Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  They carried on, the argument declining in ever-decreasing circles until it ended in mere coarse invective. And then in silence. Next day Carmen had to fly to Malaga to cover a travel-trade conference for one of her bread-and-butter magazines and she left early. Christopher was still asleep. It turned out to be a busy assignment and she met a few people whom she had not seen for some time so she soon forgot that tedious meal and their row (which, she knew, was not out of the ordinary). Later, she wondered if it was that very day that aggrieved Christopher first picked up the phone to Joanna, suggesting an innocent enough meeting, a pleasant lunch on a sunny London pavement. Everything about Joanna was pleasant. The word summed her up. No greater contrast than with herself: motormouth, the hard bitch, the tough cookie. Definitely not pleasant.

  Yet, that is not how I see myself, she now thinks. I do not believe it was how Christopher truly saw me. Our sparring and shouting was a kind of playful ritual, a letting-off of steam, a declaration of our energy and passion, a proof – I always felt – that we were alive. He opened me up, he taught me that I could give and I believe that I gave him a great deal. I loved him. I still love him. But we have cast each other adrift. We have destroyed our own happiness. Today, I do not even know where I could begin to find him.

  Throughout that summer Christopher’s meetings with Joanna increased in frequency. Carmen’s reactions had amused him. There was something about Joanna ‘the English rose’ that riled her. Her own noisy, feisty, energetic style of handling people could not be further removed from Joanna’s delicate quietness. Joanna’s meetings with Christopher were always brief – he was absconding from jobs where he was needed and to which it was always necessary that he return after an hour or two at most. But he appreciated their encounters all the more for their calming effect. This was how it was for the first weeks. No thought of anything other than pleasant conversation at outdoor tables in the bright mid-morning sunshine. Joanna was a girl from the Surrey suburbs, pretty but rather anxious, as if she were shouldering some great burden, as though she were, in some way Christopher could never manage to define, up against it. The world troubled and harassed her but the concerns which she admitted to him seemed deeply trivial. She rose above them. She triumphed. She shook out her hair with the air of someone who was not going to be defeated by what life threw at her. She smiled a wry, gentle smile of courageous acceptance. Christopher reflected that he had known so many of these girls. He pitied them but he never quite managed to understand the fardels that they seem to bear.

  Christopher was puzzled by her marriage to Carl. With his moody silences and wordless obsessiveness, his lack of any evident polish or savoir-faire in social intercourse, he seemed altogether too coarse for the young woman he watched across those café tables. Christopher did not pry but he could sense that this was a marriage made in haste and now being repented of with extreme tentativeness. She would have been happier, he thought, with a long garden hedged by privet, green gloves and a trug, tut-tutting over rose-blight and the devastation wrought by slugs. Instead she was the chatelaine of a four-bedroomed mansion flat off Gower Street a stone’s throw from Heal’s. When Christopher eventually entered it he had to admire her skill in furnishing and decorating the surprisingly large space. Skills handed on to her by her mother had been extended by the apartment’s challenges. She had struck a balance between the traditional reassurances of bourgeois taste and forays into the contemporary. He was particularly struck by the art works that hung on the walls. To his surprise, she pointed out a competent oil of the bookstalls on the Left Bank, with ripples of light on the Seine: “That was done by Carl.”

  Later, much later, after they had made love one afternoon in one of the spare bedrooms, when they both felt they had gone too far but had lost the means to retrace their steps, Joanna sat up and scanned the walls and ceilings of the room as if she were trying to find some defect in the furnishings or decoration as if this would point a way forward for her, untie this tangle of crossed paths into which she had allowed herself to be drawn.

  Christopher did not know what she saw in him. Perhaps it was simply his availability, his proximity. His time was sufficiently scarce that he did not threaten to overwhelm her with his attention. He would not swamp her. For his part he did not have the inclination to put a stop to the affair (for he knew that it would end in its own way, probably very soon, for it was not built to last). He was being used, no doubt, but in such cases it is not always easy to tell the user from the used. He was angry with Carmen and filled with jealousy and suspicion, feelings which he used to justify this betrayal. Christopher and Joanna were both haunted by the shadow of absent partners – like people who have begun a dinner party where the principal guests have not arrived. It was not a happy episode and Christopher soon found himself wanting it to end, regretting that it had not remained as a series of pleasant encounters in the sun.

