King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  This involved an escalator going deep down. Instead of standing on the treads, they ran down. Jasper wondered if the man in uniform had actually seen Chris on the roof of the car, had had a phone call from Kensington High Street that someone was on the roof of a car, or if he knew nothing except what that woman was telling him. Buskers were at the foot of the escalator, not Alice and Tom and Peter, but two men with a saxophone and an electric guitar, playing rock. Jasper looked back up the empty moving stair.

  On the eastbound platform Dean and Lee were already waiting for them. They had doubled back and got out of the single-leaf door of the car. Now there was only Kevin unaccounted for. He came rushing on to the platform just as a train bound for Debden came in. Nothing had happened, he had been given a warning, that was all. They all got into the train, though Dean's idea had been to head for Epping, but it was as well to be on the safe side.

  As soon as they were in the train, in a rather crowded car where there was no chance of a seat, Jasper understood what he had to do. This was it. When the train had emerged from the last tunnel on the Central Line between Stratford and Leyton, issuing with little more space to spare than toothpaste squeezed out of the nozzle of another kind of tube, somewhere past that point, though he was not sure yet where, he would climb out on to the roof of the car.

  He stood between Kevin and Damon, holding on to the upright, saying nothing. He intended to tell no one about this, just to do it. The car remained crowded as far as Holborn and then the passengers thinned out. Jasper got a seat. He was not yet of an age where polite altruism is practised among friends, a situation in which one denies oneself comfort and offers it to another. Such a thing would not have occurred to Jasper or to any of them. A seat became vacant and he sat down in it.

  In the back pocket of his jeans he could feel the rather squashed packet of cigarettes. When he had done his roof ride and the sick feeling had been replaced by a feeling of triumph, he would have a cigarette. The closed doors would hold it for him and he would smoke it on the way back as he had smoked that earlier one on the way down from Finchley Road.

  They came back on the Northern Line, a tall handsome man in a long overcoat and a man whose face was mostly hidden by an upturned collar and a hat pulled well down. It was a train bound for Mill Hill East that they got into, so they were obliged to change. They did so at Euston. But instead of waiting on the same platform for an Edgware train, they made their way up to the British Rail terminus, and in the men's lavatory the bear got into his bear suit. Outside, in the concourse, the bear-leader passed the chain round the bear's neck, made a noose of it, and led the bear back to the Underground.

  Money was never short with the bear-leader. It was not for money that he had the bear dance to amuse commuters. He made no attempt to re-enter the system without paying but bought two tickets from the machine while the bear waited meekly with bowed head. As they descended the escalator they were once more the centre of attention. No one looked anywhere but at them, not at the advertisements or each other or the tube map, but at the man and the bear.

  In the passage leading back to the northbound platform of the Northern Line they stopped in a corner, the man got out his mouth organ and the bear began to dance. The rich ignore the simplest things in the area of earning, making, keeping, regarding money, and the bear-leader forgot to put any receptacle for money on the ground in front of them. He had no hat and certainly he had no handkerchief, but the bag in which the Semtex was would have done, or the square scarf which, under the brown hairy suit, was still knotted round the bear's neck.

  It scarcely mattered, since only one of the passers-by gave them anything. This was a man who perhaps gave to all tube buskers indiscriminately, without even looking at them, for he tossed a 5p piece on to the ground as he strode past. The coin bounced, spun and rolled away into the corner.

  The bear said, ‘Put the bag between us and open the top of it.’

  ‘Remember what's inside.’

  ‘That won't matter. You could throw a fag end in, throw a lighted match in. It needs percussion to go up. Black powder now, that would be something else again.’

  ‘I'm learning,’ said the man with the mouth organ.

  They were bound for Epping because Dean lived there. A self-appointed leader, he made the rules without being explicit about them or even explaining that there were rules. He wanted to go home and therefore the others must come with him. What happened to the rest of them when he left them on Epping's still rustic station, at the extreme eastern end of the Central Line, was their business or misfortune. Jasper sensed some of this and vowed not to go along with it in the sheeplike fashion of the others.

