by Barbara Vine
Her own lessons with Madame Donskoy did not please or encourage her. They terrified her. She found herself constantly waiting for the Russian woman's approval. She would watch that broad, jowly, truculent face for some sign, not of appreciation, not of pleasure or even complacency, but just not of disgust. Possibly Yelena Donskoy was not disgusted, did not hate what she heard, but it was just that her old face had naturally fallen into those grim lines, as age had made the cheeks droop and pulled down the corners of her mouth.
No word of praise ever came from her. The most frequent sounds she made were grunts. She would adjust Alice's fingers. Sometimes Alice thought she made an absurd fuss about the way the violin was actually held, something she had not come across in a teacher since she first held a bow when she was twelve.
One day she said something that made Alice's blood go cold.
‘It is very amusing how you find in this country grown-up men and women struggling with technical matters which in Europe would have been mastered when they were ten.’
‘Do you mean violinists?’
Alice wished she had not asked this question. Madame Donskoy gave her horrid smile and looked sideways so that Alice could not help feeling that she herself would not have been dignified with that title, that no pupil who came to this murky, dark, stuffy house would have been.
Sometimes they had tea. Whether it actually came out of a samovar Alice did not know. It was cold, stewed, milkless, brought in in a jug. They drank it in a room where the chairs and tables were all draped in plush rugs or shawls and where there was a lot of greenish-blue and crimson Venetian glass. Yelena Donskoy talked about the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter for whom she had an extravagant admiration and Yehudi Menuhin whom she claimed as a friend.
Tom wanted to come and meet Alice after the lesson was over. His excuse was that it was not safe to walk home down Frognal and Canfield Gardens after dark. Alice let him. It was only once a week and if she permitted this she felt she was on firmer ground for resolutely refusing to let him come for her at Angell, Scherrer and Christianson.
Brian Elphick took the children out every Saturday. He always asked them what they would like to do.
‘Go to the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden,’ said Jasper promptly.
Brian agreed wholeheartedly. He had expected to be asked to take them to a funfair and took this as a sign that Jasper was beginning to develop an interest in things apart from ghosts, comics and junk food. In the train going down to Baker Street, they decided on the Transport Museum, a trip up the river, lunch at McDonald's somewhere and a visit to a cinema that was showing a double bill of two of Bienvida's favourite films: Dumbo and The Belstone Fox.
Inside the museum Brian watched Jasper examining tube cars, paying special attention to their roofs, with all the concentration of a foreign railway engineer on a fact-finding visit.
Bienvida, at her self-appointed task of making the best of things, or of giving the impression that this was the best of all possible worlds, said, ‘Daniel is a cook in a restaurant. He cooks really nice food for us. Did you know?’
‘Is he married?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Bienvida, who hadn't the faintest idea. ‘I expect he'll marry Tina and take us all to live in a new townhouse in Mill Hill.’
Without Alice, busking in the tube concourses lost much of its charm. It also lost much of its income. Alice hated to hear this but Tom knew that a great many of the people who passed them, in the tunnels and at the foot of the escalators, only dropped a coin in the hat because Alice was a beautiful girl.
Peter still went with him, but not every day. He did not always feel like performing underground in the mornings when he had been working at the hospice all night. Peter, anyway, was never quite well, had a rash all over his face and neck and was starting to lose weight. Jay was crippled by shyness and afraid to be with Tom without Peter. Terry had disappeared somewhere, like they all seemed to.
The first time Tom went alone into the Underground with his flute he felt vulnerable and rather shy. He felt awkward. It was late afternoon, just before the onset of the rush hour. He set up in the corner of a bend in a passage at Oxford Street, laying his jacket on the ground behind him, something which always made him feel he had a claim on this particular tiny piece of the Underground system. Instead of a hat, instead of the knotted scarf which had proved unsafe and a let-down, he had his open flute case. Telling himself not to feel self-conscious – had he not done this dozens of times in company? – he put the flute to his lips and began to play.
