King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  In the construction of a noose she got as far as turning the rope back on itself and making a single twist to hold the loop. It became necessary to hold the rope more firmly. She grasped it, gave a tug on it, and from above, high up over the roof, came the single toll of a bell.

  She did not hesitate, she did not wait in wonderment. A great desperate, wild excitement gripped her, an intense sensation of nothing mattering any more, that the absolute end of things was at hand. Doomsday had come. This was the end of the world and she was in it, seeing it. With that, she seized the rope in both hands and, pulling with all the force she had, dragging on the rope, reaching up as high as she could, dropping to the floor as low, she began to toll the Cambridge School bell.

  24

  Jarvis heard the bell as he was crossing the bridge. His plane from Moscow had come into Heathrow ten minutes early, at 9.25, there had been no trouble with baggage collection or customs, and the Piccadilly Line train had moved off the moment he stepped into it. Jarvis thought the graffiti on the cars had got worse while he was away. It was everywhere and multi-coloured. He even saw some inside a car. Solomon's carpet, woven of dirty-coloured threads.

  He changed on to the Jubilee at Green Park and got to West Hampstead after a journey from the airport of just an hour. Although it was slightly quicker to go home south of the station, he took the bridge. He wanted to look down on all those lines from the bridge, reassure himself it was all still there, and if defaced – if, as he had read in the newspaper on the aircraft, bombed nevertheless indomitable.

  As he reached the halfway mark and had seen a train run below his feet down to Finchley Road, flashing silver beneath the slats, the bell started. It took him a moment or two to understand that it was his bell. He tried to line up a view of the campanile through the metal bars of the bridge, failed, ran down the steps.

  The bell was tolling at a great rate. It clanged out over West Hampstead like a tocsin, like an alarm, a great ringing designed to warn a populace of fire, invasion, imminent catastrophe. People had come out on to the balconies of the flats, others were in their front gardens. Jarvis could see that many of them had no idea where the sound was coming from but that some knew very well and gazed in wonder in the direction of Cambridge School. By now he could see the bell tower clearly and the bell inside it furiously rising and falling as its tongue rang out the deep brazen clangour.

  Jarvis ran on. He was carrying two cases and a backpack but he ran. The front door was not locked. He dropped his cases, the bag from his back, threw open the cloakroom door. Alice, seeming fastened to the bell like some heroine of romance, some bellringer's daughter proclaiming that Bonaparte had come, an invading army had come, turned to him a white face and glittering eyes. He took a step towards her. With a long shudder, she flung the rope from her and fell sobbing into his arms.

  Trailing up Priory Road from Kilburn High Road where she had been to buy socks for the children in a closing-down sale, Tina, up early for once and with Jasper and Bienvida in tow, heard the bell as she turned the corner. She did not immediately know what the sound was or where it came from. Jasper and Bienvida knew. Jasper was awe-stricken. He even thought for a moment the bell must be ringing of its own volition or for some atmospheric reason. Then the loud continual clanging made him indignant. It was his bell, and whoever it was ringing it, for he knew it could not really be the bell doing it on its own or the damp air or supernatural forces, had no right to do so.

  Bienvida was staring at him in an accusing way, as if he were ringing the bell himself. Tina said, ‘Where's it coming from?’

  ‘It's our bell,’ Jasper said.

  ‘You mean the old School bell?’ Tina started remembering. She had a vague recollection of hearing it before, long ago, when she was younger than Bienvida was now. It was a memory she associated with tangles in her hair, with her mother coming upstairs and trying to ease the knots out of her long fair hair. ‘Oh, Christ,’ she said, ‘Ma'll hear it and it'll bring up all that old stuff about her brother.’

  She began running in the direction of Lilac Villa. The children exchanged glances, Jasper shrugged, and they followed her.

  But Cecilia had not in fact heard the bell. She died just before the first peal rang out.

