Remembering Carmen (3 page)

Carmen responded testily to Christopher's inquries. He could see that she detected the false note, his effort to appear detached, amused. She knew what he was thinking. What he was fearing. The ground was being cleared for a real humdinger but it was too early in the evening to launch the first strike. They attacked instead a small dish of varied dips – crushed walnut, taramasalata, something unidentified which, had he been able to stomach the preposterous prose of restaurant menus, Christopher could have had named. It was perhaps half an hour later – when he was quietly and intently at work on a challenging preparation of lamb – that Jimmy softly reappeared. He was off, it seemed, not staying for the full meal. His manner suggested more pressing business elsewhere. He had done what needed to be done. He dropped on to the tablecloth a flyer for a concert at the Purcell Room: John Cage's sonatas for prepared piano. They compliantly murmured that they would be there.

Over coffee, the first missile was launched.

“So, tell me more about the divine Jimmy.”

“What is there to tell?”

“He seemed very pleased to see you.”

Carmen looked at Christopher with that magnificent plaiting of pity and contempt that was her invariable starter.

“He's a professional charmer. He's pleased to see everyone.”

“They seem to reciprocate. They don't seem able to resist him.”

“Does that make you jealous?”

“What do you mean?”

“Forgive me, but I can't help sensing a little male rivalry here.”

“What? The carpenter and the virtuoso? In which arena, tell me, would we be slugging that one out?”

“Don't be obtuse. You know exactly what I mean.”

He knew exactly what she meant.

“No I don't. Why should I be jealous of that mountain of blue-eyed smarm?”

Carmen laughed in triumph. She had no further need of riposte.

“Are you going to his concert?”

“We could, I suppose, unless you have got one of your rush jobs on.”

He didn't like her tone. It was uncertain, trying a little too hard for insouciance. It was patently obvious that she wanted to clock Jimmy again: the triumphant entrance through the narrow door at the rear of the stage (the Purcell, with its subtle intimacy, perfectly adjusted to Jimmy's special modes of self-display); the enveloping smile thrown out like a gossamer veil over the heads of the audience; the long, magnificent silent foreplay; the hand dragged back through the thick disordered thatch; then the first strike of the keys.

Of course he was fucking jealous.

One always wants to be above this, Christopher reflected. One wants to avoid pettiness. Nothing is more miserable than the accumulation of small resentments, suspicions, deliberate misprisions, with which lovers torment themselves when the going is unsteady. One wants to be magnanimous and at ease. Brimming over.

“So he met you in France?”

“Sure. Though I'm amazed he remembered me.”

I shouldn't be scrutinising her, he thought, looking for tell-tale signs, shaky formulations, over-eager denials, making light of it.

“Would that be after I left?”

“Oh, please!”

“Sorry, but it's merely a casual inquiry. I hardly knew you at that time if you recall.”

“You mean you hadn't yet established your rights of ownership.”

“Don't be absurd.”

“Look, Chris, I don't need this, right? You know perfectly well I can't stand this creepy possessiveness. I am a free agent and I expect you to be. I thought we weren't into all that sort of thing.”

“I'm not saying we are.”

“Well what the fuck are you saying, then?”

“Only that Jimmy seemed very familiar.”

“But can't you see that he is like that with everyone, with all women. It's his way of doing things.”

“You don't seem to object.”

“Why should I object? It's up to him how he behaves. What do you want me to say? He's a sexist creep? OK, he's a sexist creep. Satisfied?”

“Fine.”

“It's obviously not fine. What you want me to say is did I sleep with Jimmy at the Hotel Magnifique. And what I am saying is that I don't answer questions like that. In fact I object to their being put.”

Christopher was reassured by her vehemence. She had not slept with Jimmy.

When the bill came, Carmen snatched it. In recognition of Christopher's services the wine had been on the house but the tally was still the equivalent of a week's income for a state pensioner. To them, this meant nothing, because they jointly earned more money than they could ever find the opportunity to spend. They were surrounded by countless others in the same predicament. They wanted to be able to spend more time with their possessions, longer at the yachting marina, more extended weekends in the Herefordshire cottage, more time gliding along the motorway network listening to audiobooks on the mellifluous in-car sound system. But the implacable ironmaster barked his orders at them and they continued to jump.

