King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Then the rules should be changed. It's very unjust.’

  The man pushed his way back. He said to Jarvis, ‘That's not for me to say, sir,’ and, less pleasantly, ‘nor you either.’

  Seeing there was to be no more entertainment, the crowd began to disperse. The musicians were packing up their instruments. The one who had not yet spoken, or not in Jarvis's hearing, was swearing under his breath.

  ‘Where will you go now?’ Jarvis said.

  The man with the bagpipes said in a phony refined accent, ‘How about dinner at the Gavroche before we go back to our suite at Grosvenor House?’

  ‘Come home with me and give us a concert,’ said Jarvis. He added, ‘I'll pay you. It won't be much but I will pay. It's for my book, the chapter on underground entertainers.’

  They looked at each other. They seemed to confer silently. The singer said, ‘OK. What have we got to lose? I'm Tom, this is Ollie and that's Mac.

  ‘Jarvis Stringer.’

  They played for him and Tina and the children until they were exhausted. It was too late to go home after that so they stayed the night. Two of them never went home but stayed on. Mac had a girlfriend and a baby with whom he lived in a Bayswater hotel room provided by Westminster Council. Ollie moved into the Headmaster's Study and Tom into Four.

  ‘I hope they'll pay,’ said Tina.

  ‘Tom's got a job as well,’ Jarvis said. ‘He gives flute lessons.’

  Tina shrugged. ‘Flute lessons? I don't believe it. Imagine that when I'm trying to get the kids off.’

  Since Jasper and Bienvida never went to bed until Tina did but fell asleep wherever they happened to be, Jarvis hardly took this protest seriously. Tina occasionally said that sort of thing to try and sound like a normal mother. She sometimes pointed out, though not aggressively, that Jed's hawk Abelard on its perch in the bicycle shed screeched incessantly during the hours of daylight. He thought they probably had enough tenants now.

  He had enough money to go to Cairo and he was off next week. From seeing one of the newest metro systems in the world, he wondered if he could fix it to go home via Budapest and see one of the oldest.

  Pearson's plan to send people ‘like so many parcels in a pneumatic tube’ met with mockery from Henry Mayhew, the journalist and sociologist. Mayhew had written a four-volume work called London Labour and the London Poor and had been an influence on Dickens. He was also the founder of Punch.

  ‘We have often smiled,’ he wrote, ‘at the earnestness with which he advocated his project for girdling London round with one long drain-like tunnel…’

  Punch itself laboured the irony: ‘We understand that a survey has already been made and that many of the inhabitants along the line have expressed their readiness to place their coal cellars at the disposal of the company. It is believed that much expense may be saved by taking advantage of areas, kitchens and coal-holes already made, through which the trains may run without much inconvenience to the owners…’

  To build it they diverted the course of three rivers and uprooted many thousand poor people living in the Fleet Valley. And this work was done by men inexperienced in the task. No one had done it before. At least they did not encounter what the builders of the Moscow Underground came up against many years later, a quicksand in their path.

  The line from Farringdon to Paddington opened on g January 1863. Victorian notables, among them Mr and Mrs Gladstone, travelled on the first train. At their destination a brass band was playing. There was a banquet in the evening for 700 people but Pearson was not there. He had died six months before.

  The Metropolitan Company had offered him a reward for his efforts. He refused it, saying, ‘I am the servant of the Corporation of London; they are my masters and are entitled to all my time and service. If you have any return to make you must make it to them.’

  Nobody says that sort of thing nowadays.

  Pearson was a brave man and a liberal, an early anti-racialist. He campaigned against the ban on the admission of Jews to the freedom of the city and as sworn brokers. It was he who helped to have removed those lines in the inscription on the Monument which accused Roman Catholics of starting the Great Fire of London.

  Tom Murray did not want to have a lot of girfriends, but just one for good, one he could be deeply serious about. He saw himself as a man who fell in love, not one who had affairs. It had shocked him to discover, while a student, that at least half the men in his year had had no love or emotional experience at all. Their sensual lives consisted in picking up half-drunk girls in pubs and spending the night with them, perhaps only seeing them once or twice more, or never again.

  He wanted a great love and thought he had found her, for life, when he was eighteen. Diana was a music student like himself, she was beautiful, warm, loving, a serious person. But her parents moved to the United States, she transferred to an American university, and after a while stopped answering his letters. For a long time there had been no one else for him because he refused to compromise. Then, just before the accident, he had met a girl whose looks reminded him of Diana. She was a pianist and he met her while they were both taking part in a young performers' competition. But while he was in hospital he lost her. She came to see him once, was shy and vague and noncommittal, later wrote to say it was best for them not to see each other again.

  During the months of recuperation and the months of rediscovering himself as a changed person, a quick-tempered, irritable person, nervous and hypochondriacal, Tom thought of sex and love as remote concepts that were not for him, that were ridiculous for him to consider. It was as if he said to himself that he had enough to worry about without that. But once at the School, in his own place and with his daily occupation, he began to think again of this dream woman, and added to the old notion of what she should be, which Diana had personified, was an idea of her as his rescuer, as someone who would save him and make him whole again.

