King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  Tom had promised Alice he would apply to the various schools of music, of which she had prepared a list. He had made this promise more than a week before but had done nothing about it. He could not imagine himself at college again, in a learning situation, and with students of twenty. It was different for Alice, who already had a degree, who needed no further formal education but could, if she so chose, apply for auditions with orchestras. Tom had dropped out of his music school because he was ill, his head hurt him and he could not concentrate, and when people spoke less than sweetly and ingratiatingly to him he flew into a rage. Would it be any different now? His head no longer hurt but he was sure he was no better able to concentrate and once more he was giving proof of his rages nearly every day.

  He even felt angry now because Alice had gone to see her parents for the second week in succession and had once again refused to let him go with her. Her visiting her parents on her own unnerved him. He was afraid they might persuade her into all sorts of things – if not to return to Mike, to continue her education, to pursue that crazy idea of hers of going to study in Brussels. They might even offer her money for this. Tom knew he had to get hold of money himself.

  Another James Galway he would never be. He would never be a Thomas Allen. He was rather proud of this piece of self-knowledge, of confronting it and bearing it. All those talents of his, his playing and his singing voice, had been crippled for ever on that night in the dark road at Rickmansworth. He looked at his poor hand, tried to bend the little finger and, failing, was overcome with self-pity.

  If only his grandmother would die! He did not need Alice to tell him he should not talk like that, think like that. He had been fond of her once, still was. As he waited at the School for Peter and Jay to come and collect him, Tom thought that instead of going down into the Underground with them, he might go instead to visit his grandmother. Why should he not say to her, you have promised me the money one day, give me some of it now? She could only refuse and she might not refuse.

  He would buy a place for him and Alice to live in, and then, if Alice wanted this, go with her for a year to Brussels. He thought of how she would love him if he made this possible for her. When they came back he would start a business. He would go on busking in the tube, busking in the tube was what he liked doing, what he really enjoyed more than anything he had ever done, but he would start a business too. Something connected with music. Tom had been good at woodcrafts at school, he was deft with his hands, and he thought he could learn to make violins. He had a pleasing picture of life with Alice ten years hence, the house full of violins made and in the process of being made, Alice second violin in some northern orchestra, or perhaps she had given that up to have their babies. Outside the house, in the suburbs of this north country town, he would hang a wooden sign with a painting on it of a violin. He had been good at art at school too.

  Instead of taking her to the same restaurant, or any restaurant at all, Axel ordered sandwiches at the bar. He said he was tired. He had been up at six to see Jarvis off at Heathrow. There were several of them, all old friends, who met at the terminal for a coffee. Ivan had been there too but he had had the sense to go home to bed.

  ‘I've got something to tell you,’ he said to Alice, but would not specify what.

  It was not very pleasant in the pub, smoky and crowded. They had a tiny marble-topped table and a small iron chair each, but were crammed into a dark corner. There was no possibility of sitting anywhere else. Axel came back with cheese and pickle sandwiches Alice did not much want to eat, more brandy for himself and another glass of the pub's champagne.

  She kept thinking of what he had said about making love in the afternoon. It was the most extraordinary remark anyone had ever made to her. She thought about it, wondering if it was a joke or if he had really meant what he said. And when, looking up, she caught his eye, she had the uncomfortable feeling he knew she was thinking this. It could not be true but she felt he knew what she was thinking all the time.

  ‘What were you going to tell me?’ she said at last.

  He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Was I going to tell you something?’

  ‘You said you were. You said you had something to tell me.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course. I wonder how you'll react.’

  He was looking at her, she thought, like a biologist at some vivisection victim, cool, interested, without the least empathy. His expression changed quickly. It was sensitive, it was almost tender. He put out the hand with the ring on it and reached for her hand across the table. Instead of taking her hand he stroked the fingers. He smiled a rueful smile.

  ‘I hope you'll be pleased. Will you pretend to be pleased even if you're not? Will you, Alice?’

