King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  No one has ever been murdered inside a London tube train. If anyone has been raped, it is not known.

  Indecent assault is common enough. The police call it ‘bustle-rumpling’. It is hard to say how much of it is deliberate and how much the result of a sometimes unbelievably close proximity in the rush hours.

  There are of course men who find the crush they curse an opportunity for fantasy made flesh.

  Alice went into Holborn station and down the escalator. The sound of music ahead surprised her because it was Tom's music, taken from his repertoire of popular classics, Mozart's little night music giving place as she approached to a Strauss waltz. It could not be Tom unless he had made a swift recovery. She turned the corner and saw ahead of her, grouped in a deep curve of the tunnel wall, Peter with his guitar and Jay with his tenor sax, a bear waltzing with lumbering steps, and Axel mouthing the jew's harp he had made from a comb and a sheet of paper.

  ‘It's not one of those amazing coincidences,’ Peter said. ‘We knew you'd have to come this way.’

  They had not stopped playing. The bear had not stopped dancing. Only Axel abandoned his instrument, screwing up the paper and putting the comb into the pocket of his long dark coat. He looked at her, smiling slightly. She moved to stand with her back to the wall so as not to obstruct the flow of people. It was disquieting, what had happened. She had a fleeting sense, soon dispelled, that they had all known each other for years, had in some way conspired, were laughing at her gullibility and her discomfiture.

  But Peter, finishing the waltz with a long trill on the strings, murmured to her, ‘They kindly offered to take Tom's place. We met them when we called for him. The bear's been quite a success.’

  The bear heard and pawed at her, shaking its heavy head. Alice could just glimpse the man's face between the jaws, an ugly, ill-made face with a spoonbill nose. He caught her looking and turned sharply away. She tried to smile but the bear's antics amused her no more than they had Cecilia. Then Axel was pulling him away, calling him Bruin and telling him to bear himself in a more seemly fashion. Jay picked up the hat and emptied the money into a bag, saying Peter was tired and they should call it a day.

  They went, heading for the Piccadilly Line. The bear stepped out of his bear suit but, instead of revealing himself fully, appeared in a hooded anorak with the zip done up high enough to cover his mouth. When he left them to go northwards, he walked with the loping stride of a big animal. She was alone with Axel, though surrounded by throngs of people. They stood on the Central Line platform, up against the wall papered with reproductions of British Museum antiquities.

  ‘I've talked to your lover,’ he said. ‘Your Tom.’

  She thought his voice censorious, a little reproving, and again, 1 oking up into his grave face, his sad penetrating eyes, she saw him as priest-like, as a stern cleric. It was an impression enhanced by the clothes he wore, the dog-collar effect of a round-necked dark sweater over a white T-shirt, the long dark scarf. Her instinct was to deny the relationship, to repudiate Tom. She only said, ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘We had a talk. It was most interesting.’

  He sounded like a blackmailer. She thought his voice had a dry edge of menace. She heard a shrillness in her own as she asked him, ‘What do you mean?’

  A slow smile was spreading across his face. ‘What do you think I meant? Oh, Alice, Alice, you thought I'd been telling him tales out of school, didn't you? You thought I might have mentioned clandestine meetings and a certain kiss – am I right?’

  No one else could make her blush like that. She hated him for doing it. Her face was hot and the blood throbbed. The way he was standing now she thought one of the worst and most intimidating positions a man could stand in with a woman, he in front of her, pinning her against the wall with a hand on either side of her but not touching her.

  He held his head on one side, he seemed to be listening, or feeling.

  ‘Train's coming.’

  She could hear nothing, feel no vibration.

  ‘It's colder,’ he said. ‘Can't you tell? And the air's moving. Your blood pressure's dropped.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Jarvis told me.’ He dropped his hands. ‘I hate the tube, it's my enemy.’

  ‘You can't call a thing your enemy.’

  ‘Oh, but you can if it's acted like an enemy, if it's done you wrong.’