First he played the little air from The Magic Flute by which Tamino fetches the beasts out of the forest. The thought came to him that he too was trying to summon beasts from a jungle, these people in this subterranean place, many of whose faces looked to him bestial, mad or very wretched. Some, on the other hand, looked happy and pleased with themselves. He was trying to summon them to pay a little, a very little, for his music.
Someone dropped a 2p piece in, someone else a five. Tom played the solo parts from one of Mozart's flute concertos, but the competition soon started up, a three-piece band with electronic instruments, including a raucous saxophone, by the sound of it not more than fifty yards away.
Where the passage turned at right angles some yards ahead of where Tom stood, was a pair of double doors set in the wall. The tunnel was hung with posters, all brightly coloured, but these doors were of a shabby matt grey. As Tom began to play a selection of English folk airs, an arrangement of Alice's, these doors opened. They opened inwards and Tom had caught a glimpse of a dark cavern, a black vault whose floor seemed to slope downwards, before a man in uniform came out and quickly secured the doors behind him.
Tom had never before considered that what he saw of the Underground system might not be all of it, that there might be secret and hidden ramifications. It was rather a thrilling thought that appealed to the child in him. The man who had come out of that hidden hallway saw Tom, gave him a glare and hurried past.
No more than five minutes had gone by, during which he once again played the little air Mozart wrote for Tamino, then Alice's arrangement of Papageno's bird-catcher song, when two railway policemen arrived. At first they were quite pleasant, merely asking what he was doing there and if he knew playing in the Underground contravened a London Transport by-law. But Tom found himself growing angry at an alarming rate. The presence of the police had driven away his audience, the passers-by who, at last, pleased by the light tuneful airs, had started dropping real money into the flute case. But the worst thing was that the rock band round the next corner was still pounding and grinding away.
One of the policemen asked Tom for his name and address.
‘I don't see what that's got to do with you.’
‘I'm sure you won't mind giving your name, sir.’
Being called ‘sir’ did not bring the same delight to Tom as it did to Jarvis. ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salzburg,’ Tom said.
He had underestimated them. They took him away and searched him, sent him off with a caution.
His takings amounted to less than a pound. He put the money into his pocket, cursing the police, wishing he had some way of getting back at them. He could feel a headache starting. They had made him come up here and if he wished to return he would have to buy another ticket. He decided to get a bus home and passed up the steps out into the sunshine. Tom, like most of the people who crossed the ticket hall at Oxford Circus, did not notice the observations room or the six television screens it contained, though it was built of glass and open for all to look at.
Inside the room the assistant station-manager was watching the screens. Two were for the Central Line, one for the westbound platform and one for the eastbound, two for the Bakerloo and two for the Victoria. A train was leaving the northbound Victoria Line platform but otherwise all the screens showed empty tracks. While his eyes followed the departing train, the corner of his glance was caught by one coming in on the Central from Tottenham Court Road
. He turned to watch the westbound Central Line screen and saw a man and a bear step out on to the platform.
It was not his first sight of them. They had appeared on these screens before and once he had come across them busking in the entrance to one of the Victoria Line platforms. The bear danced and the man accompanied him on a mouth organ. The assistant station-manager pointed them out on the screen to one of the station staff who had just come into the observations room.
‘I saw a dancing bear when I was on my holidays. In Greece. It didn't really dance, just jumped about.'
‘That isn't a real bear,’ said the assistant station-manager.
‘They put hot trays under them to make them jump up and down. That's how they're trained. Cruel, really. We wouldn't do a thing like that here.’
‘It's a man, not a bear. You might go down and see they don't start anything.’
He went down. The man and the bear were not playing the mouth organ and dancing but making the interchange to the Bakerloo Line where, on the northbound platform, the assistant station-manager saw them appear on his screen. He assumed that his staff member had driven them off and he watched them get into a train. When he first saw the man and the bear their behaviour and appearance had alerted him to the possibility of some danger associated with them. But they were only buskers, beggars, the kind they called hippies when he was young.