  Cars in London Transport Underground are seldom entirely empty. Even in the slack times, between rush hours, there are usually several people in each car, even on these distant tentacles of the lines. In their car, after Snaresbrook, only the six of them remained. Jasper had begun to feel hungry. It was lunchtime and past. He had about a pound on him, in small change, which would buy no more than a chocolate bar and a couple of packets of crisps. But Kevin was a notorious thief and always had money. The idea of Kevin's rewarding him for his prowess with a real lunch somewhere acted as a spur to Jasper, but he did not really need a spur. He was prepared, determined, ready.

  A woman the same age as their combined ages stepped into the car at Woodford and quickly stepped out again when she saw Lee swinging from the passenger hand-holds, Damon and Kevin sparring on the floor and Chris doing something to a continental ferry advertisement with a red felt-tipped pen.

  It was getting greener outside the windows, not exactly country but a lot of trees and leaves and green grass among the buildings. At Debden they would have to change, if they were going on further with Dean Miller. Jasper was not. Loughton was the place he thought of as the station at which to de-train and seek food. He was suddenly aware of the sun, of bright sunshine pouring into the car.

  The platform at Buckhurst Hill was empty, or empty at their end. The station looked sunlit, deserted. It looked like somewhere waiting for a film to happen, Jasper thought, like a Western on television where two gunmen will come out of the badlands and hold up the mailtrain on the Santa Fe railroad. By that time he had opened the door at the end of the car. Behind him Dean said, ‘He's going to sledge,’ but Jasper did not look back.

  He climbed up the door of the next car, using the handles and window frames as footholds. It was easy getting up there. What he had not anticipated was that the top of the train would be so smooth. Curved, yes, he had expected that, he had known he wasn't going to find a flat plateau, but something to hold on to he had expected, a double ridge perhaps, pipes or cables, not what was in fact there, nothing more than shallow flanges at the tops of the double-leaf doors. Nothing would have made him do a Damon and slink back. He squatted, then lay down, he edged and wriggled along and had his fingers round those curved shallow indentations when the train started.

  It gave a lurch and Jasper, his heart in his mouth, felt his body jerk and slip. He held on, digging his fingers into metal, as if the metal were soft and would give. The train pulled out, heading for Loughton along the green valley of the Roding. Under his prone body the roof felt hot. September sunshine had been shining on it ever since Leyton. Now the sun stroked Jasper's back, laid a burning hand on the nape of his neck. He spread his legs and tensed his fingers. He was in control now, he had the measure of this car roof, this train, the knack of getting a grip on it.

  In spite of the heat, he understood why it was called sledging. This was what it must be like on a toboggan roaring down the snowy slope of a mountainside. A great exhilaration filled him. The train was going fast, rushing along now, and the clatter of it sang in his ears. He bounced a little, pleasantly, not alarmingly. Why had no one said it was like this? Why had no one told him how marvellous it was?

  Jasper would have liked to yell and sing and shout, if he had dared lift up his head. He would have liked to stand on the roof of t
he train and leap along from car to car like one of the bad guys in that Western. But he dared not move, not this time, not yet, and he held on tight, lying there with his body ten times more thrillingly alive than he had ever known it.

  A great joy possessed him as the train bore him on, on, on through the sunshine, down the line to Loughton.

  10

  Yelena Donskoy lived not far away, over the other side of the Finchley Road, in Netherhall Way. Alice could easily walk there, carrying her violin. The money she had left of the hundred pounds she had brought with her would not even cover the first lesson.

  ‘I'll give you the money,’ Tom said. ‘You ought to know that. What's mine is yours.’

  They were sitting in the garden, on the grass on Jarvis's blanket. Tom had a toy xylophone someone had given Bienvida and he kept playing short snatches of melody. Alice touched his hand.

  ‘I do know. You're good to me. But I'm going to have to get a job.’

