Remembering Carmen (22 page)

Then Carl and Joanna awkwardly breached that defence. They forced Alice and Jimmy apart (there was a moment too much delay, a moment of rudeness, before they were allowed through) then stepped forward with outstretched hands to announce that they were leaving and that they did not wish to do so until they had spoken to Carmen. They did not seem the same couple she had met that evening at the table outside the restaurant where Carl had been distant and abstracted, Joanna simperingly sweet. They seemed to have taken control of themselves, consciously projected themselves as a couple. Carmen felt slow on the uptake in this particular department but when she saw Joanna smooth her stomach with the palm of her hand she was finally prompted to congratulate her. Carl beamed in a way that nearly made her laugh, not one of her mocking laughs, but in an impulse of amusement at the way in which he so comfortably, so complacently acted his part. They now proved useful to Carmen as a stalking horse to get herself out of this corner. Once she had made her escape, Alice and Jimmy advanced towards another group. She then neatly left the loving couple and swam across to the opposite corner of the roof. There a group of media friends was sharing a bottle of something special which they had brought with them and had been too selfish to leave in the general pool.

Carmen kept going for another half hour and then she caught sight of Christopher. He was detached, having just dealt with some minor electrical problem raised by the band, and she decided that this was the right moment to approach him. He saw her coming and waved. When she saw that shy, delicate smile she recalled the young man on the hotel terrace towards whom she had responded with such unfeeling sharpness. She could not help the way she was (or so she habitually argued) but there were times when she could have wished for some greater measure of sweetness in her nature, some adeptness in the easier kinds of charm. It was fatally easy to play the role of hard bitch and it was one into which she slipped far too frequently. There had been good times, times when he had brought from her what she did not know was there, what he called her generosity. Carmen never understood this choice of term. She did not see herself as the embodiment of this virtue but she came to understand that he meant her passion, her energy, her intensity, her refusal to be indifferent (but also her indifference to what the world might think). It was this, he claimed, that liberated his own passions and intensities. Yes, there had been good times, and now they had come to an end. She did not know why. In these circumstances one never does. One simply bows to one's fate.

Carmen crossed towards him and touched him lightly on the arm.

“Chris, I must be going.”

“I'm so glad you came. You saw everyone? Alice was Alice in spades, don't you think?”

“She always is. She never does things by halves.”

“Carl and Joanna seem very happy.”

“Yes, even I was touched.”

Christopher laughed sardonically. Carmen struggled to say something. She wanted to leave with some suitable word but it was not proving easy. She thought that he saw this.

“So you're off to the States?”

“Monday morning. It's only a twelve month contract but who knows?”

“I nearly said let's keep in touch but that's fatuous isn't it?”

“I suppose it is... Chris, there's so much I want to say but I can't seem to express anything.”

“That's OK. We both know what the words would say if they could come out but sometimes it's better to say nothing, to let go.”

She touched his arm again. She turned away just as someone was coming up to him with another request and managed to get to the head of the steps before he could say anything more. Tim was at the bottom of the flight, sitting on two crates having a cigarette. He nodded at Carmen and opened the small door allowing her out into the street. It was nearly midnight, she supposed, and in spite of its being Saturday night there were few people about. She cut through to Tottenham Court Road, which was a little rowdier and noisier, and caught a night bus which was surprisingly full and jolly. Most people on the bus were drunk or coming home from having a good time and there was a sense of laughing camaraderie on the top deck.

It was just at this point, after all this time, after everything, that Carmen finally broke down and cried like a child. She was crying for Carmen. Carmen O'Hare, the bloody bitch who in spite of being so damned smart could not stop herself from throwing away the only chances of happiness that were ever tossed to her.

~ four ~

Once more Christopher finds himself at the window, a sly voyeur. In his sights this morning is a family – what is the collective term? Might not such lexical games save him from this stultifying routine? – of Canada geese. They are pecking in the silvery grey mud, ugly at low tide. Their purposes are clear: to feed and forage, to survive. Might there not be something for him to learn here? There are several gulls on the peak of the bridge's high superstructure, crying into the emptiness of the morning. He who was so busy, so demonically active, has succumbed to a lethargy as solid as those banks of mud.

