Remembering Carmen Read online

  Carmen’s decision to live with Christopher was in some sense not a decision at all. It simply became, slowly, a reality. Although those first encounters quickly became sexual – for they were, for all their linguistic pugilism and mutual provocations, always attracted to each other, always adroit in their love-making, always ardent – the notion of co-habitation at first revolted them. Neither had been in a recent relationship, neither was recoiling from a failed partnership or seeking compensatory affairs. They were enjoying the experience of emotional freedom. Christopher had severed his relationship with a life in the sticks about which he refused to talk to Carmen and she was celebrating a narrow escape from matrimony at the hands of an older man. It was precisely this sense of freedom, of lightness, that attracted them to each other. Carmen considers that she sees this more clearly now than she would have seen it at the time. And there may have been something in Christopher’s view that their love of discord, their glorious hostility, was a way of ensuring that each remained free. Like brawling lions, they defended their territory in the simplest possible way, by opening their jaws and letting out a roar.

  Notwithstanding their propensity to fight, they grew to need each other. It began with an overnight stay, then a weekend which gradually lengthened at both ends, then an entire week connecting those hitherto separated points. Carmen kept on her flat, of course – a bolt-hole was vital – and Christopher’s Whitfield Street lair was large enough to give her a small cubby-hole of her own where she could write while he was out doing his fancy restaurant-fitting. It was a time when her magazine copy was full of references to giving people ‘space’. Carmen always thought it would be useful to have throwaway function keys on the lap-top which would cover these set phrases. Most lasted only a year or so, though she was always fascinated by the durability of certain words, their refusal to lie down. The most remarkable of all was ‘cool’ which strictly speaking should have gone out with leather elbow patches on tweed jackets but which was once again enjoying a revival. It would have to be a permanent function-key.

  One thing about which they never quarrelled was London itself. They were both provincials, which she supposed explained their passion for the city – its special freedoms and anonymities, its offer of escape and of choice, the generous permission it grants to various ways of living – the antithesis of the small-town’s insistence on its unique path. This large liberty can co-exist with small fixities, routines, grooves. Even in their corner of Fitzrovia they knew their Asian corner-shopman, his wry sense of humour, his predictable jokes, and those of his equally sardonic wife. There was a café – one of the few not yet refitted and homogenised by the big coffee chains – whose furniture was untouched by fashion. It was run by Italians and there was a picture of the Madonna behind the counter. They had their favourite pubs and restaurants and public places. They walked their own path through the city. They became expert at threading the narrow pavements, dodging people and traffic, discovering the short cuts, the quick back ways that avoided the press of pedestrians on the main thoroughfares. They loved it in the way the countryman, Carmen supposed (unlike Christopher she had never lived in the country and had no desire to do so) loves his fields and hills and the backdrop of sky. She had a passion for travel but always loved to return. It is true that there were parts of the city that seemed alien to her: the great wide streets, parks, mansions and institutions of South Kensington, for example, wrapped in their massive money-nets, half-hidden behind walls or guarded by porter’s lodges whose doors gleamed with polished brass. But they at least provided the pleasure of contrast. She was also rigid in her conception of what constituted the city. She loathed any hint of the suburban and anywhere not walkable from Charing Cross was to her impermissible, automatically transformed into somewhere else, not her flâneur’s metropolis but a dull district of parked cars and supermarkets and ashen-faced commuters at the close of day.

  This is not the description of an idyll, but they lived a life that suited them both. They did not believe that they were smug – the usual indictment of those who have worked out a successful modus vivendi – for each of them knew well enough from experience what the opposite of this life was like and the shape it could easily resume at a moment’s notice.

  And they had their quarrels to keep them sharp and mettlesome.