  He could not live as Jarvis did, a detached life with only casual human contact. It appalled him to think of living as Tina did, with one lover after another, apparently not even selectively, or as Jed, long separated from his wife and child, consoled by the society of a bird. He envisaged marriage, a lifelong commitment, growing richer as time passed. The face that came before his eyes was Diana's, soft-featured, full-cheeked, the mouth dimpled at its corners, the eyes large and dark brown, the hair a rich mass of chestnut-brown silkiness. She must be a musician or one who loved music. She must have that quality, without which no woman could meet his exacting standard, a gift of caring and nurturing, a loving, maternal sweetness. He found himself looking for her in the street, in the trains that took him down to his busking. He was lonely and longing for someone who perhaps did not exist.

  Like most musical children, Tom first played the recorder. He picked it up in an hour or two and went on to the guitar. His mother had a guitar she had played when she was young, in the sixties. His parents had no piano, but his grandmother had a baby grand and he taught himself to play that whenever he visited her. Soon he was learning the flute.

  He was one of those people who can play any number of musical instruments. It is said that they play none really well but this was not true of Tom who looked like becoming a child virtuoso of the flute. No one knew quite why this did not happen, why he remained good but no better than that, nor why he failed the audition for admission to a county youth orchestra. Tom himself said it was because he had to work hard at school at subjects other than music, he could not devote himself wholeheartedly to the flute. His grandmother told his parents it was due to his talent being dispersed. He had found he had a good voice and was taking singing lessons, and he went on flirting with the piano and a trumpet he had bought between practising his flute.

  Tom was his grandmother's only grandchild and one day, when he was fifteen and staying at her house in Rickmansworth in order to have access to the piano, she told him she was going to make him her heir.

  ‘I've made a will and left you everything, T
om.’

  He did not know what to say, so he said, ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘I'm not making any conditions, I've already changed my will, but I'd like you to do one thing for me. Well, two things really. I'd like you to go on to a university and do music, but I think you'll do that anyway, and I'd like you to stop playing other instruments. I mean, give up the piano and that trumpet you say you've got.’

  ‘It doesn't do me any harm.’

  ‘For my sake, Tom, because I ask you.’

  Tom thought this a ridiculous reason for doing something (or not doing something), because a person who knew nothing about it asked you. But he said he would, making a mental reservation that at any rate he would stop playing her piano. He did not stop playing the trumpet or taking singing lessons. Not playing her piano might have meant not going to Rickmansworth but he still went. He went more often. The idea of being nice to someone because they were going to leave you their money was not pleasant; Tom often told himself this, but it was the reason for his going to see his grandmother.

  He also told her lies. Apart from saying he had given up singing and trumpet-playing, he invented things, such as that his school had suggested he go in for the Young Musician of the Year contest.

  About his acceptance by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama he did not have to lie. He thought perhaps all lying would now be over because he was about to rush along the highway to success, fame and fortune. Tom did very well at the Guildhall where nobody told him he should stop singing, a piece of good news he passed on triumphantly to his grandmother. It was after he had been spending a Sunday with her that the accident happened.

  The accident changed Tom's life.

  When he went home to his parents' house in Ealing or to the Barbican, his grandmother drove him the mile and a half to Rickmansworth station, which is up on the northern end of the Metropolitan Line. Sometimes, in good weather, he walked. The evening the accident happened was fine and he could have walked. In any case, his grandmother would have driven him. But while they were out in the garden during the afternoon they began talking to the man next door who had a motorbike and was leaving for the City on it at seven. Tom had never before ridden pillion on a motorbike, but Andy the neighbour had a spare crash helmet. For some complicated reason he made this trip every Sunday evening. Tom did not much like the long train journey through Harrow and Northwood and Wembley down to Baker Street, and the changing and the waiting. He accepted the offer of a lift.

  They were on a narrow winding road which skirted Batchworth Heath when it happened. The distance from his grandmother's house was just over a mile. Andy overtook a container lorry, the kind of thing that should never have been on that road, and hit a Volvo estate car coming in the opposite direction. Everything was going too fast except Andy and he had not been going fast enough.

  Tom was thrown clear. He flew through the air and struck his head against a tree, his life being saved by the helmet. Andy died quickly under the wheels of the Volvo.

  The six months Tom spent in hospital prevented his return to college. He had a broken leg, several broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a very badly broken left hand.

  ‘Lucky you're not a pianist,’ said the orthopaedic surgeon.

  The man probably thought you played the flute just with your mouth.

  But it was not the damage to his hand or the rest of the obvious physical damage that made a tragedy for Tom. It was what had happened inside his head. Or what he thought had happened inside his head, for those at the hospital who were supposed to know told him the brain scan showed nothing untoward. He had not fractured his skull. His brain was undamaged. How to explain to them that he was changed? This quick temper that flared at nothing, that was new. This irritability. These headaches. Above all, this loss of ambition, drive and – immeasurably worst – his lost music, his lost love of it, need for it.

