Remembering Carmen (13 page)

“Now, Carl and Joanna, I am so pleased that you wanted to come today. I want you to think of this morning as a sort of introduction, a getting-to-know-you session. I think the fact that you are both here is a sign that already you are wanting to work through to a solution. This is what we all want and I am confident that everything can be resolved, that we can work together towards a new start. Tea?”

As her patter came out, Carl's apprehensions began to leave their lurking places. He regretted having come but he knew that this was just what Helen wanted. It would confirm her knowledge of human behaviour, reward her redemptive skills. She would enjoy disarming him, curing him of his predictable resistances. She had seen it all before. All it needed was some work. But did he want to work on his relationship? How had it come to this?

Carl knew that in Joanna's circle of friends he was considered to lack sophistication. He was seen to work with his hands, to be interested in cars, to have little time for cultural activities. Perhaps Joanna thought that he had married her on false pretences. Their meeting was quite by chance. He had finished his professional studies and had decided to visit Paris for a few weeks, looking after a flat that belonged to one of his father's business associates. In those days he painted. Not very well, but it amused him. One morning he set up his little easel on one of the
quais
and started to paint one of those scenes which appear on all the postcards. He supposed now that, had he possessed more originality, he would have chosen some other subject but he had found a suitable perch across the road on the steps of a building which seemed shut and which gave him a good perspective on the bookstands and the river flowing behind them, with taller buildings in the background on the right bank. It was a hot day and, from time to time, people would come and sit at the other end of the long stone step to rest or to consult their gazeteer or drink some refreshment. They also tried to see what he was doing and generally they smiled. The public always feels well-disposed to an artist at work, however indifferent it will become later.

He had nearly finished his humdrum scene when he became aware of a pretty young woman to his left at the far end of the step. She was delicately licking an ice-cream. She returned his smile and, rather nervously, got up and came over to see what he was doing. There was something schoolgirlish about her but he judged she must have been nineteen or twenty. She said she liked the painting and then, rather abruptly, she asked if it would be for sale. Carl laughed. The notion had never occurred to him. His few previous attempts had been given away to relatives. With an improvisatory boldness that still astonished him in retrospect he announced that if she would have a coffee with him when he had finished, she could have it for nothing. She burst out into giggles while he blinked at his own
chutzpah
. They had coffee, in the course of which they discovered that we were both alone in Paris, for largely the same reasons, and therefore it was a natural progress – notwithstanding their mutual shyness and awkwardness – to discuss the matter of an evening meal.

And now, in this carpeted room, Carl looked across at Joanna. She had not changed in outward appearance. Perhaps he too looked the same. He could not believe that either of them had changed inwardly to any great degree. So what had brought them to this brink of absurdity? Why were they putting their lives in the hands of this smiling woman who treated them, as we treat the old, as if they were tiny children who cannot help themselves. He got to his feet, shaking with anger and frustration. The therapist was used to this sort of reaction. Without getting up she put out her hand and pulled down firmly on Carl's forearm. Dully, he complied with the gesture and sank back into his chair. But he was not listening to the unfolding patter, its rhythms of reassurance.

There was indeed a gulf between them. He was the gauche student dabbling crudely in oils and she was the shy young woman whose parents lived in a red-roofed house overlooking a long garden which ran down to a railway line that took you to Waterloo station in twenty-seven minutes. Carl made a first, halting visit to the house one summer Saturday. There were striped canvas club chairs set out in a large semicircle – not unlike this arrangement of armchairs in North London. There was a rug on the lawn and Joanna, giggling, led him down to where her parents were sitting waiting to inspect him. Her father was all red-faced bluster and the mother anxiously polite. Carl felt their eyes on him. He felt the work of assessment being started. He did not then know that it would never end, that they would not cease to judge him, to find him wanting. And eventually Joanna herself would succumb. She, too, would compute his failings, draw up the end-of-year accounts. Were they right to suspect him? In view of how things turned out, he reflected, were their fears not all too well-founded?