  His eyes glittered as the thrill and rumble, a long way off, began to shake the lines. The train came out of the tunnel with a roar. The cars were full already but no one got out. Alice got in, was crushed up against the next person. It was going to be one of those home-goings when the station staff had to push backs in before the doors would close.

  She managed to squeeze herself against the glass partition. Axel stood pressed against her. He could hardly have done otherwise than be pressed against her, it would have been the same for any man who had followed her in. She was very aware of the length of his body, of this long, enforced embrace, for it was long and enduring simply because, instead of diminishing at the next stop the crowd increased until not one more person could have been squeezed into the car.

  The train slowed in the tunnel between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus and came to a stop. There was someone crushed against Alice on her left and someone on her right but she was not aware of them. Or, rather, she was aware of them but as solid obstructions rather than human beings, pieces of furniture perhaps. Only Axel, his chest against her breasts, his hips touching hers, their legs pressed together, seemed alive. She could feel his heartbeat, which seemed to her to quicken its pace, to increase and increase until it was pulsing very fast. She tried to regulate her breathing as might someone who is anxious or afraid, but her breath came shallowly.

  He was much taller than she, and her eyes were on a level with his mouth. She thought he was looking at her but would not lift her head to see. She closed her eyes. He would only have had to move a little to kiss her eyes. The train moved. She thought then that he was standing like this, about as close to her as one human being could be to another when they were upright and clothed, not because he desired it but because he had no choice. He was pressed up against her as impersonally as any stranger might be in this overcrowded train.

  When at last she lifted her head to look at him her eyes met his. His head was bent. Immediately he closed his eyes. His face was full of suffering, not the exasperation, the discomfort and distress that showed on other faces, but a kind of despair.

  She shivered. They fought their way out at Bond Street. The Jubilee Line train northbound was nearly as congested, but this time she and Axel were separated, two other bodies squashed between theirs. It felt cold on the windswept platform at West Hampstead after the hot fug of the tube cars. Tom would have put his arm round her to warm her but she did not want Tom. She foresaw an evening of sitting at his bedside, nursing him, that was what he liked, bringing him things to eat and hot drinks, while he talked about becoming the king of the beggars, the greatest street musician of all time, the great fiddle-maker, the Stradivarius of West Hampstead.

  She said breathlessly to Axel, ‘Can we go somewhere and have a drink?’

  He had not spoken since before she saw him close his eyes and saw the pain alter his face. ‘I don't like the pubs round here.’

  His response, cold, indifferent, as if it were entirely a question of place, not of their being together, crushed her. She tried to match his tone with her own. ‘All right.’

  ‘I shouldn't go in the tube,’ he said. ‘I don't know why I do. It must be masochism.’

  ‘Sometimes there's no choice.’

  As if she had not spoken, he said, ‘The real reason is I need to refresh my memory. I have to know. I could forget and I mustn't do that. I have to know what it was like.’ He turned to look at her. ‘We can have a drink in the Art Room.’

  It was so unexpected it brought the blood up into her face. She was glad it was too dark for him to see. A dampness that thic
kened and darkened the air laid a cold touch on the skin. The pavements were a sticky wet. Cars ruled the streets here, there were few people on foot once beyond the area round the stations. Axel took no notice of her as they crossed the bridge and descended the steps. They might each of them have been alone, two separate home-going commuters who happened to be walking parallel. And by the time they came to the gate of Cambridge School he had gone on ahead of her, was several yards ahead of her, so that she was seized by a sudden dread that he would unlock the front door and step inside and shut it behind him before she could get there. Instead, he held the door open and stood aside for her to pass through ahead of him.

  It had begun to look as if Jasper's plan was destined to fail. The plan, that is, to extend the bellrope and re-open the traps in floors and ceilings so that the rope once more passed down into the cloakroom. While Jed alone – and intermittently the hawk – lived on the top floor, it had not seemed too difficult a task, particularly now that Jarvis was away. The presence of Jarvis in Three made passing a rope down outside his bedroom door a dangerous venture. But Jarvis was gone and Tom and Alice's rooms were on the other side of the house. Upstairs the rope would have to be conducted down very close to Jed's door, but on the darker, righthand side of it and Jasper was pretty sure Jed had no cause ever to walk in that direction.