  Tom went home to Ealing at last. The little finger on his left hand would be permanently stiff and the hand, though almost entirely usable, was not the shape it had once been. More operations on it were proposed. Tom did not know if he would have them. He did not know if he could play the flute and he was afraid to try.

  His father said he must apply to return to college.

  ‘They'll make me do my whole second year again,’ said Tom. ‘That's what they always do.’

  ‘You don't know that till you try.’

  ‘I won't get a grant for an extra year and I don't suppose you'll pay up.’

  His father said not to talk to him like that, so Tom walked out and went to live with his grandmother in Rickmansworth. His grandmother said if it was a fact he would not get a grant she would finance him but that he should find out. It was surely only a matter of writing a letter or making a phone call. Tom agreed but trying to compose the letter brought on one of his headaches.

  Secretly, he began playing the flute. He only played when his grandmother was out. It was a great day when he found, not so much that he could still play, but that he still wanted to. For all that, his ineptitude caused him to fly into rages. If he had had the strength he would have broken the flute, but his left hand was too weak to apply the necessary force. Because he had to have money he got a job working in a sandwich bar near Baker Street. Some people his grandmother knew had a little girl who wanted to learn the flute and Tom started giving her lessons. Her parents did not seem to mind that he had no qualifications and had not finished his university course.

  Most afternoons when his shift ended, he caught a Metropolitan train from Baker Street up to Rickmansworth, the Amersham Line. But sometimes he went down into London instead and roamed about, especially when it was warm. He liked listening to the street musicians who played at Covent Garden.

  Once he went to a Prom at the Albert Hall. At that time there were never any buskers in Baker Street station and the ones he saw were at Leicester Square or Green Park. They played rock, which to Tom was a meaningless cacophony. He got talking to a man called Mac he met while listening to Vivaldi in Regent's Park and they agreed to try playing something in one of the Baker Street concourses.

  Mac had said something about his fondness for wind instruments without actually saying what he played. Tom was aghast when he saw the bagpipes. He brought Ollie with him. Ollie could just about manage on the violin. Tom told himself that beggars could not be choosers and if he jibbed at playing the flute in this company he could always sing. It gratified him to discover how popular his singing was.

  He and Ollie and Mac made a good team, playing at various Underground stations all that autumn and winter until Mac left because he had found a place to live up north and they took Peter on. They met Peter at Cambridge School, where they were all living. He had lost his job because the club where he played the piano had to close and, though he was after another one on the switchboard in a hospice, he was for the time being at a loose end. Peter could play a lot of instruments, though none very well.

  When Tom told his grandmother he was moving out of her house and confessed – because since the accident he had also stopped lying, could not be bothered with prevarication – that he had been busking at stations, she told him she was horrified, she was disappointed in him.

  ‘I've been ill,’ he said. ‘I'll never be the same again, do you realize that?’

  ‘We'll none of us be the same again,’ she said. ‘People change all the time. Some people change for the better. You're not ill, it's all in your mind.’

  ‘Look, I'll never be a concert flautist. My left hand will never work properly. I've got to have money, haven't I?’

  ‘You've got to have qualifications in this world before you can get money. Tom, I'm asking you, I'm begging you, it's not too late. Let's sit down this evening, you and I, and write to the Guildhall School. If there's no grant forthcoming I'll pay.’

  ‘They won't take me back.’

  ‘Then we'll apply to others. We'll apply to all the schools of music and polytechnics in the country.’


  ‘Look, I'll go back one day. I'm young, I can go back any time I want. I know I've got to go back, I know I need qualifications. But first I need money.’

  He moved out next day. She was very cold with him. At the station, where she drove him, though he had been in the habit of regularly walking there, she refused to kiss him.

  ‘Why don't you just go? ‘I'll be in touch,’ he said.

  His hand was nearly all right. One day, he thought, he would have that operation and then he would apply to go to a university with a music course. But he was very young, he was not yet twenty-three. A year to make some money in could be spared from all the time in the world.

  They went where they liked, played where they chose. Opinion was that Tottenham Court Road was the best pitch, the Central Line area. Tom didn't know that at that station you had to book your pitch in advance, add your name or the name of your band to the list under the No Smoking sign. A lot of Scots came this way via the Northern Line from King's Cross and they were giving their Scottish concert in the concourse when a heavy metal band arrived and told them roughly to move.

  The railway police and station staff were always telling them that but they had never had it from fellow buskers before. The drummer lashed out at Tom and caught him a glancing blow on the jaw and Tom had to be held back by Ollie to prevent him retaliating. That was when they all realized acting like this was only playing into the hands of the authorities and giving them a real basis for enforcing their petty laws.

  It also showed Tom something else: that busking was not what his grandmother and a lot of others seemed to think, just another kind of begging, but a real musical means of living, something you had to book and arrange like giving a concert in a concert hall. Unlike the noise made by the strummers who called it pop or country, his was serious music.