Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  “Perhaps that’s because we’re in such an ephemeral business. This place I’m doing up as a sushi restaurant used to sell computer supplies. In three years’ time it could be a travel agent. And how long is Souper Kitchen going to last?”

  “Until my early retirement, I hope.”

  Carl laughed, and as the two men sat there on the terrace in the sun Christopher felt uncomfortable about the wrong he had done him – though Carl seemed to be thriving on it. It was he who was floundering, not sure which direction to take.

  “Do you know, we went to a therapist,” he suddenly said, adopting a deliberately brisk and matter of fact tone.

  “I didn’t. Was it helpful?”

  “I didn’t allow it to be. I am afraid I walked out. I thought Joanna would be furious with me but she later admitted that she was grateful to me for pulling the plug. I think you have to be the right sort of people for therapy.”

  “What sort is that?”

  “Well, it’s partly tolerating the lingo. But I suppose I mean you have to believe in advance that it’s going to work. You have to begin with faith. And then there’s a sort of underlying thing I can’t get along with which Joanna – quite cleverly I thought – called The Utopian Premiss. The notion that all problems can be solved provided you apply yourself. Provided you put yourself in the hands of the professional. I suppose neither of us really believed that. Which made things rather hard for the therapist. She was a professional. She believed she could solve the problem. So our walking out was a kind of insult. And you know how solemn and self-righteous these people are. It all got very nasty.”

  “Are you going to tell me that you sorted things out by yourselves?”

  “Something like that. I mean to say, we’re not living in Utopia but we’ve come to see that we both took a wrong road, that we needed to retrace our steps. It’s not the same as before. It’s as if we were now walking carefully round an unexploded mine. It makes you more careful. More thoughtful. More appreciative of the importance of getting things right. Does that make any sense?”

  “A lot. I think Joanna is worth getting right.”

  Carl looked at Christopher quickly and shrewdly. Perhaps, thought Christopher, he was looking to see if he were saying more than his words allowed, as if there were a part of her he had still not surrendered. He need not have worried. Christopher was glad that they had retrieved their not-quite-Utopia. He was unhappy with his role because he felt that he had trifled with Joanna. Perhaps even exploited her – though she was an adult and far less naïve than she made herself seem. This visible putting right of things reassured him that he had not done lasting damage. For a wry moment he even wondered if he had actually done some lasting good.

  Carl then said that he must go. His work awaited him. Christopher said he would sit for a little longer to finish his coffee though he knew that he too should not have been wasting time. Left to himself he watched a large, expensive car slide into the little filling station from a side street. A man in a neat suit and a russet brown hat got out, rather overdressed for a summer’s day, Christopher thought. The man was a well-preserved seventy-five, and Christopher surmised that he was a successful and rich businessman. He moved with a rather dignified formality and his manner in addressing the pump attendant seemed that of someone who was accustomed, across a lifetime, to deference, to quiet daily recognition on the part of those beneath him in the social hierarchy, that they were below and he was above them and that was that. It was not an arrogant swagger, more a simple acceptance of the obvious fact that he was of another type. This started a reflection, as Christopher drained the last of his coffee, that he was working for a different class, the capital’s proliferating nouveaux riches. These were people who did not wear their privileges lightly. Rather they flaunted them constantly like someone waving a flag of semaphore. They took careful note of which fashions to copy, they had an encylopaedic knowledge of brand names and of what was the most expensive, the most ostentatious, the most noticeable thing. And Christopher was one of them for he worked to anticipate their tastes. They were the people he was servicing, their values were his values, yet he could not help himself, from time to time, finding something comic in the solemnity of their materialism, their conviction of the importance of money and of the simple – almost childish – connections they perceived between its power and what it would confer on them. Their talk of it in truth betrayed their uncertainty, their insecurity, their lack of that simple social confidence he had seen on the face of the kempt septuagenarian with his upright walk and kid driving gloves and gleaming brogues.

  That night Christopher walked back to Whitfield Street in a more reflective mood than was customary with him. It was still light at nine o’clock. The outdoor restaurant tables in Charlotte Street were busy. The atmosphere was gratifyingly festive. On an impulse he sat down at the lemon-coloured table of a Greek restaurant and dialled Carmen on his mobile. She responded eagerly to his suggestion of eating out and was at his table by the time the waiter had brought out the wine he had ordered in anticipation of her arrival. Her manner recently had been unusually solicitous and so, he supposed, had his own. They had both wandered and had both returned to each other, feeling their way back, doing so with gestures that were sometimes exaggerated, sometimes uncomfortable, always charged with a sense that they should perhaps be more careful in future of their life together, not treating it with such insouciance. Was this a sign of incipient middle age?

  Carmen draped a black sweater over her bare shoulders (July in London was warm but not that warm) and their glasses clinked. Quickly, the plates of meze began to arrive and they began to talk. He told her about his conversation earlier in the day with Carl. When he mentioned Joanna’s name she merely smiled. Brawling dissection of their mutal infidelities – the pastime of recent nights – had now given way to tactful forgetting. Christopher could not even be sure that a decent argument would ensue. This studied sweetness did not come naturally to them but they persevered. The open air and late-sinking sunshine helped to create a sympathetic backdrop. He sensed that Carmen wanted to talk but in ways that were not usual for her. He tried to make it easier with certain facetious clearances and smoothing-downs.

