Remembering Carmen (11 page)

Looking back, Carmen told herself that she wouldn't have blamed Christopher – had he known the full facts – for taking the same liberty. But the fact is, knowing that he was unaware of Jimmy's presence in her life, she did indeed blame him. She had no right but she blamed him nonetheless. She was not proud of that. She frankly owned to being a monstrous hypocrite. During one of their rows she even managed to tell Christopher that it was because she loved him that she was hurt by his betrayal. Yet still she wouldn't tell him about Jimmy. He had to learn that for himself from other people, from guesswork, from hints. She never told him about Nice. It had become too complex a memory for her. She wasn't suppressing it but every time her mind settled on it the implications became more distasteful. Later, she discovered that Jimmy saw it as some sort of sign, a celestial rebuke for their misbehaviour. She told him that this was a mere hang-up from his Jesuitical education, that they were living in the twenty-first century, that the Gods had departed. Once again, she was talking herself up, trying to silence the voice in her head, the one that said the same thing in a different touchy-feely version. She would conclude that you can't escape the notion that your actions have consequences, whatever mythological, theological, therapeutic babble you use to express the thought. What unsettled her about the death of that child was the fact that she couldn't separate out the idea of culpability (were they, in the end, responsible; could it have been avoided?) from all the other reasons to be guilty that paraded before the ethical camera-eye.

Sometimes she looked back to her schooldays, to what people think of as the simple pieties of the nuns. In her twenties she repudiated the lot. She laughed at what seemed their platitudinous banality but later she came to see it differently. She began to see that even the most clumsy attempt at plotting a moral course may be an attempt worth the effort. She felt, rightly or wrongly, that the nuns were out of their depth, professionally required to deal in certain concepts that their platitudes simply reduced, ossified, stripped of the vital dimension of life and growth, the tension of individual choice. The world offered its challenges beyond the brick wall and cast iron railing perimeter of their convent in the suburbs. The only tools that would prove adequate to that challenge were the ones that could tackle any sort of mess. Today, in her thirties, she was no longer certain even of her repudiations. She had passed into a new phase where she was not sure what she believed. She suspected this to be, at present, a more or less universal condition.

Christopher knew something had happened in Nice but with her second dalliance he came to know more or less everything. That he hated Jimmy was obvious enough. Men, Carmen considered, do not always react like this. Sometimes they become oddly magnanimous and forgiving. She had always put this down to their own secret guilts but now she wondered if there were not something more intricate and puzzling to this way of reacting than she could comprehend. Christopher's contempt for Jimmy was absolute. So ferocious indeed that it ended by more or less letting her off the hook. She was uncomfortable with this for she knew she was no saint. She felt sorry for Christopher, genuinely sorry, for she knew that he loved her with an intensity that was new for her, that she had never known in any previous relationship. She felt certain that he also had never known it.

Perhaps, too, she felt sorry for both of them, for the melancholy wreck of their life together, for the imbecile way in which they had thrown away their love.

But then Joanna came on to the scene. From the moment Carmen saw her she sensed trouble. She immediately developed towards her a powerful animosity. This was her first mistake because it awoke Christopher's sense of fair play. It was as if he needed to protect Joanna from her – which was absurd to begin with and then, of course, inevitable. Carmen knew that she was in a weak position but could not find a way to be consistent. I am a human being after all, she protested. At her first meeting with Joanna at the restaurant where they were the guests of her husband, Carl, she found the man decent enough but something of a bore. The amount of information she could take on board about industrial flooring and ceramic tiles was severely limited and on this occasion – to do with Christopher's having rescued him from that design dilemma – there was more of it than could be considered decent. Although she had never been much disposed to girl's chat, Carmen could have taken refuge in talking to Joanna, but her hostility was already being cranked up and they didn't get very far. Carl was a well-built, handsome guy with untidy blond hair and rather large, rough hands which his trade had made rougher. Although he was an architect, he seemed so obsessive that his work was invariably ‘hands-on'. He would discard his management suit jacket and get down with the men, wrestling with the sheer physicality of the task in front of him. There was a stark, blue glitter in his eye which ought to have been seductive in a challenging sort of way but which, as the evening wore on, Carmen discovered to be the light of mania. In fact, she thought, he was barking. What sort of life was it to prowl the streets of central London looking for opportunities to force a dreary template onto various recalcitrant premises? He seemed to have no other life, no hinterland of interests or passions outside this obsessive Procrustean job of work. No interest, that is, except large and expensive cars. She nearly wept when the conversation, having finally wrung the last drop from the matter of cutting-edge German floor varnish, modulated easily into a discussion of the new range of Audis. No subject could have been better designed to send her into a sullen and subdued rage than that of motoring. She called for another bottle of wine, threw out some outrageous provocations – to no avail – then resigned herself to some occasional sarcasms and listless (but doomed) attempts to prod Joanna into life. Living in Whitfield Street, she walked everywhere that was possibly of interest and there was always a taxi available should she ever find herself in some barbarian outpost (a provincial main-line railway station, the end of the District Line, Wood Green after midnight). The car was simply a thing that did not intrude on her consciousness if she could help it.

When they finally reached the end of this exasperating evening; when Carl had kissed her on both cheeks; and when Christopher had done the same to the simpering Joanna, who now clutched a spray of roses which she had persuaded Chrisopher to offer her, a tribute he would not have been so foolish as to try to pay Carmen. As they walked through the busy streets of Soho, Carmen and Christopher were squaring up for a major argument. Having drunk too much, in order to soothe the ache of her boredom, she was louder and coarser than she would have wished to be. Christopher – already smitten by the pale rose girl? – was quiet and restrained, less disposed than usual to rise to her challenges and poisoned darts.

“I think I now know all I am ever likely to need to know about the art of laying wooden flooring.”

“You have to realise that Carl is a perfectionist.”

“Don't you mean a bore and a tyrant?”

“He cares about his work. It's his life.”

“My point exactly. What sort of a life is it that turns on whether a millimetre needs to be shaved off a Spanish tile? The man is an automaton. He's only half alive.”

“Sometimes I think you don't appreciate that other people have different ways of taking their satisfactions in life.”

“Oh, don't get me wrong. I know it all too well. But generally I stay well out of their way. Life is too short to spend it in the company of bores.”

“I thought Joanna was quite pleasant.”

“Quite pleasant! Do me a favour! She hardly said a thing all night, sitting there with those fucking roses in her lap like a virgin bridesmaid.”

“I think that's a bit unfair.”

“Oh, I'm sorry if I was unfair. That was quite wrong of me. Perish the thought that anyone should be unfair. She was more your type was she? The pale English rose?”

“Save your clichés for your magazine pieces.”

“So what was the appeal, then? Grown tired of loud-mouthed bitches?”

“Since you mention it, you were a bit over the top tonight.”

“Over the top! Look, I was fighting for my life out there. Trapped between two megabores locked into the intricacies of fucking varnish and Miss Muffet and her floral arrangement, I was trying to inject some spark into that heap of sawdust. And to cap it all you then launch into a discussion of motor cars! You don't even own one.”

“You must provide me, next time, with a list of approved topics of conversation.”

“Chris my sweet, there won't be a next time. If you and Carl want to salivate over gearboxes do it sometime when I'm out of town.”

Their conversation had become so animated that Carmen hardly noticed her surroundings. She nearly trod on a beggar who was holding out a paper cup at his pitch under an ATM in Oxford Street. He looked at her with pained disapproval.

“Have a nice day.”

“Chance would be a fine thing.”

As if to rebuke her, Christopher walked firmly over to the young man and placed a couple of pound coins in his cup, which bore the livery of Souper Kitchen.

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.