Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  This was a happy interlude – Carmen later concluded from her inability to remember much about it. For five days they swam, ate, talked, laughed, loved and felt free. They talked a great deal about freedom. That she did remember.

  “Why don’t I feel freer than I do?” Carmen asked Jimmy one evening as they swung in a canopied canvas seat set against the wall of the villa. The last rays of sun were filtering through the leaves of the lemon trees and they were drinking a cool, dry wine, their glasses on an iron table set in front of them.

  “Well, you’re not making too bad a job of it.”

  “But this feels like an interlude, a parenthesis. It isn’t going to last is it?”

  “Why do you say that? Just enjoy it.”

  “But that’s my point. It isn’t easy.”

  “It isn’t easy because you have made a fetish of your precious work. You don’t know how to relax, to appreciate ease. It’s an art like any other.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Like any art you have to balance a talent for it, and a feel for it, with the discipline to work at it, to discover its special signature. Just as you can’t sit down at a piano and deliver a finished Chopin sonata without practice, study, thought, so you can’t achieve creative indolence in an instant, especially given the mania of your working life.”

  Carmen nestled against Jimmy, sipped her glass, plucking a fragment of seed that had landed on its surface and dropping it to the ground.

  “I like the sound of that creative indolence, but you think it’s beyond me?”

  “I think it’s beyond most people now. The means that have given them the potential for leisure are the same that prevent them realising it: all that restless energy, change, discontent, ‘dynamism’.”

  “This isn’t, is it, going to be a seminar on the Protestant Work Ethic?”

  “Not if you don’t want it to be. But that has a lot to answer for. I don’t see why one shouldn’t ask, from time to time, what piling up all that hard-earned cash is actually for. I’m not arguing for idleness. That would be stultifying. I’m saying that some things aren’t the product of furious attack. And they may turn out to be the most important things. The things that make us most fully alive.”

  “Are you going to become a missionary? I can imagine you somewhere like this, running courses for the stinking rich in how to take it easy. Self-improvement is where the dosh is today and what could be more attractive to the people with money to throw away than learning – not how to lose weight or shed an addiction, which are painful – but how to be indolent? What’s that Italian phrase?”

  “Dolce far niente.”

  “How about it?”

  “It sounds like too much hard work. More wine?”

  “Please. But seriously, I think I know what you are saying. When I look at the life Christopher and I have been living in London I can’t say it satisfies us. I think most of our friends are in the same predicament.”

  “You should travel. It’s the answer to most things. I move about a lot in my work, naturally, but I mean real travel, letting oneself drift, letting oneself be caught in unexpected places, staying on. Then moving on. Knowing when it’s right to do so. Taking the world’s pulse.”

  “I mean to, one day.”

  “Don’t delay it for too long.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Jimmy shifted in the swing-seat, took a long draught of wine. Carmen could see that he wanted to say something that was going to be difficult for him.

  “Do you mind if I talk about Christopher?”

  “If you want to. What is there to say?”

  “Oh I don’t mean one of those conversations ‘about us’. This is hard to say, but I don’t want you to throw something away that means more to you than perhaps you realise.”

  “What? Is this a subtle warning about Jimmy the philanderer? Don’t get too comfortable because you may be about to be ditched?”

  “Don’t be absurd. I think we both know where things stand. I don’t think either of us has any illusions.”

  “Jimmy, you are an incurable romantic. Just what a girl wants to hear in a Tuscan lemon grove at night.”

  “You know exactly what I mean. What are you going to do on Sunday night?”

  “OK. I’m flying back. But why do we have to compute this? It’s like what you were just saying about travel. Let’s just enjoy it. See what happens.”

  “You said you thought he might be seeing someone.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I can hardly get on my high horse. I don’t suppose it’s anything serious. Or perhaps it is. Look, Jimmy, it’s too late for me to act out the perfect marriage playlet. Not with my track record. Some things can’t be retrieved. Replayed. I’ve made mistakes. I haven’t always got it right. Correction. I’ve seldom got it right. That happens to be the way it is. I’m not the sort of person who wants to work at a relationship.”

