King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  And then, as the doors groaned shut and the train moved, the fidgeting, the adjusting of positions, the shifting of hands, ceased and all became still. Everyone froze into stillness like people playing the statues game when the music stops. She knew why. If the heaving had continued, if there had been continuous restless movement, existence inside the train would have been impossible. People would begin to scream. People would begin to beat each other in their frenzy at something so intolerable imposed upon them.

  They were still. Some held their chins high, stretching necks, their expressions agonized, like martyrs in paintings. Others hung their heads in meek submission. It was worst for the very short, like the fat girl she could see between face and face and back of head, standing with nothing to hold on to, supported by those who surrounded her, her head under the men's elbows, a woman's handbag, clutched under an arm, driving its hard corners into her throat.

  By now she had lost sight of the dress bag. Acquiring its contents had been the purpose of her outing, but she no longer cared about it. She cared about surviving, about remaining very still and suffering, enduring, holding on until the train reached Chancery Lane. There she would get out of the train and the system. She should have got out of the system at Bank, she knew that now. To lose the dress, the white Peruvian wedding dress, was a small price to pay for escape.

  When the train stopped she thought they were there. She wondered why the doors were not opening. Outside the windows all was darkness and she understood they had stopped in the tunnel. Whether this ever happened without dangerous cause, whether it often happened, what it signified, of all this she had no idea. She would have liked to ask, speak into the face of the man whose breath, rich with garlic, fanned hotly into her nostrils. Her throat had dried. She had no voice. She was aware, more strongly now than before, of all the human bodies pressed against her, the elbows and breasts and stomachs and buttocks and shoulders, and of the hard glass panel against which her own side was crushed.

  The heat began to increase. She had not specially noticed the heat before but now she did as droplets of sweat formed themselves on her forehead and her upper lip, as sweat in a single long drop rolled very cold and insinuating down between her breasts. Of that icy coldness she was very aware, but not as relief, rather as pain, rather as shock.

  It grew hotter. The train gave a lurch, a kind of belch, and she held on, held her breath, waiting for it to start. It sighed and sank once more into immobility. The man close to her grunted. His face had gone very red and looked as if it had been sprayed with water. A drop of sweat ran down her forehead and into her eye. It stung her eye and she asked herself why this should happen. Why should salt tears not sting while salt sweat did?

  While she was wondering this, holding on to the rail with a wet slippery hand, feeling the heat rise and thicken, the train belched again and this movement, much more powerful than before, shifted and heaved the people around her to enclose her in a kind of human tide. Her face now against a tweed back, she fought for breath, struggled and pushed, moaning as another icy drop flowed down her body and set off the pain.

  It seemed to set it off, to trigger it, for as it slipped along her skin like a bead of ice, a huge pain took hold of her left arm, as if an iron claw had grasped it. She arched her back, tried to stretch her neck above assorted flesh and hair and smell. The train started, moved forward on a smooth glide, and as it did so the iron claws embraced her, like the appendages of a monster.

  They embraced her and dragged her down, through shoulders and arms and hips and legs, to a conglomeration of dirty, trodden-on shoes. The train ran on smoothly towards Chancery Lane. The last thing she saw, as her heart that had the little something wrong with it collapsed, was the bag with the dress in it, stuck between a pair of trousered legs.

  There was no room in the train. Not one more passenger could have squeezed in. Yet as she sank to the floor and died they fell back, they shrank back and made the space for her she had needed for life. For dear life.

  At Chancery Lane the train was cleared and the body removed. Remaining in the car was a large dress-shop bag, made of thick, strong paper with some kind of dark blue lacquer coating and a picture of a woman in unidentifiable national costume. They were apprehensive about opening it and sent for the Bomb Squad.

  Eventually, much later, a wedding dress was found inside. A receipted bill with it gave the address of the purchaser. It was sent to her home and came at last to her family.

  2

  The young woman's death did not find its way into Jarvis Stringer's book.

