daphne had said that she could not understand the police and the BBC because by now even she, who was very unscientific and not even much of a cook, had learned from all these diagrams how to make a workable bomb. The man who had planted it, who had ‘allegedly’ planted it, was shown leaving the magistrates' court between two policemen. His name meant nothing to them.

  ‘I'm sure I've seen that face somewhere,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘The older I get,’ said Daphne, ‘the more I think people get to look like other people. I never did when I was young but now I can hardly look at a face without thinking how much it looks like someone else.’

  ‘I don't know anyone who looks like him but I think I've seen him somewhere. Not many people have repaired hare lips and noses like spoons, do they?’

  ‘That's something to be thankful for,’ said Daphne.

  19

  The room was cold and the bed not much warmer. Alice was beginning to know the view from this pillow very well, she waited there so long. Axel's cameras had returned here from the Art Room and cluttered the window sill. He had a book on the bedside shelf. Last time she was here it had been Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men, this time it was Thus Spake Zarathustra. She had never read either, had no idea even what kind of books they were, fiction or non-fiction.

  Axel seemed to live out of his suitcases. Both were always open on the floor. He might keep some clothes inside the cupboard, she did not know, she had never looked inside. Some days before he had brought the painting of Mary Zambaco in here from the Art Room. She remembered what he had said, that she resembled it a little, that the likeness was what made him like her. He had not said ‘love’ or ‘want’ but ‘like’, a tame word, a word which frightened her.

  She lay looking at the picture, which Axel had hung on the wall where a world map in Mercator's projection used to be. That same inner honesty which made her feel so miserable in Madame Donskoy's presence, forced her to admit she was not really much like Burne-Jones's Mary. She was unable to tell herself, without self-delusion, that he had brought the painting in here because it reminded him of her.

  The door opened and Axel came in. His face was set in grim lines, he looked suddenly older. The hands that held the newspaper had crunched and crumpled it, his knuckles white and shiny. He said nothing.

  The front page of the paper had a photograph half-filling it of an ugly man with a broad upturned nose. When he saw her looking, Axel tore the page in half, screwed up the rest and flung his coat on top of it. He turned his attention to her and his face changed. She had the uncomfortable feeling he had attended to the business of his life and now had a little time to spare for her. A smile began, curling his mouth, and she knew he was thinking how keen she was, how she could not wait, but got her clothes off at the first opportunity and waited there, hot for him.

  For the first time he did not bother to undress, only took off his jeans. ‘You don't mind, I hope. I'm cold.’

  Afterwards, he sent her back to the Headmaster's Study and when he called for her an hour later he had Tom with him and they were all set to go to the pub. Tom ate in the pub these evenings, so she did too. They had forgotten about economy. More often that not, anyway, Axel paid for all of them. He asked Tom if the newspaper article had brought forth any donations but Tom had to say it had not.

  ‘You should have let me do some shots of you,’ he said. ‘I'd have made a better job of it than that newspaper photographer.’

  It was a damp evening, more like April than February, the kind of weather when people say it is warmer out than in. The winter had passed without snow or frost or much rain. Only Axel seemed cold, his black overcoat drawn round him like a narrow, cylindrical cocoon. He drank brandy, quite a lot of brandy, but it had no apparent effect on him. Alice, across the table from him, was learning something: how much concentration it can take, what an amount of control, to keep one's hand from reaching out to touch another hand. She pushed her leg in between his legs, just to feel his flesh, the swell of his calf, but he suffered this only for a moment before shifting his chair back and drawing himself to one side.

  There was black powder on his hands, he hadn't bothered to wash his hands before coming out. She wondered what he had been doing in that room after he had sent her away. Watching his hands brought her to a high degree of sexual excitement.

  ‘What's that on your fingers?’ Tom said.

  Axel turned his hands over, looked at the palms, seemed surprised. ‘It's stuff they used to use to make the flash on old-fashioned cameras.’

  ‘Is that what yours are? Old-fashioned?’

  Axel said nothing. He had a way of simply not answering if the question was not acceptable. He became deaf. She was beginning to feel that he was making her half of a couple with Tom, withdrawing himself and isolating them. Then, as she watched him, she became aware of something else: that he was seriously upset, that something had happened to shock or distress him.

