Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  “Hayley, love, we’ve got a toughie here but I know you are up for it. These people are in the stone age. We are going to have to do some work around the issue of appropriate language for starters. I’ll email you my thoughts in the morning.”

  Still turning over those ‘thoughts’ in her mind, she undressed, mechanically, as if stepping into a shower, not into the arms of her soon-to-be-redundant lover. Christopher wondered, as they tussled, how far behind she had left that crusade against inappropriate language. Certainly, next morning, as they conducted their weak hostilities, which ended in mutual letting-go, he felt that her lack of stomach for a fight had more to do with that email of worked-on thoughts, her electronic battle-plan, than with any incapacity for the polemical side of love. From the diamond glint in her eye he felt that she was already elsewhere. As the door closed he fell back in lassitude on a kitchen chair. Above the clatter of heels on the stair he could hear the cry of the first cavalry charge of the day.

  Many of the young women with whom Christopher tried to recreate the passion he had known with Carmen – a doomed and desperate mission – shared this braced eagerness for work. It was a word which they used, not with the cynicism of old lead-swingers, duty-dodgers, freewheelers, escapees, nor with the oppositional force of the historical radicals hoping to liberate the working man and woman from hated chains, but with a kind of whooping triumph. They loved their work and their employers loved them for that amatory gift. It gave them sense and purpose and a moral compass in a world of lost directions and abandoned distinctions. I am what I do. As an alternative to the terror of ennui, the pain of living inside the prison house of self, it was the sweetest option, requiring only complete surrender of the will to the imperative of the workplace. An effortless bargain. In exchange, they would receive status, hard cash, a tight, sure frame into which they could pack their youthful energies. This, it seemed to him as he drew patterns in spilt coffee on the melamine top of the kitchen table, was why they seemed so manically alert. They had something bright and glittering in their sights and they were going for it with vigour and excited pleasure. It was a world of clear present light – not a world of half-shadow and nuance, touched by the breath of history, fitful glimpses of the submerged alp of possibilities, the far-off mutter of other voices.

  It was not our world, Carmen, he told himself. She also could be known by her martial zest, her wild, quarrelsome vigour. But this was to omit her ability to give, her startling generosity of spirit. No longer bathed in its wash of light, he considered that he had grown more meagre. He was wasting away. He needed the aqua vitae of her presence. Instead, he drank the brackish water of her absence.

  When Carmen came back from Nice – she would not tell Christopher where she had been, or what had happened there, though he was sure that something quite distressing had taken place – they tried to mend the torn fabric of themselves by going away together. It worked. Abandoning their lives to the care of answering machines and the thickening snowfall of accumulating electronic messages, they spent fourteen days rediscovering themselves. The process was easy. It was like coming to a country house locked up for the winter. One has only to put the key in the lock, kick away the circulars and meagre mail from behind the door, pull off the dustsheets, light a fire in the cold, dusty hearth, sweep mouse-droppings from the kitchen drawers, quickly start a simple meal on the hob, open a bottle of wine reached down from the shelf where it has lain since the last visit. Once again Christopher and Carmen surprised each other with the reminder that, after all their frantic city agendas, nothing had changed in the remote landscape of their inner lives, its quiet motions still unrolling, the same trees in leaf, bright with new growth, the same sound of the brook running down the side of the adjoining meadow. That odd miracle of instant forgetting was re-enacted.

