King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  By five in the morning she had decided to go back, to return to them and forget music, blame her defection on a temporary post-natal madness. She slept, woke up at nine to find out her second mistake: that all hotels everywhere serve breakfast. The café which had provided her supper had coffee and Danish pastries on offer. Drinking the thin, bitter coffee, she reverted to the ideas of the night, to returning home, and before she had finished it was resolved on packing her things and making her way to Holborn station and thence to Liverpool Street.

  The map of the London Underground, which can be seen inside every train, on all stations, on the back of the London A–Z guide, on tea-cloths on sale at the London Transport Museum, on posters, in diaries and in sundry other places, has been called a model of its kind, a work of art.

  It was designed by Henry Beck and first used by London Transport on posters in 1933. They paid him five guineas, or £5.25 for it. It has been reproduced in millions and has served as the model for metro maps all over the world.

  The last to carry the signature Henry C. Beck in the lower lefthand corner was issued in 1959. Today's version is irritatingly called by London Transport Underground a ‘journey planner’.

  It presents the underground network as a geometric grid. Some say that if you stood it up-ended on your roof it would look like a television aerial.

  The tube lines do not, of course, lie at right angles to one another like the streets of Manhattan. Nor do they branch off at acute angles or form perfect oblongs. A true map of the London Underground shows the central complex as a shape suggestive of a swimming dolphin, its snout being Aldgate, its forehead Old Street, the crown of its head King's Cross, its spine Paddington, White City and Acton, its tail Ealing Broadway and its underbelly the stations of Kensington. The outer configurations branch out in graceful tentacles. The seal has become a medusa, a jellyfish. Its extremities touch Middlesex and Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey. A claw penetrates Heathrow.

  The Metropolitan Line, which was begun in 1863, had additions made throughout the 1860s and 1870s and in 1882 and 1884. The District Line, which was begun in 1865, continued to grow until 1902. Additions were made to the Central Line, first opened in 1900, in 1908, 1912, 1920 and 1946–9. The years between 1860 and 1884 saw the building of the Circle, for a long time called the Inner Circle.

  The Northern Line was begun in 1890 but added to throughout the twentieth century until 1941. A new terminus and intervening stations were added to the Piccadilly Line of 1903–7 in 1933 and 1971. London's only entirely new tube line in recent times, the Victoria, opened in 1971, and the Jubilee, only a small part of which was new, the rest the partially transformed Bakerloo of 1905–15, was completed in 1979.

  Since then the Docklands Light Railway has branched off the network to serve the redeemed areas of London's east river.

  By eleven she was in Green Park Underground station with her violin, looking for Tom, lured to him by the sound of the flute reaching her as she descended the escalator.

  ‘I didn't think you'd come.’

  ‘I nearly didn't,’ she said. ‘I nearly went back to where I came from.’

  He looked inquiringly at her, waiting for her to say more, but when she did not introduced the man he was with as Ollie, another guitarist. This was Ollie's last time, he said, he was going to live in France.

  ‘They all move away,’ said Tom.

  ‘I expect I shall. I'll have to. I can't afford to stay in this awful dump I'm in for long.’

  He started singing then and they accompanied him. Alice suggested he try the Don's serenade from Don Giovanni. They had no mandolin but Ollie's guitar would do. While he sang to the girl the Don wants to come to her window, calling her his treasure, asking her not to be cruel, at least to let him see her, he looked at Alice, turned his face away from the audience who had gathered and looked at her.

  She was rather embarrassed but people loved it. A lot of coins were thrown into the guitar case and some of them were pounds. Alice had a poor opinion of her own voice, an uncertain soprano, but when Tom suggested the duet the Don sings with Zerlina she agreed. He sang in the words of the aria that she should give him her hand and put his out to her, but she pretended not to understand. People clapped. Ollie scooped out the money and found just a little short of £15.