Christopher and Carmen walked back to Whitfield Street as they always did after a meal or a show, full of the vinous fumes of physical well-being. A resentful beggar, his blanket thrown over his shoulders like a mountain shepherd, cursed them as they passed. They had failed to notice him as they crossed Tottenham Court Road, their attention distracted by the need to avoid a drunk in an expensive suit who was pissing in the doorway of a computer shop. They slipped down a side street and turned in to the south end of Whitfield Street. A huddle of doubtful youths outside Crabtree Fields quickened their step and they were soon back at the flat. The quarrel about Jimmy had vivified them. They went straight to bed.

~

The audience at the Purcell Room was well-bred and middle-class, mostly middle-aged, but with a sprinkling of the younger generation – probably professional musicians, students, tyro composers. Christopher looked around the small chamber, noting how few people in this city of millions could be mustered for such an occasion. Jimmy – in black from head to toe but T-shirt and silk trousers taking the place of tuxedo and tails – handled the audience with aplomb. They loved it as much as he did and, of course, he played magnificently. Expecting to be bored or baffled, Christopher was enchanted by the spare rhythmic beauty of Cage's composition which he found ensnaring and irresistible. Whether Carmen at his side found music or musician irresistible was a matter of no consequence to him. He happily forgot where he was or any ground he might have for behaving in a resentful or peevish fashion. At the end he applauded as vigorously as anyone else in the hall.

As they streamed away into the night, along the Embankment and over Charing Cross footbridge they said little. Jimmy was no longer an issue of contention between them. The air was sharp and appetising. They felt alive.

Inevitably, he reflected, I am cast as the pantomime villain. Let's blame Jimmy, the man who steals other people's partners. In fact, I steal no one. I have no interest in possession. They come to me of their own free will and I do not seek to hold on to them. But none of this is allowed. My function as scapegoat is too necessary for the prosaic truth to be allowed to complicate the imaginary record. How often have I seen myself not as a thief but as an arbitrator, stepping in between antagonistic parties, my services demanded peremptorily, sometimes without reward. It is not always pleasant, this sense of being ancillary to something that is happening elsewhere.

Nor am I, before we leave the metaphor of the stage, a Don Giovanni, a Casanova. The predatory male ceaselessly in pursuit of unattainable satisfaction, and destined, when time is called, to be swallowed by the jaws of hell. My amatory career began in the feminist 1970s and 1980s when the relations between the sexes were an arena of contest, challenge and mutual recrimination. In spite of my critics, I claim that I learnt from these arguments. I modified my practice but I could not stop loving women. Nor could I see it in me to apologise for what seems to me an essential activity, a necessary part of the business of being human.

Carmen claims that Jimmy first encountered her in an expensive hotel in the south of France. He has no recollection of this. As he sees it, a series of random and inconsequential sightings in London led to their having lunch and, later, to some hurried and not entirely satisfactory assignations – once in a small hotel in West London which he found rather amusing if faintly theatrical. He felt that, contrary to the way in which the charge-sheet is customarily drawn up, it was he who was being used. Carmen interested him. Her sexual allure was obvious, but something else drew Jimmy to her. He was fascinated by her strangely combative personality. He was given the usual motor tour of her past (the pinched provincial beginnings, the convent girl's ritual rebellions etc etc) and listened as patiently as he could. These recitals generally bored him in ways that were hardly expressible. He preferred to live for the present and nothing could be more alien to him than these obsessive English fossickings in the dusty lumber-room of class – always an uncle who is a bit of a card, a father whose flaws are re-arranged to his advantage with the passage of time, a put-upon mother whose quiet heroism is somehow considered an inspiration. He wanted to lean across and vigorously shake the composers of these retrogressive monologues – indeed that is exactly what he sometimes did – urging them to cut free from the past and march forward with a light spring in their step towards the bright prospect of the new day. They look at him with suppressed anger. “You do not understand.” Most true, he reflected. Most true.

