Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  Jimmy and Carmen quarrelled – which he took to be normal behaviour for her. He cannot now remember whether there was any substance to their polemics. He doubted it. The point – the need – was simply to contend. She was more adept than he at this business. He was perhaps too emollient, too given to the superficialities of social charm – for which she had no time at all. Frequently, he was taken aback by her rasping vehemence, her apparent determination to be as unwinning as possible, as if the faded fragments of old-fashioned courtesy, to which everyone else in various degrees clung in a coarsening world, were a kind of mocking offence to her, an additional aggravation. A kind of weakness. He gathered that her relations with Christopher were regulated by this kind of behaviour, certain stand-up rows in public places having become legendary in their circle.

  Perhaps it was no more than the fascinated attraction of opposites that led Jimmy to tolerate – to wish to explore – this prickly young woman. There was also a certain energy about her which captivated him. She was ruthless – and ruthlessly cynical – in her practise of her profession. She talked about it with a vivid contempt that made him wonder how she could continue to practise it. He had encountered this before with other bright young women who found themselves unable to play the part which their colleagues played, to bring off the trick of convincing themselves that the daily inanities of the workplace were in fact as important to the world as the manoeuvres of high international diplomacy.

  It is a handicap he considered that he faced as a performer (an ‘arts worker’ as he saw his like referred to in a recent newspaper) that he moved in a world of aesthetic pleasure, engaged each day in activities of patent worth. Aside from the occasional magazine interview or public relations call, he was not required to play games with himself, to pretend that what he was doing had a meaning which his inner self refused to endorse. He was happy and fulfilled in his work. His concerts gave him enormous pleasure and his commitment to new work, to breaking down the barriers of resistance to it, offered further satisfaction. He realised how lucky he was to experience this sensation. He knew how miserable many people were in their jobs. He saw it in their aggressive – if not hysterical – declarations of how much they enjoyed what they did. Carmen would speak of her employers and of her assignments with the most devastating contempt. Her intelligence became visible – vivid, outraged, traduced by the commissions it was compelled to accept. He asked himself – he was not yet ready to put the question directly to her – why she persisted. He could only assume that she had identified this world as one whose conquest she must achieve. She must have the scalp. Thus, the best and brightest of her generation went into these ‘glamorous’ media professions whose output was found so grimly disappointing, so unworthy of the attention of their intelligent peers.

  One reason for the frequency with which Jimmy embarked on new liaisons – aside from his inextinguishable love of liberty – is that he came to feel that he knew his partner too well. He scented the danger of becoming bored. Anticipating objections, he conceded that the feeling may well have been mutual. Perhaps it is so in all cases. With Carmen it was different. Knowing her was like entering a receding prospect. The more time he spent with her, the less he seemed to know her. Her contradictions flowered like some odorous bloom in the jardin des plantes. This tantalised him and drew him on. He wanted to know more, he wanted to be satisfied that she made sense. With hindsight he felt that he had failed in that endeavour. She remained the enigma that she presented to him at their first meeting.

  Sometimes he would play for her and watch, with minute attention, her reactions. There was a short Schoenberg piece – the Suite for Piano, op.25 – which he would play because she had expressed enthusiasm for it. It was not a long piece – perhaps no more than fifteen minutes – but she would sit for the duration on the edge of her seat, craning forward, tensed, suddenly tossing her head upwards when the music changed to a more abrupt tempo, subsiding, imperceptibly, when it became etwas langsam. After he stopped, she would be silent for several minutes, rocking gently, before springing up as if to shake off the surrender she had made to the power of the music. There is something magnificently cold, hard-edged, metallically brilliant about this piece which was plainly to her taste. Once, in a whitewashed warehouse-studio in Docklands where he was preparing for a recording session the following day, she sat on a slightly soiled cream-coloured sofa, spotlit by a shaft of sunlight which streamed through the high glass roof, and he reflected that never before had he enjoyed such an attentive listener. After the silence, he locked the door of the studio, which they had to themselves, and they made love in those beams of light, feeling the warmth of the sun on their naked skin, their bodies pressed against the hard, shiny wooden blocks of the floor.

