“Why’s that?” Jimmy found himself asking rather tartly.
He was familiar with Worsley, who had interviewed him on his weekly radio arts programme a year earlier. It purported to be a discussion about the public’s tolerance of new music but it turned out to be the usual ritual display of soundbites provided by a round-up of people who seemed to Jimmy to have little passion for music of any kind. He was cast as the Uncompromising Artist, and round the studio table there was an Earnest Provincial Post-Modernist Academic, a Smirking Populist, and a New Labour Voice Machine. Worsley slurped his way through two bottles of wine, occasionally sending the bottle in the direction of the panel as an afterthought, before abruptly calling time in response to a gesture from the producer on the other side of the soundproof glass who mimed the slashing of his own throat – a gesture with which Jimmy could only sympathise.
“Well, first of all they do Posh. Those high-pitched upper crust voices talking about Bertie and Virginia and Aldous are cracking radio. And then there’s the sheer bloody marvel that they’re still alive. Still churning out anecdotes about people whom you thought had died half a century ago – at least. The market for this sort of thing is always buoyant.”
“But you aren’t really talking about the artistic giants are you? These people were minor players even in their own day.”
“True but the big game have all been bagged.”
Carmen now cut in aggressively.“How do you rate Ben Bush then?”
She gestured towards the photographer, who was now out in the yard like every other escapee from the heat of the gallery and surrounded by admirers. He was dressed in black with Ray-Bans propped up on the top of his head. He rolled a cigarette, while a blonde journalist with a small Sony recorded his clipped replies to her questions.
“Don’t care for his stuff much. It’s all been done better by Danziger. But he’s very sexy just now. The Observer are doing a feature on Sunday. The book is in the hardback top ten. We can’t afford to ignore it.”
“What is the radio equivalent of bums on seats?” Christopher suddenly asked.
“Earholes on static,” suggested Carmen with a laugh.
Worsley looked a little put out. He probably thought that they weren’t taking him seriously enough. In common with most people in his trade he had an immoveable conviction of his own importance but at the same time required periodic affirmation of that status. Like someone pressing a safety button he signalled madly to another group and, making a swift apology, darted off to join them. They all looked at each other in relief. Christopher spoke first.
“It’s faintly worrying that people like that are in charge of the imaginary museum.”
“I have never met anyone who actually listens to his programme,” said Carmen.
“Oh I am sure there are a few insomniacs, lonely car drivers, academics wondering how to break in to the racket,” Jimmy speculated. “It’s just as well that the listeners can’t see him, given his standards of personal grooming.”
Carmen now indicated that she had had enough. Christopher nodded his agreement but first she dashed across to Bush, cutting across his interviewer, and pecked him on the cheek, then muttered some non-specific approbation about the show. Jimmy watched her go, thinking that he too must follow. But, when she reached the open door of the gallery, she turned, in the realisation that she had left behind a tote-bag of papers on a table placed against the rear wall of the yard. She walked quickly back towards Jimmy. He watched every motion of her body and when she came up to him he knew that she had been aware of the greed of his gaze. She bent to pick up the bag and said, quickly, in a matter-of-fact tone: “Jimmy, give me a call. I’ve got to go now.”
His eyes followed her again as she retraced her way across the yard. Christopher was waiting to gather her into the care of his outstretched arm. He turned to Jimmy and smiled in all candour. Then they both disappeared.
Jimmy waited for a few minutes, walked back into the gallery to take another look at the photographs, then slipped quietly away, knowing that he would indeed ring Carmen, very probably the next day.
Carmen knew that she should not have gone back to Jimmy. After Nice something had changed in her, quite apart from the particular change in the way she saw him. There was now something unpleasant, reproachful, quite hideous, in their mutual history. She knew that the right thing would have been to cut him out of her life, to concentrate either on rebuilding her relationship with Christopher or on the task of finding a new direction. That had always been her response to any personal crisis or dilemma: to move on. She loathed therapies, analyses, probes, and inquests. She wanted always to snatch a new beginning from the ruins of the present moment. She wanted to act. Perhaps this was naive, to think that one can cut loose, that one can cancel out the memory of failure. Might it not come back, inevitably, to haunt one? Or was that to concede too much to the memory-merchants, the exactors of retribution, the people who do not want to see you go, slipping out of their hands? She had always wanted to be free and had been perplexed throughout her life at how this ruling desire is not widespread, at how passionately so many love their slavery.
Carmen went back to Jimmy. He rang her on the morning after the private view. She could hear music playing in the background which surprised her, for he would always lecture her about combining music with other activities. He saw this as a demonstration that one was not listening. He sounded a little distracted, a little uncertain, as if he knew, as she did, that this was unwise, that the proper path was well understood and that they were choosing not to take it. They agreed to meet for lunch at a little place in Dean Street of which thay had been fond. The choice seemed to suggest a touch of harmless nostalgia: two old friends meeting again for old time’s sake. To have chosen a new venue would have been too much like a bold step forward into new terrain. When the manager came from the rear of the restaurant, recognised them, greeted them warmly, they both experienced a tremor of unease. Like guilty lovers, terrified at being found out, uneasy at their momentary triumphs, they smiled nervously at the manager, accepted the menu cards – and laughed when Jimmy, without thinking, ordered a particular Muscadet. This had always been their way of starting a meal on the first, rare and intermittent, summer evenings they spent together, while Christopher toiled late at some overdue refit, in the weeks before Nice.
