King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Same as always,’ said Tom. ‘Pint of bitter as usual.’

  He would let Axel buy the first round and therefore the third. That way he would only have one round to pay for. He found Axel curiously easy to talk to. It was something to do with the man's silence, the intent way he listened, looking into your eyes, nodding sometimes. He said now, ‘What do you think of Alice? I would have asked before except that she's usually with us.’

  ‘What do I think of her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She's very beautiful.’ Axel spoke dismissively, though the words he used sounded odd when uttered with indifference. They sounded like a contradiction in terms. ‘I think you're right.’

  ‘Right in what way?’

  ‘To discourage her from these – how shall I put it? – high musical ambitions. She hasn't got it in her.’

  Tom was astonished. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Oh, I don't. I don't know. I'm no judge. But she did play for me once. I asked her and she played for me. I was disappointed. You don't mind my being frank?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom.

  ‘That's why I think the best thing you can do is form some sort of band of your own with her in it, if you like. If she likes. As the case may be. I actually see Alice as a homemaker. You should take her away from here and get a home for her to make.’

  He held the brandy glass in both hands and smiled over the top of it, making Tom think of some advertisement for liquor or for glasses or for things which are not offered for sale, cunning perhaps, guile, or just an understanding of the human heart. The illusion went and Axel looked friendly and pleasant again.

  ‘How can I?’ Tom said.

  ‘Maybe you could get one of those government grants that are made to help people start small businesses. I don't see why a band isn't a business, do you?’

  ‘Yes, and what you get is £40 a week,’ said Tom bitterly.

  ‘I was joking.’ Axel's face changed. It became harder, it was no longer smiling, mocking or even cunning. It had become businesslike. ‘Would you like to make some real money, Tom?’

  Passengers were removed from the cars when fire broke out in a train between Elephant and Castle and the Borough on the Northern Line in January 1902.

  A man was shot at in an Underground train between Baker Street and Swiss Cottage one day in August 1910. He recovered. One of the results was to install safety communication devices for passengers in all trains.

  Twenty-four years later a runaway ballast train wrecked the signal box at Rayners Lane on the Piccadilly Line. And in the following year an Auxiliary Air Force plane crashed across the Northern Line near Colindale, caused a short-circuit fire in a signal box and burned it down.

  A serious fire in an escalator shaft at Paddington on Christmas Eve 1944 killed no one.

  Stonebridge Park station on the Bakerloo Line burned down in January 1917. Twenty-eight years later it burned down again. One passenger died from the fumes when fire broke out in a Central Line train at Holland Park in 1958.

  The ban on smoking came in 1985. It did not prevent the worst of all tube disasters, with the exception of the Balham bomb: the King's Cross fire of November 1987.

  The idea of moving back to Lilac Villa to look after Cecilia frightened Tina. She lost her calmness, her cool. It was as if all those characteristics that made her what she was, placidity and being laid-back, taking life as it came, an unworriedness, vanished as soon as she heard Daphne's news.

  She wouldn't do it, she couldn't do it. A host of reasons for not doing it jostled at each other. She was picking the best of them when Daphne said, wonderfully, almost incredibly, ‘If you don't mind, Tina, I'm going to stay here and look after your mother. It's what she would like and, of course, I should like it. The doctor says there's no need for her to go to hospital, she's not immobile.’

  ‘My God, of course I don't mind,’ said Tina. ‘I think you're marvellous.’ Relief made her generous. ‘We'll come and see her tomorrow, shall we? Me and the kids?’

  Cecilia lay on the sofa in her living room, the one that could be made into a single bed. The stairs were rather steep in Lilac Villa and there was no reason why she should be forced to use them. Leaning on Daphne and using a stick, she could limp to the lavatory. After a day or two she sat up in an armchair and the physiotherapist came to start teaching her exercises that would help her regain the use of her left leg.