  She accused him – it was during a weekend which they had awarded themselves in Nice – of “patrician indifference”, a charge which amused him at the time. In a sense, Jimmy reflected, she was right. His father had been a banker, immensely wealthy yet immensely distrustful of wealth. He had a puritan dislike of excess and lived simply in a way that only the very rich can bring off successfully. His one extravagance (and it was probably a concession to Jimmy’s mother) was the flat on the seafront at Nice. He would have preferred to spend his retirement in Geneva or Paris but his wife aspired to the south of France. He loathed the town – its municipal corruption, the spectacle of all those leathery women of a certain age in white trouser suits, their gold bracelets jangling, as he put it “like the manacles of condemned prisoners”, and the disgusting yapping pooches which they clasped to their blotched bosoms. He took refuge in his books and paintings, occupying one end of the five-roomed apartment in a magnificent austerity whose white walls became a sort of shifting inner screen on which his memories and recollections were projected. Sometimes Jimmy remembered this whiteness shimmering with a solitary blue canvas of Picasso, at another time it was a slender bronze scuplture on a marble base resting on a small side-table. In a room adjacent to this study, Jimmy’s father slept beneath a tall window with a view of the sea. He spent his days back in the study, whose hushed and reverent silence the boy always hesitated to enter. Jimmy left for his international, drifting life of the concert performer not long after his parents settled in Nice, but when they died (the car spinning off the road somewhere north of Ventimiglia) he spent some time there, sorting their effects. He sold the Picasso and bought a flat in Regent’s Park in a rather too solid mansion block. He would never pay rent again. He placed the Nice apartment with a smarmy lettings agency but not before he and Carmen spent a long weekend there. It was the site of their first quarrels.

  She was vexed, he later realised, by what she called his “languid” demeanour. Perhaps too she regretted the fact that he was not a driven soul, anxious to make his mark, to establish himself, to hoist aloft the trophies of public approval. Born with a silver spoon crammed into his mouth (her locution), he was indifferent to the baubles, the awards, the tinsel decorations that start to drape, at an exponential rate of increase, the shoulders of the successful, often at the point when their triumphs are almost over. She seemed to believe that, since life had been difficult for her, it should be difficult for everyone else. More than this, she felt that difficulty, obstacle, the heroic jumping over these fences, were intrinsic to real achievement. It was Jimmy’s denials, his insistence that art bestowed its gifts equally on the struggling aspirant and the easeful oaf, that angered her. He even went so far as to suggest that some of her examples of overcoming were specious – that far from triumphing over insuperable odds some of these sturdy folk had triumphed rather too easily. She exploded.

  “How can you say that? How dare you say that?”

  She waved her hands around the apartment, calling on its faux Empire trimmings and ornate picture frames (they were seated at his mother’s end of the property) to witness the force of her logic. Both their eyes fell on a crusty gilt frame inside which a bright beach scene (a Sisley destined that week for the auctio
n house – Jimmy did not trust the future lessees) glowed. A blue sail, a yellow expanse of sand, a shimmering parasol, the folds of a long white muslin dress, all conspired to rebuke and to repudiate his lack of understanding, his patrician indifference to the fate of the suffering classes.

  “You sit there, basking in all this...”

  There was a pause while she fumbled for some withering term that would be adequate to the enormity of this display of ill-deserved wealth, but nothing came.

  “It’s disgusting.”

  Cheaply, he leaned forward and refilled her slender champagne bumper, smiling complacently as the wine gurgled and frothed from the bottle.

  “You miss the point, Carmen.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we are all the product – I hesitate to use the term victim – of our backgrounds. We are never consulted about the circumstances of our birth.”

  She spat out her next contribution with a magnificent venom which he found thrilling.

  “So you would have preferred to have been born in a two-up, two-down in Oldham.”

  “You hardly make it sound an enticing prospect.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake stop being so urbane. You know exactly what I mean. Of course you can’t help being what you are, having had the advantages you have had. I am talking about some modicum of empathy. Some recognition that there are people in the world for whom all this...”

  Another magnificent, sweeping gesture of contempt directed towards the interior décor, so vehement that the left hand came to the assistance of the right in keeping the champagne glass upright.

  “...is not automatically assumed. May never even be seen or heard or smelt or touched or tasted.”

  “All five senses ticked off. All dues fully paid. All outrage registered.”

  “What the hell do you mean? Don’t you grasp anything I have been saying?”

  “Of course I do. But what do you expect from me? A formal recantation? A little pageant of self-loathing out of the Cultural Revolution? I am what I am. I agree that the world is unfair, that the rich are loathsome and vulgar (evidence of which, incidentally, I have had more opportunity than most to see at first hand). But I can’t undo my experiences. I can’t pretend that my life was different. In fact I’ll go further and say that the music lessons in that lovely house in Zürich, the holidays in magnificent hotels across southern Europe, the gardens and drawing rooms, the music and paintings and constant immersion in things of beauty, the sheer variety and richness of that life, were glorious and I am glad to have had them. They stimulated me and filled my life with light and colour. I enjoyed them.”

  This was a little excessive, he knew.

  Jimmy watched Carmen’s reaction, trying to read the runes of her silence. In truth he felt she was being unfair. He had, after all, set up the Foundation for Young Musicians with the residue of his parent’s estate (after deducting a generous amount for his own continuing welfare). As capitalist swine went he felt he could point to others more swinish. But he disliked what he called this moral pornography, this flaunting of one’s keener ethical sense. He had decided to settle for the patrician indifference as a manner or style. He had no wish to be unctuous.