They drank their wine, ordered, broke their bread rolls, and drank their chilled soup accompanied by a steady murmur of unexcitable conversation. They moved these banalities between them like counters on a board. Neither seemed willing, at first, to raise the stakes, to say what needed to be said. Carmen decided that she had better start to force the pace.
“So Alice is giving it all up. Did she tell you why?”
“Not really. I assumed that she wanted to quit while she was ahead. Her assets are not renewable, sadly.”
“But she’s still in good shape.”
“Well, you’ve seen her recently yourself.”
“Did she talk about that.”
“Not really. I take it she told you more than she told me.”
“I think that there might have been some... catalyst but I think her official reasons are sensible enough.”
“She seems very astute. She has invested very wisely in property in various cities. I don’t think she will have to struggle. And if the book dishes the right amount of dirt she should do very well out of it.”
“Do you like Alice?”
“Yes.”
“You seem to hesitate.”
“I suppose I do. There is a sort of controlling element in her which makes me uneasy.”
“I thought you found me too bossy as well.”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t mind boisterous, combative people who fight their corner. This is something else. It’s a kind of awesome self-control that I find quite chilling. It’s hard to express it but I find her too perfect. The looks are part of it and since they are her professional tools, as it were, she has to work on them,
keep them well-oiled and sharpened. I can’t criticise her for that. No, I suppose it’s the way everything fits so neatly. Her diary, her movements from one flat to the other, one city to another, her routine in the gym. I don’t know how she conducts her love-life but I am sure it is equally well-regulated. There isn’t a lot left to chance in Alice’s life.”
“You didn’t discuss her love-life, garner any personal insights?”
“Carmen, that’s rather low-level sarcasm for you.”
“I was wondering what you two did in Paris.”
“Why don’t you just come out with it. Did I sleep with Alice? No I didn’t sleep with Alice. OK?”
“OK. Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
Jimmy put his hand over hers, he picked a tiny breadcrumb off her sleeve with his free hand and they said nothing for a few moments. Carmen knew she was playing with fire but what could she do? After the meal they went back to his apartment near Regent’s Park. It was all so easy. Inevitable.
Looking back, Carmen told herself that she wouldn’t have blamed Christopher – had he known the full facts – for taking the same liberty. But the fact is, knowing that he was unaware of Jimmy’s presence in her life, she did indeed blame him. She had no right but she blamed him nonetheless. She was not proud of that. She frankly owned to being a monstrous hypocrite. During one of their rows she even managed to tell Christopher that it was because she loved him that she was hurt by his betrayal. Yet still she wouldn’t tell him about Jimmy. He had to learn that for himself from other people, from guesswork, from hints. She never told him about Nice. It had become too complex a memory for her. She wasn’t suppressing it but every time her mind settled on it the implications became more distasteful. Later, she discovered that Jimmy saw it as some sort of sign, a celestial rebuke for their misbehaviour. She told him that this was a mere hang-up from his Jesuitical education, that they were living in the twenty-first century, that the Gods had departed. Once again, she was talking herself up, trying to silence the voice in her head, the one that said the same thing in a different touchy-feely version. She would conclude that you can’t escape the notion that your actions have consequences, whatever mythological, theological, therapeutic babble you use to express the thought. What unsettled her about the death of that child was the fact that she couldn’t separate out the idea of culpability (were they, in the end, responsible; could it have been avoided?) from all the other reasons to be guilty that paraded before the ethical camera-eye.
Sometimes she looked back to her schooldays, to what people think of as the simple pieties of the nuns. In her twenties she repudiated the lot. She laughed at what seemed their platitudinous banality but later she came to see it differently. She began to see that even the most clumsy attempt at plotting a moral course may be an attempt worth the effort. She felt, rightly or wrongly, that the nuns were out of their depth, professionally required to deal in certain concepts that their platitudes simply reduced, ossified, stripped of the vital dimension of life and growth, the tension of individual choice. The world offered its challenges beyond the brick wall and cast iron railing perimeter of their convent in the suburbs. The only tools that would prove adequate to that challenge were the ones that could tackle any sort of mess. Today, in her thirties, she was no longer certain even of her repudiations. She had passed into a new phase where she was not sure what she believed. She suspected this to be, at present, a more or less universal condition.
Christopher knew something had happened in Nice but with her second dalliance he came to know more or less everything. That he hated Jimmy was obvious enough. Men, Carmen considered, do not always react like this. Sometimes they become oddly magnanimous and forgiving. She had always put this down to their own secret guilts but now she wondered if there were not something more intricate and puzzling to this way of reacting than she could comprehend. Christopher’s contempt for Jimmy was absolute. So ferocious indeed that it ended by more or less letting her off the hook. She was uncomfortable with this for she knew she was no saint. She felt sorry for Christopher, genuinely sorry, for she knew that he loved her with an intensity that was new for her, that she had never known in any previous relationship. She felt certain that he also had never known it.
