Remembering Carmen (18 page)

“If that's a representative slice of the lyrics I don't think I've missed very much.”

“You haven't. The Red Flag is even worse. All that stuff about martyr's blood. The worst kind of sentimentality. And such plodding harmonies.”

“So what's the significance – or should I be saying ‘semiotics' – of this little box.”

“Oh, I picked it up in Paris as a joke. I thought it might amuse you. But I can't get over the fact that you have never heard it.”

“I was never into politics. My dad was in the Labour Party which was probably why I gave it a wide berth. I wasn't attracted by all those old men in cloth caps, who met in dingy rooms and went round ‘knocking on doors'. I never understood the joy of interrupting people's evening meal and preaching at them.”

“But I've lost count of the number of arguments we've had about your precious working class background. And all those attacks on my privileged version. I thought you would have been misty-eyed at the historical trappings of the great workers' struggle.”

“I think that's all so outmoded. People aren't interested now in socialism. Even the word can hardly be pronounced without its sounding ridiculous. People want to party. To have a good time. They don't want to be made to feel guilty about pursuing money and success.”

“Is that really true?”

“Oh, I don't know. I'm just talking for myself.”

“But isn't that the problem. Everyone just talks for themselves now.”

“We're not going to have one of those boring ethical discussions are we? Because, if we are I'm going back to the motel now.”

“OK. Anyway, I'm not the right person to launch such an argument. I just hope that by ignoring it all there isn't a sudden and rather unpleasant interruption of the party.”

The waiter appeared with some deliciously cool ices. It was now half past nine but the heat had only partly diminished. Carmen was annoyed with herself because, once again, she had (automatically, unthinkingly) taken a contrary position to Jimmy's. This seemed to be the pattern these days. She had always been quarrelsome but now it had become a kind of addiction, a need. You don't have to be a professional psychiatrist, she said to herself, to see where Carmen is coming from: the girl is frustrated and all this bolshieness is displacement activity. Yes, yes. I know all that. She knew it then as she sat with Jimmy in the steamy restaurant garden. As they delved with long spoons into the deep sundae glasses and smirked contentedly at each other, she knew that she had been behaving stupidly. That's not how she was meant to be. She was supposed to be cleverer than this. But occasionally that's how it is. We find ourselves tenanted by someone else with a big mouth, crass and difficult, tactless and obstreperous. Patiently we wait for them to go away but sometimes they are a long time going.

They went back to the motel in a softened mood. She had recovered herself. Jimmy, as ever, was easy and forgiving. He was incapable of harbouring resentment. He was so good, in fact, that it was provoking. His calm, accepting, giving nature was in itself a rebuke that acted as a goad. Yes, she could actually find herself hating him for his refusal to descend to her level, to be as bad as she was.

She woke in the middle of the night and found her thoughts turning to Christopher. This was unusual. Generally a sort of automatic cut-out prevented her thinking of him when she found herself in such circumstances. When she was betraying him. The air-conditioning was so effective that she felt quite cold. She drew the sheet over her nakedness. She looked at Jimmy's sleeping back. This made her turn away abruptly. She was restless and uneasy. It was as if she sensed that this was a turning point, that perhaps this time she had gone too far, that Christopher would not have her back. She saw her mobile phone on the bedside table. The door of the bathroom was ajar and a soft light from some source (perhaps the corridor or an outdoor light) was coming in through a high window inside it. She had only to slip out of bed and take the phone to the other end of the enormous room and close the bathroom door behind her. Seconds later she was treading stealthily along the deep pile carpet so as not to disturb Jimmy.

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.