Remembering Carmen (2 page)

It turned out that they had chosen the same film –
Jules et Jim
in black and white (Christopher was always touched by the fate of poor, downcast Jules). Fully recovered now from her disgust at his carniverous eating-habits, she made no protest as he steered her towards the theatre. Afterwards, there was a drink in the bar, some genuinely shared pleasure at dissecting the shortcomings as well as the triumphs of the movie, and then – to the surprise of both – an unforced exchange of addresses.

Naturally, Christopher was the first to phone. Her voice was muffled, as if she were struggling in a dark cupboard or had become engulfed in the folds of a resistant duvet. He could not even be sure it was her. Then the sound clarified (the
pain au chocolat
now swallowed) and she became coherent. Yes, she would be interested in the movie (the new Turkish cinema season: a bold move, he congratulated himself). It turned out to be a little grim: harassment from the authorities down by the Bosphorus, low-budget pain. He had begun to regret not going for something elegantly French at the Renoir.

And so it was that London became the theatre of their operations. Christopher had recently returned from the country where, for the past seven years, he had earned his living restoring old houses: stone cottages eased out of the hands of the peasantry and sold to the gentlefolk from West Ealing, their windows lovingly ‘restored' – with about as much authenticity as would have been provided by an off-the-peg frame from the out-of-town building supply yard, but, pleasantly for him, at four times the cost. He had gradually fallen out of love with his clients, their insufferable pedantry about things of which they knew nothing (mortars, oils, varieties of timber), their inextinguishable self-regard, their air of almost militant self-satisfaction. A series of lucky chances, an unexpected inheritance, had led him to acquire a part-share in a former newsagent's shop in Whitfield Street. His business partner converted the shop (with Christopher's labour) into an organic bean-dispensary and the latter took the upper floor, above his partner's store-room, as his Fitzrovian penthouse. Carmen always referred to it as “Charlotte Street”, thinking to wash it in some of the glamour accruing from the presence of the headquarters of Channel 4 Television, several streets away. Christopher's topographical pedantry led him to use the term “Goodge Street” – only the cabbies managing to hear “Whitfield Street” without a “Where's that?” He had always been fond of this part of London and his love now began to deepen. Never again did he wish to see another country-crafts emporium brimming with over-priced ceramics and drippy landscapes painted on warped board. Nor did he wish to look again on the bourgeois weekenders who hogged the pavements of the little market towns, straw baskets affectedly crooked in their arms, enviously measuring the rise of house prices in the windows of wily and smooth-tongued estate agents (the warm rustic burr another weapon in the latter's traditional armoury of deceit). No, Christopher was now a metropolitan, a prickly and polemical ‘townie', lodged in his city pad, loving the sheer variousness of its pleasures and practical comforts. Let the red-faced swine gallop across fields on fat-arsed mares in pursuit of the fox! The rest of the civilised world would get on with its proper business. A pox on the ‘country folk'!

And, Christopher now reflects: I was in love. You will, will you not, Carmen, concede that?

~

Carmen too reflects: that it began, she supposed, with various visits to the cinema. An accidental meeting was followed by several more undemanding trips to the obvious cultural watering holes. Her frenzied life on the magazine, her pumping out of a glittering stream of bright, worthless words, had destroyed, she now considered, the life of her mind, her ambition (marked by a stiffly bound thesis on ethics presented to a lascivious tutor for the degree of M.Phil, its blue cover and gilt lettering still protected in a polythene bag from the depredations of dust) to write a book which would throw an exciting bridge between the world of the academic specialist and that of the general reader. She considered that she had ruined herself as a thinker, as a user of exact language. Christopher would be furious when she spoke in this way. He saw it as a self-indulgence, a posture. They quarrelled. That was something they were always good at. They knew how to make a vivid argument. Sometimes they were forced to leave a restaurant or a public place because of that vehemence, the sheer visceral violence of their contention. Christopher reflects: Yes, I do miss it. I miss the need and the energy. The compulsion to lock horns and to push against the other's resistance.

When Carmen met Christopher she was resigned to culture as diversion for the exhausted classes. She spent more time in restaurants than in art galleries. The four hour Lear, the dense classic novel, yielded to short movies, lightweight novels, the frothy and the fashionable, the nibbled aesthetic canapé. She was awash with money but denuded of time. Or so it seemed to her at that time. In retrospect she sees that it might not truly have been like this. She could have contended, used some of her famed aggressiveness against herself. Instead, she preferred to lash out, to make a scene. She is still not sure whether he objected to this. She thinks that they both took pleasure in their endless guerilla campaign against each other. Carmen would come to feel the lack of all that passionate enmity.