  “Sounds like the activity of a coal miner at the seam.”

  “Precisely. Let’s have a little of the dolce far niente. Let’s have a little natural spontaneity. If Christopher and I ever get back together it will happen. I can’t make it happen.”

  “I don’t want you to go back to him, naturally.”

  “Not today, at any rate.”

  “Am I that much of a rake?”

  “He called you a ‘sexual opportunist’ which I thought was quite good for him.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I’ve no idea. I’m tired of judging people, pigeon-holing them, giving them labels.”

  “I thought that was what you did for a living and called it style journalism.”

  “Yes, yes. In fact it is precisely because I do it for a living that it has started to disgust me.”

  “Which brings us back to where we started. Freedom.”

  “Right. I am a convert. Can we have lesson one of your exacting course in how to be free?”

  Jimmy laughed. He pointed to the winking lights of a jet travelling across the night sky towards Pisa or Rome. It was getting cooler. They huddled against each other for warmth. The scent in the garden was rich and sweet. The air that bore it was cool and clear. Occasionally a shout came from the direction of the beach. A car went past along the little avenue. This seemed like freedom enough. Somewhere beneath it all, like a buried watercourse, flowed all sorts of knotted problems, dilemmas. Responsibilities, if you will. But tonight Carmen felt utterly relaxed with Jimmy. Utterly relaxed with night in this place and at this time.

  Their Tuscan interlude ended all too quickly. Jimmy had to fly on to Vienna. Carmen had to return to London which, at Heathrow, was grey and cold and wet – though it was officially summer. A knot of drunken louts had spoiled the flight with their vicious language and uncontrolled behaviour. Somewhere over the Alps, Carmen turned round and gave them a look of disapproval. One of the young men staggered to his feet, unsteady from drink. His belly heaved in a dirty white T-shirt which bore – oddly she thought – a £ sign. He breathed his tinned beer over her as he brought his face close to hers.

  “Have you got a problem darling?”

  She tried to ignore him. Experience had taught her that the last thing one should do was allow oneself to become engaged in a dialogue from which it would prove impossible to extricate oneself.

  “Can’t speak can ya? Lost your fuckin’ tongue?”

  His eyes swam mistily. He had difficulty remaining upright. She noticed that on the upper part of his four fingers, above the knuckle, the letters L-O-V-E were tattooed in pale blue.

  “You’re not a fucking Eytie are you? Speaka da English darling? You know what you need love. My fuckin’ prescription. A good shag.”

  His fellows whooped with delighted laughter.“Give her one, Garry.”

  “I might just do that. I might just do that.”

  As he swayed uncertainly an air-steward came down the aisle and expertly lifted the man under the arms, guiding him carefully back to his seat into which he slumped gratefully. The
other passengers seemed relieved. They looked across at Carmen, sending that expressive signal of weary acceptance that she knew so well from previous incidents of this kind. There was a look of quiet distaste on the face of a working class couple in their late sixties who occupied the seats across from hers. They appeared hurt and baffled, as if they could not understand where such behaviour came from, why it seemed to have established itself as a norm that all of them seemed powerless to oppose.

  Carmen passed out of the airport into the Underground and was home inside an hour. She sensed immediately that Christopher was uneasy, that something had happened. She waited to find out what it was that she was to be told. He came through to the living room with a cafetière of fresh coffee which he placed on that long ash table he had made himself. He lay back against the soft leather of the sofa.

  “You missed all the fun. Carl went a little over the top today.”

  “Carl? I thought he was the most phlegmatic man in London. I’d like to have been around to see him losing his cool.”

  “I was having lunch with Joanna.”

  Christopher’s boldness, his frank, unapologetic tone did not ring entirely true. It felt like a calculated strategy, like someone trying to clear the ground for the launch of trickier matter. Entering into the spirit of the thing, she decided to play the spiteful bitch.