  ‘We usually bring our own food and eat it in the park,’ Tom said, ‘but today we thought we'd eat a proper meal in a café with you.’

  ‘But you didn't expect me to come.’

  ‘I half did. I hoped you would.’

  It was a sandwich bar like the one he had worked in. They made just enough money busking for him not to have to go back to that. Alice thought it sounded a hand-to-mouth existence. She did not tell them she had never had a job, had been supported by a husband she had left. When the coffee came Tom said she could come and live at Cambridge School if she liked.

  ‘A school?’

  ‘It used to be. It's just a house now where people rent rooms, only the rent's very low. There's a room free now Ollie's going. I asked the man who owns it and he said you could have the Headmaster's Study.’

  She laughed. ‘It sounds like a good address.’

  ‘Say you will.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Ollie. ‘Let her make up her own mind. She ought to see it first.’

  ‘Of course she'll see it. We'll go up there now.’

  The Headmaster's Study was on the first floor next to Four. Alice, who had several times caught Tom looking admiringly at her while they were coming up there in the tube, and could not forget the way he had held out his hand to her while they sang the duet, wondered if having the room next to his was a good idea. But it was the only one available, since Jarvis did not want to let the other rooms on the second floor. The sound of the trains she was sure would prevent her sleeping at night. But she took it. The absurd rent lured her, it made her hundred pounds look less pathetic than it had when she checked into Mrs Archer's hotel.

  Tom insisted on going back with her to Streatham Street to fetch her suitcase and winter coat. On the return journey he told her all about himself and he held up his left hand for her scrutiny. It looked the same as the other one to her, except perhaps that the knuckle bone of the little finger was more prominent than the rest and the finger itself rather stiff.

  ‘I think your grandmother was right. You should go back to college.’

  ‘I don't mind you saying it.’

  ‘That's what I've come to London for. I've got to go on studying. I want to go to Brussels, that's the best place. We ought to have a national conservatoire of music in this country but we don't.’

  ‘I'll go back to college one day. I have this feeling I'll know when the time's right. I'll have to pay for it myself too, but I will. It would be wrong to rush into anything.’

  She nodded, not taking in much of what he said. Being alone, as she soon would be, was a threatening thing. She did not want to find herself alone in that Headmaster's Study, where she would have to begin to think. For the first time since her escape she was very conscious of the fact that she had given birth only a month before and could even fancy she felt a pulling sensation where the fundament stitches had been. She was sore and uncomfortable, perhaps because she had been standing for so long and walking so much. If she was alone she was afraid she might begin to cry.

  The last thing she wanted was for Tom to take her under his wing, to regard her in some sense as his find and his property, but that was what was happening. He said they must meet later, she must come and eat with him in his room and he would get a bottle of wine. Then he left her.

  To avoid introspection she concentrated on her surroundings. Nothing remained to show that the headmaster had had his daily being here, perhaps here conducted interviews with backsliding pupils, commended scholars. There was no desk, only a big bed someone had made up with whose sheets she did not know, an armchair and a table, a cupboard, a window through which the passing trains could be seen, tube trains and M
etropolitan trains and the trains that went up to the Chilterns. She had seen a phone in the big hall they called the vestibule.

  Her mind emptied. She sat on the bed and real life came rushing in to fill the vacuum. She thought of Mike starting his holiday today. He would be at his mother's and Catherine would be there too and they would be talking about her, that was all they would talk about. They would be saying she was mad and her behaviour beyond their understanding. Mike's mother would say she was mad and wicked. By this time, if not long before, they would have phoned her parents and talked it all over with them.

  Alice decided to tell no one about it. She would keep it to herself. There was no point in talking about it to someone who did not know the personalities involved and could not appreciate the circumstances. She resolved on this but three hours later, having eaten Tom's Indian takeaway and drunk half Tom's wine, she was telling him her whole history.

  Tom said, ‘Why did you get married? Why didn't you have an abortion?’