  She was very happy with Daphne. She was grateful, but her gratitude was not of the kind that is overwhelming. It was more a feeling that Daphne had only met the high standard of conduct she, Cecilia, would have expected of her. It was rather like that which subsists between a devoted, long-married couple. Desertion, letting-down, failure to rise to this testing occasion, these things are not possible. Daphne had done what she would have done, had their roles been reversed. Daphne loved her as she loved Daphne. The strange thing was that Cecilia, since she had been ill, found it quite easy and indeed a source of happiness to use that word, inwardly and out loud though not in Daphne's hearing, about her relation with her friend. Substitutes for it, those were what would have been wrong. She liked to say quietly, while she half-dozed, Daphne and I love each other.

  People had crowded round while she sat there on the grey bucket seat beside Daphne. There was, miraculously, a doctor among the alighting passengers. He went up the escalator and spoke to the station staff and someone appeared with a chair, into which they put Cecilia and carried her up to street level. It was then that Daphne proved her worth. She took Cecilia home in a taxi and called her own doctor. So Cecilia avoided being taken to hospital and, if paralysed down her left side and with her face distorted and speech numbed, was at least in her own home.

  She was not confused or disturbed in her mind, but she had forgotten things. There was a great blank between seeing Brian with the children and sitting on the Bond Street platform with Daphne. Cecilia did not quite know but had a feeling that several bad things had happened in that blank time. It was those bad things which had brought on her stroke, of this she was sure, though she had no memory of what they were. There was something wonderfully strange about knowing that the hour in which she had been stricken, perhaps mortally stricken, certainly irredeemably, whatever bright and encouraging things the physiotherapist might say, was a lost hour, a tiny piece cut out of her life just as the hard-pumping blood had cut a minute piece from her brain.

  A double shock, Cecilia thought it had been, without recalling more, which had raised her blood pressure too high. It had dropped again, the doctor said. The doctor was pleased with her. Daphne cooked the things she liked to eat and got books for her from the library. Cecilia went back into her sofa-bed in the evenings and they watched television together. Though they had never done this before, they held hands. Daphne pulled her chair up against the side of the bed, took the paralysed hand in hers and held it. There was no movement in that hand but there was feeling.

  Cecilia's face got better first, within days. The second time Tina came with the children they could understand everything she said. Daphne had been able to understand almost from the beginning. Peter called in on the way home from the hospice, looking shaken, and told them a sad story of a boy of twenty who had died the night before in his arms.

  ‘I don't think people ever actually do die in someone else's arms, do you?’ said Daphne after he had gone. ‘I didn't like to say so because he was so upset, poor boy. But it would be very uncomfortable for the patient and very hard to gauge exactly when to sort of get them into your arms, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I expect they mean they put their arm round them when they see they're going.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that's it.’

  ‘Do you believe in eternal life, Daphne? Do you think the soul leaves the body at the point of death and goes off to a place of bliss?’

  ‘No,’ said Daphne.

  After a while she said, ‘You are talking well. You're nearly back to normal.’

  ‘I expect
you'll say it's not very wise, Daphne, but I would like to look at my face. I can take it, really. After all, at my age I hope I'm past vanity. If you'll find my handbag for me, there's a mirror in my powder compact.’

  Daphne did not look very hard for the handbag because it was as Cecilia said and she thought it unwise for her friend to see the distortion of her mouth. And Cecilia understood this. She had not, as Daphne believed, forgotten about asking for the bag, only decided not to repeat her request and thus avoid causing Daphne distress.

  The old woman appeared asleep and there was this handbag on the seat beside her, asking to be taken. Nicholas Mann, unemployed, clever, sharp and penniless, living in his sister's flat with her and her boyfriend, took it. Nobody saw him take it or if they did they preferred not to say. He got out at Baker Street.

  Almost the first thing he did was remove Cecilia's wallet containing cash and three cards: one credit card, one charge card and a cashpoint card. He also took out her chequebook. The rest of the contents of the bag and the bag itself he put into the first rubbish bin he came to in his progress along the Marylebone Road.

