King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  Jarvis's mother told Jarvis his grandfather had gone to live with Jesus. She never explained the means by which this journey had been made, though Jarvis some time later overheard a conversation about suicide, his mother referring to her ‘poor father’, and put two and two together. When he was fifteen his mother told him about the hanging. He had nagged her about why they did not go to live at the School, instead of letting all those other people live there, and at last she told him why.

  ‘I could never bring myself to live there,’ she said, and then, in a way characteristic of her, ‘Besides, it needs thousands spent on it before civilized people could live in it.’

  Civilized people, in her view, did not include her aunt Evelina or cousin Tina or the idealistic vegetable gardeners. She and Jarvis's father and Jarvis lived in a semi-detached house in Wimbledon. Jarvis disliked the whole suburban scene but there was not much he could do about that until he was older. Sometimes he went to West Hampstead and paid a visit to the School, to the commune, and enjoyed it very much and thought how much he would like to live there himself. When he slept there, as he occasionally did in the classroom on the ground floor known for some mysterious reason as the ‘Remove’, he could hear the trains run past the end of the garden and to him it was the most romantic sound in the world. Going home next day, he noticed as he waited on the platform for the tube to Baker Street, that the track sings as the train comes into West Hampstead, long before you can see it, and the silver lines shiver as it approaches.

  There was a property boom in the seventies. This was nothing to what came ten years later, no more than a mini-boom, but prices began to rise and estate agents to rub their hands and gird their loins and look about them. One of them wrote to Jarvis's mother to tell her he could get a good price for Cambridge School. In the eighties estate agents actually called on Jarvis at the School to beg him to put the place in their hands. They bombarded him with letters and rang him up at least once a week. He always told them to forget it because the School was falling down, it was subsiding, and one day would crumble and disappear: the trains had shaken it to pieces. This was what the surveyor had told the first buyer to whom Jarvis's mother had offered the School in 1976. He had been going to convert it into flats but backed out of the deal nearly as fast as the second prospective buyer, who was a surveyor himself.

  The commune moved to Devon, leaving behind them some rhubarb growing in the garden which was still there when Jarvis moved in. At one point the local authority threatened to put a schedule of dilapidation on the place to force Jarvis's mother to repair it. His father died, two years later she remarried and went to live in France. She could see – anyone could see – that Jarvis was an eccentric. He was very different from the sort of person who gets a job and then a better job and promotion and a wife; two children, a boy and a girl, a house, a better house, a car and all the rest of it. As soon as he had any money he spent it on going to Central America or Thailand by the cheapest possible means to look at some new underground. He was gathering data for a book about world metro systems, a task on which he had been engaged for years. When he was at home he had begun living at the School, where he boarded up the broken windows and had the chimneys cleaned.

  ‘You'd better take it over,’ Elsie said, off to Bordeaux. ‘It seems such a shame, that dear old place going to ruin. You could let a bit of it and live on the rent.’

  She said this last doubtfully because she had seen the School as recently as Jarvis had and could not imagine any ‘civilized people’ renting it. But she worried about Jarvis having practically nothing to live on, as she saw it, though he never worried.

  He had a little bit of money his father had left him. His mother got the Wimbledon house. Jarvis's money brought him in a tiny income, on which it was just possible to subsist if he walked everywhere, never went to the cinema, ate anything nice, smoked, drank, bought new clothes nor used the phone. Jarvis didn't much want to do any of these things, but he did want to go up north and admire the old Glasgow PTE, not to mention going back to ride once more San Francisco's BART, which tunnels deeply through the rock under the Bay. His income he augmented by writing pamphlets about railways, teaching an evening class in car maintenance – a subject he knew little about but which he mugged up from a handbook the night before – and, if things got bad, painting houses.

  When his mother had gone, Jarvis got into a District Line train at Wimbledon Park, changed on to the Victoria Line at Victoria and on to the Jubilee at Green Park for West Hampstead. It was a long and awkward journey but Jarvis enjoyed it. He could never get tired of the tube.

