Remembering Carmen (15 page)

“Poor dear.”

“Is that all you can offer: cheap sarcasms?”

“Well, I can do lethally honed satire if you prefer.”

“Did you enjoy your holiday in the sun?”

“No holiday. Being surrounded by a lot of travel industry types. It would put you off going on holiday for life.”

“There's no need to keep up the pretence, Car, I've spoken to Marianne. There was no conference in Viareggio. I know about Jimmy, too, so can we cut the crap?”

“Fine, so let's get straight to the interesting bits. What was Carl doing brawling in Berwick Street? Did he have some reason for getting overexcited at his wife's pleasantly unexpected lunch with an old friend? And, please, don't offer me any of the usual explanations.”

“I don't think either of us is in a position to squat on the moral high ground.”

“So you have been fucking her.”

“Do you have to be so crude?”

“Oh, it's to be expected. I'm a rough Northern girl. We call a spade a ruddy shovel where I come from. Do you think I'm incapable of noticing anything? Do you think I was dreamily lapping up the taciturn charm of dopey Carl while you two were cosying up that night in the restaurant? Give me some credit for having eyes in my head.”

Christopher poured out the coffee. He stared into the surface of his mug. He rubbed his eyes and suddenly looked terribly tired. For the first time since she had returned Carmen felt sorry for him. She felt sorry for herself, too. What had become of them? How had they got into this predicament? She did not want to talk about Jimmy. She could not entirely understand a rather strange reaction she always had after spending some time with him. Intense and vivid as her encounters with him were – for Jimmy was always a wonderfully animating presence and Italy had been a special period of grace – once he had gone the atmosphere quickly faded. She could hardly now recall what they had done together, what they had talked about, what had kept them both so enraptured. For she was convinced, in retrospect, that they had been enraptured. It was like a dream whose vividness barely survives the moment of waking. But was she, hard-bitten Carmen, the victim of a sort of schoolgirl fantasy? Was she, perhaps, merely Jimmy's plaything? One of his many playthings? She found herself thinking of Alice and the presence of both of them in Paris not so long ago. Their apparent prior awareness that they were both to be there. Carmen was not the sort of person who liked to be duped. She liked to think she was in control but, suddenly, she felt helpless. She reached out to Christopher but he refused to respond. She felt his arm stiff and unwelcoming. She supposed each of them was silently taking the measure of the other's legitimate outrage. Surely he could see this? Surely he could see that she needed him? That they needed each other?

After several minutes silence, with each of them prostrate on the sofa, sullen and intransigent, she raised herself and poured out some coffee. She wanted to be refreshed. She wanted to find a way out of this silliness. She wanted them to beat a path back to the crossroads where they had taken the wrong turning, but could it now be identified? Swinging through the automatic doors at the airport she had felt so alive and certain and purposeful. She had been riding high. Yet now she seemed to have collapsed inwardly. More than this, she seemed to feel a sort of quiet terror stealing over her. She could no longer discern any bearings. In a matter of seconds her world had collapsed and she had an unpleasant sensation that she was the architect of her own misfortune, that even Christopher was a victim of her delinquency. Had she driven him to this absurd dalliance with the negligible Joanna? Was everything, simply, her fault?

She wrapped her hands around the coffee mug and rocked herself slowly backwards and forwards on the edge of the sofa. She did not dare bring her eyes round and look Christopher in the face. She did not dare risk the request for forgiveness being refused.

Carmen's return from Italy was marked by a brief showdown with Christopher which ended in an unsatisfactory silence, a brooding, ambiguous peace which lasted for several days. Both were trying to find a way to get to the bottom of what had happened. Events had overtaken them, demolishing their usual libertarian conviction that nothing really mattered but the pursuit of intelligent pleasure, the connoisseurship of experience, doing as one pleased with no more than a loose do-as-one-would-be-done-by ethic to mark off its indistinct limits. Something had changed, yet quite what that change had been and what its implications were for both of them remained to be calibrated. In the case of Christopher, to be witness to that short blow which felled Carl in a London street – absurd slapstick that it was, from one point of view – had proved the catalyst. To this point he had not lived his life in this way – with the coarse plotline of a soap opera. He expected things to proceed more gently, without such stark confrontations. Plainly, from now on, they would not abide by this rule.