  He could only think of music. To him it was inconceivable she or he or anyone with her training and aspirations could seek any work but the most menial outside. Working in a sandwich bar was all right, that was like an actor ‘resting’.

  ‘Teaching, d'you mean?’ he said. His own teaching job had come to an end. The child had failed her flute exam and the parents blamed him.

  ‘I mean a secretarial job.’

  He played a long trill on the rainbow-coloured plates. ‘You can't be serious.’

  ‘I think I could do it. I've got a degree and they say it doesn't matter what you've got a degree in as long as you've got one. I used to work for my father in the holidays and I got quite good on the computer.’

  Hearing about her degree had begun to irritate him. It seemed to throw his own deficiencies into relief. She was beginning to know that look of his, sarcastic, petulant, the eyebrows up and head a little to one side.

  ‘But why?’

  A train came up from Finchley Road. She waited for it to pass. ‘Tom, I haven't enough money to pay Madame Donskoy for even one lesson. I know you'll give it to me but you can't go on giving it to me, can you? You haven't got it. I think I could earn quite a lot and it wouldn't be for long – maybe a year. It would be easy to travel up and down from here, so close to the tube.’

  ‘I don't believe I'm hearing any of this. We make money busking and we have a good time, don't we? We're playing real music and getting an audience. We made £21 yesterday.’

  She did not say it aloud, but thought, between three people for a day's work. Tom banged away at a single note on the xylophone. Sometimes he looked like a little boy, his lips pushed out.

  ‘I thought you liked playing the violin.’ It might have been Jasper talking.

  ‘I like it too much not to do the best I can with it.’ She tried to talk briskly. ‘I haven't been quite honest. I'm not thinking about a job, I've applied for one. I've got an interview on Friday afternoon.’

  He sat up. She could see he was furious. In a quick violent gesture he hurled the toy hammer he was holding across the garden.

  Alice pretended to take no notice. She began talking steadily about how she had hoped her father's partner would give her a reference. But her father still refused to speak to her and when approached through her mother as intermediary, said that if it was in his power he would like to see to it that she never got a job anywhere ever again. She wrote direct to her father's partner. Jarvis was going to give her the other reference. He knew nothing about her secretarial skills but, as Tina said, he would give anybody a reference for anything, he was kind.

  Tom was not looking at her, he seemed not to be listening. When she tried to take his hand he snatched it away. She got up and went to hunt for Bienvida's xylophone hammer in the bushes.

  A disquieting thing happened. Having found the hammer up by the fence which separated the garden from the railway line, she had to go back to him. She sat down cautiously. He was kneeling, she thought he was getting up, but suddenly he threw his arms round her and held her so that she could hardly breathe. It was public here and she hated the idea of people seeing but she let herself go limp in his arms.

  ‘I love you so much, darling. Don't quarrel with me, we mustn't ever quarrel.’

  Nobody in Bienvida's class at school ever had tea. They had crisps or chocolate biscuits and cans of drink when they got home from school, but not tea, not the kind of thing she got at her grandmother's. Bienvida knew nothing of the English tradition of tea, bread and butter and sandwiches, biscuits and cake and a pot of tea served at four o'clock. She was too young to have read about it and no one had told her, but she sensed, when she had tea at Lilac Villa, that this was how things should be, had used to be, and was something surely specially appropriate for people of her age when they got home at four.

  Other things at Cecilia's Bienvida also much approved of. She was a child who liked washing her hands before meals, perhaps because she had never been told to do so. She liked sitting in a clean room, at a table with a cloth on it, or on the chintz sofa, watching Neighbours on her grandmother's television. She liked talking with Cecilia, though much of what she said to her was lies.

  Bienvida told the lies less for her own protection than for her mother's. And in the hope of making Cecilia happy and making her believe existence at Cambridge School was orderly and smooth-running and what Cecilia herself would call decent. So when her grandmother asked her, putting the question optimistically, as one expecting the answer ‘yes’, if Jasper was attending school regularly, Bienvida replied that he was.

  ‘He does go to school, doesn't he, Bienvida?’