  Half an hour later he was crossing the footbridge from the northern to the southern side of the lines. The rails below him, steely and shining, made a wide silver river. The bridge, though reinforced with big steel girders which obstructed much of the view, had old lichened wooden boards across its central section and wooden stairs. Between the girders the back of the School could be seen, a rather forbidding, dark plum red with Gothic windows of a kind more suitable to a church. On either side of it, where the houses had been bombed, blocks of dull flats had been built during Jarvis's childhood.

  A Metropolitan train roared up non-stop to Wembley Park and a slower Jubilee passed it, stopping at the platform below. Jarvis thought he would enjoy hearing the sound of these trains while he was writing his history of the London Underground. He went down the steps and through the little brick alley.

  Cambridge School was cold inside and it smelt. Jarvis crossed the vestibule, a large high-ceilinged chamber with mock-medieval hammer beams, on the walls of which were incised on yellow pine panels the names of pupils who had in some small way distinguished themselves. A big iron lamp with branches, an electrolier, hung high above from the ceiling two floors up. The flights of stairs ended in galleries with pine balustrades and all the heavy, badly carved dark-stained woodwork was pine, as it might be in a church. The stair banisters had excrescences shaped like pew ends every few treads. Jarvis opened the case he had brought on the vestibule floor, carried the typewriter into Remove, where he put it on one of the desks, and took his clothes upstairs.

  There had never been a first form at Cambridge School. New pupils began in the third form, and III in Roman numerals showed in worn black lettering on the door ahead of him. IV or Four was on the door to the right and round the corner on the left was the Handwork Room, the Headmaster's Study being on the extreme right next to the bathroom and opposite the Staff Common Room. All the woodwork in the School was pitch pine, now become either a fierce saffron yellow or a dark, almost sooty, brown. The floors were of the same wood, some bare, some covered in linoleum, and everything appeared in a state of decay. Jarvis thought he had read somewhere, or been told, that woodworm was most active in May, yet now in September those small heaps of ginger-coloured dust that lay everywhere looked fresh, and as he opened the door of Three a trickle of the same dust came down on his head.

  He chose to sleep in Three because it had the best view of the Jubilee Line, unobstructed by trees, and as he came into the room and crossed to the window, he saw beyond the garden and the trees and the rhubarb plantation a silver train speeding southwards. There was a fireplace too, as there was in Remove and the other first-floor classrooms, Six and Upper Six, and in the Staff Common Room. At the moment it was warm, but soon it wouldn't be and he would need fires. He would need light too. The electricity supply had been cut off at least two years before.

  Jarvis was an eccentric and in the opinion of many who knew him a very strange man, but he had a quiet way of getting on with things. He was not a procrastinator. No one could, with justice, have called him a layabout. When he had had his lunch, which he brought with him in the suitcase, a packet of salami sandwiches, a croissant with jam in it and a fruit-and-nut bar, he set off for West End Lane, to the Electricity Board and the Gas Board, to make inquiries about a chimney sweep, and put an advertisement for tenants in a newsagent's window.

  But before he got to
the newsagent's he met, coming out of Fawley Road with a small boy and smaller girl, his first cousin once removed, Tina Darne.

  4

  The trains ran down to Finchley Road all day and up to West Hampstead all day and others pounded through without stopping up into Buckinghamshire. The sound of the trains and the flash of their silvery sides through the trees was part of living at the School. The blaze of lights in the evening was part of it, and the singing and shivering the rails made. Only at night, in the deep of night between one and the dawn, was there silence and semi-dark.

  You got used to it. Jarvis liked it and Tina did not mind. There was not much that Tina minded. The two bathrooms and the kitchen were communal, but Tina had her own bathroom and kitchen. No one had the Art Room, the Science Lab, the Handwork Room, the Staff Common Room or the Headmaster's Study, though there was a chance someone would one day. No one used the cloakroom where Jarvis's grandfather had hanged himself and no grown-up person ever would.

