King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  He took a rest, then tried again. It was while he was striking ineffectually at the nut that the notion came to him that Axel might not be dead. Axel might only be terribly injured. True, it was sixty feet down, but Tom thought he had heard of, read of in newspapers, people falling far greater distances than that and surviving. That dreadful cry meant nothing. He could only have cried out while he was still alive. The idea of Axel being still alive was monstrous to Tom, unthinkable. Unthinkable, but possible. It was all the more reason for getting this ring-bolt off. He imagined the terribly injured Axel coming out of a coma in hospital and telling people about the man who had been with him, telling them to go and look on the roof.

  Time was still scurrying past. Time had changed its nature since his act of cutting the rope, for during the minutes or probably only seconds he had waited for Axel to begin his climb, eons had passed. But now, as in the hymn they had sung at school, a thousand ages were flashing by like an evening gone. He saw that it was now a little after five o'clock.

  The first tube trains would begin running through Holborn around six. It might be that the first thing the staff responsible for this would do, was enter the disused tunnels and begin a morning inspection. Perhaps, on the other hand, this only happened every other day or twice a week, say, and this morning was not an inspection morning. There would be time for him to go down into the street, hang about somehow till nine and when the first shops opened buy a spanner. But by then, or soon after, the Angell, Scherrer and Christianson people would be coming into the building, Alice would be coming into the building.

  The roof would be closed to him until the following night. Tom thought about it. He knew that once out of here he would be afraid to come back, at no matter what hour of day or night. Nor could he, at present, go home. Alice thought he was in Bristol. Tom realized that he still had a little while, he had an hour, for it was unthinkable that anyone could discover Axel's body before, at the earliest, 6.30.

  Like it or not he must search the whole building for a spanner: go back down there, not stop because he had found a plumber's hammer in a cloakroom, but search cupboards, see if there was a basement or even a cellar and search that. Go down to the publishers' offices and search them, go down to the blue- and black-lined boxes and search.

  He got up and started across the roof. Passing the hut to which the rod was attached, he examined the place where the rod was fastened to the corner of this small solid building. There was no help there, no possibility of detaching it. But suppose he were to try entering the building under this roof? Better the devil you don't know than the devil you do, thought Tom. For all he knew the rooms immediately below him were full of tools, they might even be the storerooms of some motor maintenance company or engineering firm.

  He tried the door to the hut. It was not locked. As he had supposed, a trapdoor filled most of the floor inside. He pulled on the handle but the trapdoor was bolted on the inside. So much for exploring the motor mechanic's paradise he had envisaged below. Tom looked round the inside of the hut. Shelves filled two walls on which stood cans blackened with oil and grime, other cans that had recently contained coke, a triangular plastic pack made for holding sandwiches, a glass jar full of nails and an adjustable spanner.

  If it had been a laughing matter, Tom would have laughed. He had searched the building once, might have searched again in vain, had planned a raid on another unknown private building, while all the time a spanner was under his nose. He reached for it rather gingerly, as if its presence here were too good to be true, as if it might vanish at his touch. His hand closed round it and felt its cold, solid reality. It had been carefully maintained and there was even a dribble of oil still on it.

  In less than a minute he had the ring-bolt off. Although it was light enough up here to use the spanner, see his way about, find things, although dawn was coming, it was still too dark to read the time. Tom switched on his torch, noticing that the light was growing feeble, the battery was running out. His watch showed him twenty-five to six.

  He was still unsure what to do until Alice had left the house. Remove himself, certainly, from these environs as soon as he could, get into the first tube train that came, go somewhere, anywhere. He switched off the torch, conserving it for later, for passing through the building. The ring-bolt, the serrated knife and the hammer he put into his backpack, he wiped the spanner and replaced it on the shelf inside the hut and, as an afterthought, wiped with the welt of his sweater the metal rod to which the ring-bolt had been fastened.

  Having checked he had left nothing behind, Tom made his way across the roofs between dish and aerials and ventilators to the door. The air seemed colder and a little breeze had got up. He closed the door behind him, stood for a moment at the top of the stairs in the pitch-dark, then switched on the torch. The light it gave was now very dim. He saw 5.45 and did not look at his watch again.

  His first call was the kitchen where he replaced the knife in the drawer, having wiped its handle. By the pale gleam of the torch he found the head of the stairs, went down and along the passage to the little orange-scented room where the lavatories and washbasins were. There he switched off the torch and put the light on. It was safe to do that, but even so the roar of the fan starting up once more made him jump. He wiped the hammer and holding it with his jacket sleeve between it and his hand, laid it carefully on top of the hand-dryer. It made a small metallic click. Tom found that all sound he did not directly make himself alarmed him. He switched off the light but the sound of the fan continued. A few minutes must pass before it died away. He began walking back along the passage to the stairs and as he came to them, as he set his foot on the first stair down, two things happened.

  The torch went out and everything beneath him blew up in a tremendous roar.