  The day before, Tina had told Jasper there was a new tenant in the house, someone who had taken Five and the Art Room. She told him with no particular purpose in mind, she was only making conversation. Jasper was not pleased. The presence of someone else up there would interfere considerably with his plans. Of course it depended, as Bienvida had pointed out, on the sort of person it was. A woman like their mother would not notice, a woman like their grandmother would notice and would care. A man like Jarvis or Brian or even Daniel Korn would care, though Tom would not.

  Bienvida, holding the doll called Caroline, and Jasper with a torch were in the passage outside the door to the Science Lab to the left of the top of the upper flight of stairs. There was no light on up here, only on the two lower floors. It was dim but not really dark. They had rolled up part of the runner and prised open the trapdoor with a screwdriver left behind by Daniel Korn when he had put up a shelf for their mother in her kitchen. Jasper had his new torch which he had bought with the money Cecilia gave him for Christmas. He shone it down the hole, which was a dark and dusty nest of old raw wood and cobwebs.

  ‘You can see where the other hole is in the ceiling down there. It'll be dead easy to do if no one comes and stops us.’

  As he spoke they heard the front door open and close. Part of the purpose of their visit to the top floor was to try and see the new tenant. Since Jed was in the garden with Abelard, their mother out and, so far as they knew, Alice in Tom's room with Tom, it seemed likely that this was who it was. Quickly, Jasper closed the trapdoor, Bienvida rolled back the carpet, and they retreated into the darkness of the passage.

  Jasper expected the newcomer to switch a light on ahead of himself, to switch it on from the foot of the stairs, in which case he and Bienvida would have ducked behind the Science Lab door and watched through the crack. No light came on, though footsteps ascended, two sets of footsteps.

  The woman was Alice, walking ahead and quickly in the direction of the Art Room. The man was tall and dark with a beard and wearing a long dark overcoat. Jasper at once recognized Axel Jonas and clapped his hand over his mouth to keep himself from crying out.

  There was a sink in the Art Room and running water. Axel took a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard under the sink, and three glass tumblers, one of which he filled with water. A bulb without a shade, hanging from the centre of the ceiling, was the only light and it was of low wattage. The room was very cold and felt damp. Axel pushed on the switch of an electric fan-heater with his toe.

  He gave Alice one of the tumblers, poured in two inches of whisky and a dribble of water. She disliked whisky, would never have had it from choice. He made himself a drink in the same way, identical quantities in an identical glass. The only chairs were upright ones of shiny pitch pine. He indicated one to her, cocking his thumb, and sat down in another, the table between them. Things could hardly have been less comfortable, the air still icy, the fan roaring and the dim lightbulb slightly swinging in the breeze it made.

  They kept their outdoor clothes on. Alice was about to take a sip of her whisky when he put out a hand to stay her, said, ‘No, we'll drink to each other.’

  Their tumblers touched with a ringing sound surprisingly clear and musical in such cheap glass. His face was grave, almost sad.

  ‘To someone else's lover.’

  She did not know what to say. ‘To you.’

  The whisky that felt cold in the glass was hot in her mouth and went down her throat like a trickle of flame. She could not suppress her shiver, nor keep from defending herself.

  ‘I didn't tell you I hadn't – got someone. I didn't deceive you.’

  She expected him to smile but he didn't. The whisky had gone straight to her head. Her head was already swimming, she was already made a little reckless.

  ‘Why do you expect me to tell you everything about myself? You've told me nothing about you.’ She recollected that he had, just a little. ‘Well, things I don't believe, things no one would believe.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘You said you were mad, you said you hated things, the tube. Are you really a photographer?’

