Remembering Carmen (20 page)

They said little on the flight back from the States. He hated these night flights, penned in to seats where there is never enough space to stretch one's unnaturally long limbs. They made him long for the night deck of a boat, watching the clouds race, taking deep draughts of air, or even the rocking motion of a train, with its snapshots of ordinary human life by the way, shunting and shouting on the platforms as one cranes to read the station name. The youthful Jimmy would have been able to say what type of aeroplane this was but his adult version was as indifferent as he had become to the makes of automobile. All he remembered was that it was large enough to have a sort of central space around the toilet cubicles where one could linger briefly, stretch one's legs, feel the circulation flow. Carmen slept because she was tired but also, he felt certain, because it was a way of avoiding conversation with him. He lay awake trying to imagine what shape that conversation would have taken. Mutual recrimination, Jimmy lazily playing the role of complaisant punchbag? Violent altercation resulting in vexed shushing from drowsy passengers, stewards being called? Or sobbing regret of the self-indulgent it-was-all-my-fault kind? With these possibilities under review he was glad of the cloak of slumber. On the back of the seat in front of him there was a small screen which showed, for those weary of the in-flight movies, the plane's course across the pole. A white line crossed the mass of frozen ice, a process seemingly without end.

For someone who travelled so much he gave very little thought to the question of destinations. It was one of the routine bones which Carmen would seize when she was in need of an argument. She was angered by his lack of unease, the patent absence of any need to shore himself up, to place markers along the route. When he had been younger and had won, precociously, some international piano competitions (goaded as much by family expectations as by personal lust for glory) there had been a certain satisfaction which even then he rationalised as being no more than the necessary knowledge that he had won the respect of his peers. The tyro performer, actor, creator needs these tokens of endorsement which say: you are right to continue; we acknowledge that your talent justifies your continued ambition to see it realised to the full. But now, in what he was vain enough to resist admitting were his middle years, the need was no longer there. He sympathised to a degree with Carmen's plight which he saw as the penalty of the upwardly mobile – the need to prove oneself, to measure the distance one had come from those diminished, meagre beginnings. He had begun from a point, materially and culturally speaking, where she would have wished to arrive. His argument that this had no bearing on the present exercise of talent was one which she summarily rejected. He said she was peddling Puritan propaganda. He argued – in one of their rococo variations on a well-worn theme between them – that difficulties, obstacles in the path of genius, far from extracting heroic powers in response, could sometimes choke off and destroy a fragile but important talent, lay it waste with too much discouragement. She would rage at him when he spoke like this. He considered that she was not listening to what he said. In his view she was thinking only of herself and her personal need to triumph, to be seen to be the victor. He thought many of her triumphs hollow but he held his tongue. In her self-righteous reminders of the milestones she had passed, there was a lack of compassion for those who had not made a like journey, who had fallen by the wayside, which he found bitter and ruthless. But she would no doubt say that in this she was vindicated, that inequality exacts penalties, piles up a tally of damage. He judged it best to say nothing when the argument reached this stage.

Jimmy had no real taste for these gladiatorial encounters and many times found himself wondering about Christopher whose verbal tournaments with Carmen had become legendary. He seemed to Jimmy a peacable enough type, unusually sensitive and ‘artistic' given his trade – though that observation no doubt confirmed the odiousness of his upper-class assumptions about manual labour. Carmen rebuked him for making the assumption that Christopher shared the values of those retail entrepreneurs and flashy restaurateurs who were his clients and Jimmy didn't doubt she was right. What provoked her about him was his ineffable self-assurance (which, merely to provoke her further, he called the handicap of my birth) but Christopher, he judged, was more equally matched, more likely to avoid the provocations that had been installed in Jimmy as standard. Perhaps their arguments were of another kind, more in the nature of lover's tiffs than the ideological/sociological debates in which Carmen and he engaged.

When Jimmy broke in on her in the Charlottesville motel he was startled by the way she looked up at him in a kind of mute appeal. She was holding out her mobile phone on which Christopher's number was displayed. He could not adequately describe that look. It mixed bewilderment, fear, pain, desperation. In that instant he grasped how much she loved him and the knowledge shook him profoundly. He felt marginalised, elbowed aside. Look at Jimmy, he could hear them say, the smooth philanderer, the posh one they think they are drawn to. But in the end it's always the first one, the sturdily loyal partner, to whom they return when the tempting dalliance is over. He knew that he would almost certainly never evoke such a desperate love in anyone's heart and he felt sharply bereft, jealous of that look, that love. He was angry. He wanted to seize that phone and hurl it out of the window. He wanted to tell her that she was here with him, that this was what she had chosen. But that terrifying vulnerability she showed as she turned towards him deflected his rage. He took her in his arms and carried her back to bed, holding her for an age until he felt the regular breathing of sleep in the still body which lay against his own.

She did not go back to him. She cut off her relations with Jimmy. All he knew was that she had accepted the offer of some sort of media job in the States but she did not write to him. He realised that he hardly knew any of her friends. Christopher he still felt uncomfortable about approaching for self-evident reasons. This was not the first time that a woman had passed in and out of his life (and sometimes the speed of that passage had been like the blink of an eye) but it was the first time that he had felt so troubled, so full of unease. He wanted to know what had happened to her, where she had gone, whether she had healed the wound he had dealt her. Normally he was serenely callous about those with whom he had been involved. Often, it is the best strategy, for both parties. But this was a special case and he could not put her out of his mind. Equally, it was clear that extinguishing her memory was the only thing likely to cure him.