He saw Carl some time after this. He expected a difficult encounter but Carl was oddly conciliatory. Christopher's brief relationship with Joanna was over. He had neither seen nor spoken to her since she ran from the restaurant that day (where, as Carl no doubt now knew, they had been scattering their fistfuls of earth on its corpse). Perhaps, in some perverse sort of way, Carl was grateful to him for restoring them to each other, for injecting something into the bloodstream of their relationship. The two men were working in the same street again, a quieter one shaded by plane trees between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. They were having coffee at a café with a little terrace overlooking a quaint art deco filling station that must have been there since the 1920s. Carl held out his hand as they sat down.

“No hard feelings.”

There was something slightly comical about this, as if he were offering consolation after having beaten one at a game of squash. But he was not being facetious or sly. That was not Carl's way. He was always deadly serious. Christopher mumbled something to indicate that he accepted his goodwill and wished the matter to be at an end. He added quickly that Joanna had gone down to Surrey to supervise the transfer of an elderly relative into a nursing home.

“I think it's the best thing all round, especially now that Joanna is starting a new job.”

“A new job?”

Christopher didn't want to spoil things by showing too keen an interest. In fact he did not wish Joanna to be a subject at all.

“Yes, she's doing a temporary job at the Senate House Library.”

He jerked his thumb in the direction of the grey bunkers on the far side of Gower Street.

“Her relative isn't really capable any more of looking after herself so it seems the best thing.”

It is always the best thing.

“I'm not sure her family ever took to me you know. Especially her father.”

Christopher looked across at Carl. He was not the sort of man who confides much in other men. He almost never spoke about personal matters. Christopher wasn't even sure whether he had any real friends or intimates. This contributed, he thought, to a certain air of sadness that lingered about him. He was a perfectly decent man who did not know how to give anything of himself to others. Had he been able to do so he might have had a much happier life. Christopher supposed that brought out certain instincts in Joanna. She would rescue him, make him her project. And now she had an extra reason to take him in hand, to atone for her wickedness. The library job was clearly part of the new order of things.

“I think her father decided, almost from the start, that I didn't measure up in some fashion. They only had the one child and I fancy that he wanted a boy who might be trained up to take over the firm – one of those fusty high street family solicitors who do everything (eventually). Since there was only Joanna, a husband might be the next best thing. I was not a lawyer. An architect wasn't the same thing at all. Her mother also seemed to be uncertain about me. Joanna never wanted to talk about that. She had her own problems and didn't want to mix mine up with them. I gave up trying to understand families years ago. I sometimes wish – vindictively no doubt – that he could have had a son just so that he could watch him grow up to refuse to do what he wanted – by opening a gay bar or joining the army – just to teach him that one can't always plan other people's lives for them. I've never grasped this obsession with handing on the baton, perpetuating the family name, keeping the show on the road.”

“Perhaps that's because we're in such an ephemeral business. This place I'm doing up as a sushi restaurant used to sell computer supplies. In three years' time it could be a travel agent. And how long is Souper Kitchen going to last?”

“Until my early retirement, I hope.”

Carl laughed, and as the two men sat there on the terrace in the sun Christopher felt uncomfortable about the wrong he had done him – though Carl seemed to be thriving on it. It was he who was floundering, not sure which direction to take.

“Do you know, we went to a therapist,” he suddenly said, adopting a deliberately brisk and matter of fact tone.

“I didn't. Was it helpful?”

“I didn't allow it to be. I am afraid I walked out. I thought Joanna would be furious with me but she later admitted that she was grateful to me for pulling the plug. I think you have to be the right sort of people for therapy.”