  Carmen also tried, Christopher believed. He never loved her so much as he did during that fragmentary time – during that warm, easy summer. He felt that she had come back to him, willingly, so that they could live again as they had lived before, so that they could recoup their triumphs. He was deceived. The spectre of Jimmy had not been expunged from their al fresco feast. He genuinely believed, however, as he recalled that night, that she had convinced herself that she had let him go, that she did not wish to return to him. That she did return was a calamity. But it was an eventuality that seemed quite remote, if not impossible, as they resumed their voyaging from that twilit terrace. Today, as he presses his face against this long window, looking down on the river at low tide, at the detritus on its exposed banks, at the antics of the wading birds, he tastes again the special flavour of that moment which he did not know to be an interlude merely, a graceful exception, but which seemed to him like the restoration of joy, a gift of permanence. For his foolishness, for his refusal to learn the lessons of experience he repents – if there is anyone out there who is willing to listen to his confession.

  Carmen talked to him about Jimmy the public figure, carefully removing from her narrative any personal details, any fragments of intimacy, as if she were trying to say that this was the new Jimmy she had constructed for both of them: the friend with an international profile, the serious musician, the name. Christopher was glad to play along with this game. He could see that, if they were to convince themselves of its truth, then it might work. Slowly, he introduced the topic of Joanna – whose retirement from the scene was much more definite now that she and Carl had renewed their life together. These last details, fresh from today’s narrative of the wounded husband, were listened to by Carmen with eager attentiveness. Perhaps too eager
. Notwithstanding his total absorption in this process of reconciliation and cordial forgetting he could not help noticing – or perhaps he merely imagined that he noticed – a certain light of triumph (shaded, fitful) in Carmen’s eye as he confirmed the facts of Joanna’s extinction as a living subject in their little pageant. Momentarily, he had an intuition of the inequalities, so to speak, in the balance of power. He could not be certain that Jimmy would vanish with the same alacrity as Joanna.

  “When is his next concert?” Christopher inquired pleasantly.

  “I’m not sure. But he’s bound to post us a flyer. I think there was to be a London concert next month and an appearance at a contemporary music festival somewhere up north.”

  “He seems to be doing well.”

  “Yes, I gather there’s a new CD out in the autumn.”

  How well informed you were, Carmen, my love, Christopher reflects. How many facts you let me have, and with such studied casualness.

  “I was wondering whether we should have a party.”

  “Sounds a good idea. Where?”

  “Whitfield Street.”

  “Won’t it be a bit crowded and sweaty at this time of year?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of having it inside.”

  “What? In the street?”

  “No, I have a better idea. The flat roof on the store-room behind the shop at the back has just been resurfaced. I was thinking of organising some flower tubs and turning it into a roof garden. We’d have to share that with Dave but he spends most weekends in Somerset anyway.”

  “Excellent!”

  “We can rig up some lights, borrow some chairs, set up a barbecue.”

  “We’ll have to move quickly before the end of the summer.”

  “I thought of the last week in July.”

  “Before everyone flees to Tuscany.”

  “It’s a bit late but I’ve only just had the idea.”

  She looked across at him with her eyes full of pleasure at the prospect of their throwing themselves into something new. Something which united them both. It would symbolise their new start, their revived togetherness. Yes, yes, too neat, an idea too obviously riding for a fall, but on that evening in Fitzrovia, as they waved the empty wine bottle at the waiter, gesticulating for more through the plate glass of the taverna window, it seemed just the thing. Christopher took Carmen’s hands – more beautiful to him than the marble perfection of Alice’s much-photographed pair of jewel-props – and held them in his. He lifted them to his lips and she gladly held them up to him as if they were yet another joyful gift, a present of herself.

  I kissed your hands, Carmen, because I felt at that moment that we were free again, riding out on the skimming yacht of our love, swept by the co-operative elements, over the breaking waves.

  How I mock myself now. How my lips curve into the repellent sneer of the cynic who has foreseen all, who is incapable thereafter of being deceived. But then – and was it worth it for such a moment, whatever the price subsequently exacted? – I could have believed in any proposition the world cared to put. I believed in you, Carmen. Never forget that. I believed in you.

  Jimmy met Alice in Paris where he had been taking part in an international Webern festival. Carmen found this out and he found her anger piquant. He did not consider himself to be the sort of loathsome beast who enjoys playing with women’s affections, setting one mistress against another, standing back to observe the reactions, the catfight, but, given Carmen’s instinctive aggression, her readiness to judge and condemn her male partners, he smiled at her vivid self-righteousness. As it happened, his meeting with Alice was an innocent encounter with an old friend. It was malicious of him, he admitted, to allow another inference to be taken, to fail to quash it.