  He had already noticed that Cecilia was not in the habit of signing herself with her full name but with the initials C. M. The same signature was on her cards. Written on the chequebook, on the back cover, were four digits which Nicholas Mann thought might be Cecilia's secret cashpoint number. In this he turned out to be correct. He went to Brighton where he checked into an hotel. He spent a lot of money during the rest of the day on meals, drink, clothes and personal accessories. Then, fearing that the loss of the cards must already have been reported, drew out at the cashpoint all the money Cecilia had on her current account and spent the evening in the casino. Luck was with him and he trebled Cecilia's money, returning to the hotel with £1,400.

  Next day he phoned his sister and told her he would not be coming back. Since her boyfriend, with whom she was very much in love, had said if Nicholas stayed he was going, he had had as much as he could stand, this made her very happy, so happy that when the boyfriend said he had run out of condoms but would go out and get some, she said not to bother, let's not bother with that any more. It was the first time she had ever had sex without using a contraceptive and she conceived at once.

  After Alice had left for work, Tom went along to the Art Room as arranged, where Axel had said he wanted to talk to him. The first thing he saw when he entered the room was a rope. It was a long, tough-looking but thin rope, tightly wound up into a cylinder shape. To one end of it was attached a steel ring bolt. Axel was sitting at the drawing table. It was cold and he was wearing his long overcoat. On a sheet of paper on the table he had been drawing some sort of plan or chart.

  He said to Tom, ‘Did you mean what you said about being prepared to be my assistant?’

  Tom hesitated. Then he said, ‘If the money's good.’

  ‘It may involve – let's say stepping over the wrong side of the law.’

  ‘So long as it's non-violent.’

  ‘Oh, it's non-violent,’ said Axel, as if the very idea were bizarre, as if Tom had said so long as it doesn't involve going up in a space probe.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what it is? I mean, I presume there is something, you're making me some offer? This isn't all academic?’

  That made Axel laugh. ‘You've seen the rope. That's not an academic rope, is it? It's not an illusion, you can't do the Indian rope trick with it.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Axel changed tack, in the way he had. He said, ‘I don't know how well you know Jarvis.’

  ‘Not very well. I like him, you couldn't help liking him. He's my landlord, that's more or less it.’

  ‘He's never talked to you about – well, the esoterica of the Underground?’

  ‘I don't think I understand what you mean.’

  ‘He's never talked to you about the disused parts of the Underground, the old shafts, for instance, some of which are vertical tunnels coming up through London buildings?’

  ‘I've never been interested in trains, the tube, all that,’ said Tom, ‘except for playing music there.’

  ‘So you don't know what a Signals and Communications Room is?’

  ‘I think I can imagine.’

  Axel handed Tom the piece of paper on which he had been drawing. It was a plan, but of what Tom had no idea. There were lines that might have formed the outline of a building, there was something shaped like a greatly elongated pot. While Tom was looking at it, Axel said, ‘I want to take a photograph of something in the Signals and Communications Room. The room is marked on the plan with a cross.’

  Tom could see it as a small circle, a spider in the midst of a web. ‘Will they let you?’

  ‘If by “they” you mean London Transport Underground, I haven't asked them. I don't bother asking permission for things when I know the answer will be no. I have to do it without asking and I want you to help. That is the thing I want you to do.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said slowly. ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘I don't suppose you do see. Not yet. There won't be any breaking, though there will be entering. There won't be any burglary or picking of locks. I'll explain exactly what I'm going to do and you have to do in a minute.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ said Tom, and because that sounded weak and, indeed, childish, did not wait for an answer. ‘What do you want this photograph for?’

  ‘I'm a photographer.’

  ‘That's not an answer,’ said Tom, more than usually bold. ‘Photographing things the authorities want kept secret sounds more like the action of a – well, a spy.’

