Remembering Carmen

by Nicholas Murray

  Once she had closed the door she switched on the light. She immediately found it too bright. The furtiveness of her project seemed to require less brash illumination. She lowered the drawbridge of the lavatory seat cover and sat down to examine the dial of her phone. Christopher’s was the first name in the directory sequence (she had ensured this by putting an ‘A’ arbitrarily before his name) and all she had to do was press the relevant button. She hesitated. What would she say? Actually, what time was it now in London? Wasn’t there a five hour gap? Or was it six at this time of year? It was probably already morning. He would have left for work. And then he would return later to see the details of her missed call, to wonder what was up. She would have lost the advantage of surprise. But this was beside the point. She still did not know what she wanted to say. She did not know what she felt. She could identify only a vague sense of transgression, of having at last woken to the realisation of what she had done. Was she trying to seek his forgiveness? That wasn’t really her. He wouldn’t have appreciated that. Did she merely wish to tell the truth? That sounded better – but for the problem of identifying what the truth might be in this case. It wasn’t a matter of straight report. It would require the awkward terms, the unforgiving vocabulary, the full resources of that blunt moral terminology she had found herself turning to increasingly in recent weeks. Somehow she wasn’t ready for that. What she felt now was the need to speak to him in the old way: that carefree, laughing, facetious, playful, nonsensical fashion in which they had joshed each other at first, before the quarrels became more serious, before they turned from verbal play-acting to something more wounding.

  There was a girl at school. Carmen racked her memory for the name. Theresa, she thought it was. They had once been friends in that intense but abruptly terminable way in which we keep our friends at that age. They went everywhere, did everything together, and then they fell out. Possibly Carmen had started to go out with a boy of whom poor Theresa was fond, whom she had marked out as hers. Carmen knew this but she did nothing to repel his (obviously clumsy) approaches. As it turned out he was no more interested in Carmen than he had been in Theresa and she was dropped within a week. But the damage had been done. Carmen could still hear her shrill voice echoing down the polished corridor that led from the assembly hall to the playground.

  “You’re a bitch, Carmen O’Hare. You’re a bloody bitch.”

  She was right, poor little, tear-streaked, straggly-haired Theresa. I was a bitch, Carmen now told herself. A prize bitch. I didn’t know then that I would make it into a career profile, a trademark. I know also that I was something else. In the right hands – and this was it, this was what I was groping towards – in Christopher’s hands I was capable of becoming something else. He turned the key in the lock and the door fell open. I found that I could open out, that I could give. People saw those stagey quarrels and laughed. Sometimes they became alarmed. But they knew we were good for each other, that under the warm spring rain of Christopher’s attention the bitch had flowered, had become, briefly, another kind of woman. I never liked to admit it. I wanted to be seen as a strong woman who didn’t need a man to define herself against, to be grateful for. I could make my own way, elbow aside my own obstacles, make my own luck. But that was all bluster and now I was prostrate before the truth. I needed him but, because of what I had done, it was almost certainly too late.

  Carmen looked down at the display. ‘a chris.’ All she had to do was to press the little button. He would pick it up. She would say... what? She did not have the confidence to do this, to say what needed to be said. And there was something else. She could not face the idea of failure. That was another of her trademarks: Carmen did not fail. Carmen the success, crashing from one triumph to the next. Carmen the role model for the young journalists and would-be editors. She did not do failure. Nothing brought out her bitchiness more surely than the weepy female in the office who had been sacked, jilted, spiked. She was like a healthy person in a hospital ward, fearful that she might catch something. And failure was the ultimate curse, the plague that struck one down and left one to rot by the side of the road. She needed the steady adrenalin surge of success, the constant verification, the tacit applause. At this moment she could not face being repulsed by Christopher. She did not think that she could handle it.

  Then there was a crash. The door flew open. The light blazed. She looked up, blinking like a frightened, hunted animal. Jimmy stood in the doorway, naked, rubbing his eyes, struggling to emerge from the blanket of sleep.