Three days later, at the slackest time, early afternoon, Jasper, with Damon and Kevin, came down into London on the Jubilee Line, changed on to the Bakerloo at Baker Street and on to the Circle going clockwise at Embankment. There were no automatic ticket gates at West Hampstead but a staffed barrier, which sometimes made it possible, if the man at the barrier was otherwise occupied or even temporarily absent, to slip through. But today the man was there, his eagle eyes on them from the moment they came into the ticket hall, and he continued to watch them as they reluctantly put their money into the machine and took out minimum-fare tickets: Jasper was short of money and the collection of coins to make up 50p that he had put into the machine were almost the last he had. Brian's pocket money, bestowed on the previous Saturday, was gone and the ticket money had been all that remained of the £5 Daniel Korn had given him to keep out of his and Tina's way last Monday evening. If you do not go to school but spend your days drifting about London, money does not go very far.
He had never stolen money, only things, but the idea was not entirely unacceptable. The woman sitting opposite him, who had got in at Regent's Park, had placed her handbag on the seat next to her. Jasper eyed this handbag longingly and he could see that Kevin was doing the same. But they were not alone with her in the car, there were two men up the other end. Someone would press that orange alarm button thing if they tried anything.
In the Circle train Jasper began to feel nervous. The other day he had heard his grandmother say to Tina, apropos of some dangerous activity she thought (erroneously) that he might be up to, ‘They have no fear at that age.’
Jasper said nothing, but inwardly disagreed. He had a lot of fear, as much often as he could handle, though of course he could hardly tell how much more he might have when he was grown-up. He was afraid now. But there was nothing to be done about that, he was committed to it and had to go on.
Chris had ridden the section between Gloucester Road and Kensington High Street. Jasper's plan was to do the next bit, Kensington High Street to Notting Hill Gate and on to Bayswater. No one, except possibly Dean Miller, had travelled more than one station. Practice had taught Jasper how better to maintain his grip on the roof of the car but it was still, as he saw it, the essential problem. They made the surface of those cars so smooth, so curved and slippery-smooth. It was as if they did it on purpose. As Jasper came to think of it, he saw that it probably was done on purpose. He reflected regretfully on the old car he had seen in the museum, relegated now to use by British Rail on the Isle of Wight. The roof of that had all sorts of handholds and footholds, ridges and flanges and overlapping bits to hang on to.
A lot of people got out at South Kensington and the train waited there, though no one got in. Damon kept saying he wanted a Dairy Milk bar out of the machine but he was afraid the train would go off without him. Of course, by the time the train did move he might have bought chocolate for all of them and, come to that, been out into the street and back.
It gave Jasper a bit of a shock to see a railman, a guard perhaps, come in by the door at the end and walk through the car. He had come to think of those doors as for their personal use. The man looked hard at them, glared at them, as he passed on his way to the door at the far end. Grown-ups, Jasper had found, especially male grown-ups, reserved a special sort of look for people of his age when they were in a group: condemnatory, harsh, threatening. He wondered how old you had to be not to get it any more. Perhaps quite old, perhaps it only increased as you got to be a teenager.
Kevin said, when the man had gone, ‘Suppose you'd been getting out on the roof when he came.’
‘I wasn't, was I? So you can't suppose I was.’
‘Oh, yes I can.’
‘You can't.’
‘I can.’
‘Shut up, will you?' said Jasper. ‘I'm going up on the roof at the next station. Is anyone coming with me?*
Damon wouldn't. Damon it was who had lost his nerve and come down last time. His eyes met Jasper's and Jasper saw fear there. He was not going to say anything, he would leave it to Kevin to start chicken-calling. But he did think how strange it was that a daring forger like Damon should not be afraid of writing his aunt's signature on a cheque but be scared stiff of riding on the roof of a tube train car.
He asked his question again, out of politeness really. Company on the roof would not be congenial and he was glad when Kevin said, no, not this time, they'd leave him to get on with it. The train came into Kensington High Street, Jasper opened the door at the end of the car and climbed out on to the roof.
