Ah, Ruth Rendell makes her first appearance (but not her last) in this blog. She’s famous in her native Great Britain, but I’ve never met anyone else who ever heard of her. She died in 2015, leaving an enormous body of work. All of it was published under her own name and a pseudonym, Barbara Vine. It took me a while to figure out the differences between a Rendell book and a Vine book—I loved ALL the Vine books, but I found fewer Rendell that I enjoyed. I first read Ms. Vine’s work upon the release of A Dark Adapted Eye, a tour-de-force of psychological suspense that was very different from Ms. Rendell’s well-known series of Inspector Wexford detective novels. She wrote other books under her own name that weren’t part of the detective series, some of which are every bit as suspenseful and psychologically complex as her pseudonym’s, and those I have all read.
Vine’s books are interested in the lives of ordinary people surviving, usually in London—either struggling economically, or, more likely, because of mental illness. Or both. She delves into the personalities of these people and she explores why they make the choices they make—and their various quirks, eccentricities, addictions, and delusions—with a thoroughness that’s riveting. I’m a psychologist’s daughter, so this is my jam. I love her careful reveal of how all these disparate lives with their attendant problems come together to form an engrossing story. No matter how I try, I can’t guess what the common thread will be amongst the characters, but they always evolve into a complete tapestry that touches them all with tragic and often profound consequences.
This particular story isn’t one I consider among her best, but it sucked me in all the same. It’s set in l988 London, where AIDS was making its way through the gay community and Communism seemed to be dying out, although it is NOT an AIDS-crisis story. The title refers to this:
It’s the London Transport Underground, familiarly known as the “tube.” A vast, interconnected system of trains, sometimes underground, sometimes not, that Londoners use to go everywhere it does. This book’s characters all use the Tube, some live near its stations and tracks, one is obsessed with it, some work in it, some commit crimes on it, and some die because of it.
“While they waited on the platform Jarvis told them about King Solomon’s carpet. This magic carpet of green silk was large enough for all the people to stand on it. When ready, Solomon told it where he wanted it to go and it rose in the air and landed everyone at the station they wanted. He said the tube reminded him of this carpet and elaborated his theme, but they were not listening.”
Jarvis Stringer has inherited the old Cambridge School building. His parents had run a school for girls after the war, so it was constructed with dozens of rooms and a bell tower, from which his father hung himself when Jarvis was a boy. At the start of this story, Jarvis hasn’t anywhere else to live. He received a small inheritance along with the school, which provides basic sustenance, but Jarvis needs money. Jarvis needs money because his hobby (obsession) is the study of major metropolitan subway systems of the world. Traveling is expensive, even for someone as frugal as Jarvis. He’s already been to New York to ride and inspect the world’s largest, he attended the opening of Atlanta’s MARTA, and has marveled at San Francisco’s BART, which has the deepest track in the world under its bay. He badly wants to visit Omsk and see the rumored many new stations and expansions of its system, and at the beginning of this book, he’s saving his money. He’s a kind man, even if nearly everyone would consider him eccentric. Jarvis doesn’t mind. While saving for his planned trip to Russia, he’s writing a book: a complete history of the London Underground. This takes up most of his time, sitting in his room in the School, typing. He is only vaguely aware of his surroundings, for he lives in his own head much of the time.
Jarvis decides to rent the rooms of the School for extra income. He charges rents so absurdly low as to guarantee a ready supply of tenants. These people, their backgrounds, their chance meetings, their passions and betrayals, their inadequacies and desires, all join together at the School. These connections, both planned and spontaneous, form the plot of this novel.
Occupants of The School:
Tina is Jarvis’s cousin. Her mother Cecelia and Jarvis’s father were siblings. Tina has two children, a 9-year-old boy named Jasper and a younger girl, Benavida. As the novel opens, all three have moved into the school with Jarvis. Tina doesn’t know who the fathers of her children are, as she has slept with every man she has ever met, including cousin Jarvis, long ago when they were teenagers. Tina’s mother, Cecelia, lives within walking distance of the School, but they don’t get along very well due to Tina’s aforementioned propensity for casual sex and lax attitudes towards disciplining her children. Cecelia disapproves of nearly everything about Tina, but she has learned to censor herself so she can continue seeing her grandchildren.
Tom is a talented singer and flutist, a musical prodigy who could play a little piano and trumpet, too. Tom attended the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and flourished there. One day, instead of making the complicated train journey from visiting his grandmother’s house in Ealing back to London, he accepts a ride on the back of a motorcycle from his gran’s neighbor. They hadn’t gone a mile when the crash happened. The driver died under a lorry’s wheels, but Tom was thrown clear of the wreckage and hit his head on a tree. He spent six months in hospital with many broken bones and emerged, after several surgeries, with a permanently crooked little finger on his left hand. He has lost his place at school, he’s depressed, he has trouble concentrating, migraines, black thoughts, and rages (it’s obvious Tom has suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury, which wasn’t yet a thing when this novel was written.) He ends up busking in the stations of the Underground, trying to regain his former ability to play the flute.