  In those early meetings Joanna would ask Christopher about Carmen, not being in the slightest degree aware of the latter’s hostility towards her. Not having any career of her own other than homemaker (he later discovered that she was attending daytime lectures in the history of art for a diploma of some kind) she had evidently spent her life pumping people who had real jobs for details of what they did. “Is she compiling a careers directory?” Carmen had spat out venomously during one of the rows. Joanna seemed surprised and a little put out when Christopher explained Carmen’s attitude to her work. Joanna found it difficult to understand that peculiar combination of brilliant performance and self-contempt that was the career of Carmen. Why would anyone persist in a way of earning one’s living that was so much despised?

  “She’s very... trenchant, isn’t she?” Joanna ventured one day as she sat with Christopher in a sunlit corner of the Café Rossignol in Berwick Street. He laughed and Joanna seemed rather hurt. He assured her that he was not mocking her but that Carmen’s trenchancy was her signature, her way of being alive.

  “I wonder what sort of childhood she had. That’s often the key, isn’t it? Was she an only child?”

  “I think she was. But I can’t be sure. She never talks about things like that. If she were an only child it would probably be just as well. I can’t imagine how any rival would have fared. Because any sibling would immediately have been identified as a rival.”

  “Is she very competitive?”

  “You’d have to ask her that yourself. In a way, I suppose. She likes to have arguments and then win them. She’s not a good loser.”

  “I had a brother, three years older than me.”

  “Had?”

  “Yes, he died on a climbing expedition. They shouldn’t have gone. It was all so unnecessary. It was horrible. The teacher who took them eventually committed suicide. But it seems as though it wasn’t really his fault. All so unnecessary.”

  Christopher waited for Joanna to collect herself after this tearful (as it became) recital. There was a quality of innocence about her, a childlike plainness of seeing and speaking, that touched him, accustomed as he was to hard-boiled grapples with Carmen and her circle. Perhaps, he considered, this was his contribution to the slide towards intimacy: a sort of pity for the poor girl (who of course wasn’t a girl at all), a need to offer protection. Pity also for her evident need for affection, for some tenderness from the oaf, Carl, whose finer feelings (notwithstanding his youthful daubs) seemed reserved for walnut dashboards and the art of the carburettor. No doubt this is how all such affairs begin. In a flurry of specious logic.

  And there was the case of Jimmy.

  Christopher now began to suspect that Jimmy may have been involved – in some fashion he couldn’t pinpoint – in the now notorious trip to Nice. At any rate, he discovered, in the usual grubby, piecemeal, lowering way, from friends and acquaintances and the putting together of two and two, that Jimmy was very much in the present frame. Christopher began, as one usually does, by blaming himself, the simplest and most unthinking strategy. He had neglected her for his work. He ha
d not been around. He had maddened her into rows that perhaps could have been avoided. He had not, perhaps, given her enough, recognised the signals she was sending him, learned to accept the gifts she was prepared to lavish on him.

  I know now, Carmen, Christopher rebuked himself. Now that I have lost you. I am now the scrupulous accountant of loss. I see it all with absolute clarity. How perfect is the vision afforded by impotent remorse! In the days of my present dissipation I at last get the message. (He sold the Whitfield Street premises; his share in the bean-business. An accident put paid to his survival rating in that quick and cut-throat world.) In this pleasant garden flat at Hammersmith with its view of the river, the oarsmen on their slender boats, the geese waddling in the blue-grey mud, I turn over my memories. I accuse myself daily from my enforced retirement. I have become an expert analyst of my own errors, a master of pellucid hindsight.

  But I could not have legislated for Jimmy. Turn me at the breath of a conjuror’s spell into the perfectly responsive lover and he comes on still. Waiting, watching for his opportunity. You played into his hands, Carmen, my love, my loss. You allowed him to take you away from the one person who could have given you something more lasting. That was your choice. Let me not question your right to do so, impair in any way that precious freedom that we boastfully celebrated. That was our undoing.

