Remembering Carmen (9 page)

I was wrong, Carmen, he considers. I was so ready to blame you but I too was culpable. I used your willingness to go your own way as a permit for my own adventure but I paid a price which I now regret. There was no love like yours (I want you to think this too, wherever you might be) and I squandered the advantage. That was the mistake we both made. We tore up the title deed to our mutual happiness and scattered the pieces in the wind. It is for this reason that I lie alone here, listening to the dull traffic hum, the shouts in the street, wondering what has become of the free spirit I once thought myself to be. It is why I struggle to recoup the lost memories of our time together, remembering, painfully, what I so carelessly threw away.

A week later, coming down Windmill Street with some brass hinges that he had just collected for a job from Windmill Tools and Hardware, Christopher saw Joanna as she tripped out of a small gallery. She was the first to wave. He suggested coffee. They talked, laughed, found a chance to discover some common ground that their brief outdoor meal had not quite allowed them to establish, and parted easily. He thought, for both of them, that was an end of it. And then, unsurprisingly, for she and Carl rented a mansion flat near Gower Street, he began to meet her – accidentally but quite frequently – in the little streets of Fitzrovia and Soho where most of his work was to be found. Often, potential clients would walk into a place where he was working and ask for his card. In this way he did not have to look for work elsewhere in the capital. He and Joanna mostly contented themselves with a quick coffee, because he did not have much time to spare, but once or twice, when he was between jobs or waiting for some sub-contractors to complete a component of the refit, he was free for lunch. The summer continued to bathe everything in a rather steamy heat. His eyes would sting with what he assumed to be pollution. There was a smell of traffic fumes in the air but also, at times, a pleasant languour, tables in the sun, glasses of chilled wine, a sense of some recovered ease, the memory of past summers, lost summers, no doubt imaginary summers, when one could allow oneself a little respite from the demands of the clock and the diary, the peremptory present. Perhaps it was this that lowered his guard, he reflects, that allowed him to forget Carmen for a moment. A moment that proved fateful.

Perhaps she might not have gone back again to Jimmy – or with such consequences – had he been more attentive, had he not wandered during those few weeks in the city sun. He wants, now, to seek a reason, to make it logical, to suppress the idea that what happened was without reason or necessity or pattern. He wants an explanation but he has none.

Jimmy interrogates himself: did I feel guilty about my role in wrecking the relationship of these two people? Should the hateful Jimmy dress himself in penitential costume and beg forgiveness? But whose forgiveness, and for what misdemeanour precisely? I was hardly, in this instance, an odious seducer, spotting his opportunity like a soaring hawk who plummets to earth to clamp his talons on the soft neck of a helpless prey. Carmen came to me freely. No, no, you will not hear me say “threw herself at me” – that is certainly the language of the professional predator.

Jimmy struggles to recollect the beginning of his amatory narrative. It begins, he considers, in a series of casual encounters. A small concert at the Wigmore one bright autumn Sunday lunchtime. A supper party in Holland Park thrown by some theatrical people, which turned out to have the flavour of a business meeting, a public relations initiative. A private view. The opening of a ghastly new Mediterranean restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Christopher, whom he always referred to with unfeeling sarcasm as The Gentleman Builder, may, he reflected, have had a hand in the design of that place.

Perhaps it was the memory of the sort of restaurant preferred by his father, who would ritually take him out for Sunday lunch on the first day of the school holidays to some old-fashioned place characterised by gilt mirrors, heavy silver tableware, antique yet courteous waiters (Jimmy had never understood the new fashion for rudeness) and understated menus, that had prevented his delighting in these instantly-refitted, over-designed, noisy bistros. No matter which European capital they were settled in at the time, his father would find his way to these older places. There was one in Rome with a mosaic floor in the entrance lobby representing a school of dolphin which he could see now was probably a copy of some Roman original and therefore culpable of its own kind of vulgarity, but he was always struck by the great calm of these establishments. Perhaps that was their function: to celebrate a world of settled assurance where the rich and cultivated could move in the knowledge that this was an experience to which they were both accustomed and entitled. He could quite see how, early in the course of a people's revolution, such places would be singled out for storming.

Jimmy was introduced to the concept of guilt by his Jesuit teachers (the family arrived in Rome just at the point when he was ready for secondary education and his father, forgetting the ancient faith of his family, chose the Academia San Vicenzo on grounds which Jimmy suspected were purely aesthetic: the school was located in a delightful ochre building next to a church whose cloisters surrounded a beautifully tended garden). It is probably inadvisable to expose small boys to the notion of guilt. They will immediately proceed to take it too much to heart. Nor is it an especially useful mental condition. For not merely does it have little or no effect in halting any misdemeanour, it both saddles those who were prepared to do wrong anyway with an unnecessary burden, and perpetuates the notion that we are governed by a subtle moral order of repentance and remorse – when in fact we are usually guided by our instinctive drives alone. In a happy phrase, Carmen called Jimmy a “moral Macchiavelli”. This he interpreted as an attempt to pass the responsibility for what was happening entirely to him, and, as usual, he acquiesced.