  Axel laughed again. He took his plan back and wrote some words on it, made another cross.

  ‘If you agree there'll be a considerable monetary reward.’

  ‘I suppose I've already agreed,’ said Tom.

  ‘You haven't asked what the monetary reward will be.’

  ‘No, I haven't.’

  ‘Does ten grand sound all right?’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds?' said Tom. He must have misheard. ‘Did you really say ten thousand pounds?’

  ‘I expect I could make it a bit more.’

  ‘You could? Don't you mean your employers, bosses, masters could?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Tom stared at him.

  ‘You'll have to trust me,’ Axel said, ‘and I'll have to trust you. I've proved I trust you by telling you all this. I've burned my boats, queered my pitch, whatever you like to call it, telling you I want to take this photograph – well, photographs. You could phone London Transport, make an anonymous phone call if you like, and that would be the end of it. So by telling you what I have, I've really put myself in your hands. I want you to put yourself in mine and trust me about the money. You'll get a thousand now, when you agree, and the rest when it – when the task is done. OK?’

  ‘I must think about it.’

  ‘Don't think about it for too long.’

  ‘I'll tell you tonight.’

  The fire began when a lighted match fell through an escalator. This escalator led from the Piccadilly Line platforms to the main ticket hall concourse under the mainline station forecourt. The time was 7.25 in the evening, the date 18 November 1987.

  Dense obliterating smoke filled the passageways. People later described it as a black hell. Passengers arriving by train smelt the smoke and tried to crush back into the cars, but there was no room. Trains left people stranded. Others went through without stopping, though the trapped people banged on the windows as it passed. One man said, there was plenty of room in the train but we could not get in.

  One view was that trains pushed air into the tunnels and fanned the flames, another that trains impeded the wind.

  Thirty-one people died in the King's Cross fire.

  The worst accident on the Underground before this was on 28 February 1975, when a train hit the end of a tunnel at Moorgate station, killing forty-three people.

  Later in the day Tom met Jay and
a friend of his called Mark at Tottenham Court Road and they went down the escalator to the pitch they had booked. It was in the concourse that is circular and tiled in coloured mosaics. Peter was ill, Jay said, at least he was not well enough to stand up to hours of playing.

  Mark was a saxophonist. He had brought his saxophone and his new true-diversity wireless microphone system as well. Tom was taken aback when he heard what it had cost. They set up in the mosaic area, which might have been designed as a concert hall specially for them, Mark said, laughing. He laid down his saxophone case open on the tiles in front of them. The microphone, Tom found, was very light and easy to hold and when he sang the sound was stunning. It seemed not to come just from his throat and lungs but from the walls and the very air itself, filling up the tall round room and flowing through the entrance and exit passages. Tom sang folk songs, ending with ‘Scarborough Fair’ because he liked the bit about the one who lived there and was once a true love of his.

  One or two people passing looked taken aback by the sound and one woman actually flinched, but most people loved it. Tom sang ‘Auprès de ma Blonde’ and a French party, who looked like students, gathered round and joined in. All the voices and the saxophone and guitar amplified to the system's full capacity fetched one of the station staff down the escalator to move them on. He tried to move them off, but even he couldn't say they were playing to the annoyance of passengers. They set up again further along the passage and Tom sang the Toreador Song from Carmen for the benefit of his French audience.

  From where they now were he could see a pair of those grey doors Axel had said would lead into the disused part of the Underground, to half-lit tunnels and narrow unlit passages, old lift shafts and shafts where staircases once ran up. He kept thinking about what Axel wanted him to do, what he had agreed to do, though it was not too late to back out, and he could not see anything wrong about it. It was odd, considering how she had left her husband and her child, but he always felt Alice was somehow more of a moral person than he was. He would have liked to talk to Alice about this and hear her views. But Axel had made him promise to tell no one, not even Alice.