Perhaps, too, she felt sorry for both of them, for the melancholy wreck of their life together, for the imbecile way in which they had thrown away their love.
But then Joanna came on to the scene. From the moment Carmen saw her she sensed trouble. She immediately developed towards her a powerful animosity. This was her first mistake because it awoke Christopher’s sense of fair play. It was as if he needed to protect Joanna from her – which was absurd to begin with and then, of course, inevitable. Carmen knew that she was in a weak position but could not find a way to be consistent. I am a human being after all, she protested. At her first meeting with Joanna at the restaurant where they were the guests of her husband, Carl, she found the man decent enough but something of a bore. The amount of information she could take on board about industrial flooring and ceramic tiles was severely limited and on this occasion – to do with Christopher’s having rescued him from that design dilemma – there was more of it than could be considered decent. Although she had never been much disposed to girl’s chat, Carmen could have taken refuge in talking to Joanna, but her hostility was already being cranked up and they didn’t get very far. Carl was a well-built, handsome guy with untidy blond hair and rather large, rough hands which his trade had made rougher. Although he was an architect, he seemed so obsessive that his work was invariably ‘hands-on’. He would discard his management suit jacket and get down with the men, wrestling with the sheer physicality of the task in front of him. There was a stark, blue glitter in his eye which ought to have been seductive in a challenging sort of way but which, as the evening wore on, Carmen discovered to be the light of mania. In fact, she thought, he was barking. What sort of life was it to prowl the streets of central London looking for opportunities to force a dreary template onto various recalcitrant premises? He seemed to have no other life, no hinterland of interests or passions outside this obsessive Procrustean job of work. No interest, that is, except large and expensive cars. She nearly wept when the conversation, having finally wrung the last drop from the matter of cutting-edge German floor varnish, modulated easily into a discussion of the new range of Audis. No subject could have been better designed to send her into a sullen and subdued rage than that of motoring. She called for another bottle of wine, threw out some outrageous provocations – to no avail – then resigned herself to some occasional sarcasms and listless (but doomed) attempts to prod Joanna into life. Living in Whitfield Street, she walked everywhere that was possibly of interest and there was always a taxi available should she ever find herself in some barbarian outpost (a provincial main-line railway station, the end of the District Line, Wood Green after midnight). The car was simply a thing that did not intrude on her consciousness if she could help it.
When they finally reached the end of this exasperating evening; when Carl had kissed her on both cheeks; and when Christopher had done the same to the simpering Joanna, who now clutched a spray of roses which she had persuaded Chrisopher to offer her, a tribute he would not have been so foolish as to try to pay Carmen. As they walked through the busy streets of Soho, Carmen and Christopher were squaring up for a major argument. Having drunk too much, in order to soothe the ache of her boredom, she was louder and coarser than she would have wished to be. Christopher – already smitten by the pale rose girl? – was quiet and restrained, less disposed than usual to rise to her challenges and poisoned darts.
“I think I now know all I am ever likely to need to know about the art of laying wooden flooring.”
“You have to realise that Carl is a perfectionist.”
“Don’t you mean a bore and a tyrant?”
“He cares about his work. It’s his life.”
“My point exactly. What sort of a life is it that turns on whether a millimet
re needs to be shaved off a Spanish tile? The man is an automaton. He’s only half alive.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t appreciate that other people have different ways of taking their satisfactions in life.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I know it all too well. But generally I stay well out of their way. Life is too short to spend it in the company of bores.”
“I thought Joanna was quite pleasant.”
“Quite pleasant! Do me a favour! She hardly said a thing all night, sitting there with those fucking roses in her lap like a virgin bridesmaid.”
“I think that’s a bit unfair.”
“Oh, I’m sorry if I was unfair. That was quite wrong of me. Perish the thought that anyone should be unfair. She was more your type was she? The pale English rose?”
“Save your clichés for your magazine pieces.”
“So what was the appeal, then? Grown tired of loud-mouthed bitches?”
“Since you mention it, you were a bit over the top tonight.”
“Over the top! Look, I was fighting for my life out there. Trapped between two megabores locked into the intricacies of fucking varnish and Miss Muffet and her floral arrangement, I was trying to inject some spark into that heap of sawdust. And to cap it all you then launch into a discussion of motor cars! You don’t even own one.”
“You must provide me, next time, with a list of approved topics of conversation.”
“Chris my sweet, there won’t be a next time. If you and Carl want to salivate over gearboxes do it sometime when I’m out of town.”
Their conversation had become so animated that Carmen hardly noticed her surroundings. She nearly trod on a beggar who was holding out a paper cup at his pitch under an ATM in Oxford Street. He looked at her with pained disapproval.
“Have a nice day.”
“Chance would be a fine thing.”
As if to rebuke her, Christopher walked firmly over to the young man and placed a couple of pound coins in his cup, which bore the livery of Souper Kitchen.
Remembering Carmen Page 8