  “Carmen, what’s up? What time is it?”

  He looked down and saw the phone. She found herself, like a guilty child caught in some minor misdemeanour, helpless under his peremptory gaze. She handed it to him as if had been the catapult whose stone had shattered the pane of glass in the conservatory. He took it from her. He noticed the name on the display and looked down at her on her ceramic throne.

  “You didn’t ring him?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you? Don’t hold back on my account. I don’t control you, Carmen.”

  “I... wasn’t going to really. I just thought... I just wanted to...”

  Jimmy was now on his knees. He took her hands and covered them with his own. He kissed her with great tenderness but when he looked afterwards into her eyes she could see in his own the unmistakeable signs of regret. He knew that whatever it was that they had enjoyed was now over. No rancour, no jealous spasm, no prospect of scenes. He lifted her up gently and led her back to bed. She lay against him there, reassured by his presence in spite of this knowledge that it would be their last night together. They both slept surprisingly soundly. The next morning they were preternaturally bright and solicitous, busying themselves with packing and making their farewells and arranging transport. They flew back that night, and when Jimmy left the Underground at Warren Street their parting was like that of two travellers who have casually and lightly met, who have exchanged addresses, but who do not expect to make use of them in the future.

  When Carmen got back to Whitfield Street, Christopher was not there. He would almost certainly be out making an early start on his latest job. Tired and jet-lagged as she was, she started to pack. Leaving a note for Christopher, she gathered up her things and returned to her own flat, wanting only sleep and forgetfulness.

  Christopher now began to think that he should have cancelled it. He was certainly in no party mood. That festive condition seemed, in fact, to be shared just now by everyone but him. But a certain native stubbornness made him want to persist. He had no taste for victim status. He did not one anyone to feel sorry for him. He decided to go ahead. And, when writing out the invitations, he resolved to leave nobody out. If embarrassments, awkwardnesses, resulted from his juxtapositions of guests, so be it. They had only themselves to blame.

  A combination of instinct, justified suspicion, a brief newspaper report of a controversial statement on arts policy from a leading pianist attending a conference in Virginia, and a pained (but he hoped not malicious) informative phone call from a woman friend (yes, yes, but long ago) gave Christopher a sufficient outline of Carmen’s movements. He was able to fill in the remaining details with a combination of fevered imagining, righteous contempt, and stabbing regret. He could not say whether he knew with certainty that it was over or whether he still hoped that they could crawl out from under this amatory wreckage intact, ready to give it one more try. These things are never cut and dried. His thoughts and feelings were confused.

  About Jimmy he was less confused. He knew that one should not succumb to jealous rage, to wishing the wretched rival more than metaphoric harm. After all, he had not himself behaved in an exemplary fashion and this was a relationship founded on comfortably old-fashioned libertarian principles, an ‘open’ relationship being the arch term of art. Neither of them was meant to entertain for a moment the usual forms of jealousy or attempt any control of the other partner’s sexual freedom. But that was the official ideology. Beneath it was
written another script which specified the appropriate moves with greater precision, which set out what was really allowed and disallowed. He could never fail to see Jimmy as anything other than an opportunist, a serene predator who did not care for either of them but only for his own pleasure. He was a connoisseur, a sexual gourmet, a collector of beautiful women. His charms were obvious and of a kind that Christopher could never hope to emulate. They were the product of the culture that had made him, inescapably, what he was.

  Christopher felt that his own country at the start of the new century had lost something of its intelligence and grace in the art of living, a coarse Anglo-Saxon streak (always present in the rosbif caricature of continental Europeans) coming too much to the fore and cross-breeding with the showy materialism that went under the general heading of ‘style’, and about which Carmen in her magazine pieces was such an expert pundit. Jimmy’s manner spoke of something else, of another possibility, of a road not taken. Christopher also admired, without reserve, his dedication to his music, the skill of his interpretation, that special liquid grace of his playing, and the largeness of his aesthetic vision. Had Carmen’s life not become intertwined with his, he should have been an unreserved admirer.