  Christopher considered that he enjoyed his work, which might be described as the plucking of order from chaos. The city was constantly renewing itself. Capital, one of his business partners once observed, grows lazy until it is woken from its sleep and reminded that there are things to be done, new opportunities to seize. Buildings were there to be bought and sold, refurbished or destroyed. Rebuilt from their own ashes. Old factories, dairies, dispensaries, their original purposes sometimes inscribed in ceramic tiles or garlanded in swathes of stone acanthus, were refashioned by clever designers and architects into new uses. Forty yellow tables with their accompanying tubular steel chairs were loud with diners on new Mediterranean cuisine in an old Zion chapel somewhere off the Tottenham Court Road. A scruffy Greek restaurant whose long lease had expired was now an aseptic gallery of costly artists’ prints. Christopher waxed fat on all this ripping up and tearing out. He was quick and worked well to the blueprints provided. He had assembled a good team with whose help he would rip through the latest commercial premises, sizing, squaring, anticipating problems, juggling with solutions, taking pleasure in accommodating imperfections, protrusions, departures from exact angles. His clients were bracingly ruthless – unlike the slow, ruminative, rustic commissioners of unnecessary window-work whose fickle minds had changed from week to week. They were appreciative of his quick, provisional, extemporising skills. Every day on which interest was paid, and turnover deferred, worked on their angst, agitated their whole sensibility. They walked into the devastation of floorspaces, lean and hungry, wanting to know how much longer he would be, what corners could be cut, what dead branches could be lopped from the specification to speed fresh growth. At their heels the next set of professionals waited, champing at the bit, eager to pay their tribute of finishing skill to the whole project, to bring nearer the moment when the tills started to ring, the cards began to be swiped through the jaws of the Visa machine like a sharpening blade. Christopher felt like a pioneer hacking back the undergrowth at the edge of the last settlement. He was riding high. He was intoxicated. He was part of the energy and action in this city.

  He asks himself: what happened, Carmen? How did we contrive to cancel this bacchanale? He asks the questions but he already knows the answers. The answer.

  Christopher was hardly aware of Jimmy when he slid, deftly, into their lives, smiling, unrolling the soft, luxurious carpet of his charm, the famous charm that had caused so many to give themselves to him, prodigally, eagerly, without restraint and against their better judgement, when judgement was not the issue. Christopher and Carmen had opening night tickets at Kerkyra in Museum Street. Carmen swept in from work with her glossy black hair – longer now – clamped at the back in a sapphire ring of elasticated silk, turning every head in the crowded room. A type with long hair tied in a pigtail was plucking a mandolin in the corner. The lighting was subdued. Christopher’s olive-green counter was strewn with seductive nibbles and ranged with complimentary glasses of house Mantinia. Waitresses hung back, ready for their assault. A new wave of Greek cuisine – taking the old staples and giving them an expensive gloss – was sweeping the capital. Captain Corelli’s in Old Compton Street had shown the way but dozens had followed. Christopher himself had three commissions in the queue – mostly quick refits of a kind he could turn around in three days, bribed by the first of them to get the lads lined up for a classic weekend job: in on Friday night at six and the corks popping at Monday night’s opening.

  Out of the cool clatter of cutlery and glassware, Jimmy approached their table, smiling suavely, large hands extended. You noticed the hands, of course, for they were Jimmy’s trademark, his USP. That memorable CD cover of Berg,
Schoenberg and Webern, with the elongated, delicate hands poised over the keyboard, had been a catchy icon after it won a Gramophone award and was advertised on the Underground – itself a rather remarkable achievement for three alumni of the Viennese School. Jimmy knew how to manage his success, how to play the admiring fish. He knew just how far to go and when to hold back. It was a performance as impressive in its way as his conduct at the piano. Like everyone else, Christopher and Carmen ate, eagerly, out of his hand. Unlike some celebrities who keep a dim recollection of those they have met – their real interest centring on themselves – Jimmy had remembered Carmen from the hotel on the Riviera. Christopher could see that Jimmy was homing in on her – although he was scooped up into the general embrace – and she warmly rose to take those magnificent hands. He smiled, offered them the gracious tribute of himself, wordlessly, for several seconds, then, after a quick acknowledgement of his encounter on the Riviera with Carmen, nodded with the faintly arch grace of a maître d’, and backed away to his table where he rejoined the glittering couple with whom he had come to dine. Christopher could not help noticing that he was unaccompanied.