  Where the wooden floors were not exposed they were covered in that brown linoleum with a pattern of black fleurs-de-lis. The great iron electrolier, with its arms and claws, still hung high above the entrance hall. It resembled a medieval instrument of torture, a rack or wheel. The lamps on it were fake candles, set in sconces like upturned lion's paws. All the windows had roller blinds made of a dark-green fabric so tough that the years of neglect had done nothing to decay or even damage them. They rolled up and down perfectly and their presence obviated the need for curtains. There was no central heating, only a collection of electric and oil and gas heaters, imported by tenants or discovered more or less in working order in the Handwork Room where all such things were stowed.

  Tina had warned against putting that advertisement in the newsagent's. She thought it unwise. Arriving at the School with Jasper and Bienvida in a borrowed beat-up Ford van, its roofrack loaded with launderette bags of clothes and its inside with her sticks of furniture (sticks was the word), she told him the advertisement would only attract riff-raff. Jarvis grinned but could see the wisdom of it. There was riff-raff and riff-raff, your own being a different thing altogether.

  ‘Asking around’ was what Tina recommended. The moment she was settled in she would start asking around. Jarvis thought he had better get on with it himself because anyone Tina found would very likely default on the rent. Tina herself was not a risk in this area because the man she had lived with longer than any other was paying her £50 a week for the children's keep. It was not that Jarvis was asking much rent, in fact no estate agent would have believed what he was asking, but the whole point of letting bits of the school was to get enough for him to live on, indeed to get to Cairo and ride on the new 42.5 kilometre, 33-station ENR.

  He went among the beggars who congregated in tube-station entrances, looking them over as they sat hunched and huddled on steps. It was not possible to give a home to all, so how could he pick out one or two? At the foot of the Piccadilly Line escalator at Leicester Square a drunk man squatted, singing hymns. Jarvis tried to talk to him but he was deeply suspicious, saw Jarvis first as a social worker, then as the press, swore at him and spat, landing a gob of spittle on his jacket lapel.

  It was late but the platforms were crowded. When the train came in Jarvis had to stand. He changed on to the Jubilee Line at Charing Cross and at Bond Street four men got in. They entered the train confidently, in a way that put Jarvis on the alert; they looked immediately to right and left, then having exchanged whispered words, split up, two going to one end of the car, two to the other.

  Trouble in the Underground was something he had occasionally witnessed. It was usually late at night but not always. Once he had seen a girl set upon by a gang of other girls on a descending escalator. He was on the one going up. She was standing still, alone on the moving stair, when the others pounded past her, snatching her bag from her shoulder, a chain from her neck, the last one tearing the earrings from her ears. At the top, Jarvis jumped on to the down escalator but the gang had disappeared into a train coming in opportunely and their victim stood weeping, holding her bleeding earlobes.

  Another time he had seen a tourist, a non-English speaker, make the discovery that his wallet had been taken, with his passport and everything he had. That had been in a train like this one, a Jubilee train heading northwards, and Jarvis could clearly remember the man's despair, his shouts and exclamations in a language no one understood. But if these men who had split into two parties were here for some heist or scam, they were being slow about it, for they sat calmly in silence, one of them in the seat next to Jarvis, a dusty-looking, very ordinary, middle-aged man in a voyeur's dun-coloured raincoat.

  They all got out at Baker Street. But not to change trains, only cars. Jarvis saw them get into the next car and on an impulse he jumped up and followed them. The same thing took place at St John's Wood and now he thought he knew who and what they were. Perhaps what told him was the attention they paid to the drunk man who weaved his way, shouting and stumbling, down the car. Most people when confronted by that kind of thing pretend it is not happening, hide themselves behind newspapers, show an unwarranted fascination in reading advertisements, but these four watched the drunk man's progress, they seemed to monitor it. When he staggered out at Swiss Cottage the youngest and tallest of them went to the door, apparently to check that he did not re-enter the train.

  ‘Are you Guardian Angels?’ Jarvis always talked to people without reserve. If he was curious he asked.

