Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  Carmen skilfully drew her Fabian heroine away from these jagged black rocks towards a calmer expanse of untroubled water. It was the Sapphic seam that she had been instructed to mine. “Politics are a complete turn-off for readers at the moment,” her editor had warned her.

  Christopher continued his prowling around the room like a child playing a game of hide and seek. He was reasonably confident that he had collected a sufficient number of revealing and/or quirky shots around which Carmen’s text would wrap itself like a well-managed vine.

  Eventually, Carmen concluded that she would get no more juice from this wrinkled lemon and stood up with, it seemed to Christopher, an unnecessary brusqueness. They offered to gather up the coffee things but Lavinia waved away their gesture.

  “Mrs Meredith will deal with all that later. I don’t know what I would do without her. She’s Welsh, but very nice.”

  They retreated down the camber of her drive with their idiot smiles flashing like warning lamps. Back in the herbaceous street they conducted a quick post-mortem.

  “You didn’t get to the story about Virginia Woolf’s knickers and the Henley Regatta?” he queried.

  “If that anecdote gets another outing the public will scream.”

  They left Great Malvern in good spirits. The outcome, however, would be brutally disappointing. The piece was set up on screen yet spiked peremptorily by a new features editor who swept into the office on her first day determined to establish her authority by a casual show of violence. Carmen’s profile was the first blood-sacrifice of the day. By then it was too late to offer it around to those few broadsheets who cared sufficiently about mid-twentieth century literature, all of whom either had decided Watersmith was an obscure relic or had commissioned their tie-in pieces already. Their little joint essay eventually found a home in a badly-produced literary quarterly emanating from North Shields where it appeared fourteen months later.

  Carmen came back from Nice in a state of shock. That terrible business finished for the time being her affair with Jimmy (though a breeze would stir the embers into flame once or twice more). It was an accident. She found it hard to see that it could have been avoided, even if they had been more vigilant, less absorbed in each other. Even the parents of the dead child seemed to accept that this was so, blaming themselves, in spite of the protestations of Jimmy and Carmen, for not exercising more care over their precious child. She would wake, shaking, seeing the whole scene replayed with preternatural vividness, reliving its terror, night after night. Until, of course, it began to fade, slipping back into that repertory of casual horrors that the system of nightmares keeps for future use.

  Christopher, towards whom she felt she had behaved so monstrously, was marvellous. Knowing nothing of what had happened and therefore freed from the need to express the usual fatuous reassurances, the sentimental clichés, he merely waited for her, listening, avoiding comment, allowing her to say what she needed to say, however halting and self-contradictory and exhausted her utterance. Carmen had gone straight back to him. He suspected that her deliberate vagueness about her reasons for going to Nice – a refusal that was not unusual between them, so fiercely did they cling to their freedom – covered something that would turn out to be painful for him. Perhaps for that reason he drew back from interrogating her, from seeking to know more. She decided not to come clean, saying only that she had witnessed a dreadful accident whilst staying with an old friend. She was sure that he was unconvinced by the detail but it suited him to go along with the general tenor of her explanation.

  But something irrevocable had happened. Not-

  withstanding the freedom of their relationship, its absence of shackles and demands, an important barrier had been breached. Carmen had been seriously dishonest with Christopher. Deceit had now entered their mutual existence like a virus. Their life together would never be the same again. Perhaps that point can be identifed as the start of the process which led to its dissolution. If so, she considered that she had only herself to blame. But on those occasions when they had talked in the past – in the most general terms – about ‘relationships’ they had agreed that chance plays the greatest part and that the course of an involvement can often seem pre-destined, our own ability to steer it, to rescue it from disaster, turning out to be quite limited. In short, no one is to blame. No doubt a very convenient philosophy for some partners.

  Carmen agreed to Christopher’s suggestion that they take a fortnight in Greece. It was a way of avoiding morbidity – or the possibility of an approach from Jimmy for whom she was not ready – and it proved a success. She was drawn back to Christopher. They were closer during that fortnight than they had ever been. It is true that she was troubled by her deceit. She could not say to him just why he meant so much to her at that time. Her renewed affection for him was triggered by a remorse that could not be confessed but which, in some sense, she felt sure he understood. They gave themselves to the immediate moment, something that it was rarely possible to do in their London lives – they were so bound up with calculating self-interest and ambition. As Carmen lay on that raked, pebbled beach she turned over in her mind again and again the direction her life had taken and seemed likely to take in the future. It is not unusual, she felt sure, for people to consider that their lives have taken a wrong turning, even when they are decked in the livery of apparent success. She tried to impose a shape on what had already happened: the precocious student, the heroine of the neatly measured-out wild period, the reformed, promising post-graduate, then the reaction against an academic career, the pursuit of metropolitan success. To say that she was not satisfied misses the point. No one in her world, she considered, believed that they were satisfied. Indeed, the restless, manic energy, of those media trades was driven by unease, by a desire to break out from something unspecified into something else even more impalpable. Yet at the same time it was the continuous process that possessed Carmen and her colleagues. She would nonetheless gladly have changed places, taken up something more radically fulfilling. The problem was that she did not have the first idea what that desirable avocation might be.