  ‘I don't know,’ she said, like a little girl.

  ‘Oh, come, you do know, you must. Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I'm coming to live in your house.’

  She said nothing. For a moment she thought she had misheard or that it was an expression, a slang term or euphemism, for something else. It was like saying, when you turned someone out, that you were showing them the door or giving them the keys to the street.

  ‘I'm sorry. I don't know what you mean.’

  He repeated what he had said, with an edge of exaggerated patience. ‘I'm coming to live in your house. In the house you live in. I'm renting a room – well, two rooms.’

  ‘BBut you can't. It's Jarvis's house.’

  ‘Oh, Alice,’ he said, and the fingers again stroked her fingers. ‘What do you take me for?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘What did you think I meant? Did you think I was going to become a squatter? Naturally, I asked Jarvis. Well, as a matter of fact, Jarvis asked me.’

  ‘Why do you want to? You've got a place to live.’

  ‘I can't go on sharing with a bear.’ He laughed a little. She stared at him. Her hand felt as if it must melt under that feather-light stroking. ‘I can't share with anyone. Alice, you promised to pretend to be pleased.’

  Had she promised? She was stunned by his announcement. She did not know what she felt.

  ‘I shall be taking the Fifth and the Art Room,’ he said. ‘He says they're vacant.’

  He would be above her and Tom, up on the second floor with Jed and the train set and the bell. It would not always be afternoon. She felt herself redden again and he saw it. She could tell that he saw it from that small twitching smile of his. It was a long time since she had noticed the presence of anyone else in the bar or smelt the smoke or heard the bursts of laughter. They were alone. She felt very weak and very vulnerable. He tightened his hold on her fingers and grasped them.

  ‘What do you believe in, Alice?’

  She felt her way, anxious to know what he meant. ‘God, do you mean, or some principle or what?

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘Music…’

  ‘Ah, I thought you'd say that.’

  ‘How about you?’ She whispered it.

  ‘I? Well, I believe in love. Everlasting love, love beyond the grave. Revengeful love and retribution.’

  He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it lingeringly. ‘And now you must forgive me, I have to go.’

  She could hardly believe what she was hearing. She heard herself whisper, ‘No, no, please…’

  ‘But, my dear, I have an engagement I absolutely must keep.’ She hardly recognized the affected drawl. He laughed at her bewilderment. ‘Oh, Alice, don't look like that. I believe you are pleased I'm coming to the School.’

  ‘I am pleased,’ she said numbly.

  Once more he hailed a taxi, opened the door and handed her into it.

  15

  Cecilia Darne had once said of her neighbour's cat when its flank was grazed by a car that it had learnt its lesson and would now avoid the streets. Bienvida repeated this rather sententiously.

  ‘I'm not a cat,' said Jasper.

  His sister did not know what he meant. She had remarked to hi
m that she supposed he wouldn't do any more sledging after his scare.

  ‘Anyway, cats don't ride on top of tube trains,’ said Bienvida, who was beginning to see the falseness of her analogy.

  ‘No, but I expect rats do,’ said Jasper. ‘I expect they come out of holes in the roof and ride on top of a train to get to the next station. They could go for miles like that.’

  They talked about rats for a while and about mice. Bienvida had found that if she put breadcrumbs on the cloakroom floor in the evening, when she came back later she stood a chance of seeing as many as a dozen mice feeding. One ran across Jasper's hand while they were sleeping down there and he woke up yelling, but no one else in the house heard him. For weeks he had kept away from the Underground. He had even gone fairly regularly to school. Once he had dreamt about that last roof ride and in the dream he had not jumped off in time, there had been no man in a bear suit to catch him, and the green metal overhang that Axel Jonas said was not low enough for him to hit his head on was only an inch above the roof and rushing towards him as he woke up. In another dream Axel Jonas had been on top of a car with him, struggling with him to throw him off on to the live rail. Jasper had resolved never to go back, never to risk that again.