  ‘Those are my cameras over there.’

  There were two of them with other photographic equipment on a table under the painting of the girl. She looked, nodded.

  ‘All right, but the bear…’ She tried to laugh it off. Something Tina had said came back to her. She had been quoting her mother. ‘Do you think I look like her?’

  She had displeased him, she could tell at once. That dead, glazed look concentrated his face.

  ‘No. Not at all. Has someone been telling you that you do?’ It must have been the meekness in her eyes as she nodded that made him kinder. ‘She is Mary Zambaco by Burne-Jones. He was in love with her. You can tell, can't you? Perhaps you do look a little like her.’ His face smoothed and his eyes lit. ‘There is a resemblance.’ As if to himself he said, ‘I wonder if that's why I like you?’

  She was enormously pleased; more than that, it was as if she had suddenly been made excitingly happy. It no longer seemed important or even relevant to ask him about the bear, about why he wanted to come here, about his idle, unemployed existence. He read her thoughts again.

  ‘I told you I was a psychologist. You know they're all mad. If you had heard of Freud doing something like that, walking about Vienna with the Bear Man, you wouldn't find it at all incredible. Why don't you believe in me?’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I'm sorry. It just seems so strange.’

  ‘It is strange.’

  He got up and fetched the whisky bottle. She murmured, no, no, and put up her hand to cover the glass. He took her hand by the wrist and moved it away, mechanically, like someone pushing a handle. Another two inches of whisky went into her glass. He poured more than that into his own. She was staring up at him, caught as she had been at their past meetings by something mesmeric in his dark blue gaze.

  She said breathlessly, ‘I want to ask you something else.’

  ‘I may not answer.’

  ‘You won't mind answering this. How did you get my phone number at work? Jarvis didn't give it to you, he couldn't have, he didn't know the name of the company, only that I work in a building next to where a shaft goes down into the tube. You know how he's always thinking about trains and tube lines. You hadn't met Tom then. You didn't even know Jarvis let rooms.’

  He had never returned to his chair but had been standing in front of her with his hands on the table. When she named Tom she saw his fingers press harder on the wooden surface and the knuckles whiten. For a moment he did not speak.

  ‘I'm sorry but I would like to know.’

  His v
oice seemed different, softer, more thoughtful. ‘I followed you. I followed you from here one morning.’

  So it had been him.

  ‘You followed me?’

  He smiled faintly, ‘Why not? Aren't you glad I did?’

  Her head swam. She pushed away the glass. ‘I don't want any more to drink.’

  ‘Are you cross with me?’ He did not sound as if he cared, was only curious.

  ‘No. No, I'm not cross. I don't understand you. I don't know what you want, what you're doing here.’

  ‘I want you,’ he said.

  He pulled his chair round, sat on it and put his hands on her arms, not her shoulders, but her upper arms, gently pressing and stroking through the thick winter clothes. It was absurd the clothes they were wearing, but the room had not warmed, in spite of the blasts of heated air. She turned her face slightly from him, twisting her neck. He did what he had done before when he kissed her, took her face in his hand and held it, moving his fingers across the skin, feeling the bones, as if he could not see, as if he were blind. His own face he brought close to hers, closer and closer till the lips touched without kissing.

  She could not bear the feel of those heavy clothes, but loosened her scarf and pulled her coat apart. His tongue touched her lips and licked them apart. It was rough, like a cat's. He held her by the neck, very lightly and softly, his fingers stroking the fine, thin skin at the back of her ears. She was growing weak, her bones made of limp string. The kiss was slow and exploratory, almost without pressure, boneless, their mouths made of silk. She found herself sliding backwards on the absurd hard wooden chair.

  He opened her coat and her cardigan and her blouse, delicately, sweetly, not touching her skin, undressing her the way an expert lady's maid was supposed to do. When she felt his fingers they were miraculously warm in that cold room. He kissed her breasts, rubbed his lips against her skin, held her breasts in both hands delicately, like someone touching flowers.