Alice is 24, a gifted violinist, wife, and mother of a baby girl. Her marriage is loveless, and she felt nothing but guilt at being a mother whose heart wasn’t completely engaged by her baby. She longs to play her violin well enough to join an orchestra that would travel and perform regularly. Motherhood is incompatible with her ambition, so she leaves her family a note that she won’t be returning, and escapes to London with just £100.
Jed is a volunteer Safeguard on the tube. Safeguards are to England what the Guardian Angels are to New York: men who ride the trains, looking for trouble to stop. His passion, however, is his pet hawk, Abelard. Jed always smells of the rancid meat he feeds Abelard, so people generally avoid him, and he takes Abelard with him everywhere he goes, except on his nighttime train rides with the Safeguards.
All of these people, each unknown to the others (except Jasper and Tina), move into the School, and they all live together comfortably enough. Jarvis originally met Tom while walking through a tube station when he stopped to hear Tom’s classical trio busking. Jarvis met Jed on the tube, late at night during one of Jed’s Safeguard patrols. Because neither Tom nor Jed had a permanent place to stay, and because Jarvis was a kind man, he invited them both to move into the School. Alice, the runaway wife and mother, is the next to move in. Just after leaving her husband and daughter, upon arrival in London, she hears Tom’s voice and flute in the tube station. She recognizes the piece, she has her violin, and almost without meaning to, she joins in with the buskers. Tom falls in love with her the minute he sees her, and invites her to come live at the School. Tom and Alice are a couple from that moment on, but while Tom is madly in love, Alice is not—she just felt she had no alternative.
There is almost always an older, judgmental person in Barbara Vine’s books; one who feels superior enough to try to impose their views on other people, who manipulates and lies with equanimity, and we are definitely meant to dislike that character. In this book, it’s Tina’s mother, Cecelia. However, in this case, we are also meant to sympathize with and understand her frustration with her daughter. We are gradually, in small increments, given to understand that Cecelia and her best friend since school days, Daphne (both are in their seventies), are in love. Neither one is aware of it, exactly, and nothing physical ever happens. No words are spoken between them of this kind of love. They’re content to visit each other once a week and talk on the phone at exactly the same time every night. Cecelia is acutely aware of how the world perceives her:
“She might not have been there for all the notice they took of her. However, Cecelia 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.”
Cecelia is old-fashioned, judgmental, and disapproving, yes; she also exhibits personal growth and self-awareness that were previously unknown to us as the story unfolds.
Terrible things have happened, are happening, on the tube.
The book opens with an account of an afternoon in the life of a much-pampered, privileged, wealthy woman who had always been “delicate” and fussed over due to her “heart murmur.” This unnamed woman takes a taxi to Harrod’s to buy a dress for a party that night. It’s a beautiful dress of pure white, heavily embellished and embroidered. On a whim, she decides to do what common people do and take the tube home. But she’s never been on it in her life, gets hopelessly lost, train after train, disembarking and waiting, shivering, on the platform, then getting back on another and being surrounded by rush hour commuters, squashed between them in the car. She spirals, hyperventilating, panicking, feeling suffocated, and her heart stops. The carrier bag she’d been holding, the one containing the white dress, had been trampled upon and nearly left on the train, but it was returned to her family, along with her body.
That opening vividly illustrated how frightening the tube can be, and imparts dread. Who was she? Why was the dress described so thoroughly? So she had a panic attack brought on by the crowd, which brought on a fatal heart attack, which is tragic for sure, but she has no connection to any of the characters. The significance of this event won’t be revealed until the end, and even then, you have to work a little bit for the connection, but when it comes, it’s just ANOTHER thread neatly woven into the tapestry that is this story. And there are many.
Tina’s son Jasper “sledges.” Sledging is riding face down on the top of a subway car itself. It’s illegal, and it’s dangerous. Jasper is nine years old, smokes regularly, has a tattoo of a lion on his back that nobody knows about, and cuts school so much he’s being suspended. Tina loves him in her own distracted way, but she doesn’t know where he is most of the time, doesn’t know (or doesn’t care?) about his truancies, doesn’t worry, and isn’t home herself for days at a time. Tina knows her mum lives just a short walk away, and she takes Cecelia’s proximity and availability for granted. Jasper’s fellow delinquents have been cutting class to hang out on the tube, generally being nuisances, annoying other riders, and smoking. One of them describes sledging and claims to have done it himself from one station to the next. Very quickly, Jasper becomes a veteran sledger who knows the tunnels and clearances of the tube, and he’s very good at it and never gets caught. But one of his mates, simply to avoid being dubbed “chicken,” attempts his first sledge ride while Jasper is sitting in the car below. The train had to slam on its brakes and come to an emergency stop while in a tunnel, on tracks high above the subterranean depths of older, deeper tunnels. The boy was flung from the roof and killed, right before Jasper’s eyes. By the end of the book, it seems likely that Jasper, too, will suffer from PTSD. That’s really unfortunate, as Tina will never notice.