  They chose, after the briefest of debates, an island in the Sporades. The ferry docked at a tiny mole on which only a dozen people were waiting: an old couple lugging boxes fiercely tied up in string, a quickly trotting Orthodox priest with a long black beard who was nearly too late for the impatient boat, a motorcylist, a dusty lorry, several idlers or fishermen. They were the only passengers to disembark. With a peremptory hoot the ferry backed away and was soon steaming on to its remaining destinations. As they walked towards the waterfront its beauty silenced them. The houses were painted in white or in light pastel shades. There were few people about. The season for visitors having barely begun, they feared that they might have difficulty finding rooms, but an inquiry at the only open bar resulted in gestures, shouting, then the appearance, apparently from nowhere, of a middle-aged woman in black. She had an amused, ironic air. She led them up an open stairway to a room with a direct view of the harbour and the sea. It had clearly not been used since last season but she made the motion of a broom and grinned. They squeaked open the windows opening on to the balcony, scraped up two white plastic chairs, wiped off some bird lime, and sat down to breathe the lovely morning air, delighted at the warmth of the sun on their pale northern skins. At that moment, Carmen, Christopher reflects, I did not wish to be anywhere else, holding cupped in my hands the bright fluttering butterfly of present pleasure. I think you shared my desire. I think you would recall that moment were I to offer it to you now. But I cannot do so. I do not even know where to find you.

  Unthinkable, then, such an outcome.

  Each morning they would perform their ritual visit to the artopoieio, coming back with fresh bread to make their own coffee in the briki that hung in the small communal kitchen at the end of the corridor, all the rooms as yet uninhabited. Their arrival had acted as a catalyst. They heard the scrape of beds, the clatter of plastic dustpan on terrazzo floor, and the hosing down of chairs. The season was slowly declaring itself open.Their days were spent in delicious languor. After breakfast they would saunter up and down the waterfront, engaged on trivial and specious errands, then move slowly towards the beach or take a pack of bread, olives and a thin wedge of hard cheese up into the wooded hinterland where roseate craggy rocks hung over the twisting track and where they would climb for half a day before being driven down by the heat to a refreshing immersion in the transparent water of the pebbly beach. In the afternoons they would doze fitfully, or sit on the now shaded balcony reading their bulky paperbacks. What lessons, Christopher wonders, did I learn that fortnight from the plump pages of I Promessi Sposi? In the evenings, showered and changed, they would descend to the bar for a milky ouzo, then walk to the opposite end of the front to the single restaurant where they chose stuffed tomatoes or fresh fish, washed down with no doubt too many jugs of wine from the great dark barrel at the back of the cool interior of the taverna.

  And afterwards what lovers do, holding each other lightly, too sedated by this Sybaritic regime to detour into their customary verbal skirmishing. Looking back, from the ruin of his present existence, Christopher considered that the memory of this was almost sufficient to redeem what came after. He told himself that he had received his due, more than his due, and that it was mere greed, mere peevishness, to insist on coming back for more. He must learn that lesson. He must learn to let her go. Carmen’s disappearance may have been the better part of wisdom. Perhaps, after all, it was not from cruelty but from having his interests at heart that she discharged him. Made mellow by these recollections he will agree to anything. He saves the hangover for his bitter awakening in the small hours.

  Jimmy, however, he cannot forgive. That was palpable cruelty. Carmen allowed herself to grow apart from him, to extend towards the other’s sun for – what? A brief affair that lasted only weeks and which destroyed everything they had built. Yes, yes, they spoke of freedom. They repudiated possessiveness. They held on to their rights. But surely that was mere rhetoric? They did not believe – Christopher did not believe – that it would be put to the test. That either of them would act on it. Carmen gave herself to him, she made him the recipient of her marvellous gift and he tossed it back to her, hardly used. This he did n
ot understand.

  It has already been made clear that discord was the aphrodisiac cordial they quaffed. But on one occasion at least they became a splendid team of two. Before launching his career as a fashionable metropolitan shopfitter, Christopher had dabbled in photography. There had also been spells of teaching, pottery, landscape gardening – had he not also put on, for a season, the roomy trousers and peaked cap of a municipal park-keeper? Postgraduate qualifications in the literature of the Spanish-speaking peoples had quite disabled him from any proper and sustained employment. The photography had lasted for as long as six months. He had taken pictures of other people’s gardens for a range of horticultural and ‘leisure interest’ magazines – at the bottom end of that particular market. Now, Carmen was keen to use his services, for the good reason that he was very cheap. Her fitful ambition was to break out of the trivia of young women’s journalism (though Christopher always admired her skill in picking up the latest trends, mastering instantly the appropriate language) and launch herself as a serious broadsheet writer, profiling the better class of celebrity.