  He could not know it but to talk of aborting Catherine, who was a living child, a person, was like coolly contemplating murder. To talk of it now, that is. She had thought of it then.

  ‘Everyone got at me,’ she said. ‘It's hard to explain because you think I'm strong.’

  He had said so. She must be strong to leave like that, to make plans for leaving and carry them out.

  ‘I'd just left the Royal Academy, I'd just got the results of my finals. Mike was pleased I was pregnant. He wanted to be married and have a family and he said this way I'd have to marry him.’

  ‘Did he do it on purpose?’

  ‘No, it was my fault, it was an accident. I'd never thought of marrying him, he was just a boyfriend, he didn't even seem all that attractive after I got pregnant. Then my parents and his parents started on me. My mother said she didn't know what things were coming to when you had to make girls get married because in her youth it was always the boys who didn't want to.’

  She thought he was going to start talking about abortions again. He only said, ‘You didn't have to do what they said.’

  ‘I gave in. I know it was weak. I was one of those people who're sick all the time in pregnancy, not just in the mornings, I was sick day after day for hours. I couldn't go out, I couldn't do anything. Mike was there every day, being nice to me and telling me not to worry about anything, he'd found this flat and his mother was seeing to furnishing it and they were making arrangements for the wedding. I just gave in, I hadn't the strength to resist them. A week before the wedding the sickness stopped and my mother said it had been psychological, she said that “deep down inside” – I'm quoting her – I longed for marriage and once I knew I was really going to get married I stopped worrying.’

  ‘What would you have done if you hadn't got pregnant?’

  ‘I was going to be a concert violinist.’ She looked at him. ‘I'm still going to be. That's why I ran away. That's why I left my baby.’

  Her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry. Tom got up and went to sit beside her. He took her hand, then when she seemed not to mind this, put his arms round her. She sobbed and he held her close to him.

  6

  A dark purplish-red, or burgundy, is the colour of the Metropolitan, green of the District, yellow of the Circle, scarlet of the Central, brown of the Bakerloo, dark blue of the Piccadilly and black of the Northern. These are the colours of lines on Beck's map and also sometimes of station trims and new station bucket seats.

  On the map the Victoria Line became light blue. When the Jubilee Line was nearly finished there was some speculation as to what colour would be used for it. Possibilities remaining were pink, lime green, orange and mauve.

  London Transport Underground chose grey.

  Pink has been given, unexpectedly and without precedent, to the Hammersmith branch of the Metropolitan.

  The days went by and Alice did not phone her mother. Each day she had gone with Tom and Peter or just with Tom down into the Underground and played her violin. This, in spite of resolving not to do it again, not to lower her standards, which playing pop classics against a background noise of trains and pounding feet and chatter, yells and whistles and rival groups, seemed to her to be.

  Standing there with the violin tucked under her chin and the bow in her hand, she was removed from anxiety and from thinking of Catherine. In a way it was as if she was drugged. She felt set apart. The people who passed by, sometimes pausing to give them money, were the others. She and Tom and Peter were special and different, allied by their music.

  It kept her from worry and it kept her from settling down to write those applications which would lead to progress in her career of serious music. Alice had already told herself that it would be stupid to think about those applications yet. Apart from still being post-parturitive, she was in a state of shock – self-induced shock but shock just the same. The worst thing for her was to be alone. The best thing at the moment was to be with someone who admired her and was kind.

  While Tom played his flute or sang, she played her violin, not much liking the sounds she heard herself making, sometimes even glad there was so much background racket and an undiscerning audience. But she had re-entered the world of music, she comforted herself with this; in the least expected way she was back in the life from which Mike and his family and marriage had threatened to cut her off for ever.

  That night, after she had confided in Tom and begun to cry, he had comforted her, held her in his arms and kissed her. If he had not known she had had a baby only a month before he would have wanted to make love to her, she was sure of that. But she did not know if she would ever want to make love to Tom. Would she, come to that, with any man ever again? Alice's body felt cold and closed-up and stiff except where it felt sore and vulnerable, and her mind felt sore all over.