  “That must have been nice for the two of you. Was she as radiant as ever, little Jo?”

  Her own moral position was so doubtful after five days with Jimmy that she wasn’t planning to overdo this line of approach.

  “She was fine. We bumped into each other in Berwick Street and I suggested lunch. We went to La Barca.”

  “You must take me there some time.”

  Christopher looked at her with distaste, as if she were deliberately trying to lower the tone of their encounter.

  “We were just quietly eating when Carl bounded up from nowhere and took a swing at me. There was a sort of tussle and someone came out of the crowd to break us up and copped a blow meant for me. It was a bit farcical in fact. The guy then hit back at Carl and laid him out. The police arrived and took him away. Joanna was distraught.”

  “Poor dear.”

  “Is that all you can offer: cheap sarcasms?”

  “Well, I can do lethally honed satire if you prefer.”

  “Did you enjoy your holiday in the sun?”

  “No holiday. Being surrounded by a lot of travel industry types. It would put you off going on holiday for life.”

  “There’s no need to keep up the pretence, Car, I’ve spoken to Marianne. There was no conference in Viareggio. I know about Jimmy, too, so can we cut the crap?”

  “Fine, so let’s get straight to the interesting bits. What was Carl doing brawling in Berwick Street? Did he have some reason for getting overexcited at his wife’s pleasantly unexpected lunch with an old friend? And, please, don’t offer me any of the usual explanations.”

  “I don’t think either of us is in a position to squat on the moral high ground.”

  “So you have been fucking her.”

  “Do you have to be so crude?”

  “Oh, it’s to be expected. I’m a rough Northern girl. We call a spade a ruddy shovel where I come from. Do you think I’m incapable of noticing anything? Do you think I was dreamily lapping up the taciturn charm of dopey Carl while you two were cosying up that night in the restaurant? Give me some credit for having eyes in my head.”

  Christopher poured out the coffee. He stared into the surface of his mug. He rubbed his eyes and suddenly looked terribly tired. For the first time since she had returned Carmen felt sorry for him. She felt sorry for herself, too. What had become of them? How had they got into this predicament? She did not want to talk about Jimmy. She could not entirely understand a rather strange reaction she always had after spending some time with him. Intense and vivid as her encounters with him were – for Jimmy was always a wonderfully animating presence and Italy had been a special period of grace – once he had gone the atmosphere quickly faded. She could hardly now recall what they had done together, what they had talked about, what had kept them both so enraptured. For she was convinced, in retrospect, that they had been enraptured. It was like a dream whose vividness barely survives the moment of waking. But was she, hard-bitten Carmen, the victim of a sort of schoolgirl fantasy? Was she, perhaps, merely Jimmy’s plaything? One of his many playthings? She found herself thinking of Alice and the presence of both of them in Paris not so long ago. Their apparent prior awareness that they were both to be there. Carmen was not the sort of person who liked to be duped. She liked to think she was in control but, suddenly, she felt helpless. She reached out to Christopher but he refused to respond. She felt his arm stiff and unwelcoming. She supposed each of them was silently taking the measure of the other’s legitimate outrage. Surely he could see this? Surely he could see that she needed him? That they needed each other?

  After several minutes silence, with each of them prostrate on the sofa, sullen and intransigent, she raised herself and poured out some coffee. She wanted to be refreshed. She wanted to find a way out of this silliness. She wanted them to beat a path back to the crossroads where they had taken the wrong turning, but could it now be identified? Swinging through the automatic doors at the airport she had felt so alive and certain and purposeful. She had been riding high. Yet now she seemed to have collapsed inwardly. More than this, she seemed to feel a sort of quiet terror stealing over her. She could no longer discern any bearings. In a matter of seconds her world had collapsed and she had an unpleasant sensation that she was the architect of her own misfortune, that even Christopher was a victim of her delinquency. Had she driven him to this absurd dalliance with the negligible Joanna? Was everything, simply, her fault?