On that summer afternoon he tried not to put a foot wrong. Joanna helped by squeezing his arm, whispering encouragement, letting him know that the verdict was: so far so good. Tea was brought. A heavy cake. A cat came down the lawn to add its professional weight to the process of assessing and inspecting. He could hear the voices of neighbours, the whooping cries of children in an inflatable paddling-pool on the other side of the fence, the periodic rattle of a Southern Region train at the foot of the garden. Joanna's father was a solicitor coasting down the last short slope to retirement. His wife was much younger than he and valiant in good works. Once or twice Carl felt an urge to howl like some imprisoned beast but for the most part he did what was expected of him. He thought it had gone well until, when he eventually reached the moment when it was decent to propose that he go, Joanna's father came over to him and put his hand on his shoulder and said: “Very nice to have met you Carl. You must come again.” What was odd was the intonation, the faint air of menace as if he were threatening him, defying him to have the brass gall ever to come near his daughter again. Carl could not decide what he had done wrong. Like any young man of twenty he was encumbered with a sense of general inadequacy but he could not identify any particular misdemeanour. Joanna dismissed his reservations – rather unconvincingly, he thought – and claimed that it had all gone well. “They liked you,” she said, in a rather brisk, matter-of-fact tone.

Not long after this they went to a party on the other side of London. They stayed over by arrangement and, to their mutual surprise, had their first sexual experience. Joanna henceforth behaved like someone who has suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, discovered a new hobby. She was always perfectly decorous and outwardly ever the well-brought up Surrey girl but her sexual appetite turned out to be remarkably vigorous. Carl had to struggle to keep up with her inventive energy. They kept in touch during the year of their first jobs (she was doing a diploma in librarianship at one end of the country, he was adding a diploma in interior design to his professional portfolio at the other) and they had as many weekends together as they could manage. Carl met her parents again but on these occasions they seemed to have withdrawn into their shell. He could not get much from them beyond pleasantries and even that hostile gleam in her father's eye seemed to have dulled. As Carl and Joanna drifted towards marriage the parents merely acquiesced in what now seemed inevitable. Two weeks before the wedding, the old man (as he had come to seem) was hurled by a sudden coronary forwards on to his roaring petrol mower which dragged him several yards down the slope to the hydrangeas. His wife reacted to his death by appearing to shrink before their eyes in the subsequent months. She did not long survive him and with the proceeds of that cream-coloured 1930s villa they bought a large flat in central London and had a series of expensive trips around the world. Joanna almost wilfully buried the skills in garden and home that her mother had dinned into her but Carl suspected that they were merely dormant and would start to show themselves again before very long.

By now he was successful and very busy indeed. Joanna was made redundant from her college library after a re-organisation and showed no desire to find an alternative post. She dabbled in the history of art and developed a collecting interest in early twentieth century craft furniture. It was about this time – long before Carl had any evidence of her involvement with Christopher – that he began to suspect that she may have been (in ways and through opportunities he could not quite imagine) gratifying her other passions. Perhaps, Carl considered, they should have found their way to the therapists earlier than they did. But this was a story of too little done too late, an inventory of errors. Which makes it the usual story.

The therapist, preliminaries over, had barely launched herself on to the main menu, when Carl stood up, this time in no mood to be fobbed off. She smiled tolerantly. She was professionally incapable of being taken by surprise. She would weave him back into the sublime circle of her special spell. When it became apparent that he was determined to resist her, the mood changed. She darkened. She looked on him with contempt and even her sisterly solicitation towards Joanna ebbed – as if she too were part of the conspiracy against her. No longer was it a matter of their throwing away their chance to rescue themselves from the wind-lashed rock of dysfunction. The couple were showing their contempt for the therapist's very metaphysic: her look contained no hint of possible forgiveness. Carl led the way and Joanna (who might have been expected to have put up a fight) meekly followed. Civilised abuse followed them down the hall (later there would be softened pleadings, wheedlings) and they passed out into the blur of noise and traffic and low-level drabness that was Kentish Town Road.