  She slept badly. By the third day the silence from Mike and her parents and his parents grew uncanny. Yet how could it be otherwise when they did not know where she was? She asked herself which of them she should phone and found herself trembling at the thought of phoning any of them. His parents were impossible, her mother-in-law would just put the phone down. As she stood there in the vestibule, in front of the carved names of Cambridge School's distinguished pupils, all the Dorothys and Joans and Ediths and Hildas, the glass-panelled front door opened and an old woman let herself in. She said good morning to Alice and Alice said hallo. She was thin and rather tall with a very lined gentle face and hair that was white but which Alice could see had once been blonde. She could also have told this was Tina's mother before Mrs Darne went off down the passage that led to the Headmaster's Flat. Alice thought it would be easier to phone someone like that than her own mother if you had done what she had done, but she could be wrong there. Appearances were deceptive and her own mother looked handsome and smart and had what people called a very sweet expression.

  Still, it was her mother she must phone and that by default. Apart from other considerations, many other almost insuperable obstacles, in order to get hold of Mike or her father she would have to go through switchboards and in her father's case a secretary. She dialled her mother's number and nearly put the phone down when it started ringing.

  When her mother answered, she said the stupid thing she always said to those who were supposed to be close to her, ‘It's me.’

  There was silence. Alice heard her mother's indrawn breath. More silence, nothing. She expected the receiver to be replaced.

  ‘It's me. It's Alice.’

  ‘I heard you the first time,’ her mother said.

  Alice waited. At least her mother had spoken.

  ‘I think you must have lost your mind.’

  ‘All right, I can understand people might think that,’ Alice said. ‘I had to leave, that's all. If I'd left it longer I might never have gone.’

  ‘Then it's a great pity you didn't leave it longer. Who do you think is looking after your baby? Did you think of that? Are you going to condescend to tell anyone when you'
re coming back?’

  ‘I'm not coming back.’

  ‘Alice, you are coming back. You are having some sort of mental breakdown. The best thing will be to tell me where you are and Daddy will come and fetch you, or Mike will. Well, Daddy will. Mike's too angry and upset to do anything. You need to see a doctor. You probably need to be hospitalized.’

  Alice had always called her mother Mummy. This would no longer do. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I left because I want to be a musician, I don't want to be someone's mother and someone's wife. I don't love Mike, I don't even like him any more.’ If she mentioned Catherine's name she knew her voice would break. ‘I'm not going to tell you where I am. Not yet. But I'll tell you one thing. I'm a violinist now, I'm free to be that. I don't expect you to understand.’

  Marcia Anderson gave her hard little laugh. It always made Alice wince. ‘Mike saw you'd taken your violin. You left your baby and took your violin.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mother,’ said Alice. ‘Give my love to my father.’

  ‘I shan't bother, he's never going to speak to you again,’ said Marcia.

  Alice looked up at the lamp which was like an iron tarantula hanging from its web. Leaning her head back kept the tears inside her eyes. She thought, I'm not going to cry any more, it's stupid and awful, wanting to cry for everything. She stood there, leaning on the phone table, and started reading the names incised into the wood. She made herself read to keep from crying: Hilda Bevans, two credits, three passes in Oxford School Certificate, 1944; Marjorie Grace Pickthorne, one distinction, two credits, four passes in Oxford School Certificate, 1945. From behind the door of Remove came the regular faint clatter of Jarvis's typewriter.

  The first trains were drawn by steam engines. The smoke and steam had to escape and passengers had to breathe. A civil servant home on furlough from Egypt said the tunnels smelt like a crocodile's breath. In the end they used a locomotive which diverted the steam into tanks behind the engine by means of a ducted exhaust. When the train emerged from the tunnel the tanks were opened and the steam released.