  The sound was enormous, enduring, broken as thunder is broken. The building rocked and the stair under his feet shifted. Waves of noise rose up in great crashing breakers beneath him. At the same time it was as if warehousefuls of furniture were being hurtled from the roofs of towers and cannon were expelling iron balls across infinite battlefields and avalanches tumbling rocks into the depths of mountain passes. He clung on to the banister while the explosion roared in his ears, burst and reverberated, throbbed and echoed, coughed, rumbled, gave to the house a final push and slid into a series of tremors.

  The tremors grumbled and whimpered. It was as if the place was shivering with fear of what it had undergone. Tom stood on the stairs, realizing he was still alive, he was still there. He trembled as the building trembled. Having not breathed as it seemed to him for the endurance of the explosion, he now breathed quickly and shallowly as it, adjusting itself, began to breathe again.

  He took a step down, then another, blind in the absolute dark.

  23

  One night, when Arsenal were playing at home, a bomb went off in a tube train car on the Piccadilly Line.

  The bomb had been taped to the underside of seats. It exploded at nine o'clock at Wood Green where the train terminated, blowing out the sides of the car but not utterly destroying it.

  The car had been quite empty. What the bomber had forgotten was that most people using the line would get out at Arsenal for the football, as they did.

  That was in 1976. A short while before, a man got into a train at West Ham and as he did so the duffle bag on his shoulders began to smoke. No one but the bomber was hurt and he was shot while escaping.

  All things considered, there have been remarkably few bombs in the London Underground.

  Jasper, legitimately at home because his Easter holiday had begun, was beginning to recover from his traumatic experience. He had spent the previous evening with Jed, first collecting from the depot in Barnet where they were ‘processed’ the day-old chicks with which Abelard's diet was varied, then feeding them to the semi-somnolent and now rather fat hawk. Jasper found himself fascinated by these scrawny, yellow, miserable corpses, born to be fodder. They were very different from the fluffy go
lden Easter emblems that had currently appeared in the shops. One day, he thought, he might come to understand the adult world in which both kinds of chick existed, one to be adored and cooed over, the other swiftly slaughtered – how? – and mashed up into bird and animal-feed. He did not understand it yet.

  That Abelard had his permanent home in Upper Six Jasper had not fully realized till now. Of course he was aware that the screaming had stopped, but had supposed only that the hawk had grown out of it. People often told him he would grow out of things, some of them the things he best liked about himself. The removal of Abelard meant the bicycle shed would now be empty. Jasper had cast wistful eyes on this shed from the moment of his arrival at the Headmaster's Flat, but Abelard had already been in residence.

  He saw it as a summer retreat. There were other possibilities not yet gone into. It might smell revoltingly of hawk and have to be cleaned, an operation in which he was not well-versed. In the morning, after Tina had gone round to Lilac Villa with Bienvida, having waited for their departure with that habit of secrecy he had got into even when there was no need for it, Jasper went out to investigate the shed. He ran, ducking his head, because it was pouring with rain.

  It was larger inside than he had thought. Someone, perhaps Jed himself, had made an attempt to mend the roof. The smell of hawk was there but not strong and not at all unpleasant. It looked as if the place had been swept. There were various objects of interest on some shelves at the back, old suitcases, a pair of very large lace-up walking boots, something that might be a tent, and, of immediate appeal, a coil of rope.

  Feeling very pleased, Jasper uncoiled the rope and was gratified to find it much longer than he had thought at first. It was very long. It would do.

  Dawn had come.

  As soon as he was out in the street Tom had realized he should get himself as far from there as soon as possible and as fast as possible. Something had happened nearby, in one of these streets perhaps, or up in Holborn. He knew by then it had not been an earthquake, it had been a bomb.

  The explosion had seemed to come from the depths of the building he was in, but this was deceptive. There was no sign anywhere of damage, of debris. The street was silent, empty. He made his way back into Kingsway, walking quickly but not running. Cars were parked down here and cars were moving, not many yet but enough to show the city waking into life. The only person he passed was a ragged man carrying an empty bottle. Tom looked back and saw him stuffing the bottle into a wastebin.

  There should have been sirens by now, police cars coming and perhaps an ambulance. But coming where? He came to Holborn Underground station but it was closed. The time was twenty past six and it was still closed. Rain had begun to fall. It was no more than a thick mist, a soft grey drizzle. Tom thought of what Axel had said about taking taxis; he shuddered when he thought of Axel.

  He would be very conspicuous walking along High Holborn with his backpack at this hour. But if a policeman stopped him what would he find? Only the ring-bolt and a torch. Tom dropped the ring-bolt into a bin attached to a lamp standard. Now he only had the torch, an entirely innocuous thing to be carrying. The rain, though fine, began to soak through his clothes and drip from his hair.

  Chancery Lane station was open. A train going to Ealing Broadway came in and Tom got on. Only one other passenger was in the car. As the train approached Holborn a voice on the passenger address system announced that it would not be stopping there. The reason given was ‘signalling problems’

  Tom felt stunned. He could not think, he was trembling. That word ‘signalling’ had done it. It was the Signals and Communications Room that Axel had been going to photograph, or said he had been going to photograph, somewhere down here in the old labyrinth of tunnels near Holborn. Tom pushed his fingers through his wet hair. His cold wet fingertips he pressed against his forehead, which for some reason had become burning hot. He did not want to think, he dared not.