  She wrapped her hands around the coffee mug and rocked herself slowly backwards and forwards on the edge of the sofa. She did not dare bring her eyes round and look Christopher in the face. She did not dare risk the request for forgiveness being refused.

  Carmen’s return from Italy was marked by a brief showdown with Christopher which ended in an unsatisfactory silence, a brooding, ambiguous peace which lasted for several days. Both were trying to find a way to get to the bottom of what had happened. Events had overtaken them, demolishing their usual libertarian conviction that nothing really mattered but the pursuit of intelligent pleasure, the connoisseurship of experience, doing as one pleased with no more than a loose do-as-one-would-be-done-by ethic to mark off its indistinct limits. Something had changed, yet quite what that change had been and what its implications were for both of them remained to be calibrated. In the case of Christopher, to be witness to that short blow which felled Carl in a London street – absurd slapstick that it was, from one point of view – had proved the catalyst. To this point he had not lived his life in this way – with the coarse plotline of a soap opera. He expected things to proceed more gently, without such stark confrontations. Plainly, from now on, they would not abide by this rule.

  He saw Carl some time after this. He expected a difficult encounter but Carl was oddly conciliatory. Christopher’s brief relationship with Joanna was over. He had neither seen nor spoken to her since she ran from the restaurant that day (where, as Carl no doubt now knew, they had been scattering their fistfuls of earth on its corpse). Perhaps, in some perverse sort of way, Carl was grateful to him for restoring them to each other, for injecting something into the bloodstream of their relationship. The two men were working in the same street again, a quieter one shaded by plane trees between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. They were having coffee at a café with a little terrace overlooking a quaint art deco filling station that must have been there since the 1920s. Carl held out his hand as they sat down.

  “No hard feelings.”

  There was something slightly comical about this, as if he were offering consolation after having beaten one at a game of squash. But he was not being facetious or sly. That was not Carl’s way. He was al
ways deadly serious. Christopher mumbled something to indicate that he accepted his goodwill and wished the matter to be at an end. He added quickly that Joanna had gone down to Surrey to supervise the transfer of an elderly relative into a nursing home.

  “I think it’s the best thing all round, especially now that Joanna is starting a new job.”

  “A new job?”

  Christopher didn’t want to spoil things by showing too keen an interest. In fact he did not wish Joanna to be a subject at all.

  “Yes, she’s doing a temporary job at the Senate House Library.”

  He jerked his thumb in the direction of the grey bunkers on the far side of Gower Street.

  “Her relative isn’t really capable any more of looking after herself so it seems the best thing.”

  It is always the best thing.

  “I’m not sure her family ever took to me you know. Especially her father.”

  Christopher looked across at Carl. He was not the sort of man who confides much in other men. He almost never spoke about personal matters. Christopher wasn’t even sure whether he had any real friends or intimates. This contributed, he thought, to a certain air of sadness that lingered about him. He was a perfectly decent man who did not know how to give anything of himself to others. Had he been able to do so he might have had a much happier life. Christopher supposed that brought out certain instincts in Joanna. She would rescue him, make him her project. And now she had an extra reason to take him in hand, to atone for her wickedness. The library job was clearly part of the new order of things.

  “I think her father decided, almost from the start, that I didn’t measure up in some fashion. They only had the one child and I fancy that he wanted a boy who might be trained up to take over the firm – one of those fusty high street family solicitors who do everything (eventually). Since there was only Joanna, a husband might be the next best thing. I was not a lawyer. An architect wasn’t the same thing at all. Her mother also seemed to be uncertain about me. Joanna never wanted to talk about that. She had her own problems and didn’t want to mix mine up with them. I gave up trying to understand families years ago. I sometimes wish – vindictively no doubt – that he could have had a son just so that he could watch him grow up to refuse to do what he wanted – by opening a gay bar or joining the army – just to teach him that one can’t always plan other people’s lives for them. I’ve never grasped this obsession with handing on the baton, perpetuating the family name, keeping the show on the road.”