Jimmy's manner (which was derived from his comfortable, guilt-free cosmopolitan inheritance) never wholly ceased to annoy Carmen. He could seem too languid for her taste, too untroubled. She was, like most of her contemporaries, a driven thing. She lived in a constant race of activity, as if she feared to stand still. Both work (which figured more prominently in her life than he thought wise) and leisure seemed conducted in a panic. She was also intensely combative. Jimmy had been told many times by mutual friends of her legendary rows with her partner. He considered that this was part of the same need: to confront and to face down and by thus asserting oneself to make oneself aware of one's pulsating energies. I argue, therefore I am. Only those who are deeply assured can afford to be careless of whether they succeed or fail in social contests. After the first rehearsal in Nice they argued about this constantly. She felt that he was insufficiently aware of the struggle that had been enforced on her by her working-class background. No doubt tactlessly, he pointed out that her period of struggle had been remarkably short-lived and had by now been eclipsed by the period of her success. She was magnificently scornful. Nothing Jimmy could do or say would redeem him in her eyes. He was the lazy toff, softened by a lifetime without struggle or material anxiety. He made some lame attempts to describe the difficulties of his early musical career which had been marked by failures, by a long effort to make his mark (not helped by his preference for the innovative and the avant-garde) but she simply would not accept this plea in mitigation. The quality of her grievance was of a purity and an intensity that brooked no comparison. She trilled the refrain that he had heard from so many beautiful heroines: “You do not understand.”

But, yes, Jimmy now admits to himself, I was guilty. I should have intuited that our relationship would not work. That, far from its being the result of the sly and sophisticated manipulations of this moral
Principe
, it was embarked on by her in order to counteract the difficulties she was having with The Gentleman Builder. What these were I never quite divined but other people's relationships are a subject, I have generally found, best avoided. I can see now that I should have extricated myself far earlier. I should have rebuffed her, perhaps, before our affair ever began. But (I am late coming to this) she was to me utterly desirable. I could not resist her. I could not turn her away. My reasoning was not Jesuitical but visceral. I wanted her because of what she was, because of what she awoke in me, and our superficial arguments and ratiocinations hardly bore on the case. Yes, I plead guilty, as when, after a long drawn out avoidance, I owned up to a minor offence (a window broken by a thrown football boot in the communal shower room during some high jinks) and the tall, lean priest with the steel-rimmed glasses gloated in triumph when I delivered myself to him. He turned it into a moral seminar, refusing to beat me, forcing me to analyse what I had done, to take pride in my courage in accepting blame, to trace the refinements of conscience, the personal sequence of decisions and actions that had flowed from that silent self-examination. Yes, yes, I plead guilty.

But that incident on the coast-road beyond Menton (so sudden and violent that it struck me like an intended reprimand from some unseen and supernatural moral being) changed everything. We were united, complicit in that horror, in our responsibility for it. Her first reaction was to flee. I gather that she went back to her partner, that they went abroad and found some solace ‘on the rebound' as her magazine relationship-dissectors would put it. But she came back. I accepted her back, as if there were unfinished business that we needed to see through to a conclusion. It was unsatisfactory and intermittent. I gather also that her partner became involved, briefly, with someone else. The pattern became more complicated. I cannot say whether the shock of the child's death disoriented us all, drew in, one by one, these other actors, or whether what happened was the result of our common instability – rootless, untethered people following only the logic of our desires. But what other logic leads us forwards?

Their first meeting after Nice, which he eventually allowed to have taken place, was at the launch of a book of photographs taken by an acquaintance of Carmen's, Ben Bush. This event took place in a small gallery in East London and the evidence of Ben's talent was arrayed on its freshly-rollered white walls. The photographs in the book were of contemporary street-people – homeless, derelict, impoverished drug-users. His art seemed to make these people look even more desperate than they must have appeared in real life. They stood out starkly in shadowed landscapes, like etchings of figures in a mediaeval hell. Jimmy felt that the images were too beautiful, that their art imposed a barrier between him and the quality of real suffering that their subjects had patently undergone. The heat of the crowded gallery drove him out into a small paved yard at the back of the gallery where, in spite of the late sunshine, it was gratifyingly cool in contrast to the inner inferno. As he passed towards the brick wall at the bottom of the yard (topped with ugly razor wire) he heard a shout behind him.

“Jimmy!”

“Carmen, I didn't expect to see you here.”

All his desire, his helplessness before Carmen's presence rushed back to him. He wanted her again and he struggled to think of some diverting strategy. He told her of his reservations about the photographs and she ripped into him with vigour. He stood accused of aesthetic naïveté, of failure to understand the relationship between treatment and subject, and much else. He took his drubbing with a smile, feasting on her animation, the splendour of her invective. She was on magnificent form. Christopher came over to join them. Had he known of Jimmy's recent role in Carmen's life, the musician felt sure that it would have been evident in his manner – in certain emphatic ironies, or waspish interventions, a mocking tolerance. But it was clear that he had, at this stage, no idea that Jimmy was the bounder and cad who had seduced his lover away from him. Jimmy guessed that Carmen had been vague about Nice. She was very good at withholding any information which she considered it unnecessary for others to know. Christopher's frank cordiality of manner and general air of ease in Jimmy's presence confirmed to him that she had not come clean with him. At their last meeting the two men had got off on the wrong foot after Christopher had made some crass observation about a Mark Anthony Turnage piece he had just recorded. Nothing endeared him less to the English than the boundless self-confidence with which, it seemed to him, they flaunted their aesthetic conservatism, not content to display it but seeking at the same time to compel one's approval of it, and his anger on that occasion had no doubt resulted in a lack of sophistication in rebuttal. But if Christopher had resented that righteous anger there was no sign of difficulty in his manner.

“Jimmy, you've met Christopher haven't you?”

“Yes, wasn't it at that restaurant-opening in Museum Street? What was that place called?”

“Kerkyra.”

“That's it. And didn't you have a hand in the décor, Christopher?”

“I did. I remember that one very vividly. We were still working on it two hours before everyone sat down.”

“I don't know how you can work at such speed. I seem to be getting slower and slower. It takes me a week these days to read a score properly and get myself into a position to start working on an interpretation.”

Carmen took a rapid glug of her Chardonnay and launched delightedly into the attack.

“That's fine for the idle rich, but the rest of us have to move faster and faster these days just to stand still.”

“I rather object to the term idle.”