  Carmen was away a great deal in those weeks when Christopher was taking tea with Joanna. Those travel magazines, with their freebies he was too busy to share with her, produced commission after commission. Opportunity after opportunity.

  It was around this time that he had to travel out to the sticks to a factory somewhere beyond Worcester specialising in a hard-wearing, glassy tile whose samples had captivated his current client. He was due to launch himself into the crowded juice-bar market, with three outlets about to open before the end of June, a month behind schedule. Christopher had been unhappy with the first batch of tiles and had been invited down to the factory for a technical session followed by a free lunch, for the manufacturers could see that further orders waited. He fell into conversation on the train to Worcester with a retired railwayman who was travelling on his free pass, changing trains at random, with no particular destination in mind. He was heartbroken at the decline of the great industry in which he had spent his life since 1936 when he had joined the Great Western Railway in Plymouth. Christopher told himself: I am a sucker for these threnodies of the old timers, their on-cue regrets.

  The railwayman began with the loss of the men who inspected their lengths of track, loving each tarry sleeper and tailored curve of rail; their replacement by jobsworths who were more interested in admiring the view. He went on to defective signals, criminal under-investment, rudeness, vandalism, locked waiting rooms – and Christopher lapped it up.

  “This pass is a good thing [Christopher was dismayed at the sudden appearance of a good thing in this gloomy riff]. If the weather’s good, I just say to the wife, let’s go off somewhere and off we go. It doesn’t matter where.”

  There was the briefest tremor, like the shadow of a bird’s wingbeat over a sunny lawn, which they both recognised. For Christopher had just been told that the wife was dead, three years ago, ten years into the railwayman’s retirement. Past and present were getting tangled up. These days, he had only himself to interrogate when the sun brightened the new day. He could no longer make a proposal to ‘the wife’. He was alone with his memories: the tapping of wheels with a dull hammer, the whistling of a gang going out along the cutting, a distant chuff of steam.

  Carmen, whispers Christopher to himself, is it preposterous to think that we might have grown old together? A pair of wizened pensioners on the up platform, blackbirds carolling in the trees behind the empty station building, a packed lunch, a thermos, a timetable, the sun blazing at its zenith like it does in the classic serials on TV as the merry face of the train appears around the corner. We have spared ourselves that. We have not run the risk of going stale. Yes, that one has been avoided.

  When Christopher first became convinced that it was happening, that Jimmy had glided once more into their lives, he blamed himself but then he blamed Carmen and he blamed Jimmy. He was happy to blame anyone who crossed his path because he wanted an explanation. He wanted to know why. He did not want to be told that there was no explanation. He was certainly not ready for that. That would have finished him, he thought, just then. Give me a villain every time. Yield me up a scapegoat and let me get to work.

  Jimmy fitted the bill. Christopher supposed that he resented his freedom, his easy assumption of it. His own freedom was the byproduct of a sort of mania. He worked all hours, struggled to keep one step ahead, tore about London in pursuit of fresh commissions. He banked up the money, which eventually overtook what he had accumulated by his inheritance and his lucky investment in the Whitfield Street property. He quite overlooked – in the way that the self-made generally do – that his financial success had its own good measure of luck. This did not, however, prevent him from judging Jimmy. He had never, he reflected sardonically, let hypocrisy stand in his way. Carmen reported to him what she had heard (or had her eyes seen?) of Jimmy’s inherited wealth. There was a substantial apartment “on the Riviera” – a studiedly vague form of words which started certain speculations in Christopher’s mind – and his apartment near Regent’s Park (bought, so she informed him, with the proceeds from the sale of a minor Picasso owned by his banker father). There was the childhood drift through European capitals, a varied but always expensive education, music lessons with the best teachers at every turn, the early debut recital at the Wigmore, the fluke success of the Schoenberg CD (the result of its being used as part of the score for a cult art movie) and the constant, undimmed success with women. Jimmy was not the old style smooth seducer – though the cuckolded and the cheated always represented him as being this. He was the sensitive type, who had learned a few tricks from the feminists, who was never crass. His seductions did not draw on the resources of antique machismo but were achieved by subtler means. Women did not feel they were being used or wheedled into bed. He flattered their intelligence; he treated them as equals; he bothered to listen to what they said and to behave as if they were individuals. In return, they loved his modernised politesse, that whiff of old money and old manners subtly enjoined with the brash scent of contemporary cool. Even Christopher, when his growling jealous resentment was over, had to admit that it was an admirable act, conceived and executed with perfect timing and timbre.

