Remembering Carmen (8 page)

What was she doing in Nice? Christopher tried to believe the offered version, that she was with an ‘old friend'. Perhaps if he had listened a little more carefully to the gossip he would have heard of Jimmy's connection, that apartment which he rented out. But that would have been merely to bring nearer by a few weeks or months a reckoning that was inevitable. Now, of course, he had the full story but then he suffered in confusion and not knowing. It's hard not to fall in with the moralists, he reflected, and see this as the mandatory payback, the redemption of the mortgage deed, the punishment for pleasure.

During that first period apart – a week then seemed longer than seven days in duration – he slept badly. He would wake in the small hours and sometimes dress and walk out into the streets. There was always someone about, noise and drunken laughter, police sirens, smashing bottles. In Tottenham Court Road groups of whooping young girls, half-naked whatever the weather, high on alcohol and the lesser designer drugs and loud music and laughter, made their disorderly way home from clubs after the Tube had closed its gates. Bodies re-arranged themselves under blankets in doorways. Rubbish piled up outside the bars and restaurants. If Christopher were late enough he would see the bundles of newspapers being thrown out of vans outside newsagents' shops, hear the acceleration of traffic that had been subdued for only a couple of hours, sense the new day starting, its arrow pulled back against the string.

It was the not knowing that was the source of pain. Christopher and Carmen had declared often enough their mutual faith in freedom, in the refusal of petty restrictions. They claimed not to want to know about each other's activities, where these were of no necessary concern. They dreaded the life of the married couple (dread intensified by total ignorance) whom they supposed to be condemned to perpetual surveillance of each other's lives, rowing about the slightest tilt sideways of their nuptial bark, unable to act freely as individuals, always having to flaunt in the world's face the routines of the practised double act, always having to be seen to manage successfully the art of being The Couple.

We were not like that, Carmen, he whispers, but we foundered also. We had not discovered the secret of loving in perpetuity. You mocked me for even wanting such a thing. Perhaps you were right. You were the free spirit. Your giving was part of this. Knowing that the moment does not last, you threw yourself into transforming it, to exalting it, to making it sufficient of itself. And I shared in those episodes. I knew them. Is that not enough?

~

After Nice, after the self-dramatising coldness which they chose briefly as their substitute for the marital tiff, after the fortunate episode of Greece, they eventually found their balance again. The old passion resumed. Until the arrival of Carl. And through Carl, Joanna.

This time Christopher was responsible. Carl was an architect in charge of the Souper Kitchen chain's expansion programme. His job was to ensure that each new shop fitted exactly the specifications laid down in protocols drawn up in the Chicago head office of Souper Kitchen. Colour schemes, counter design, ratios of tables and chairs to floor space, size of neon signs, disposition of soup-urns, all had to be incorporated with exactitude into each new outlet. Chicago was adamant. There must be no deviation from the house-style. Carl threw himself into this task with the zeal of an officer of the Inquisition searching out every shade and nuance of individual heresy. His was the sort of mind that could not bear approximation, the fair-enough-that'll-do that is the working philosophy of the building trade. Christopher liked to think of him self as a perfectionist of sorts. He took pleasure and satisfaction in the skill with which he surmounted the usual obstacles: residual problems of space and size, wall angle, window position. But he was working always against the clock. And each client was different. Carl's client, by contrast, was always the same and the specification allowed for no individuation. Christopher would have found this frustrating but Carl approached his constraints with a sort of wild-eyed passion, derived extraordinary pleasure from them. It was exactly the impossibility of half-measures, the prohibition on almost getting it right, which animated him. Where Christopher might have quite enjoyed the inventive challenge of working around an immovable pipe, or an old fireplace which it had been decided to retain as an original feature, Carl would have taken this as a taunt, an affront. With a blaze of anger he would attack the obstruction which threatened to deflect the smooth implementation of his exact blueprint.