  Instead of getting out of the Jubilee Line train he had changed on to at Bond Street, at his usual stop, Tom went on to Kilburn. The idea of going home was horrible. He rang Peter's bell but there was no answer, so, without thinking, avoiding all thinking, trying instead to make music in his head and hear that, he trudged up to the hospice where Peter still sometimes worked nights.

  He was there behind the desk, perhaps only temporarily alone, listening to a radio that played very softly.

  ‘What's wrong? You look awful.’

  That was quite something from Peter, whose death's head stared out from its thin parched covering. Seeing him, his perpetually weary look, made Tom realize how tired he was, how exhausted to dropping point.

  ‘Can I stay here for a bit, Pete? Can I sit somewhere?’

  Peter asked no questions. He was one of whom too many questions had been asked and he did as he would be done by.

  ‘Sure, you can go in the TV room. There won't be anyone in there for hours.’

  He told Tom where it was. The room smelt almost intolerably of stale cigarette smoke. Some of the residents smoked heavily, fifty or sixty a day, they were past being harmed by it. Tom sank into one of the armchairs. Then he shifted on to the settee and rolled on to his face, his head in his arms.

  After a while Peter came in, walking slowly, the way he did now, and with his head bowed.

  ‘All right?’

  Tom said he was.

  ‘I go off at eight but there's still an hour to go. You can stay on anyway. I've just heard the news. Someone put a bomb in the tube. It was timed to go off at six this morning when the first trains start.’

  ‘Was anyone – was anyone – hurt?’ Tom whispered. ‘Was anyone killed?’

  ‘They're not sure. It's a bit of a mess down there.’

  Alice went to the Art Room and to Five, looking for Axel. It was early still and she was not worried. He was unpredictable, he would always be, and she must not expect otherwise. She could not tell whether his bed had been slept in, for he never made it.

  She looked out of the window at the river of train tracks and saw a silver train, scored all over with black and red graffiti, come up from Finchley Road, and stop in the station. Axel might be on it. Tom might be on it, but hardly yet. She did not believe that story about Bristol, though not caring whether it was true or not. Whatever he was doing, he was not seeing another woman. Very likely his absence was something to do with her, some clumsy surprise he was creating, some consolation, some gateway he was opening for her into a world of compromise and second best.

  Rain was falling steadily. Water lay in pools on the platform. From the Art Room window she could see people with umbrellas up. Cars moved sluggishly through puddles. Alice went back to the Headmaster's Study and wrote a note to Tom. It was as brief as the one she had written to her husband. She read it and tore it up. The superstition about tempting providence made her do this. If she had a note prepared and waiting for Tom, Axel would not come or, if he came, have changed his mind. If she was not ready for him, still had things to do, he would come soon, impatient for them to be off.

  The morning passed with infinite slowness. The phone rang at lunchtime, and, thinking it would be Axel, she went down to answer it. It was her mother.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘What news?’ Alice said.

  ‘The IRA have tried to blow up the Underground. Well, they haven't said it's them but it must be. Don't you ever listen to the radio?’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘The bomber blew himself up. That's one thing to be thankful for, he won't do that again. He's in bits. They didn't put it like that, though he must be. They said he can't be identified. Mind you, he didn't do all that much damage. He thought the bomb was bigger than it was, you know, would do more than it did.’

  ‘You didn't phone to tell me about a bomb in the tube, did you?’

  ‘I have to have a reason, do I, for speaking to my own daughter? The fact is I thought you'd like to know Mike has got a girlfriend. She's twenty-five. She's a computer
programmer and she lives somewhere in west London. The really good thing is she absolutely adores Catherine. I think it's nice he didn't get anyone until the possibility of his divorce was well in sight. I mean, he'll only have a year and three months to wait, won't he?’

  She heard someone come into the house at about four. She listened behind the door of the Headmaster's Study and heard a furious wiping of wet shoes on the doormat. The door open an inch, she watched Tom come up the stairs. He did not look in her direction, perhaps the crack between door and frame was not visible, but went straight into Four.

  A little later, footsteps could be discerned on the top floor. Axel was back. She thought that only for a moment. The footsteps were at the other side of the building, near the Science Lab. It was only the children playing.

  The rain had stopped. The sky was a great dome lined with concrete. It was the colour of grainy stone and looked as hard. She had never before lived in a place from which you could see people approaching at such a distance. If someone came by tube and took the bridge, you would see them on the top and coming down the wooden stairs five minutes before they got here. Axel had not told her where he was going, she had no idea where he might be. She only knew he must be coming back because his things were still here.

  Or she thought they were still here. They had still been here at eight this morning. The awful thought came to her that they might be gone, he might have come back for them very quietly, stealthily, while she was in the Headmaster's Study after her mother's phone call. Anxious as she had been, taut with fear, she had nevertheless fallen asleep on the bed for a few minutes. The night before she had hardly slept. Suppose Axel had come while she was asleep, had come, had collected his things, and crept away?