After a fall from a piece of unattended scaffolding, which prevented him from working at the same pace and therefore prevented him from working at all, for there was no work without frenzy in that line of business, he sold up his share in the Whitfield Street property (you may see an expensive furniture shop there today). Pocketing a staggeringly large sum and retired to this riverine perch, freed from economic necessity, to cogitate. His thoughts, he could report, had been prolific and without issue. He had been moving steadily into the deep, vegetable core of stasis. He was now a specialist in the pretexts for inaction. For every possibility, every sparky proposal, he loosed half a dozen counter-arguments, devastating in their power of negativity. He cancelled several projects before lunch and moved on to an afternoon of thwarted hypotheses.

His new obsession was the idea of travel. It is thought of as the universal panacea, the easy cure-all for the disease of ennui. It is compelling in its simplicity: look, move on, find a place to sleep and eat, move on again. It supplies the grounded and the baffled with the one thing needful: an onward drive, a proposal of motion, and escape from being here and now, a flight into the arms of the provisional and the unprescribed. Who was it spoke of ‘the sins of settlement'? Let us stride manfully away from them in our hobnailed boots and bush-hat, finding purpose in locomotion, shriving in the swing of one's step. He had got out the maps and spread them in his window eyrie, tracing the course of a fat, looping river through the dripping green of a jungle, naming cities, deserts, mountain ranges, lakes. Smoking Mount Bromo at dawn, the sluggish Yangtse, the toot and churn of a paddle-steamer on the Missisippi, the turmoil of Calcutta, afternoons slumped on the slatted deck-bench of an Aegean steamer. Make no mistake, he insisted: these excite me. I am susceptible to their sweet carolling, their peremptory promise. But I remain here, becalmed, my face pressed against the cold glass of the window-pane. Inert.

The name of my condition is not ennui, Carmen. You come to me in my sleep, reminding me of our prodigal carelessness, our spendthrift love. For us there was no reckoning. We were above and beyond that. Foolish? Why, of course, what is authentic human life without folly? Wisdom is beyond us as a species. It remains a pretty conceit of philosophers or theologians, inaudible and antique, irrelevant to our whooping progress towards disaster. Disaster? Carmen, my love, my loss, do I exaggerate? Do I dramatise? I think not, for I am ruined. I am living in your wake. I am the blue smoke drifting under the window after the vehicle has sprinted. I am the remnant, the aftermath, the unpicked-up pieces, the flak, the outcome, the consequence, the by-product.

A barge is coming up the river. I transform its load of scrap into a royal progress. Scarlet and brass trumpets. Wigs. Ermine. Quilted gear. Strumming court musicians, yellow hose, curling pumps. Swift-flowing gaiety. I am diverted. I race at the speed of my imagination, the only asset I now possess, Carmen. Oh, and my memory. I am an accomplished backward voyager, a rememberer of lost time, a connoisseur of what has been. I reach back into the coffer of our mutual past, scooping up the riches stowed there, letting the handfuls trickle through my fingers, then I close the lid with a miserly thud, patting the brass-bound lid, snapping the key shut, tucking its cold, chain-hung steel into the flabby wallet of my midriff. This they cannot take away from us, Carmen. This they cannot cancel or annul. It has been, it has had its day. There is regret, certainly. But there is also a kind of validation which says: this once was, this is not imagined, it has its reality still.

Christopher no longer rails against Jimmy, the usurper, whose crown turned out to be made of paste. He was no more than a cipher, a minor catalyst in the process of the dissolution of that life with Carmen. He heard him today on the radio, playing Beethoven's bagatelles – a departure from his usual stamping ground among the avant-garde. He was beguiled by the music, made drowsy and delirious. From which it can be deduced that Christopher has not yielded to the banal invitations of nihilistic despair. He can be moved still. The world seduces him with its manifold tricks. He is not a candidate for the overdose, the slashed wrists in the warm bath, the last leap from the cast-iron parapet. He objects, partly on aesthetic grounds, to the vulgarity of suicide, but he deplores it also because there is still too much to which he is attached. Too much which he wishes to know. He claims the freedom to wreck his life. He has exercised that right with aplomb. But he does not wish to be the one to end it.