  Only accidents of a more spectacular kind would appear there, the first ‘sledger’ to come to grief, the over-zealous railmen attempting to close doors who were decapitated at tunnel portals, the victims of fire. He read the account of the inquest and of the later failed efforts of the family to bring an action against London Transport Underground. If they had been successful, the incident might have appeared in one of the chapters of disaster.

  The girl's brother was later to claim acquaintance with him but by that time Jarvis was in Russia and his book half-finished. He started it while he was living with his mother in Wimbledon, before he moved to the School.

  It was to be a complete history of the London Underground.

  London has the world's oldest metro system [he began]. It dates back to 1863, to a Victorian London of slums, of gaslight, of the powerless and the poor. Three-quarters of a million people came there every day to work. They came on foot, by river steamer and in horse-drawn omnibuses and drays. And there were those who could not come at all, they lived too far away.

  One man had a vision of a railway that would link all the mainline railway termini. His name was Charles Pearson and, though born the son of an upholsterer, he became Solicitor to the City of London.

  ‘A poor man,’ he wrote, ‘is chained to the spot. He has not leisure to walk and he has not money to ride a distance to his work.’

  There had previously been a plan for gaslit subway streets through which horse-drawn traffic could pass. This was rejected on the grounds that such sinister tunnels would become lurking places for thieves. Twenty years before his railway was built, Pearson envisaged a line running through ‘a spacious archway’, well-lit and well-ventilated.

  His was a scheme for trains in a drain.

  3

  The house by the line was always called the School. Jarvis Stringer called it that, as he had done since he was a small boy. He was too young to remember when it had been a school, though his mother could, she had been there as a pupil. By the time Jarvis was five it was closed and abandoned and his grandfather had killed himself.

  The building was a red-brick Victorian house in that West Hampstead street which runs parallel with the Metropolitan and Jubilee Lines of the London Underground. This large house, neo-Gothic in all respects but for its Italianate belvedere, stood about a third of the way between West Hampstead station and Finchley Road station, at which point the lines enter portals and dive underground. Its grounds were small for so large a house, no more than two shrubberies dividing it from its neighbours, and at the rear a stretch of lawn with trees ran down to a fence. Through the palings of this fence the trains could be seen rolling past, northwards to Amersham and Harrow and Stanmore, southwards to inner London. They could be heard too, a constant if sporadic singing rattle. Silence came only in the deep watches of the night.

  These lines had been there for many years when Ernest Jarvis bought the house in the twenties, the Metropolitan Railway having been extended from Swiss Cottage to West Hampstead in 1879. Ernest was well off, having his share of the Jarvis family money, and there was no reason why he should not have made his school in some more attractive part of NW6, up in the neighbourhood of Fortune Green for instance. Even his daughter did not know why he had chosen a house overlooking the railways or for that matter why he wanted to keep a school at all. He did not particularly like children, though he liked trains. Jarvis Stringer's grandparent
s’ qualifications for keeping a school were that he had been up at Oxford where he had read Greats and she had left Goldsmith's College halfway through her teacher training.

  The mystery was that it was successful for more than thirty years. People sent their daughters to Cambridge School, dressing them up in the toffee-brown and pale-blue uniform Elizabeth Jarvis had selected. Perhaps Ernest had been rather clever in naming his school and Elizabeth showed great psychological soundness in the choice of that Cambridge-blue trim on the blazers and ribbon on the panama hats. Of course no one even hinted at some connection between this school for girls by the railway lines and the great university, but the implication was there. Because of its name and that pale blue the school enjoyed a peculiar indefinable distinction. A small kudos attached to going there, though the fees were never high. Studies were not taxing and little emphasis was placed on the passing of examinations. It seems to have been a fact, as Jarvis's mother pointed out, that no girl from Cambridge School, NW6, had ever got to any university, let alone Cambridge.