  She was on the sofa-bed that became a bed during the hours of daylight, propped up by two pillows and two sofa cushions, and Daphne was sitting beside her on a stool, asking her what she would like for her lunch. It was much too early for lunch but things moved at a leisurely pace in Lilac Villa and Daphne liked plenty of notice before preparing half a scrambled egg or a very small cup of soup, which were the only things Cecilia ever wanted to eat these days.

  Cecilia said egg, or Daphne thought she said egg, but it was very difficult to understand anything she said. It became more difficult every day. Cecilia's mind was full of vague images and memories, her whole mental process had become most of the time like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense, but this dream of hers was audible only. She could not see it, this past she conjured up, the people who inhabited it and spoke. What she could see, and still see quite clearly, was her own drawing room, the window with the white sky, and Daphne sitting beside her, looking not a year older than she had on her wedding day when Arthur Bleech-Palmer gave each of his wife's bridesmaids a cameo brooch. Cecilia got Daphne to pin the brooch on her every day and she thought this pleased her friend.

  About two minutes before the ringing began, Cecilia was stricken with a pain in her side. It was like she imagined having an electric drill pushed into you might be and at the same time like the pains of labour, which she thought she had forgotten. She did not tell Daphne she had a pain but taking hold of her hand, said, ‘Dear, I have loved you all my life with all my heart.’

  Daphne, who thought she was trying to say something about scrambled eggs, leant nearer. ‘I didn't quite get that, Cessie.’

  The grip on her hand began to slacken. Daphne laid the hand back on the blankets. A sound came from Cecilia the like of which Daphne had never heard before, a rattle from the depths of her, and, thinking she wanted to clear her throat, Daphne quickly went behind her and tried to raise her upright in the crook of her arm. Cecilia's head lolled and with wide-open eyes she subsided softly on Daphne's bosom.

  ‘Oh, Cessie,’ said Daphne, ‘oh, Cessie, Cessie, my dear.’

  Somewhere out there, from the direction of the School, a bell began to ring. It came so appositely, so like a knell for Cecilia, that Daphne cried out. She stood up, holding her hands up to her face, listening in horror to the tolling bell, the rapidly clanging, roaring, hysterical bell.

  Another bell rang, the one on the front door.

  To answer it, to do anything about it now, seemed a superfluous act. Daphne continued to stand there, listening to the bell, with her hands up over her face and the tears dripping through her fingers. The front doorbell rang again, the way it does when someone keeps a thumb pressed on it. This time Daphne had to go. Numbly, she let in Tina, Jasper and Bienvida.

  Bienvida was actually at the drawing room door. ‘No, no, don't go in, not for a moment. Oh, that awful bell! What is it? Why doesn't it stop?’

  ‘Why not go in, Auntie Daphne?’

  Daphne believed you should never mention death in the hearing of children. But what could she do? They were all looking at her with innocent wonderment, knowledge gradually dawning on Tina's face.

  ‘Oh, Tina, Tina,’ she said, she had to say it, ‘your mother's gone. Just this minute. She died in my arms.’

  Without a preliminary sob or hiccup, Bienvida burst into howls. The bell rang on, then stopped with a double clang and a rattle.

  After the funeral, when Daphne had gone home to Willesden, Daniel Korn came over in his van and helped Tina move all her things back to Lilac Villa. Tina intended to do what Jarvis had done with the School and let rooms. The biggest room on the top floor had already been taken by Jed, who wanted more space. Tina had put him well out of the way because the hawk
smelt so strongly and she had an idea that smell, like heat, rises.

  Jarvis's publisher was quite keen on the new book he was contemplating, Metro Networks in the USSR and Eastern Europe. He was nearing the end of the last chapter of his complete history of the London Underground. Tom intended to stay on at the School and a drummer he was working with called Archie was going to take Five when the lease on his room ran out. Jarvis knew he would have no trouble finding tenants for the Headmaster's Flat, the hard part was all the deserving people he would have to turn away.

  Tom had said nothing to him about Axel, he never mentioned Axel to anyone. As for Alice, she was in no state to talk. It was Tina, over a cup of tea at Lilac Villa, who asked him if Axel had left owing him rent.

  ‘Who's Axel?’ said Jarvis.