  The man in the raincoat turned to look at him, hesitated, said, ‘A similar organization. We're the Safeguards.’

  ‘Do you get much trouble?’

  ‘It's been quiet tonight. In fact, it's been quiet all this week. Making up for last, I reckon.’ The man in the raincoat said hopefully, ‘You're not looking to join, are you? It's voluntary but there's what you might call a lot of job satisfaction.’

  Jarvis, who was getting out at the next station, asked where they would be the following night; the man who said his name was Jed Lowrie told him the Metropolitan, the Hammersmith Line. On the ramshackle desolate station at Latimer Road he met them dutifully changing cars, but instead of joining the Safeguards, found himself offering Jed and Abelard, his pet Harris hawk, a home at the School.

  Jed also had part-time employment in the Job Centre, and he turned pale when he heard the minuscule rent Jarvis was asking. The hawk installed in the old bicycle shed, Jed moved into Upper VI. Peter Bleech-Palmer, who was the son of Tina's mother's best friend, took V while he was waiting to share a flat with someone in Kilburn.

  The research Jarvis embarked on for his book took him into the lower level concourse at Bond Street. He was conducting an experiment with the gales that blow through that station when he paused to listen to three buskers playing Scottish reels. One of them had the bagpipes, another a violin and the third a flute.

  They finished a rendering of a Burns song and then the flautist put down his flute and began to sing in a fine baritone voice. He sang ‘Scotland the Brave’ and then ‘So Far from Islay’, he sang of exile and loss, of love of one's country and separation from it. The subject of his songs was as far from subterranean noise and heat and crowds as could be imagined. Jarvis was entranced. The only kind of music he liked was sung music and of that he liked all sorts – opera, lieder, folk, country, rock, jazz, soul, the blues.

  ‘That was very good,’ he said to the singer. ‘I don't know when I've heard anyone sing that so well. Do you do requests?’

  ‘Do we what?’

  ‘You know, like in a restaurant or whatever. If I ask you for something will you sing it?’

  ‘Depends what it is.’

  The singer, who was a good-looking fair-haired boy, no more than twenty-three or four, looked pointedly at the hat, now reposing on the tiled floor. Jarvis fished in his pocket and among the coins found a pound.

  ‘He'll sing the whole of the Don's part in Don Giovanni for that,’ said the man with the bagpipes.

  Jarv
is laughed. He asked for an Irish song of love and loss. The singer sang it without accompaniment. Imagine accompanying that on the bagpipes! When he got to the line about its not being long, love, till our wedding day, Jarvis felt the old undefined longing and the tears pricking his eyelids, though the last thing he wanted was a wedding day or a wife or any permanent relationship, come to that. He thanked the singer and gave him another 50p, which he could ill afford.

  A crowd had gathered, blocking the passage. Having understood what was going on, people were putting up their hands for requests. There was a scattering of applause as the singer began and the bagpipes skirled. Jarvis slipped away and on to the platform to feel the wind blow through, ahead of the train emerging from the tunnel. He knew that when they built the Jubilee Line they had had to put in a big fan shaft here to release the air or passengers might have been blown off the platform on to the line.

  It was windy. Women's hair got blown about. Jarvis had once seen a poor girl's skirt blown over her head and been embarrassed for her. The passengers carried away, another lot came streaming in. He went back the way he had come, hearing the music ahead of him, and recognized the tune of a Geordie air. The crowd was still there, but someone in uniform was pushing his way through and starting to harangue the singer.

  Jarvis, who was taller than anyone else there, said over the top of heads, ‘They're not doing any harm. They're cheering us all up.’

  ‘It's against the rules, sir,’ said the man in uniform.

  Being called ‘sir’, which happened seldom, always had a terribly softening effect on Jarvis. He could not help feeling how kind it was of a fellow human being to accord him such deference, that the speaker must have a particularly sweet and generous nature, must love and honour him, and he had to struggle against this, he had to resist cravenly agreeing with whatever was said that preceded that ‘sir’. He just managed.