  It was not herself. It was nothing to do with her. A sudden flash of knowledge that she had not the power to upset him, never would have, made her shiver. It passed and a little confidence came back. She remembered how, less than two hours before, he had made love to her. He didn't have to make love to her, he must want her.

  While he was away, fetching more drinks, Tom said, ‘I'd never have thought of him as a moody person.’

  She shrugged. She was watching Axel at the bar, his hands as he took the glasses, the shift of his shoulders, the gravity of his glance.

  ‘You missed your cue,’ Tom said nastily. ‘You should have said that was my province.’

  Axel set the glasses in front of them, went back for his own. He said to Tom, ‘Would you like to be my assistant?’

  ‘Assistant at what?’

  ‘When the photographer came to take your picture, didn't he have someone else with him? Someone to carry cameras and tripods? A helper? In fact, an assistant learning the business?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Yes, he did.’

  Instead of repeating his request, Axel said carefully, not looking in her direction, looking across the smoky room towards the windows, ‘You see, I've had a blow. You could say I've had a loss.’

  Tom looked uncomfortable. ‘I don't mind giving you a hand.’

  ‘There would be money in it,’ Axel said coldly. ‘A lot of money.’

  A porter at Covent Garden saw a ghost in the station in 1955. This apparition, six feet tall, slim, was wearing a light grey suit and white gloves. Others confirmed the sighting. It is not known what made them believe this was not a living man in a grey suit and white gloves.

  During the building of the Victoria Line the diggers sometimes saw a black shape in the tunnel. Although the complete The Lord of the Rings trilogy was not published in paperback until 1968, the year of the opening of the Victoria Line, the three parts had been in hardcover and in libraries for more than a decade. Was the shape the diggers saw a Balrog? Or was it because they or one of them had been reading Tolkien that they imagined they saw a Balrog?

  A Balrog, according to J. R. R. Tolkien, is a vast black shape that appears in subterranean places.

  Dressed for shopping, belonging to a generation that put on ‘good' clothes to go to Oxford Street, Cecilia set out in a tweed skirt and new cashmere jumper, the brown broadcloth topcoat that even Tina admitted to be smart, brown gloves and pumps as shiny chestnut-coloured as a conker. She carried her brown leather handbag and a shopping bag of a kind rather superior to the usual plastic carrier, a hessian bag with a red design round its border.

  It was Saturday and, as arranged between them during Cecilia's stay in Willesden, they were to meet at Bond Street station to buy Daphne a spring costume at Selfridges. Daphne always bought her clothes at Selfridges. She continued to call a matching skirt and jacket a costume,
though Cecilia had once or twice told her this was a suit. Cecilia did not persist, understanding what Daphne meant when she said ‘suit’ sounded to her like something men wore. She had feelings like that about words herself, not the same feelings but close enough for empathy.

  On the way to the station Cecilia was going to call on Tina. It was late in the morning and Cecilia did not anticipate any unwelcome revelations. She did not expect to see the children, who in any case had been to tea the day before. They would be out with Brian. Cecilia meant to get a shopping list from Tina so that she could bring her what Tina called ‘goodies’. As she walked along she thought about the little dead boy. Jasper's new wary silences she attributed to his reading about the dead boy in the papers.

  Brian's car was outside Cambridge School. The children, or just Jasper, refused to go in the Underground since the accident to the boy who had been on the roof of the train. There was a van parked at its tail but this meant nothing to Cecilia, who was noting the precocious flowering of shrubs which her brother had planted and which still remained in the School garden among the weeds and elderberry and sycamore suckers. The camellia had big red flowers like roses, ‘very showy’ was the way they put it in the plant catalogue. She could remember buying it for Ernest all those years ago, and the little one with mauve flowers the following year. She could never forget the name of that. It was called a Daphne and she and her Daphne had bought it together, amused by its name. She opened the gate and went up the path; as she reached the front door it opened and Brian came out with Jasper and Bienvida.

  She talked to them for a moment, looking all the while at Jasper. She was anxious about Jasper and she watched him for signs of a return to his old intense, serious or cheerful, busyness. It was because of this careful study she gave to Jasper's expression that his face was more than usually imprinted on her mental eye. She carried the image of it with her as she walked across the hall, past the cloakroom which, if she no longer shuddered at, she could not pass without awareness, to tap on Tina's front door.