  The problem she and her editors faced was that of a diminishing number of potential subjects. All the big game had been captured. In addition, the pool of celebrity was being re-stocked with inferior fish. The link between fame and talent having been more or less severed, a subject could be invented overnight, thus staving off shortages. But there was sometimes a problem, even with the more optimistic features editors, in convincing readers that they had heard of the celebrity being wheeled out into position. In short, there was no shortage of minnows but where were the leaping salmon, the savage-toothed pike? One solution to the problem was the sub-genre of rediscovered celebrity. Ancient relics of Bloomsbury who had an anecdote or two to tell about Dorothy Brett or Maynard Keynes or Virginia Woolf (involving with luck a sexual misdemeanour or a scabrous mot) were particularly well-received. It gave the reader a pleasant frisson to think of how brittle was the platform on which fame rested. Set against today’s ubiquitous trollop was the wizened oldster who had slept with HG Wells and now lived obscurely in Somerset in a cottage thick with books and dusty oils by forgotten Edwardians who were once the outriders of the avant-garde. The appeal was that of ancient manners, patrician hauteur, and old venom recapitulated in perfect sentences. A feminist critic who had been a university contemporary of Carmen’s tipped her off about Lavinia Watersmith, whose solitary novel, Absent From Felicity (1931) was about to be re-issued by a new post-feminist imprint.

  “Yes, but where is Great Malvern?” Christopher asked Carmen in a tone which nonetheless implied that his consent was taken for granted. He told her that he had a new job starting in three days’ time so they had better move quickly.

  Carmen, a city girl to the core of her being, was unable to answer his question without recourse to a large, flapping road atlas. Since Miss Watersmith’s diary was not, these days, crammed as tight as a city banker’s with important assignations, she was able to accommodate them the following day. They were at Paddington station next morning at 8.30 a.m. Christopher was warned to hold his tongue, avoid calling her “Mizz”, and be on the look-out for good framing shots. There was at least one Carrington painting in the house and, it was rumoured, a rare portrait of Lytton Strachey by a talent so obscure that neither of them could hold the name in their minds longer than the time taken to be told it over the phone by Carmen’s academic buddy.

  Two hours after leaving Paddington, the train pulled in to a delightful station, rather like those one had as a child in a railway set. Yellow stone, cast iron pillars wrapped around by fruiting vines in coloured tin, a few bewildered Japanese tourists, and a mad Worcestershire aboriginal in a white open-necked shirt mouthing imprecations at anyone who would listen, all greeted them as they disembarked. As if to suggest that this was quite far enough for any civilised person to venture, the train immediately prepared to reverse for the return journey to London. There were no taxis in the designated rank so they set off on foot through leafy streets flanked by large, solid houses. A pall of suffocating gentility hung over the town, whose inhabitants seemed universally ancient and well-to-do.

  “We are in the heart of middle class, middle England, my sweet,” Christopher informed Carmen in a tone of thin sarcasm.

  “Makes you want to head straight back to the Smoke.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Albion Villa, Hyacinth Drive.”

  “Is that for real?”

  “It’s what it says here.”

  Soon they stopped a ruddy local in mirror-bright brown brogues and a pale green tweed jacket in whose V was lodged an efflorescent yellow Paisley cravat. Ebulliently, he turned them round and gestured towards the distance and Hyacinth Drive, third on the left. In his excitement he dropped a string bag of library books, causing his small Scots terrier in its tartan cummerbund to break into a fit of shrill yapping. They thanked him and darted away.

  “Quiet, Monty! Quiet, there’s a good chap!”

  Carmen spoke for them both when she observed that this had better be worth it. Hyacinth Drive turned out to be a steep ascent towards the base of the Malvern Hills. The substantial late Victorian villas – with their high protective shrubberies, solid gates built to withstand the intruder, and their air of quiet, self-assured dulness – retreated from the sloping road, being reachable by asphalted drives of a gradient even steeper than that of the Drive itself. Albion Villa eventually hove into view. It was much like the others, though its paintwork was in a poorer state of repair, and the garden was slipping easily into a state of urban wilderness. Brightly coloured weeds poked out of the fissures in the asphalt, and the front gate lacked several of its supporting struts. They marched up to the front door which turned out to be open. A small shrill voice called from within:

  “Is that you, Miss O’Hare? Do please come in. The door is open.”