Jimmy and Carmen quarrelled – which he took to be normal behaviour for her. He cannot now remember whether there was any substance to their polemics. He doubted it. The point – the need – was simply to contend. She was more adept than he at this business. He was perhaps too emollient, too given to the superficialities of social charm – for which she had no time at all. Frequently, he was taken aback by her rasping vehemence, her apparent determination to be as unwinning as possible, as if the faded fragments of old-fashioned courtesy, to which everyone else in various degrees clung in a coarsening world, were a kind of mocking offence to her, an additional aggravation. A kind of weakness. He gathered that her relations with Christopher were regulated by this kind of behaviour, certain stand-up rows in public places having become legendary in their circle.

Perhaps it was no more than the fascinated attraction of opposites that led Jimmy to tolerate – to wish to explore – this prickly young woman. There was also a certain energy about her which captivated him. She was ruthless – and ruthlessly cynical – in her practise of her profession. She talked about it with a vivid contempt that made him wonder how she could continue to practise it. He had encountered this before with other bright young women who found themselves unable to play the part which their colleagues played, to bring off the trick of convincing themselves that the daily inanities of the workplace were in fact as important to the world as the manoeuvres of high international diplomacy.

It is a handicap he considered that he faced as a performer (an ‘arts worker' as he saw his like referred to in a recent newspaper) that he moved in a world of aesthetic pleasure, engaged each day in activities of patent worth. Aside from the occasional magazine interview or public relations call, he was not required to play games with himself, to pretend that what he was doing had a meaning which his inner self refused to endorse. He was happy and fulfilled in his work. His concerts gave him enormous pleasure and his commitment to new work, to breaking down the barriers of resistance to it, offered further satisfaction. He realised how lucky he was to experience this sensation. He knew how miserable many people were in their jobs. He saw it in their aggressive – if not hysterical – declarations of how much they enjoyed what they did. Carmen would speak of her employers and of her assignments with the most devastating contempt. Her intelligence became visible – vivid, outraged, traduced by the commissions it was compelled to accept. He asked himself – he was not yet ready to put the question directly to her – why she persisted. He could only assume that she had identified this world as one whose conquest she must achieve. She must have the scalp. Thus, the best and brightest of her generation went into these ‘glamorous' media professions whose output was found so grimly disappointing, so unworthy of the attention of their intelligent peers.

One reason for the frequency with which Jimmy embarked on new liaisons – aside from his inextinguishable love of liberty – is that he came to feel that he knew his partner too well. He scented the danger of becoming bored. Anticipating objections, he conceded that the feeling may well have been mutual. Perhaps it is so in all cases. With Carmen it was different. Knowing her was like entering a receding prospect. The more time he spent with her, the less he seemed to know her. Her contradictions flowered like some odorous bloom in the
jardin des plantes.
This tantalised him and drew him on. He wanted to know more, he wanted to be satisfied that she made sense. With hindsight he felt that he had failed in that endeavour. She remained the enigma that she presented to him at their first meeting.

Sometimes he would play for her and watch, with minute attention, her reactions. There was a short Schoenberg piece – the Suite for Piano, op.25 – which he would play because she had expressed enthusiasm for it. It was not a long piece – perhaps no more than fifteen minutes – but she would sit for the duration on the edge of her seat, craning forward, tensed, suddenly tossing her head upwards when the music changed to a more abrupt tempo, subsiding, imperceptibly, when it became
etwas langsam
. After he stopped, she would be silent for several minutes, rocking gently, before springing up as if to shake off the surrender she had made to the power of the music. There is something magnificently cold, hard-edged, metallically brilliant about this piece which was plainly to her taste. Once, in a whitewashed warehouse-studio in Docklands where he was preparing for a recording session the following day, she sat on a slightly soiled cream-coloured sofa, spotlit by a shaft of sunlight which streamed through the high glass roof, and he reflected that never before had he enjoyed such an attentive listener. After the silence, he locked the door of the studio, which they had to themselves, and they made love in those beams of light, feeling the warmth of the sun on their naked skin, their bodies pressed against the hard, shiny wooden blocks of the floor.