  After they returned Carmen resolved to take some small measures of amelioration. She would devote herself at least to the odd assignment that bespoke quality. That was what prompted her to take Christopher with her as photographer on the doomed assignment, whose chaotic outcome was one that she might have been able to predict. She went quickly back to her bright trash. To her dismay, she discovered she was getting better at it. The commissions came in such profusion that she was working harder than ever. She even won an award sponsored by a hairspray giant.

  One evening Carmen was rung by an old friend. The call came as she sat with Christopher at an aluminium table set up outside an Italian coffee shop in Wardour Street. He joked that it was another of her lovers. She said sweetly that she did not usually choose her own sex. She and Alice met two days later at a restaurant in Southampton Row.

  Alice had always been striking, but now she seemed to Carmen to have reached that level of casual perfection that one associated with legendary French film actresses who have discovered the means of outwitting time. She was dressed in the very simplest outfit of black which you knew instinctively (without being remotely able to guess at the house of couture which had sold it to her) to be very expensive. Her movements, her way of holding herself, gave away her profession. Carmen had always wondered how Alice survived in it. The model agencies seemed now to prefer anorexic waifs, street kids, the calculatedly dishevelled. Alice, a reprehensible twenty years older than these new fashion magazine icons, belonged to an older school of studied elegance. Even that word now rang a little false. But she was still in demand. There remained certain products which traded on a more traditional image of female beauty. She was just young enough, and just elegant enough, to appeal to the classier end of the market. She was also utterly without illusion. She knew that her days were numbered, that cool aplomb was one thing and that wrinkles, the resistless decay of
the flesh, were another.

  Carmen had assumed that, being in London briefly from her Paris base, Alice had been at a loose end and wanted simply to catch up with an old friend. But as they talked it became clear that something else was worrying her. The main course had barely arrived when she began to broach her real agenda.

  “Did you know I was thinking of packing it all in?”

  “But why? I thought you were at your peak. I must have seen you seven times going down the escalator at Green Park the other day.”

  “Oh God, that jewellery they made me wear was ghastly.”

  “Rather Versace, I thought.”

  “Don’t mention that name in my presence.”

  “Is this a case of quitting while you’re ahead?”

  “Not exactly, but of course one has to be careful not to overstay one’s welcome on the billboards.”

  “Then it’s something else. I can’t help noticing you’ve been silent on our usual topic.”

  “Oh, the love-life is still the same.”

  “I bet it is.”

  “Don’t believe anything you read in the media about G____.”

  “So what’s the new departure? Don’t tell me you’re writing a novel.”

  “Oh, Car, credit me with some IQ.”

  “Then what is it: revulsion at the shallowness of the fashion industry? But you were revolted by it before you even took your first trip along the catwalk.”

  “No, it’s something else.”

  As they spoke, Carmen could see a change coming over Alice. Slowly, her trademark composure, the achieved poise that fashion editors could not stop falling for after all these years, crumpled, collapsed inward like a plastic beaker tossed on to a bonfire. For the first time Carmen saw a new side of her. She saw a kind of exhaustion, a sudden glimpse of vulnerability, uncertainty, confusion. Not perhaps so very different from expressions she had seen at moments of stress on the faces of other friends, but so wholly at odds with what she expected from Alice that it shocked her. Carmen waited for Alice to explain in her own time.

  “I don’t know whether any of this will make sense. I know that I will be accused of ‘over-reacting’. The highly strung pedigree racehorse panicking in the viewing enclosure. That’s usually how they deal with my outbreaks of feeling which, as everyone knows, I am not supposed to have. The glittering ‘icon’ is not meant to show any passion, to lose her cool. But what everyone forgets is that it is all a performance. It is put on. And sometimes one wants to put it off, to allow the real me to escape.”

  “That’s usually a mistake, believe me. But we’re all playing roles. Look at the stuff I churn out.”

  Alice looked at Carmen and laughed. It was an interval in the gloom. She had obviously read some of her friend’s pieces, probably in magazines where the text threaded itself around the bodies of Alice’s younger friends. Carmen reflected that she didn’t expect Alice to show quite such ready endorsement of her self-deprecation.

  “No, it’s something more than the usual ritual self-loathing.”

  “Which comes with the turf.”

  “Exactly.”

  Carmen looked at Alice’s hands. They were so perfectly shaped – giving the manicurist so little to do in the way of enhancement of their effect. She stretched them out in front of her as if she were calculating the value of an asset, an object. Her beauty, Carmen felt (not for the first time) was unsettling. Could one be almost too perfect?

  “It happened about three weeks ago. I was coming up an escalator at Bond Street – just like you said a moment ago. It was that same poster.”

  “The one in the white knickers and the gold jewellery. The Egyptian slave look.”

  “Someone had...”

  She faltered. Carmen wasn’t sure whether to take her hand, to offer her some physical reassurance, but neither of them had ever been the touchy-feely type. Instead, she waited for Alice to pick herself up, to put herself back on course.