  But time changed things. After a while, even Cecilia's neighbour's cat most likely ventured once more to cross the street. He never spoke about it to Damon. The others, who did not go to his school, he had not encountered since that last fateful ride. He had no need to discuss it with anyone. He dwelt on it alone. What exercised his mind, what tempted him, was that long run from Baker Street to Finchley Road, that run which was the same distance as on the Jubilee but without two intervening stops. He had told Axel Jonas he had already done it.

  If he had not told Axel Jonas this he would not care so much, it would not matter, he could forget it. But, as things were, it was as if he had to make that lying boast into truth. He had to do it and then he could stop. Like one of those tennis players whose ambition is to win Wimbledon, once he had done it he could retire.

  Calling on Tina at the hour she herself appointed, the ‘safe’ hour of noon, Cecilia saw a tall, dark young man with a beard and a shorter man with a hat and scarf on unloading furniture from a rented van. There was a metal structure that might just be a bed and a thing Cecilia thought might be called a futon and a lot of cameras and photographic equipment. A number of boxes and suitcases stood on the pavement outside the School gates.

  Cecilia recognized the bearded man as the one who had tormented her in the train. She therefore assumed that the other one had been the bear. It was a shock and she had to curb a natural instinct to turn and flee homewards. Her heart was pounding but she watched them as she approached, as she went up the path and from the shelter of the School porch. They did not recognize her, she was sure of that. She might not have been there for all the notice they took of her. However, Cecilia was used to that and did not even mind much. She knew very well that the least noticeable, the most invisible and indifferently regarded of all human beings, is an old woman.

  After a moment or two she decided she must be mistaken. One dark bearded man looks very much like another. There must be hundreds of tall thin young men with black beards in London. As for the other, she had never really seen the bear's face, she had not dared to look between those jaws. She was glad she had been sensible and not allowed panic to prevail. Having given them one more glance to confirm her certainty they were not her tormentors, Cecilia let herself into the house. Seeing the two men struggling up the path with the bed frame, she left the front door open for them.

  The children were at school. At least, they were not there. Cecilia preferred to believe they were at school. At this quiet noontime, finding Tina in her kitchen seated at the table drinking coffee and reading the Guardian, she could make herself believe all was well. When Tina looked up like that and smiled and said, ‘Hallo, Ma. Hi. How's tricks?’ she could not suppress the hope that this remark would be followed by, ‘I've got something to tell you,’ and then by the longed-for announcement: ‘Brian and I are getting married next week.’

  No such announcement was made. Easy-going, calm, taking life as it came, Tina got up and made her mother a cup of coffee. She talked desultorily about this new job that had come her way and which she might take. Over the years Tina had talked of taking jobs, sometimes with enthusiasm, but she never had taken them. There was a broad streak of happy-go-lucky, philosophical placidity in the family, which showed itself in Jarvis as well as Tina, and perhaps in Jasper, though it had by-passed Cecilia and her siblings and showed no sign of coming out in Bienvida.

  ‘I want you all to come to me for Christmas, Tina,’ she said after her daughter had finished outlining the dubious advantages of working part-time in a nearly new old-clothes shop. ‘You could come on the Eve if you liked and stay over and then the children could have their stockings.’

  ‘Yes, well, OK. I mean we'll come on the Day all right. We don't have to decide anything now, do we?’

  Tina never wanted to decide anything like that now. Spontaneity was what she liked. Turning up as a surprise. Cecilia did not persist with that one. She was approaching what Daphne, who watched and always had watched a lot of panel games on television, would have called the $64,000 question. She skirted round it.

  ‘Daphne will be staying as usual, of course, and Peter will try to come for lunch.’