When Christopher first met Carl he was working on a Thai restaurant in Beak Street in Soho. Carl was next door, supervising the fitting-out of a new Souper Kitchen. Typically, these outlets fitted themselves into those narrow spaces once occupied by the small cafés which were rapidly disappearing from central London. Their trade was mostly soup to go for busy office workers with short lunch breaks. Seating inside was minimal. At the back of this particular shop (which was part of a long terraced building which the local authority had belatedly listed) was an odd marble remnant – probably eighteenth century in origin – which Christopher guessed had originally been some sort of internal fountain in an inner court. The authorities, pending an archaeological investigation due to start in several months from the other side of the building, had decreed that the marble wall – about six metres in length – should remain. Three quarters of its length was in Christopher's restaurant and the rest protruded through to the old café where it had always been boxed in behind a false wall of tongue-and-groove boarding nailed to a framework of two-by-two. Christopher, for his part, was quite pleased to have found a solution: a long bench-seat resting on top of the marble which could be lifted up on a hinge if necessary for inspection. Carl, however, was not so easily satisfied. It was the howls of anger next door that drew his neighbour in to see what was the cause of the fracas.

Christopher found Carl surrounded by brick and sawdust, a metre-long aluminium spirit-level in his right hand which he held like the magic wand of a disconsolate Prospero measuring the ruin of his former dukedom. Around him – watchful, uncertain – stood two or three labourers. They had exhausted their usual repertoire of sarcasm, apparent inability to hear any instruction, sly disobedience, and muttered exasperation. None of this worked on Carl. He stood silently in his yellow hard-hat with orange brick-dust colouring his blond beard, staring at the short length of marble which offered its defiant rebuke to his dream of exact order. He was not ready to concede defeat. He would listen to no advice, no pragmatic reassurance. Christopher had heard something of this legendary perfectionist and it interested him to see Carl for the first time, to feel the pressure of his wordless anger that seemed so far in excess of the immediate provocation. It was a metaphysical condition.

And then Christopher began to offer his advice, sidling up to the question, asking for the plans, discovering (quite by accident, but Carl looked at him as if he were some saving messenger from the Gods) a potential loophole. The scheme devised by Chicago was posited on a fixed arrangement of elements whose disposition was apparently unalterable. It derived from exhaustive market research and was of a complexity that would have baffled a court functionary of the late Byzantine empire. Customer flows, ‘decision-patterns', ‘spend wishes', ‘impulse triggers', had been precisely calibrated. The relationship between the desires of humans (who were accorded a freedom of action commensurate with the programmed reflexes of Pavlov's dog) and the arrangement of temptation (substantial item followed by lesser impulse purchase etc.), created in sum a web or subtle snare into which the customer would walk, inexorably. To place a rack of potato chips or a trough of fudge brownies in the wrong place would be to wreck the intricate dynamics worked out in computer simulations across the Atlantic. One false move and the entire precarious structure of controlled desire listed fatally.

But Christopher had spotted a chance of adaptation. The Water Bar, separated as it was from the purchasing nexus, and consisting of a large cool urn of plain tapwater for which there was no charge to the customer, had a weak relationship to the overall strategy. Hoping that the customer would purchase more expensive bottled mineral waters or juices, the Water Bar needed to be placed at the end of any counter-sequence. It was the place to which one went with a loaded tray when all the transactions were done. It was specified that it should go at the end of the line of arrayed goods. Christopher pointed out to Carl that the narrow shop was also quite short in length compared to many Souper Kitchens. The Water Bar might just fit according to specification but it would be tight. What if – he suggested – it were angled (admittedly a breach of the design principle of an unbroken straight line of temptation) so that it could be made to rest on a platform not unlike his bench-seat which would disguise the marble plinth.