  But he was not permitted to be so dispassionate in his assessment of Jimmy. No doubt his unhurried charm, the universal adulation, were temptations too strong for anyone to resist. Women were drawn to him for reasons so obvious as hardly to need stating. And why would he have wished to turn them away? His wandering lifestyle was not an encouragement to settled domesticity – even if his temperament had been disposed to it – and the intense but short-lived affair, the plucking of the most interesting and fragrant blooms, suited him admirably. Christopher was merely unlucky and found it hard to draw up a convincing indictment, however bitter (and coarse its expression) his resentment could be at times.

  He was shocked, during a particularly vivid verbal skirmish with Carmen, to discover from her that Jimmy had dismissed him as indistinguishable from his clients, seeing him as one of those fast-living new vulgarians whose money was being scattered so conspicuously around the capital. Christopher was hurt by what struck him as its injustice (later, of course, he saw that his immersion in this world would naturally have led anyone to assume on his part an unalloyed endorsement of it). He was also hurt by its ingratitude. After all, he had been generous enough to applaud his talent, might he not have conceded that he too was a little different? But perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was more enmeshed in its values than he cared to admit. Those unleashed energies, the sense of excitement, the heady atmosphere of change in the city had undoubtedly captivated him but he saw it as a more professional, a purer (the word, he concedes, may provoke a sneer but it catches something of how he saw his avocation) engagement with the task in hand. He did not nod his head to the page-turner at the keyboard of a concert grand but he made, he crafted, something with his imagination and his talent.

  When Christopher spoke in this way Carmen would snort derisively. He retorted that her own gifts were hardly a vindication of her early promise, of the analytic philosopher that she was poised briefly to become in her early twenties. She came back with heavy fire and they locked themselves into one of their fiercely staged conflicts which resolved nothing, but which blazed magnificently.

  He was out when she returned from the States. He had begun early on a new bistro in Lexington Street and came back to a scribbled note on the kitchen counter: “Back from US. Jet-lagged. Gone back to my place to sleep. Speak to you later.” It was her usual minimalist style and left no clues. He was inclined to think it a front for some more permanent disengagement, whose terms would be confirmed later when they had found the opportunity to ‘speak’. As he walked back to Whitfield Street the skies had begun to darken. A violent summer storm seemed imminent. From the sound of traffic as he passed along the narrow corridor, he realised that the window of the tiny room Carmen used for her writing when she was staying with him (she had always insisted on keeping her flat, it seemed to him, as a safety net) was open. Lightning flashed as he stepped into the room to secure the window. The unnatural, sharp, electric brightness showed, what he would have seen in any light, that her possessions had gone. Nothing was plugged in to the sockets. Her minimal office apparatus (bear mascot, mug of pens, several box files) had been hastily scooped up. He knew that if he went into the bedroom he would find the drawers and hangers empty of the few clothes she kept there. There was a brusque completeness about her withdrawal that was also utterly characteristic: conducted at a run, without regard to how it might affect anyone else.

  Carmen, he muttered to himself, I have called you generous, which, when our love was at its most extreme pitch, you were. You would surrender, and evoke, everything. I have never felt more intensely alive than during those episodes (pitifully few in retrospect) when we could, like Donne’s lovers, eclipse the world. But you could also be cruel, Carmen, with a harshness that seemed to hold no mercy to anyone, least of all yourself. I think, indeed, that at those moments, you were punishing yourself. The rest of us were merely collateral victims, of little account in the tally of war. Perhaps there was no other way. Perhaps this peremptory evacuation was the kindest way to do it, as if, in the nature of the case, there could be no more tender stratagem.