  ‘Yes, of course he does,’ Bienvida said with as much earnestness as she could muster.

  ‘Because he's a clever boy and he needs education.’ Cecilia hesitated, went on vaguely, ‘He would need it even more if he weren't clever, but I'm sure you know what I mean.’

  Bienvida, eating homemade sponge cake, butter-iced and scattered with chocolate vermicelli, said she did know. She sat very upright at the table, enjoying the soapy smell of her clean hands.

  ‘I expect you go to bed at the same time, don't you, even though he is two years older than you?’

  This time Bienvida did not have to lie. She replied that this was true, they did go to bed at the same, forbearing to add that it was seldom before eleven and might be at midnight. Rather gracefully, she changed the subject by asking if she could have another piece of cake, another piece of this delicious cake, a grown-up adjective which made her grandmother smile.

  Cecilia, in spite of the smile, felt miserable and ashamed of herself. It was very wrong, she had always maintained, to question innocent children about their mode of life behind their parents' backs. If she had heard of anyone else doing it she would deeply have disapproved. But she could not help herself. She could not help herself though she was not entirely, or even halfway, deceived by Bienvida's lies. She even knew what kind of lies they were, designed to protect her and Tina and keep them happy and caring for one another, and she loved Bienvida even more for this.

  Knowing they were lies should have kept her from further questioning. It inhibited her but could not quite stop her. She felt her way round the burning question, the one that might have the terrible answer, she danced round it, pouring Bienvida more weak sugary tea, plying her with chocolate chip cookies. Was Jed still there? That noise she heard while visiting the School, was that really a bird he kept?

  ‘It caught a magpie,’ said Bienvida. ‘It killed it.’

  To Cecilia's horror, her dark eyes, often tragic, filled with tears. How to comfort her? What to say? There was of course nothing to say, there was no comfort. But Cecilia's speculation that she might have in the freezer the kind of ice-cream that is called a Dracula stopped the tears falling. And Cecilia, coming back from the kitchen with this dark-red frozen confection in a glass dish, returning to Bienvida who sat quiet and sad with her hands folded, could not proceed to her most important question, her ultimate, momentous and awesome q
uestion. She could not bring herself to it. It was not possible for her to ask this innocent and gentle child, whose eyes were too wary and too sad for her age, if her mother's boyfriend Billy was living with her and sharing her bed. However she put it, whatever circumlocutory terms she used, she could not ask it and retain her self-respect. As it was she could feel in her mouth the sour taste of disgust.

  It was a distance of no more than two hundred yards to the School but Cecilia walked her home. It was daylight, it was on the whole a ‘nice’ district, Cecilia thought Bienvida an obedient girl who would remember about not speaking to strangers, but nevertheless she walked home to the School with her. She always did. She had read too many newspaper accounts of abducted and murdered children, seen too much evidence on the television of the peril children were in.

  At the School gates she left Bienvida and watched her until she disappeared round the back of the house. She might have gone in with her, the child had even asked her if she was coming in, but Cecilia never called at the School in the evenings. Besides disliking the place, she was afraid of what she might see. Daphne had told her she imagined much worse than could possibly be happening, drinking and even drugs and the place in a mess and Tina with some man, perhaps in bed with some man. Oh, no, that's nonsense, Cecilia had said, I don't imagine that at all, but she did.

  When she got back Cecilia went upstairs and looked at the rooms up there. A pang came to her when she remembered how she had obliged Tina to ‘live’ downstairs while sleeping on the top floor. That this had really only been so that she could see as much as possible of her grandchildren did not really make it any better. Her motive had been selfish. It was pleasant upstairs, with fine views from the rear windows. You could see as far as the Heath. A bedroom each for the children, a living room, and the fourth room she would have converted into a bathroom and a kitchen, as she should have done long ago. Tina could have the big bedroom on the floor below. This reminded Cecilia that Tina probably was not sleeping alone, probably never would sleep alone. She did not think she could stand having Tina's boyfriend, any boyfriend of Tina's, to live in her house.