“What sort is that?”

“Well, it's partly tolerating the lingo. But I suppose I mean you have to believe in advance that it's going to work. You have to begin with faith. And then there's a sort of underlying thing I can't get along with which Joanna – quite cleverly I thought – called The Utopian Premiss. The notion that all problems can be solved provided you apply yourself. Provided you put yourself in the hands of the professional. I suppose neither of us really believed that. Which made things rather hard for the therapist. She was a professional. She believed she could solve the problem. So our walking out was a kind of insult. And you know how solemn and self-righteous these people are. It all got very nasty.”

“Are you going to tell me that you sorted things out by yourselves?”

“Something like that. I mean to say, we're not living in Utopia but we've come to see that we both took a wrong road, that we needed to retrace our steps. It's not the same as before. It's as if we were now walking carefully round an unexploded mine. It makes you more careful. More thoughtful. More appreciative of the importance of getting things right. Does that make any sense?”

“A lot. I think Joanna is worth getting right.”

Carl looked at Christopher quickly and shrewdly. Perhaps, thought Christopher, he was looking to see if he were saying more than his words allowed, as if there were a part of her he had still not surrendered. He need not have worried. Christopher was glad that they had retrieved their not-quite-Utopia. He was unhappy with his role because he felt that he had trifled with Joanna. Perhaps even exploited her – though she was an adult and far less naïve than she made herself seem. This visible putting right of things reassured him that he had not done lasting damage. For a wry moment he even wondered if he had actually done some lasting good.

Carl then said that he must go. His work awaited him. Christopher said he would sit for a little longer to finish his coffee though he knew that he too should not have been wasting time. Left to himself he watched a large, expensive car slide into the little filling station from a side street. A man in a neat suit and a russet brown hat got out, rather overdressed for a summer's day, Christopher thought. The man was a well-preserved seventy-five, and Christopher surmised that he was a successful and rich businessman. He moved with a rather dignified formality and his manner in addressing the pump attendant seemed that of someone who was accustomed, across a lifetime, to deference, to quiet daily recognition on the part of those beneath him in the social hierarchy, that they were below and he was above them and that was that. It was not an arrogant swagger, more a simple acceptance of the obvious fact that he was of another type. This started a reflection, as Christopher drained the last of his coffee, that he was working for a different class, the capital's proliferating
nouveaux riches
. These were people who did not wear their privileges lightly. Rather they flaunted them constantly like someone waving a flag of semaphore. They took careful note of which fashions to copy, they had an encylopaedic knowledge of brand names and of what was the most expensive, the most ostentatious, the most noticeable thing. And Christopher was one of them for he worked to anticipate their tastes. They were the people he was servicing, their values were his values, yet he could not help himself, from time to time, finding something comic in the solemnity of their materialism, their conviction of the importance of money and of the simple – almost childish – connections they perceived between its power and what it would confer on them. Their talk of it in truth betrayed their uncertainty, their insecurity, their lack of that simple social confidence he had seen on the face of the kempt septuagenarian with his upright walk and kid driving gloves and gleaming brogues.

That night Christopher walked back to Whitfield Street in a more reflective mood than was customary with him. It was still light at nine o'clock. The outdoor restaurant tables in Charlotte Street were busy. The atmosphere was gratifyingly festive. On an impulse he sat down at the lemon-coloured table of a Greek restaurant and dialled Carmen on his mobile. She responded eagerly to his suggestion of eating out and was at his table by the time the waiter had brought out the wine he had ordered in anticipation of her arrival. Her manner recently had been unusually solicitous and so, he supposed, had his own. They had both wandered and had both returned to each other, feeling their way back, doing so with gestures that were sometimes exaggerated, sometimes uncomfortable, always charged with a sense that they should perhaps be more careful in future of their life together, not treating it with such insouciance. Was this a sign of incipient middle age?