  “Someone had scribbled some graffiti... across the... crotch.”

  She broke down. She whispered across the table the vile little obscenity that some twisted mind had framed. Short, vicious, impregnated with hate for her sexuality, her womanhood. She took a deep slug of white wine and struggled to continue.

  “It’s not the first time, of course, it’s often no more than an adolescent joke. One has to be used to it. It’s a professional hazard and often a relatively minor one. After all, if you flaunt your body across the hoardings and the bookstalls, you can hardly justify maidenly outrage. The house rule is to take it all on the chin, to minimise it, to avoid being uncool. But there was something different about this. There was a kind of virulence about it that chilled me. Where do words – thoughts – like that come from? Are they just random, a lone nutter? Or is this widespread? If so, it frightens me.”

  “I’m sure there have always been people like this around.”

  “But I sense that it’s ... deeper, somehow. I got a kind of chill off that, as if it were the tip of something, or a curtain pulled back on something very nasty indeed.”

  Carmen looked hard at Alice. She wasn’t sure she was handling this very well. The obvious feminine solidarity was there. All women have known harassment and worse. Alice knew Carmen was on her side. And, naturally, these were topics she had sounded off enough about in her pieces over the years. But there was something else at work here. She was seeing the gradual removal of a brilliant, gilt-flecked veil and beneath it was a woman fearful and exposed. The Alice sitting across the table from her was not the Alice that the world knew. It was not the Alice that Carmen knew.

  “The fact is, Car, I’m frightened. Frightened at what I’ve done.”

  “At what you have done!”

  “Haven’t I colluded in this, turned myself into an image of upmarket sexuality, offering an eyeful to every passenger on the Underground?”

  “Oh, Alice, please! This is all wrong. You are a beautiful woman. You have added beauty to the world – think of those Bruce Neubauer pics. They’re in the Museum of Modern Art for Christ’s sake! Women shouldn’t be required to cover themselves up, to deny their sexuality, their pleasure in how they are, just because a minority of men...”

  Alice looked up and smiled through her tears.

  “You once would have said a majority of men.”

  Their laughter dispatched much of the tension that had been building up. This time Carmen did find herself stretching her hand across the table, giving those beautiful hands a gentle squeeze.

  “The fact is that I am through with this business. I suppose you never make a decision for one reason alone. It’s been building up for some time. The disgust at the business is always there. Liked piped music in a department store. But I can see that I have only a limited amount of time. I am thinking of selling that tiny Manhattan apartment – do you remember, you stayed there – and making Paris my main base. And, yes, I have been talking to publishers, but about a sort of reminiscence.”

  “Well, you have met just about everybody.”

  “I think I can survive. There are all sorts of things I want to do and I’d rather choose to do them now than wait for them to be forced on me as a kind of survival strategy. I’d like to spend the next phase of my life doing some proper living. Perhaps that nasty little creature with the indelible pen has done me a favour after all.”

  Alice was slowly recovering, gathering up the scattered fragments of herself, re-establishing the customary poise. It was a subtly mingled process, physical and emotional, utterly riveting to watch. She kept drawing herself up, straightening her back, stretching out her arms, breathing deeply, running one of those slender beautiful fingers across her brow. When she had finished, when the process was complete, she turned her attention to Carmen.

  “And what have you been up to? How’s life with Christopher?”

  “Oh, we’ve had our usual ups and downs. It’s fine just now.”

  “Has there been anyone else?”

  She interpr
eted Carmen’s silence.

  “So you’ve been a naughty girl again?”

  “We’ve always been very open. Actually, that’s not the right word. In some ways we’re not open at all. We have always made a point of allowing ourselves as much...”

  “Don’t say it. ‘Space’”

  “You think I’m living out one of my ‘lifestyle pieces’?”

  “Possibly. But I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

  “No, go on.”

  “You mean that you don’t feel the need to tell each other everything. I’ve always been the same. It goes against the textbooks which say you have to share every damn thing. But I want the freedom to be myself in a relationship. To have secrets when I want them. Why should I have to tell everything.”

  “Your publishers will be expecting you to.”

  “That’s different. That’s for dosh, darling.”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “No, I suppose not. I’ve just decided to give a little more indulgence to the real me – if I know, after all these years, who that is. I’ve had a good run for my money. If I start to whinge tell me to be quiet.”

  They had now reached the end of their meal. The waiters, drawn like moths to a lamp by Alice’s beauty, had pestered them throughout with unnecessary inquiries – and that damned pepperpot the size of an elephant’s phallus. They asked for the bill and exchanged up-to-date addresses. Alice ordered Carmen to come and see her in Paris. She was flying out first thing in the morning. There would be no time to see Christopher.

  “Another time, darling,” the fully-restored Alice purred as she flagged down a cab in New Oxford Street. She stepped into the back of the vehicle and waved regally, before popping her head through the window.

  “Oh, by the way, I had a call from that gorgeous hulk, Jimmy, earlier in the week. He’s got an engagement in Paris the week after next and he’s going to look me up.”