  ‘That fellow with the beard who went to Heathrow to see you off, the one who came to live in Five and the Art Room.’

  ‘I don't know anyone called Axel. He must have been a squatter. I'm surprised we haven't had more of them.’

  ‘He went around with a bear,’ said Jasper, but no one took any notice of him.

  Jarvis said that if he was going to do this new book, the one about Russia and Eastern Europe, he ought to go off to Berlin and ride the U-bahn, he ought to see what happened when the line reached the Wall. What he would like to do, when the time came and they had pulled the Wall down, was ride in the first train to run through from Friedrichstrasse to Marx-Engels Platz, from the West to the East without a change. He talked happily about dates and plans, having apparently forgotten about the man who had squatted in his house and not paid him a penny.

  It was not so easy for Jasper. He said nothing, but he thought a lot. Up in his new bedroom, which was the one Daphne Bleech-Palmer had when she stayed, he sat on the window seat, from where he could see the trees on the Heath but not the silver trains, and sometimes thought about the man and the bear. Now they had a big colour set he and Bienvida watched television much more and one evening he had seen Ivan's face on the screen, the sewn-up lip and spoonbill nose, while the newscaster talked about him being sent for trial on charges of bombing and murder.

  Jasper remembered Axel, the first time they met, asking him about lost stations and secret ways of getting into the tube and Ivan the bear man saying they were three of a kind. Ivan was a professional bomber and had no doubt taught Axel about explosives. It seemed to Jasper quite likely that Axel had got into the tube by one of those secret ways and been responsible for blowing it up. Or trying to blow it up, for he had evidently not been very successful, and Jasper thought it was going a bit far, those experts whose comments he had heard saying the bomber had aimed to wreck the entire system. Out of madness, or revenge, or mindless hatred.

  Occasionally he dwelt on what had happened to Axel. What did happen to you when you blew yourself up? People on television said a lot about bombs but they never said that. Jasper imagined bits of Axel scattered all over the tunnels, his hair and his teeth, and somewhere among the debris that ring he wore. They had never identified those bits, they still had no idea who it was and perhaps never would have. Jasper had decided to say nothing to anyone, not even Bienvida, but keep it as the second great secret of his life, the first being how he had sledged alone on the great long runs.

  Jarvis finished his book on a pessimistic note:

  It is not long since London Transport was making a small annual profit, but things have changed and the changes are due to railmen's strikes, to unscheduled re-building and to increased spending on safety measures. For instance, the District Line trains, all seventy-five of them, recently had to be taken out of service after electric motors broke free from car bogies. Doors were opening on the wrong side of cars, the side without a platform, there were accidents, and thousands had to be spent on finding a fail-safe system.

  Blackfriars Bridge over the District and Circle Lines has been rebuilt and the cost was £3 million more than expected.

  One of the plans for cutting costs is to stop all tube services on Boxing Day. At present London Transport is paying its employees double time for working on 26 December.

  The numbers using the London Underground are declining: only 765 million last year and there will be fewer this. One of the results has been a loss of £10 million in ticket revenue. At the time of writing the Underground faces a cash shortfall of £40 million.

  This was so depressing that he added a few lines he was sure his publisher would make him cut out.

  On the face of it, this does not look like the time to enlarge the system by building new lines. And yet it is only by such enormous outlay as this would entail that the London Underground can recoup its losses and instead of a slow, ignominious death, go on triumphantly to a future in the twenty-first century.

  No qualms troubled Tom about using Axel's money. In a mail order catalogue he had seen an advertisement for a wonderful device and had sent off for it. This was a music-maker called a Voconverter 5000. You sang into the microphone and it played back the same tune to you, transformed into the sound of any one of thirty musical instruments. When the tune was recorded you could lay four more tracks on top, using different instruments. It cost £400, but he could afford it. He imagined playing it back in the tube, the start of a revolution in busking.

  Down in the cellar, he contemplated Axel's property. He had put the cameras into two plastic carriers and all the rest into the two suitcases. The lot, covered by a dust sheet formerly used by some decorator of long ago, stood in the sooty compound where Ernest Jarvis had once kept his coal.