  Carmen responded testily to Christopher’s inquries. He could see that she detected the false note, his effort to appear detached, amused. She knew what he was thinking. What he was fearing. The ground was being cleared for a real humdinger but it was too early in the evening to launch the first strike. They attacked instead a small dish of varied dips – crushed walnut, taramasalata, something unidentified which, had he been able to stomach the preposterous prose of restaurant menus, Christopher could have had named. It was perhaps half an hour later – when he was quietly and intently at work on a challenging preparation of lamb – that Jimmy softly reappeared. He was off, it seemed, not staying for the full meal. His manner suggested more pressing business elsewhere. He had done what needed to be done. He dropped on to the tablecloth a flyer for a concert at the Purcell Room: John Cage’s sonatas for prepared piano. They compliantly murmured that they would be there.

  Over coffee, the first missile was launched.

  “So, tell me more about the divine Jimmy.”

  “What is there to tell?”

  “He seemed very pleased to see you.”

  Carmen looked at Christopher with that magnificent plaiting of pity and contempt that was her invariable starter.

  “He’s a professional charmer. He’s pleased to see everyone.”

  “They seem to reciprocate. They don’t seem able to resist him.”

  “Does that make you jealous?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forgive me, but I can’t help sensing a little male rivalry here.”

  “What? The carpenter and the virtuoso? In which arena, tell me, would we be slugging that one out?”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You know exactly what I mean.”

  He knew exactly what she meant.

  “No I don’t. Why should I be jealous of that mountain of blue-eyed smarm?”

  Carmen laughed in triumph. She had no further need of riposte.

  “Are you going to his concert?”

  “We could, I suppose, unless you have got one of your rush jobs on.”

  He didn’t like her tone. It was uncertain, trying a little too hard for insouciance. It was patently obvious that she wanted to clock Jimmy again: the triumphant entrance through the narrow door at the rear of the stage (the Purcell, with its subtle intimacy, perfectly adjusted to Jimmy’s special modes of self-display); the enveloping smile thrown out like a gossamer veil over the heads of the audience; the long, magnificent silent foreplay; the hand dragged back through the thick disordered thatch; then the first strike of the keys.

  Of course he was fucking jealous.

  One always wants to be above this, Christopher reflected. One wants to avoid pettiness. Nothing is more miserable than the accumulation of small resentments, suspicions, deliberate misprisions, with which lovers torment themselves when the going is unsteady. One wants to be magnanimous and at ease. Brimming over.

  “So he met you in France?”

  “Sure. Though I’m amazed he remembered me.”

  I shouldn’t be scrutinising her, he thought, looking for tell-tale signs, shaky formulations, over-eager denials, making light of it.

  “Would that be after I left?”

  “Oh, please!”

  “Sorry, but it’s merely a casual inquiry. I hardly knew you at that time if you recall.”

  “You mean you hadn’t yet established your rights of ownership.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Look, Chris, I don’t need this, right? You know perfectly well I can’t stand this creepy possessiveness. I am a free agent and I expect you to be. I thought we weren’t into all that sort of thing.”

  “I’m not saying we are.”

  “Well what the fuck are you saying, then?”

  “Only that Jimmy seemed very familiar.”

  “But can’t you see that he is like that with everyone, with all women. It’s his way of doing things.”

  “You don’t seem to object.”

  “Why should I object? It’s up to him how he behaves. What do you want me to say? He’s a sexist creep? OK, he’s a sexist creep. Satisfied?”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s obviously not fine. What you want me to say is did I sleep with Jimmy at the Hotel Magnifique. And what I am saying is that I don’t answer questions like that. In fact I object to their being put.”

  Christopher was reassured by her vehemence. She had not slept with Jimmy.

  When the bill came, Carmen snatched it. In recognition of Christopher’s services the wine had been on the house but the tally was still the equivalent of a week’s income for a state pensioner. To them, this meant nothing, because they jointly earned more money than they could ever find the opportunity to spend. They were surrounded by countless others in the same predicament. They wanted to be able to spend more time with their possessions, longer at the yachting marina, more extended weekends in the Herefordshire cottage, more time gliding along the motorway network listening to audiobooks on the mellifluous in-car sound system. But the implacable ironmaster barked his orders at them and they continued to jump.