Shortly after this Jimmy was asked to record a new piano work by a young but rising composer. He had performed an earlier work of his (bravely billed as the World Première when it was done in a small studio in Lambeth before a tiny audience consisting mainly of the composer's friends and family) and he was very keen on this new piece. He found its uncompromising intelligence and austere beauty entrancing. It was a profoundly difficult piece to play and, in that week of rehearsal and interaction with the anxious composer and the exacting recording engineers, he was grateful to be able to lose himself in the difficulty of the enterprise, erasing in this way the recent memory of Carmen.

One night, after a long session in the studio which was to result in the final recording being made the following morning, he returned to his apartment in Regent's Park to find amongst the fan of junk mail which he carried with a glass of wine to the sofa, an invitation to a party. To his surprise it was from Christopher and on the stiff green card he had scribbled a note: “It would really be very nice if you could come.” Jimmy hesitated. He dismissed the idea that he was being set up, invited there to be mocked or abused for his trifling with Carmen (as it would be represented). But there were other reasons to hesitate. He feared that Christopher might be concerned to implicate him in his predicament – in the way that the bereaved mournfully pool their shared versions of loss. Jimmy had always shrunk from the horrors of male bonding (his education having made of him a stoic in that regard) and he had rather face his feelings about Carmen on his own. Furthermore, it was quite likely that he would not know any of the other guests and that – here, once again, he must risk sounding snobbish – they would not be the sort of people from whose company he would derive much pleasure in the course of an evening. But there was a quality of sincerity in Christopher's appeal. He felt sure that Carmen could not possibly be amongst the invitees. He assumed that she would have exercised the freedom of the freelance to fly to the States almost immediately and besides, the presence of either Christopher or himself would have been sufficient to persuade her to decline an invitation.

Jimmy put down the other letters (unsolicited appeals from his bank and other banks to borrow money he did not wish to borrow) and sipped his wine. The invitation card had been wittily designed as a cartoon which represented a fenced-in roof garden where crowds of people (some of whom he suspected were recognisable caricatures to the other guests) were partying. As it happened there was a party being thrown by his composer the same evening but he could quite easily move from one to the other event. Given the dullness of the composer – in such contrast to the fascination of his music – he would be glad of the excuse to leave early. Benjamin was a lank, earnest, young man with a shaven head and a habit of wearing a sort of oriental loose pyjama suit of wrinkled grey linen. He treated Jimmy with great reverence, probably because he envied, and hoped to acquire, the celebrity he enjoyed, and always approached him with a solemn intensity and a limply outstretched hand. Jimmy could quite imagine finding an hour or two with Benjamin an adequate length of time on a Saturday night.

Nor, if he was honest, had Jimmy allowed himself to overlook the fact that at parties one is always exposed to the possibility of meeting someone interesting or attractive, something not to be dismissed lightly when one is, as he now was, formally unattached.

~ three ~

If one is an impulsive character – which Carmen was generally taken to be – one does not resolve on a course of action by some process of moral mathematics, balancing the pros and cons, and following the findings of the scale. But at some level a reconciliation of possibilities must surely take place – even if the decisive response appears instinctive and thoughtless. Having cut free from two men with whom, at various times she had been happy, but who now represented the source of her current misery, Carmen's decision should have been to avoid any further contact. That should have been obvious. But in spite of this she chose to accept Christopher's invitation and to go to the party. She had not, however, expected to see Jimmy. Perhaps she chose to go – this was her later rationalisation of the intuitive urge – because she wanted to demonstrate (to herself if to no other) that she was free of them, that she had regained her liberty of action. She had no intention of being cowed, of keeping out of sight, of steering clear. She would act in exactly the way she pleased.

Christopher, as was to be expected, had excelled his own high standards of imaginative design, his feel for urban theatre. What had once been a flat, puddled roof on a dull annexe behind a building in an inner London street was transformed. Around the rim of the roof he had erected ultramarine panels to enclose the space. At each corner were four spotlights, each with a different coloured bulb, the combined effect of which was to wash the roof space with a dynamic mix of colour. In the centre of the arena four trestle tables were arranged to form a large ‘X'. On the tables were set dishes of food, and the apparatus of the bar. One entered through a small door cut into the large double gates of the delivery yard (tickets taken by Tim, one of Christopher's joinery assistants who had been instructed to be vigilant against possible gatecrashers attracted by the lights and music) passing a parked yellow JCB whose scoop had been raised to the level of the roof and draped with a bright red cloth. In this suspended mouth stood two musicians – a saxophonist and an electronic keyboard player, fed by a fat electric cable which dangled beneath them. Their notes poured out over the crowd on the roof a couple of feet below them. This striking mobile orchestra pit was the night's main talking point, especially when, during breaks, Tim climbed into the cockpit and lowered the digger's arm to allow the musicians to alight on the roof amid loud ironic cheers. Later, guests were given the story of how Christopher had negotiated long and hard at a neighbouring construction site to borrow the JCB, only succeeding when a bundle of used notes was produced – with a further deposit as surety.

As Carmen stepped through the narrow gap, handing her invitation to Tim, she was for the first time apprehensive. Perhaps it had been a mistake after all. Cutting loose, putting these people out of her life for ever, might have been the wiser course. But it was too late as she climbed up the angled wooden steps (bolted to the side of the roof for the evening) to the party arena. She immediately spotted a couple of people she knew, gestured to them, collected a drink, and went over. Pete was literary editor of one of the broadsheets for which she had done some work – but never for his pages, in spite of the increasing confluence of arts coverage and the sort of stylish trivia she pumped out. He was engaged with Kate (a deputy features editor who had commissioned pieces from Carmen) in a discussion about the sudden retirement of some BBC big cheese. She was not impressed by the departing mogul.

“The man was a complete wanker.”

“I couldn't disagree more. He had an incredibly sophisticated feel for the younger audiences, especially that tricky 18-30 age group.”