He could see the heads of the passengers getting into the train. No one saw him. No one looked up. He lay down, wriggled along and stretched out, gripping with his fingers the edge of the shallow depression above the double-leaf doors. The station was open to the sky, a cloudy whitish sky, and to the right loomed a large red-brick building. Jasper could see ahead of him the opening to the tunnel, which looked quite large. It looked as if there would be a yard or more between him and the inside of the tunnel roof.
For all that, he wished the train would start. More people kept arriving on the double platform of this rather big spread-out station, but no more got into this train. They wanted the District Line to Wimbledon or the Circle going east. He felt a dryness in his throat, a slight constriction like the beginning of feeling sick. It would be better when he was actually in the tunnel. As the doors closed he felt the vibration through his body, a kind of tingling. The train moved off quite smoothly, heading for the opening and the darkness inside.
It became dark very quickly once the car he was on passed into the tunnel. The smell was sharp, oily, gaseous. He turned his head and looked to the right side, then to the left, but he could see nothing. The lights from the car did not reach up here and the brickwork and cables which could be seen from inside the train were invisible out here in the dark. It was a straight run, so keeping his hold was less of a problem than it might have been.
The darkness was awful. Jasper had not really anticipated such deep, intense, furry darkness. It was as if it was not (as he had once heard a teacher say) absence of light, but something solid, a darkness not airy but made of something, cloth perhaps, which lay on him and wrapped him. A dirty smelly blanket of dark swaddled him in thick folds. He thought of lifting his head, his eyes seeking the light, but he remembered the roof which might not be so high here, which might come down lower. At this point it did not do to think about projections sticking down from the tunnel roof like those things you got in caves, stalacmites or stalactites, poles or iron spokes. He would not think of them.
Then light showed ahead, t
hen light burst with a wonderful unbelievable brightness overhead, as the train passed under a shaft. But it was very short, a brief brilliant gap, before a dark mouth swallowed the linked cars again. Dean had told Jasper there would be a second shaft, a much bigger one, and he could already see the distant glimmer of it far ahead. The train rushed into the light, into a long shaft planted like a garden and, high above, a bright white sky shining down. There was a bit more tunnel, but not much, and then the train was braking and shuddering, Jasper feeling the withdrawal of speed, a trembling through his legs.
Notting Hill Gate.
Yellow brick arches on either side, like the supports of a bridge. Stairs going up from the platforms. It was too near the surface to have an escalator here. While they waited in the station, he turned his head and looked back the way they had come. Though he had sometimes felt while in the tunnel that the roof was in places frighteningly low, the exit from it, a red brick arch, looked quite high above the top of the train where he lay. Jasper felt a surge of exhilaration. It had been easy, it had been great. He would go on to Bayswater, maybe even on to Paddington. Later he might think about doing the long stretch from Baker Street to Finchley Road, where the Metropolitan trains charged at high speed past the old ghost stations.
The doors closed. The train trembled and slid into motion. Jasper dug his fingertips into the shallow curved flanges above the doors. He felt the car begin to rock a little at the gathering of speed and he lifted his head for a glance at the tunnel mouth ahead of him.
It was not a brick arch like the one they had come through but a steel girder. Not a curved portal, not an arch, but a metal overhang that seemed to scrape the top of the first cars as they passed under it. There it hung, a curtain of green-painted steel, a half-descended guillotine, a killing barrier to break off anything that protruded above the surface of a train roof, or sever a head. And it was one of a series, five or six of them, green metal traps.
Jasper stared. The first overhang was still a long way ahead but it was coming closer, closer, as the train speeded up. He thought, it'll chop my head off. A kind of paralysis took hold of him. He seemed glued to the car roof, rigid, his back arched and his head up, no hands, his hands numb. Ahead, the green wall of metal awaited him, it would not suddenly rise up, it would not yield and give way or slide open like a supermarket entrance. It was not made of that green sponge stuff his grandmother stuck flowers in. It was iron-hard iron and it would sweep him from the roof and fling him on the brick walls, spread him on the posters, shatter him on the air. But first would come a blow like a hammer with a head on it twenty feet wide.