  Christopher and Carmen walked back to Whitfield Street as they always did after a meal or a show, full of the vinous fumes of physical well-being. A resentful beggar, his blanket thrown over his shoulders like a mountain shepherd, cursed them as they passed. They had failed to notice him as they crossed Tottenham Court Road, their attention distracted by the need to avoid a drunk in an expensive suit who was pissing in the doorway of a computer shop. They slipped down a side street and turned in to the south end of Whitfield Street. A huddle of doubtful youths outside Crabtree Fields quickened their step and they were soon back at the flat. The quarrel about Jimmy had vivified them. They went straight to bed.

  ~

  The audience at the Purcell Room was well-bred and middle-class, mostly middle-aged, but with a sprinkling of the younger generation – probably professional musicians, students, tyro composers. Christopher looked around the small chamber, noting how few people in this city of millions could be mustered for such an occasion. Jimmy – in black from head to toe but T-shirt and silk trousers taking the place of tuxedo and tails – handled the audience with aplomb. They loved it as much as he did and, of course, he played magnificently. Expecting to be bored or baffled, Christopher was enchanted by the spare rhythmic beauty of Cage’s composition which he found ensnaring and irresistible. Whether Carmen at his side found music or musician irresistible was a matter of no consequence to him. He happily forgot where he was or any ground he might have for behaving in a resentful or peevish fashion. At the end he applauded as vigorously as anyone else in the hall.

  As they streamed away into the night, along the Embankment and over Charing Cross footbridge they said little. Jimmy was no longer an issue of contention between them. The air was sharp and appetising. They felt alive.<
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  Inevitably, he reflected, I am cast as the pantomime villain. Let’s blame Jimmy, the man who steals other people’s partners. In fact, I steal no one. I have no interest in possession. They come to me of their own free will and I do not seek to hold on to them. But none of this is allowed. My function as scapegoat is too necessary for the prosaic truth to be allowed to complicate the imaginary record. How often have I seen myself not as a thief but as an arbitrator, stepping in between antagonistic parties, my services demanded peremptorily, sometimes without reward. It is not always pleasant, this sense of being ancillary to something that is happening elsewhere.

  Nor am I, before we leave the metaphor of the stage, a Don Giovanni, a Casanova. The predatory male ceaselessly in pursuit of unattainable satisfaction, and destined, when time is called, to be swallowed by the jaws of hell. My amatory career began in the feminist 1970s and 1980s when the relations between the sexes were an arena of contest, challenge and mutual recrimination. In spite of my critics, I claim that I learnt from these arguments. I modified my practice but I could not stop loving women. Nor could I see it in me to apologise for what seems to me an essential activity, a necessary part of the business of being human.

  Carmen claims that Jimmy first encountered her in an expensive hotel in the south of France. He has no recollection of this. As he sees it, a series of random and inconsequential sightings in London led to their having lunch and, later, to some hurried and not entirely satisfactory assignations – once in a small hotel in West London which he found rather amusing if faintly theatrical. He felt that, contrary to the way in which the charge-sheet is customarily drawn up, it was he who was being used. Carmen interested him. Her sexual allure was obvious, but something else drew Jimmy to her. He was fascinated by her strangely combative personality. He was given the usual motor tour of her past (the pinched provincial beginnings, the convent girl’s ritual rebellions etc etc) and listened as patiently as he could. These recitals generally bored him in ways that were hardly expressible. He preferred to live for the present and nothing could be more alien to him than these obsessive English fossickings in the dusty lumber-room of class – always an uncle who is a bit of a card, a father whose flaws are re-arranged to his advantage with the passage of time, a put-upon mother whose quiet heroism is somehow considered an inspiration. He wanted to lean across and vigorously shake the composers of these retrogressive monologues – indeed that is exactly what he sometimes did – urging them to cut free from the past and march forward with a light spring in their step towards the bright prospect of the new day. They look at him with suppressed anger. “You do not understand.” Most true, he reflected. Most true.