  After this skirmish, Jimmy suggested going for a drive in the hired car. They sped off along the coast road in the direction of Monaco. As they took those twisting corners, the breeze streaming through the windows, he felt her mood soften. She shook out her hair with pleasure and excitement like a frisky pony and began to talk about having come this way as a young student on the train. She had changed to another train at the border and pressed on south. Her carriage was shared with two nuns and a pious looking couple who basked in the nuns’ nimbus of sanctity. As the train approached Rapallo a wizened old codger had risen to his feet. He looked down at the glittering sea. Enraptured, he exclaimed:

  “Che bel mare! Limpido!”

  This, thought Jimmy, was the Carmen I loved so briefly, for whom I incurred the enmity of poor, wretched Christopher, whose life with her I broke up and destroyed. After both of us she disappeared. Out of the ruins of jealousy and anger she renewed herself and then was lost to us. A mere six weeks in my life but they left a more powerful impression than any other human being has left. It might have been longer had that day ended differently, had it not cast its long shadow (never admitted, never articulated) on our pleasure, but the chance happenings that destroy happiness proceed from the same beginnings as those which launch it in triumph. You see, he rebuked himself inwardly, how I remain the cracker-barrel philosopher?

  The car sped on. They laughed. They touched. They passed a white coupé parked in a little viewing-space. A perfect couple, as if posing for a fashion plate, stood by their car looking out to sea. A pink chiffon scarf flew from her neck like a pennant. He was directing his video-camera at the rocky precipice below. Along here there were several such viewpoints. Jimmy and Carmen began to search for a suitable place to stop. She picked up his hand. He moved it to touch her thigh. An oncoming tour bus sounded its horn at them. Perhaps he had strayed too near to the central road marking or perhaps this was a gallant jest, a ribald tribute to the lovers’ louche caress. He was careless. They were both careless, sensing no doubt, the heady imperative of carpe diem. He would shoot quick glances across at her, play with her fingers, return his eye to the wheel. As they came round a rocky corner, a viewpoint became visible. There was one car parked there but room for one more. He started to brake. The family was gathering around the boot of the car for drinks, laughing and excited like them. A little girl of perhaps five or six, pretty and blonde, her feet in white sandals, suddenly skipped out from the edge of the parking-bay as they continued their long, slow braking movement. Eyes on the rest of the family ahead, Jimmy had not seen her. She seemed to come precipitately from nowhere. He was still travelling quite fast in the wake of his impulsive decision to stop.

  How often since had he been haunted by the sound of that soft knock, the sight of the little body thrown to one side like a discarded bag of picnic refuse. The scream, the swinging around in disbelief of the family at the car, the explosion of shock at what had happened, the force of it surging through a barrier of disbelief, the unmitigated horror as Jimmy and Carmen jolted forward in their seats from the final abrupt halt. The seconds of realisation, anguish, uncontrollable distress would give place to an aftermath of waiting in hospital corridors, being interviewed by cold and sceptical police officers, struggling to approach the parents in their renewed grief when it was announced by the doctors that everything was over.

  Jimmy still hears the stifled sobbing of Carmen, who could not get out of the car, frozen as she was by shock. She wanted to go. He had of course to stay (after some initial uncertainty he was informed that no charges would be brought) but, after insisting that she wait until at least the next morning, he let her go. He thought that this would be for ever, that she would go back to Christopher. This is what she did, but not immediately, and not, as it turned out, irrevocably, for he would see her again in London. These events became a subject about which they could not talk, though he would gladly have done so.

  The newspaper reports, inevitably, referred to what happened as “a tragedy”. At the time, Jimmy considered that the dull cliché for once was right. It is in the nature of classical tragedy to make human life seem predestined. Things happen on those bare, anguished stages because they must happen, because the Gods insist on a pattern of retribution and justice, a particular conclusion. This terrible, needless death seemed connected – in ways he could not articulate exactly – with the fleeting hedonism of those few days in Nice. It was as if they needed to be taught that their lives were tangled up with the lives of others, that if they overreached themselves in the selfish glut of pleasure there would be a price to pay. He should have liked to try this interpretation out on Carmen but for now she was gone. And as the days and weeks passed he began to retreat from this grand theory. He felt only intermittent pain and remorse, logic giv
ing place to the stab of isolated images – the tearful parents at the hospital, the little coffin lowered by tapes into the ground, Carmen, shaking uncontrollably at his side in the immediate aftermath, resisting the comfort of the hand he extended to her.

  Christopher’s latest amour is just ending after seven tempestuous days (seven times longer than his average dalliances – for that is now what they have come to seem). Catriona is in public relations. She is mistress of the argot of her profession. When they go to bed she brings her mobile to the bedside, laying it down with care, as a mother might anxiously position her child’s crib within reach should its crying in the night demand her attention. In place of the soft warble of his bedside telephone, Catriona’s device erupts with a martial trumpeting like that of a crowd of cinema Cossacks hurtling in savage vengeance across some arid steppe, sabres raised to catch the flash of the sun, leering triumph in every horseman’s eye. Just now, he listened to her conversation with a ‘work colleague’.