Carl looked at him wordlessly, like someone surfacing from the deep, turbulent water of a dream. He stared at Christopher intently as if he were trying to gauge his motive. Was he a tempter, a sly Siren voice drawing him towards a perilous reef? Then he turned his head to look at the lump of marble embedded in the base of the wall. He looked down at the plans. There was a further period of silence. Christopher waited for him to make the next move in his own time. The alternating glances quickened. He shook the plans excitedly. He sighed deeply – this was the moment when he yielded to necessity, when he allowed that, at this time and in this place, there could not be realised an absolute perfection – and, with a noise like a swallowed grunt, he tore into his labourers, shouting and gesticulating, egging them on as if they, not he, had been the instrument of this agonising delay. They were pleased enough to get on with something, never having understood his peculiar intransigence in the first place, and they went to it with a will.

Later, when the fit was done, Carl came round to offer Christopher his thanks. He had his hard-hat in his hands and looked exhausted like an epic hero after battle. He sat on a crate in the middle of his new friend's restaurant floor, picking small wood-shavings from his ragged and holed jersey, taking occasional draughts from a bottle of water, and watching with approval the lime green panelling being hammered into position around the walls. He said that he did not care for Thai food but he knew a small restaurant nearby in Frith Street where he had proposed to take his wife (by way of compensation for a spate of late nights that had been needed to claw back the lost time occasioned by the difficulties in Beak Street). He asked if Christopher would like to join them. Something in the way he spoke of his wife and of the reasons for this outing alerted Christopher to a possible source of tension in the relationship. Having had his own difficulties with Carmen, he was reluctant to become involved just now as a spectator of marital dysfunction. He had always resented couples who seemed willing to inflict their private antagonisms on others, to rub their noses in it. (He and Carmen tried as far as they could to conduct their rows if not in private then away from the company of their friends.) But he found that he liked Carl. Perhaps Christopher thought that he represented the better side of him, the perfectionist he might have been had he cut fewer corners, accepted fewer Friday night jobs, agreed to fewer impossible deadlines. Christopher was still proud of his work but he knew that the fierce desire of Carl to get it absolutely right was now beyond him. He had stood at that turning, paused regretfully, then chosen the other fork in the road.

As it turned out his apprehensions had been wrong. Carl's wife, Joanna, was relaxed and warm. There was no bickering or shrillness or tight-lipped backchat between them – though Christopher sensed a certain scrupulously courteous indifference towards her on Carl's part. Joanna was, like all in the party, in her late thirties. She had very short black hair and was dressed in loose white linen which seemed to accentuate a certain delicate pallor in her complexion. Christopher watched Carmen looking her up and down, appraising her. It did not occur to him that she was assessing her as one might a potential rival. Carl and he talked a little shop until Carmen cut them short and drew the conversation on to more congenial subjects. The party was sitting, on this hot June evening, in the open, penned into a little enclosure on the pavement in front of the restaurant with a fine view of the comings and goings. Frith Street on these summer nights attracted crowds of lively, noisy people. Outside the pubs, large groups spilled on to the pavement, hugging their pint glasses to their bosoms, or swigging from chilled bottles. The men, Christopher noticed, always seemed to outnumber the women in these groups. At other cafés and bars and small restaurants, tables had been placed outside, as if, for these few weeks of tolerable weather, London was prepared to transform itself into a Mediterranean café society, in spite of its knowledge that the scope was brief and that the tables would eventually have to be stacked up and put away after a short exposure. Tourists and clubbers and idlers thronged the street. Cycle-taxis clustered in wait for trade at the junction with Old Compton Street. There was a queue outside Ronnie Scott's. Joanna, Christopher felt, was a little detached from everyone else and the conversation. Her attention was taken by the people on the street. He was just about to wave away a rose-seller when Joanna stopped him and took a small bunch, crushed into cellophane, from the Balkan woman who carried them in a quiver in the crook of her arm. She laid the flowers on her white lap and it suddenly struck him how beautiful she looked. Carl and Carmen had locked horns over some movie about which they disagreed violently and were ignoring them. Christopher smiled at Joanna.