  In 1939, when the new double tubes were constructed, branching off the Bakerloo system, Ernest spent much time away from the school watching the digging of the new Metropolitan Lines under buildings at Finchley Road. He saw the underpinning of the North Star Hotel and the rebuilding of Finchley Road station. Not many years later, during the Second World War, bombs fell in the street, destroying neighbouring houses but leaving Cambridge School intact. Elizabeth Jarvis said it was like St Paul's Cathedral, miraculously saved while all around it lay in ruins. Elsie Stringer thought the analogy unfortunate, but typical of her parents' attitude towards the school.

  Jarvis came down from Cambridge with a degree in engineering; not a very good one because he had done no work. From his grandfather he had inherited a love of railways and the School. That is, his mother inherited the School first and never went in a train if she could help it. Jarvis wandered about the world as young people do, but instead of driving a van to India or observing political upheaval in Central America or getting into trouble in Africa he went to look at metro systems. He was one of the first passengers on MARTA, the Atlanta underground, when it opened in 1979, rode the new tube in Fukuoka two years later and in the following year watched the building of MMTA in Baltimore and the metro in Caracas.

  It was while he was playing with his first train set, a fifth birthday present, that the news reached his mother of her father's suicide. Jarvis was in his bedroom and Elsie in hers, next to his. She took the phone call in there. He had heard the phone ring but did not listen to what was said. He was playing trains. Sometimes, when he thought about that day, as he did occasionally, it occurred to him that this was the first instance of railways being able to distract him from the pains of life. In future, it was always to be the same.

  His mother came in, fell on her knees in front of him and pressed him to her. She was gasping and shuddering. She held on tight to him, murmuring, ‘Oh, my darling, hug Mummy, hold on to poor Mummy, poor Mummy's had a terrible shock.’

  Jarvis put up with it for a moment or two. Then he struggled to escape. He looked at her. She was very white.

  ‘What's the matter?’ said Jarvis.

  ‘Poor little boy, it wouldn't be right to tell you,’ she said.

  She sat on his bed, shivering, hugging herself. Jarvis went on taking his train from London to Penzance, the Cornish Riviera. In his imagination he was both engine driver and passenger. When they got to Plymouth he would be station-master as well. Even then he had a special devotion to subterranean tracks and as the train came to the Wellington tunnel (he and his parents had been on holiday to Cornwall that summer) he began letting out a series of long drawn-out hooting sounds.

  His mother burst into tears. Jarvis hooted once more. But he was a tender and affectionate child and he saw that something more was required of him. He got up and stood by his mother and put his hand on hers. She had behaved like this when his grandmother died a few months before. He said to her, ‘Is grandad dead?’

  She was so shocked she stopped crying and asked him how he knew. Jarvis said he had guessed. He had also noticed that she was not just unhappy this time. There was something more. He sat on her lap and let her hug him. He judged five minutes was long enough for that, a lifetime when you are five, and since he had just learned how to tell the time he watched the clock over her shoulder. She went on sitting there staring at him long after he was back on the floor. By the time he had got the train to Exeter St David's, its first stop, people had begun arriving, notably his father in a taxi.

  Ernest Jarvis had hanged himself. The school had begun to fail in the forties and fifties and the number of pupils declined to fifteen, to ten, to three. Long gone were the days when they employed four teachers. His wife taught the remaining pupils, three seventeen-year-olds, and, as if she had only postponed death until her duties were done, she died of a heart attack at the end of July, the day after the last girls left. Ernest had no wife, no occupation, very little money and a huge white elephant of a house that needed ten thousand spent on it.