  Tina said nothing. She was scraping red varnish off her nails, using the tip of her right thumbnail as a tool, and dropping the peelings into the dregs of her coffee. Cecilia tried at first to pretend this was not happening, tried neither to look directly at Tina, nor ostentatiously away. Because she could not actually not think about it, she tried telling herself it was not filthy and disgusting but a normal thing to do, what thousands of young women did, and she must be a fussy old bigot even to notice it. She breathed steadily for a few moments and said, ‘I thought of asking Brian too.’

  ‘Asking Brian what?’ said Tina.

  It was not in Tina's nature to make things easier for anyone. She did not know when things were hard. They were never hard for her.

  ‘Asking him for Christmas, Tina.’

  ‘Oh, did you?’

  ‘Do you think he would come?’

  ‘I don't know. You could ask him.’

  Cecilia left it. She was going to meet Daphne at Brent Cross Shopping Centre, where they intended to do their Christmas shopping. She went there by bus. There is a station at Brent Cross on the Northern Line, but in order to get to it from West Hampstead, no more than two miles away, it would have been necessary for Cecilia to go down into London on the Jubilee, change at Baker Street on to the Circle, at King's Cross on to the northbound Northern (the Edgware branch) and finally reach her destination eight stations later. Jarvis, in his youth, had made a plan for an underground link between Golders Green and Kilburn with intervening stations called Child's Hill and West End Lane, but this was never more than a dream, and he did indeed dream about it, asleep in the hotel in Dnepro-petrovsk, as he often dreamed of non-existent or fabulous lines and of whole apocryphal metro systems.

  Axel Jonas had been living at the School for two days before Alice knew he was there.

  She had said nothing to Tom about his imminent arrival. She had said nothing to anyone. As soon as she had time to herself, Tom having gone out to buy food, she opened the doors of the rooms he was to have and looked inside. She had never been in either before. The windows of each were hung with dark green blinds as were all the windows in the School. Five contained a table and a wooden upright chair. In the Art Room the easels were still there and a long table with chairs round it. There were framed pictures on the walls, some of these, reproductions of what Alice vaguely knew to be famous paintings: a red-headed girl in a white dress and an angel holding a lily, the portrait of a young woman with a long white neck, a church with an immensely tall spire and trees round it.

  From the windows of Five you could see the garden, t
he backs of factories beyond the railway lines, the silver trains scarred with vestiges of graffiti, the same view as from her own room. The Art Room gave on to the street, the row of leafless plane trees, the houses with paper chains glimpsed behind the windows and lumps of cotton-wool ‘snow’ stuck on the glass. It was dry and cold out there, the cold light wind ruffling litter and leaves along the gutter.

  Alice was expecting a phone call. It was two weeks since she had spoken to him. Each time the phone rang she expected it to be Axel and she ran down to answer it before Tom could. But it was always Daniel Korn or Tina's mother or Peter. Tina only answered the phone if there was no one else in the house. She took the attitude that if she was wanted, some intermediary would fetch her, or if there was no one there the caller would ring back when there was. Tom, on the other hand, answered the phone a lot. It was very likely for him, for his ‘work’. Alice noticed, with increasing disquiet, that Tom was beginning to take the attitude to busking in the tube of a man running an important and lucrative business from his home.

  ‘Jay knows a really good guitarist he thinks he can persuade to join us,’ he said to her one evening two days before Christmas. ‘It'll be a distinct asset if we can get him.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I've got to give some serious thought to how we're going to handle the competition. These rock bands, however basic, always have really sophisticated amplifying equipment. At the moment we just don't stand a chance against it.’

  They were in the Headmaster's Study. Tom had his elbow on the table and his chin resting in his hand. He was frowning with the effort of concentration. A lock of fair hair had fallen across his forehead and he pushed it back, combing through it with his fingers.

  ‘There's no question who makes the better sound. People want our sound, they love it, you can see that. It's a fallacy that people aren't hungry for art, for good music. They are. But what's the use when it's drowned by a hundred decibels of saxophone? I've got to make it my aim as soon as we've got over Christmas to do something about amplifying our sound.’