  Tom could not imagine anyone would come trying to identify those cameras. One was a Nikon, the other an Olympus with a telephoto lens and looked enormously expensive. He decided to keep them and accordingly took them upstairs to the Headmaster's Study, where he put them inside the cupboard. Tom had moved into Alice's old room after they took her away. It was bigger and got more light than Four.

  He had made up his mind to take Alice back. After all, no one knew better than he that Axel was dead. When he visited her in the psychiatric ward he tried to tell her she was forgiven but she never made him any answer or even seemed to know who he was. They said she would get better, it was only a matter of time, to give it time. The drugs they were using were marvellously effective in cases like this. When she was all right again he thought of asking if the two of them could take on the Headmaster's Flat, but since she was not all right yet he rather welcomed the delay occasioned by Jarvis's departure the day before for Berlin.

  He was alone at the School at last. It was a mild, dry evening, which would suit his purposes. The previous week some people in the flats had lit a fire on the ground between their block and the train lines. There had been a great deal of smoke but it had not lasted long and no one had complained, though this of course was a smokeless zone. If they could do it, so could he.

  The presence of Axel's things in the School, in his keeping, had worried him daily, ever since he put them in the cellar. That Jarvis might return without warning had not occurred to him, though what warning there could have been he hardly knew. He was on tenterhooks a lot of the time for fear Jarvis would go into the cellar, find the cases and the cameras and start inquiring.

  All sorts of ideas for disposing of Axel's property kept passing through his mind. He even thought of dumping the cases at some railway terminus or taking them to Heathrow where, abandoned, they would certainly be stolen. But most of the things inside the cases were marked in ways which identified them as Axel's, the books with his name in them, the collection of photographs, which Tom had not even glanced at. There were two heavy parcels, wrapped in brown paper, one of which contained letters from some female relative, possibly a sister. The other was a similar package inside a plastic bag which he did not trouble to open. He could remove all Axel's signatures but how could he be certain of not having missed one? Axel's fingerprints might be on file and all those things would be covered with his fingerprints – and, now, with Tom's.

  Fir
e was the best way. He returned to the cellar and fetched the cases up into the hall. Searching the School for paraffin reminded him of how he had searched the Angell, Scherrer and Christianson building for a weapon and then for a spanner. There were half a dozen oil heaters in the School and paraffin must be somewhere, unless now in the spring it had all been used up. Cans of petrol he found, two of them in a kitchen cupboard, but he was afraid to use petrol, he didn't want to set fire to himself. Eventually, he found a can of paraffin in Remove beside Jarvis's fireplace.

  He went outside with the cases. The lawn would do, somewhere at the end by the rear fence. To the fate of the books, the letters and the photograph of the girl Tom was indifferent but it seemed a pity to burn the white dress. Still, he dared not keep it. What could he do with it? He smiled wryly to himself when he thought of bestowing it on Alice. He prepared the basis of a bonfire with newspaper and with sticks gathered from all over the garden, over which he poured a trickle of paraffin.

  The sky was clear and the air was still. April had been a lovely month, like high summer. Tom heard a train coming and saw its silver sides flash between the open boards of the garden fence. He took the matches out of his pocket. Then he tipped the contents of the suitcases on to the ground, put the dress on the pyre he had built and then Axel's own clothes, the jeans, the trainers and the black overcoat.

  He put a match to the wood and paper. Because of the paraffin it caught quickly and flames shot up, eating the white dress and the overcoat. They burned very fast. Tom found himself a long stick, a fallen branch from one of the big trees. He threw on the books, watching with satisfaction while the fire consumed them. It relieved his mind to think of the flames eating up Axel's signature, licking and swallowing his fingerprints.

  The smoke was dense, white and choking. But it would soon be over, leaving a few handfuls of grey ashes. He would stamp on the ashes and grind them into the ground, smooth earth over where the fire had been. He threw on the first parcel of letters, pushed it with his stick as the flames caught it, then the other box, the last thing to be destroyed.