  Christopher walked into the bedroom, hardly bothering to confirm the evidence which he had predicted of Carmen’s retreat. The thunder cracked and rain slashed against the window panes. He secured another window. As he looked out he saw people running along the pavement, newspapers held above their heads as impromptu umbrellas. A couple in summer clothes – he in a T-shirt; she in a tiny white vest and calf-length slacks – scorned to run, laughing, holding each other, their hair plastered to their skulls, their clothing tightly clinging to their bodies, enjoying the shower, ecstatic at their freedom, their indifference to what mere weather could put in their path. The more provident citizens, huddled under tiny tote umbrellas, edged along the pavement, hugging the wall. Rain drummed on the silver metal tables outside the pub, filling abandoned glasses in an instant. Puddles swelled above drains which could not take more than a fraction of the floodwater. And then, as suddenly as it came, it was over. The sky became lighter. People emerged laughing from doorways, cafés, pub entrances, spreading out their palms for confirmation that the downpour had really stopped. Barmen followed, wiping the chairs with sponges, tipping water from glasses on to the pavement, coaxing the refugee drinkers back out into the street. A girl shrieked as a passing taxi showered her with water from a broad puddle. Two youths were poking the sagging canopy in front of a restaurant, hoping to spill its contents with a terrific splash, until a waiter emerged to chase them off.

  And then he saw her, working her way along the street. No umbrella, but she had clearly seen out the storm under cover somewhere along her route. Craftily, he watched her from his position at the first floor window. The sky was clearing rapidly. A crack of blue appeared and even here, in the heart of the dirty, dusty, summer city, he could smell the brief, steaming freshness that was being prepared. Carmen walked towards him, towards a confrontation that he no longer feared. He moved back from the window and sat on the bed to await the sound of her key in the lock. When she chose to ring the bell he knew that it was all over.

  She allowed herself to be kissed briefly on the cheek like someone being greeted by a barely known hostess on arrival at a party. Christopher stood back to let her pass. As she sat down on the sofa he looked at her as if she were a perfect stranger and he were wholly disconnected from her.

  “Chris, we need to talk.”

  “I’m sure we do. How was Jimmy?”

  “Chris, this isn’t going to be made any easier by sarcasms. Let’s try to keep it adult.”

  “Adult. That’s an interesting term. I must note that one for future reference. And I apologise for the sarcasm. I’m merely a manual worker, a yuppy with a power drill, as the great concert artist would put it. I haven
’t the time to perfect a more studied utterance.”

  “Oh stop talking crap. I take it you know where I have been.”

  “And with whom.”

  “And with whom.”

  “Well, I am waiting to hear about this ‘need’, about what makes it imperative that we talk.”

  “Ease up, will you, Chris. This is hard enough.”

  “Oh yes, it’s hard. It’s very hard. You’ve no idea how hard it is. I don’t think you’ve even begun to contemplate how hard it is.”

  “OK. OK. I have hurt you. I have made a mistake. With Jimmy it’s...”

  “All over? Spare me.”

  “Well it is. It’s over, it’s played out.”

  Carmen paused. She had been wringing her hands tightly around the strap of her handbag, fighting, it seemed to him, for a way through this that did not take her usual course of a blazing row, the discharge of all batteries. That was not how she wanted it to be.

  “I won’t be seeing him again.”

  “Third time unlucky? I suppose I should be grateful that you have seen the light at last. Should I be grateful?”

  And then a new sound in her voice, never heard before, a tone that seemed to come from somewhere at the farthest edge of desperation.

  “Chris, I no longer care what you or I or anyone feels. I am tired. I am exhausted by all this. You don’t need to be grateful. I don’t need to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness. There’s nothing left in these gestures. They solve nothing. I’ve spoiled everything we had. I don’t know why I did it. But it’s done. Last night I realised suddenly, as if a light had suddenly been switched on, how much you had meant to me and the enormity of what I had done. I haven’t come to ask you to take me back. I realise that I have lost that chance. That it’s too late.”