Joanna walked behind Carl, sullen and wordless. He too said nothing. He flagged down a cab and they got in without any histrionic ‘scene' of the kind married couples so frequently cleave to. The cab-driver ostentatiously adjusted his mirror in order to inspect his fare. Evidently, he judged it prudent to leave them to simmer in silence. They were spared his jaunty observations and nuggets of folk wisdom. Back at the flat they collapsed on the long sofa and Carl went out to fetch a bottle of wine and two glasses. Joanna laughed when she saw this and her mood improved rapidly. He realised that she too had dreaded the encounter from which they had just forcibly rescued themselves. Because of her apparent enthusiasm in making the arrangements Carl had wrongly jumped to the conclusion that it was a process she wanted to go through with. It was the spirit of her mother in her: the need to be seen to be doing the right thing, even if it was the wrong thing. Setting one's face against inertia. They held each other. They kissed. They became more intimate still. Thus they ended the day on a note of rising expectation that, out of this knot of tangled paths, the way would become clear. If it did not, Carl reflected, then the blame was his. He need not have done what he did. He need not have put at risk this fragile hope of a resolution.

Carl found out by accident. There is, of course, no other way to make the necessary discovery. Three disparate pieces of data came together. One of his men casually mentioned that he had seen Joanna lunching nearby. This in itself was not implausible or problematic. She frequently lunched with girlfriends – or, in truth, with friends of any gender – since her husband was so rarely available. For some reason Carl asked about her companion – evidently with too little finesse to prevent the lifting of a head, the exchange of a glance amongst the workforce. He thought he detected a certain reluctance to share speculations with him. Generally oblivious to the details of her daily routine which Joanna ran past him at breakfast, this time he remembered that she had said she was out on a field trip to the Ashmolean that day. And, finally, they had tickets for a show which – again so rare were these excursions – was always followed by a meal out, an indulgence for which she always prepared by rigid abstinence from any mid-day meal. Even poor dull Carl could see the ignition of a spark from the conjunction of all these elements.

Gloomily, like a character in the shabby melodrama this was becoming, he made an excuse and left the shop with its whining drills, stacked planks, and curled shavings on the sawdusted floor. He knew the restaurant, which had helpfully been identified, and knew that it was opposite a coffee bar with another entrance in a side street through which he could dip unseen. He settled with a paper cup of coffee amongst the listless office-workers and set up his tawdry observation post. The restaurant was able to drop the upper part of its street-facing window which gave diners the advantage of
al fresco
dining without the disadvantages of being importuned by flower-sellers, beggars, hawkers and miscellaneous madmen of the street. Above the row of colourful window boxes he caught sight of Joanna. She was sitting across a table from Christopher, whom Carl knew as the restaurant-fitter who had come to his aid several weeks previously. They were intent on conversation but he could not say, even in his feverish condition, that they displayed any especial intimacy, any fuel for his outrage. Joanna looked out of sorts and Christopher seemed to be pleading with her. Neither looked in the least bit comfortable. At one point he tried to put his hand on her arm as a calming gesture but she withdrew it sharply. So far, so good, thought the amateur gumshoe.Then, as if she regretted this stab of coldness, she leaned forward and placed her hand around the back of Christopher's neck. They looked at each other in this next frame of Carl's silent movie for several seconds.

Then she pulled him to her and kissed him more than briefly. Carl leapt to his feet, blundered out of the coffee-bar leaving a trail of upset cartons and trays in his wake. He strode across the street and stood below the box of bright blooms, bellowing some coarse and almost certainly uninventive obscenity. Joanna, alarmed, got to her feet. Christopher remained seated. He seemed curiously relaxed, as if he had no reason to show any discomfort or unease at the intruder's ruffian-like arrival. This had the effect of maddening Carl still further. He stepped on to the narrow strip of tiles in order to bring himself closer to their trysting-place and lunged at Christopher. The latter ducked neatly then stood up, retreating into the interior of the restaurant. Carl was off balance and, steadying himself, reached out for something to hold on to. His mistake was to grasp one of the window plant troughs which were unsecured. The whole thing came away from the hinged wooden shelf beneath the window and landed on the pavement. Passers-by were now expressing interest. A small crowd had gathered and a beefy type decided to act as referee. Carl planted on him the blow he had prepared for Christopher. Outraged, the man swung back at Carl and (he discovered later when he came round with a sore head in a small confined space which he discovered in horror to be a police cell) laid him out.