  Tentatively, with that extravagant slowness of movement – tender smirks, condescending sweetness of manner – with which we behave when approaching the elderly and infirm, Carmen and Christopher crossed into the hallway. A gloriously blue canvas crossed by a solitary white gull winging above a trough of yellow sand filled the whole of the left-hand wall, quite diverting their eyes from the threadbare carpet.

  Miss Watersmith, her white hair disordered as if she had been caught in a stiff gale at sea, smiled welcomingly at them, her veined and knobbled hands gripping tightly a light aluminium Zimmer frame. She looked like a benign little bishop about to deliver a sermon from the pulpit. She wore a loud orange dress of delicate silk which must have been quite a hit in 1947. She cocked her head in the direction of the front room which opened off to the right.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment. Do make yourselves comfortable. Mrs Meredith has been so kind and laid out our coffee things. If you could be so kind as to pour us all out some coffee, Mr...”

  “Wilson.”

  “That would be most kind. I am afraid that I take such a long time to complete anything these days.”

  And then she laughed (having moved about three feet into the room):

  “But time, contrary to the conceits of the poets who would see me hastening to the grave, is what I seem, these days, to have in abundance. I can happily spend half an hour getting up to consult a dictionary for one word. When I was young I seemed to have no time at all. We lived, you know, in such an unconscionable whirl. We were so fast. But now I am inundated with time. The days are so long. And Charon and his dark boat are nowhere to be seen.”

  They laughed a little too enthusiastically.

  “I expect you have come to hear me prattle about my days with Virginia. That’s what they all seem to want to hear now. It’s an awful thing to say but I didn’t really like her at all. She was so bluestockingy, and such a wicked gossip. That was the thing I didn’t like about that set. So malicious in their gossip. It really wasn’t necessary. I think that they didn’t really care for ordinary human kindness. There was something cold an
d brittle about them all. But oh, so immensely clever and so witty and so entertaining when they wished to be. I expect we would all be the poorer without them.”

  Miss Watersmith had reached her high chair, transferring herself thither with a neat, pleasant little movement from the support of the Zimmer which remained parked in front of her. Christopher brought her a cup of coffee and another to Carmen. The Woolf anecdotes had been milked dry by previous expeditions up the dandelion-pocked drive. Carmen had already explained that there was nothing more to be had there. She intended to focus on the novel but her editor expected at least a few scraps of gossip that weren’t already stowed in the cuttings file.

  “Yes it’s quite extraordinary,” Lavinia continued. “To think that my little book should be given another outing and so late in the day. It was considered quite a controversial novel at the time of course. Compared to what one reads today or sees on the television it no doubt strikes you as very tame indeed. But even my buried hints at love between women were too strong for some stomachs. The moral reprovers are so good at picking up the merest hint of sexual unorthodoxy. I think their minds must dwell on it a great deal. When I look at it now I think perhaps that I made it too sentimental. The heroine is rather a drip, don’t you think?”

  As Carmen swung into action at this prompt Christopher began to withdraw his camera from its bag with the wily circumspection of a bagsnatcher. Lavinia looked across at him and waved her assent with a little playful gesture of the hand. He started to move around the room, waiting for the decisive moment. He was half listening to her talk.

  “Of course we saw Mosley rather differently in those days. He was quite dashingly handsome and so many people felt in the 1920s and the 1930s that things were in such a frightful muddle that some stronger medicine was needed. The traditional prescriptions hadn’t really worked. I suppose he offered a solution of sorts. With the benefit of hindsight we can see it was all wrong of course. But hindsight is something you never have at the time. I sometimes wonder if we don’t need something a little more forceful now with all these dreadful strikes and so forth.”