  They met in a small restaurant of her choosing in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She was in reflective, elegaic, mood which he took to be the result of her decision, finally, to quit her trade. Moving those beautiful hands expressively above the cloth to emphasise her points, Jimmy had never seen her so entrancing, so luminous.

  “This is the part of Paris I first knew as a young model. I had a tiny garçonnière under the tiles at the top of a tall building and I was out every night, returning only to sleep. I can’t think how I kept up the pace. It was extraordinary, you know, the sheer speed of that life. Though I suppose, compared with today’s supermodels, I led a much less raunchy life. Apart from the endless Martinis, I didn’t do drugs or anything like that, though others did.”

  “What about life’s other pleasures?”

  Alice smiled sweetly.

  “Oh, well, it was Paris, after all.”

  “How did you get into all that?”

  “Oh the usual chain of accidents. It was a friend of my uncle’s who made the first introduction. He was at a fairly senior level in the rag trade and knew lots of people. Everyone knows I had the looks for it. But looks date, and by the Eighties I was beginning to seem not exactly the thing. It was a canny move on the part of my agent to start targeting the market for traditional high chic. I don’t think I would have held my own against the eighties crowd. I’m not Kate Moss, am I?”

  “Alice you are not, as a grateful world can attest.”

  “I don’t mind those girls. Under the sham accents and high-class slumming I can see myself. I was hardly less ruthless or manipulative. It was a form of defence by attack. You were so much at other people’s mercy you had to fight the few battles you could win for yourself. But taking the direction I did, I added another ten years to my career.”

  “And now you are putting it behind you. Are you relieved?”

  “I think I am. I’ll always miss aspects of it. There’s a special kind of excitement that’s simply unrepeatable. But I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

  “The book sounds interesting. Are you going to dish the dirt?”

  “Not especially. I wanted to concentrate more on the inner story. Everyone thinks that one is just some feather-brained midinette.”

  “They’ll buy it for that reason. They’ll want the gossip.”

  “I don’t say I’m going to produce a work of philosophy.”

  “No semiotics of fashion.”

  “No semiotics. But I’m interested in the dynamics of the business, how it finds people, transforms them, educates them in its values. I met Carmen in London and she was very encouraging.”

  “Well, that’s her field isn’t it, pop sociology.”

  “Thanks very much!”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that. What I meant, I suppose, was that she knows how to balance the analysis, the politics even, with the necessary leavening of juicy bits. Talking of which, is James Hermann, the concert pianist, going to figure in this tale?”

  “Do you think he should?”

  “Well, it would all be a bit old hat wouldn’t it?”

  “Darling, I am ancient, I was born in the 1950s. Most of my material will be ancient history to the fashion and magazine editors who all seem to be still in their teens.”

  “The 1950s. I love that vagueness. It could be significant to which end of the decade you refer.”

  “You’ll just have to guess.”

  “If I had improper designs I would make some smoochy remark about it being no earlier than 1959.”

  “Instead you suspect, brutally, that it’s closer to the other pole. You definitely don’t have designs on me.”

  “Do you regret that?”

  “Jimmy, I always let the good times take care of themselves. That was always my way. Regrets take up too much time and energy.”

  “So they were good times?”

  “Of course. But we’ve both moved on. Tell me about Carmen.”

  “What is there to tell?”

  “Oh come on, I told you we saw each other last month in London.”

  “Ah, girl talk.”

  “Something like that. I didn’t get a blow by blow account if that’s what you’re thinking. But enough hints were dropped.
She’s been having difficulties with Christopher.”

  “The demon builder.”

  “They’re such a pair of yuppies.”

  “I haven’t heard that word in ages. Is it still current?”

  “I’m too lazy to find out what the updated term is. But you know what I mean. They’re always trying to make an impression, always trying to spend their way into people’s hearts.”

  “Looking at the prices on this menu I was rather hoping that you might be on a similar tack.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll put this on exes. A business meeting.”

  “So what did you pick up from Carmen?”

  “Only that she was unsettled and...”

  “Playing the field.”

  “If you like. I’ve known Carmen for ages. She chose me as one of her first profile subjects – I was a ‘role model’ for the teen mags she was writing for just then – and we somehow hit it off. Because I’m always jetting around the world we don’t get the chance to meet very often but every now and again we touch base. She’s one of those people whom success has not been good for. I was cynical, I suppose. I let the good times wash over me. I partied. I ate at Brasserie Lipp. I developed a taste for the good things. I even hung around the fringes of an intellectual set. Deconstructionists I think they called themselves though I never got as a far as working out what that was. They dressed well, I have to say.”

  “I thought you were born to it, that famous elegance.”

  “Oh, Christ, no. We’re all frauds in this business, darling. My parents ran a corner shop in Basildon. But the difference between me and Carmen is that I loved the self-invention, the sheer extent of the deception. And, after other people came to believe it, I believed it myself. Nowadays I couldn’t rewind the tape. I’ve forgotten all the details of my origins. I am what I am this morning.”