  But then Jimmy was a performer and all the world loves a strolling player, envying a freedom they could have themselves, often enough, if they tried. Am I being somewhat tart, Christopher wondered? Am I letting him get to me? I should think so. I should think it highly likely. He went through various stages of hating Jimmy. The early outrage – centring first on Carmen herself for her unforgivable betrayal – was succeeded by a focussed loathing for the very notion of Jimmy. Sometimes it was petty and childish. That CD he stamped on, having tossed it to the kitchen floor, picking up the shattered box rather sheepishly, feeling a fool, and feeding it uneasily into the plastic swing-bin. After this he tried to pull himself together. He started to deliver sonorous moral lectures to himself – a tumbler of malt in his hand – about the need, in a contemporary relationship, to avoid the dreary bourgeois notion of dutiful monogamy, to adopt an aristocratic notion of sex, of high indifference to where the pleasures of civilised sensuality were sought. But this was equally unsuccessful. For it was not the sexual errancy that hurt him most, it was the loss of intimacy, the loss of that intense bond which he thought they both enjoyed, Carmen and he, but which was now ruptured. For good? Even at that stage (which he later discovered to be the second of her three fatal loops of dalliance with Jimmy) he hoped that she would tire, that she would return to him, that the ineffable seducer would move on to newer, sweeter, grass at the top of the meadow.

  She did return, by which time he was fatally compromised with Joanna. Christop
her now moved quickly to terminate that little episode. He had exhausted the possibilities of his English rose who in turn was now consumed with guilt and resolved to return to Carl, to make him her new project of improvement. “I think we need to work on our relationship” she informed Christopher solemnly at their last al fresco lunch. All this talk of work, rendering love down to a task, he found sharply anaphrodisiac. He was glad to be discharged.

  ~ two ~

  Carl had rather not have found out. In view of subsequent events, he was very clear about that.

  Joanna insisted on dragging him to a distant friend of a friend, who had set up as a therapist. She said they must work on their relationship. Carl did not like such talk which seemed to him, anyway, to carry within it the seeds of its own failure. If we must work on our marriage then surely it is doomed. He was sorry. He was a practical man. He did not work with approximations. He liked exactness.

  The consulting-room (Carl considered that this was probably not the correct term) was on the ground floor of a substantial terraced house in North London. One ascended a short flight of steps and opened a heavy door which, he couldn’t help noticing from the drag across the tiles, marked by a scoured arc, needed some easement. He believed that he would have offered there and then to remedy the situation had he been carrying his tools. They stepped across the threshold, Joanna leading the way with her usual dogged badge of courage, then passed in to the front room through a door on the left. It was furnished very simply. Not exactly the bleakness of a waiting room or surgery, but a little frigid, Carl thought. There was a beige fitted carpet, four or five armchairs arranged in a companionable circle, a dull print of (if he was not mistaken) Monet’s lilies covering most of the end wall, a small console on which were a TV set and video recorder and a stereo sound system, and a low circular table at the epicentre of the arrangement of chairs. A single, white ceramic vase of yellow roses stood on the wide window sill. The Venetian blinds were three-quarters open. Everything was neat and tidy. It did not have the feel of a room that was ever used for the ordinary, messy business of living.The therapist, who lost no time in instructing them to address her as Helen, left the room to make some tea. They said nothing to each other but looked around. They were uncomfortable and apprehensive. When Helen returned with the tea she smiled at them as if they were imbeciles or perhaps small children being offered a treat. Carl thought she noticed his hostility but it seemed to fire her up with enthusiasm. She threw herself into the business with vigour.