  Cambridge School had a bell which was never rung, which had never been rung. It was housed in the belvedere, a word that Ernest insisted meant ‘bell tower’ even after his sister Cecilia told him its correct meaning of ‘beautiful view’ or ‘beautiful to see’. He bought the bell in a shop in Camden Passage and hung it up, intending to ring it to summon laggard children to school. Then his sister told him gently that schools like his didn't have bells, a bell would lower the tone of the place and put off the parents of prospective pupils. The bell continued to hang there, the rope passing through apertures in the ceilings of the top, first and ground floors into a poky cell which was to double as cloakroom and bellringer's room. After a year or so the rope was taken up from the lower floors and wound on to a cleat on the top storey.

  Ernest Jarvis did what he had to do elaborately, and it must have taken him a long time. The trapdoors which covered the original apertures and which had been closed for thirty years he managed to get open with the aid of a tool, a screwdriver from the appearance of the marks. Methodically, he replaced the screwdriver in a toolbox in the garden shed, though he was not known as a tidy man.

  When he unwound the rope from the cleat the bell rang once. Perhaps he had forgotten that the bell would ring or he hardly cared whether it rang or not. Cecilia Darne, who lived round the corner, said she heard a bell toll once at about eight in the morning. Of course she also heard it toll again and then heard a broken peal, a dreadful stuttering ringing, some quarter of an hour later. Many people heard that but only Cecilia seemed to have heard that first single clang as Ernest, her brother, in freeing the rope from the cleat, gave it a tug which caused the bell to spring upwards and fall again.

  He passed the rope through the now open apertures, down into the place where those toffee-brown overcoats had once hung and above them the brown felt hats with their Cambridge-blue ribbons. By November 1958 there was nothing in the cloakroom. A row of pegs on one wall faced a row of pegs on another, eight feet apart. A small window, rather high up in the wall facing the door, was glazed in frosted glass with a single pane above of the stained kind in a dark purplish-red. The stone floor was covered in very light brown linoleum with a pattern of black fleurs-de-lis. Ernest fetched a stool from one of the classrooms. It was a teacher's stool that had once stood behind a high desk. In the event, Ernest chose not to use it. He was getting on for seventy and had arthritis. Perhaps he did not trust himself to mount that stool and do what he had to do.

  The stool was there when he was found. So, of course, was the chair, from his own sitting room, which he had considered more suitable for his purpose, kicked over and lying on its side. When Jarvis came to take over the house, although a good many people had been inside it and others had lived in it, the chair and the stool were still in the bellringer's room. The stool stood in the corner to the left of the window and the chair diagonally opposite it. They looked as if they had bee
n arranged by some cleaner who had been sent in to tidy up and who did not know that in this room Ernest Jarvis had hanged himself. The rope, however, was no longer hanging down through the hole in the ceiling. Jarvis, coming there to take possession thirty years later, found a rope attached to the bell and its other end wound round the cleat. He wondered if it was the same rope but did not like to ask his mother.

  Probably it was the same because hardly anything in the School had changed. Another aunt, Ernest Jarvis and Cecilia Darne's sister Evelina, lived there in Ernest and Elizabeth's living quarters until she died. Then Tina Darne, who was Cecilia's daughter but only a year or two older than Jarvis, persuaded Jarvis's mother to let her move in and start a commune. Tina stayed for no more than six months but some good, hard-working, idealistic people remained, the kind who are made for communes and communes for them, and they mended the window frames and grew vegetables in the garden. But none of these people changed the School. It was far beyond their means. By that time it needed not ten thousand spent on it, but forty.

  Ernest had made a will when his wife died and left everything to his only child. ‘Everything’ was the School and £98 in the bank. Considering he had been in possession of a thousand a year from carefully invested family money, a very good unearned income in 1925, he had not done well. Perhaps he thought of this too when he climbed on the chair and made a noose at the end of the rope, a very neat noose with the rope bound ten times round the loop in even rings.

  It worked. As he dropped and kicked away the chair the bell rang once. Poor Ernest must have kicked and jerked, for it rang again, a stuttering tremble of sound, and then was silent. A neighbour who heard the bell, a sound she had never heard in all her fifteen years in the street, puzzled over it for half an hour and then went across the road to the school.