In their long talks, in their quarrels, Carmen told him much about himself. She was much pre-occupied by her own life story, her early sociological romance. But he said little about his own life. There always seemed, by contrast with the lifes of others, so little to say (the childhood in a council house in Northamptonshire, the scholarship to an old grammar school with red caps and a modicum of sexual irregularity, two dull and doting parents, his father a clerk in the municipal ratings office, his mother a doler-out and scooper-up of school dinners... he breaks off. The dullness is suffocating). Christopher had never been a navel-gazer, a seeker after that most banal form of knowledge: the syllabus of oneself. The world and other people and the things that they do have always seemed to him subjects of far greater interest than his own
curriculum vitae
.

This was one of the routine starting-points for their quarrels. His refusal to be sparked into excited fire by her class-grievance, the hardships she would inventory across the linen covers of costly restaurants, the rage against those who have had it easy – a condition which he always took to be the desired state of any intelligent human. Why does he say this now? Because he has left her with too little of himself, too little to remember him by. He wants to imagine her in her Manhattan loft – if that is where she has settled for the present like an edgy migrating bird – performing with him the same ritual recovery of memories, pleasures, moments. He asks himself what it was that drew the two of them together, what held them in that stormy, aerial mating. He seeks to isolate what it was, about him, that made the thing happen, sustained it. It is a question which, in the nature of things, he cannot answer. He cannot see himself as others see him. He cannot know what set them on this course. He can know only his own enchantment.

But perhaps she is silent. Perhaps she is not tormented. Almost certainly, she does not share his state of inactivity here. He sees her vividly combative in the gladiatorial circus of an open plan office, ripping into her new ‘colleagues', driving onward, locking horns, engaging, tussling, notching up ephemeral triumphs and always seeking to conceal behind that furious energy her lack of belief in what she does, her sense that something better might have been allotted to her, were she able to discover what it was. There are mornings when he wants to tell her that he wakes with a brisk new purpose, when cheerful maxims bounce off the bright sunlit walls: make a fresh start, seize the day, shake yourself, get on with the rest of your life. Vigorously throwing aside the sheet, he races to the shower, cleanses himself, primps and prepares the battered envelope for its new adventure. Even the sound of water gushing into the kettle has a reverberance of expectancy, a prophetic music. Ice-cold milk, the crystal glass of freshly-squeezed juice, the reek of newly ground coffee beans, all endorse the belief that this is a day apart, a clearing of the ground for action and enterprise. A beginning. After these lively preparations there occurs a change of mood, a chastening. Objections arise. Difficulties queue in the antechamber, waiting for an audience. One has replaced the easy towelling bathroom robe with the uniform of the day. It is time to step out, to work one's way towards the High Street, acquire the newspaper, fill a plastic bag with miscellaneous provisions. Already dissipation is in train. The one purpose has been diverted by the many, resolution is weakened, the omens are not good. Returning to his waterside lair he drops the bag on the table, feels the glass walls of the cafetière to see if another cup can be risked, lets a glazed eye fall on the lurid headlines, senses, inexorably that the day, like a greased rope, is slipping through his hands at accelerating speed. He watches the craft, loosened from its moorings, drift helplessly out into the current.

And so, Carmen, he declares, I am back in my upper bow-window, surveying the river like a helmsman at his station on the poop. I sit at the light ash desk which I made with my own hands and presented to you, my love. I dream that you will come to retrieve it, just as, in a fairy tale, a shoe, a fragment of a sword blade, a gem, is produced, after many adventures, to validate a connection, to justify a claim. I shall not dispute your ownership. I shall ask for no proofs. You shall have it, Carmen, running your lovely hands again, as you did at first, across its smooth surface, trying the drawers, admiring the cut of its legs, announcing the great projects that would be accomplished by its agency. I remember one day coming to you as you worked. The screen of your portable computer was lit, papers were spread wide on this now denuded surface, you were intent on your world of words and no other world could gain entry, not even mine. I stood behind you, wanting to grasp your shoulders, wanting to break in on your consciousness, but I sensed the silent intensity of your task. I stood and watched for perhaps a minute then backed slowly out of the room. You never knew that I had been there. Sensing you.