Jarvis literally knows nothing about his tenants or what they do under his roof. He departs London for Russia about halfway through the book, and doesn’t return until after the climactic event occurs. But it’s through his obsession with subway systems and the book he’s writing about the London Underground that we are able to read various facts and trivia about the tube. I found these sections fascinating. Gradually, these sections become smaller, but contain more gruesome details. A huge fire at King’s Cross station destroyed much of it and killed 30 people. A train full of riders crashed head-on into a blocked-off tunnel and killed 50. Air raids during WWII caused massive amounts of people to seek shelter in the stations of the Underground; still, Luftwaffe bombs struck their targets, obliterating them and the people sheltering within. But there had never been a successfully-detonated bomb placed into the Underground by a person or people (this was written long before 7/7/05).
Everything this author does is in gradual increments that can go two ways when they’ve accumulated into a giant reveal: either it’s like a light appears and illuminates the truth of a character or situation, or it’s like all light is extinguished and you might feel a tight ball of dread that lodges behind your ribs because you know disaster is coming. Rendell/Vine is a MASTER at this.
The final character to enter this story, Axel Jonas, a man who apparently torments tube commuters for fun, encounters Jasper rather dramatically in a tube station just as Jasper flings himself off the top of the subway car, narrowly avoiding being decapitated by a steel overhang at the entrance to the tunnel ahead. Axel starts a conversation with the boy about his sledging, then offers to take him for pizza. Jasper is perpetually hungry, and he’s inclined to like this man because he doesn’t chide Jasper for sledging. Axel asks Jasper a litany of questions about the tube itself, specifically whether or not Jasper knows anything about “ghost stations,” or stations long closed and unused that trains never stop for. Some of these stations supposedly have ventilation shafts that go right up through the centers of office buildings. Jasper replies that Jarvis could tell him, Jarvis is his mum’s cousin, he knows everything about the tube, he and his family live with Jarvis at a school, Jarvis has even gone to Russia to see their subways, and then he gives Axel his last name. Jasper tries to memorize the man’s face with its cornflower-blue eyes, short dark beard, and short black hair, so he can tell Bienvida all about their strange lunch.
Axel turns up at the School. Alice, the only one home, answers the door. Axel pretends to know Jarvis, pretends he spoke to Jarvis before he left for Russia and rented a room from him. Alice accepts this (everything in the School is done on impulse without much deep thought), and Axel moves in. Alice is immediately entranced by Axel’s blue, blue eyes, and his mysterious nature, and eventually they begin an secret affair, in the rooms just above the room she shares with Tom.
What is gradually revealed is Axel’s sinister plan. He wants, badly, to destroy the Underground, or at least cripple it so badly that it stops running, hopefully forever. He uses Alice’s infatuation, Tom’s friendship, and Jasper’s youth in his attempt to accomplish this goal. Axel never tells anyone what he’s doing. He hides every part of it from his fellow inhabitants of the School, and selects Tom to be his unwitting accomplice in his mission. None of the characters have any idea of his plan.
Alice, lovesick and yearning, picks a night Axel is out, and goes through his suitcases, drawers, and cupboards. She doesn’t suspect him of anything, but is desperate to learn who he really is, where he’s from, and what he might be hiding from her. She finds, but does not recognize it for what it is, a heavy plastic bag taped shut that’s full of some kind of liquid. She seals it back up and returns it to the closet so that Axel won’t know she’s snooped. The room smells strongly of petrol afterwards. Oddly, she also finds, in an old, stained carrier bag hanging in the closet, a a beautiful dress of pure white, heavily embellished and embroidered, and she wonders: is this a gift for herself? There is a small photograph in his suitcase of a lovely woman with his same dark hair and cornflower-blue eyes, and Alice knows immediately the photo is of his sister.
Reading this was a bit like I imagine heaven to be. My heaven, anyway. I raced through the last parts of the book as the stakes got higher and higher, and the narrative thread got tighter. And as usual with Ruth Rendell, I marveled at the seemingly effortless way she weaves separate storylines together to create a cohesive, propulsive suspense novel. So much suspense! I won’t detail how the story ends, but you can guess, I think. I enjoyed this re-read!
Hot enough for ya? A sweltering summer Monday smile from Rufus Fletcher in A Fatal Inversion (1992). Adapted from Barbara Vine’s novel, this 3-part psychological thriller is excellent, giving Jeremy Northam one of his best early roles.
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE (née Grasemann; 17 Feb 1930 – 2 May 2015) was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.
Rendell is best known for creating Chief Inspector Wexford. A second string of works was a series of unrelated crime novels that explored the psychological background of criminals and their victims. This theme was developed…