Carmen's decision to live with Christopher was in some sense not a decision at all. It simply became, slowly, a reality. Although those first encounters quickly became sexual – for they were, for all their linguistic pugilism and mutual provocations, always attracted to each other, always adroit in their love-making, always ardent – the notion of co-habitation at first revolted them. Neither had been in a recent relationship, neither was recoiling from a failed partnership or seeking compensatory affairs. They were enjoying the experience of emotional freedom. Christopher had severed his relationship with a life in the sticks about which he refused to talk to Carmen and she was celebrating a narrow escape from matrimony at the hands of an older man. It was precisely this sense of freedom, of lightness, that attracted them to each other. Carmen considers that she sees this more clearly now than she would have seen it at the time. And there may have been something in Christopher's view that their love of discord, their glorious hostility, was a way of ensuring that each remained free. Like brawling lions, they defended their territory in the simplest possible way, by opening their jaws and letting out a roar.

Notwithstanding their propensity to fight, they grew to need each other. It began with an overnight stay, then a weekend which gradually lengthened at both ends, then an entire week connecting those hitherto separated points. Carmen kept on her flat, of course – a bolt-hole was vital – and Christopher's Whitfield Street lair was large enough to give her a small cubby-hole of her own where she could write while he was out doing his fancy restaurant-fitting. It was a time when her magazine copy was full of references to giving people ‘space'. Carmen always thought it would be useful to have throwaway function keys on the lap-top which would cover these set phrases. Most lasted only a year or so, though she was always fascinated by the durability of certain words, their refusal to lie down. The most remarkable of all was ‘cool' which strictly speaking should have gone out with leather elbow patches on tweed jackets but which was once again enjoying a revival. It would have to be a permanent function-key.

One thing about which they never quarrelled was London itself. They were both provincials, which she supposed explained their passion for the city – its special freedoms and anonymities, its offer of escape and of choice, the generous permission it grants to various ways of living – the antithesis of the small-town's insistence on its unique path. This large liberty can co-exist with small fixities, routines, grooves. Even in their corner of Fitzrovia they knew their Asian corner-shopman, his wry sense of humour, his predictable jokes, and those of his equally sardonic wife. There was a café – one of the few not yet refitted and homogenised by the big coffee chains – whose furniture was untouched by fashion. It was run by Italians and there was a picture of the Madonna behind the counter. They had their favourite pubs and restaurants and public places. They walked their own path through the city. They became expert at threading the narrow pavements, dodging people and traffic, discovering the short cuts, the quick back ways that avoided the press of pedestrians on the main thoroughfares. They loved it in the way the countryman, Carmen supposed (unlike Christopher she had never lived in the country and had no desire to do so) loves his fields and hills and the backdrop of sky. She had a passion for travel but always loved to return. It is true that there were parts of the city that seemed alien to her: the great wide streets, parks, mansions and institutions of South Kensington, for example, wrapped in their massive money-nets, half-hidden behind walls or guarded by porter's lodges whose doors gleamed with polished brass. But they at least provided the pleasure of contrast. She was also rigid in her conception of what constituted the city. She loathed any hint of the suburban and anywhere not walkable from Charing Cross was to her impermissible, automatically transformed into somewhere else, not her
flâneur
's metropolis but a dull district of parked cars and supermarkets and ashen-faced commuters at the close of day.

This is not the description of an idyll, but they lived a life that suited them both. They did not believe that they were smug – the usual indictment of those who have worked out a successful
modus vivendi
– for each of them knew well enough from experience what the opposite of this life was like and the shape it could easily resume at a moment's notice.

And they had their quarrels to keep them sharp and mettlesome.

Christopher considered that he enjoyed his work, which might be described as the plucking of order from chaos. The city was constantly renewing itself. Capital, one of his business partners once observed, grows lazy until it is woken from its sleep and reminded that there are things to be done, new opportunities to seize. Buildings were there to be bought and sold, refurbished or destroyed. Rebuilt from their own ashes. Old factories, dairies, dispensaries, their original purposes sometimes inscribed in ceramic tiles or garlanded in swathes of stone acanthus, were refashioned by clever designers and architects into new uses. Forty yellow tables with their accompanying tubular steel chairs were loud with diners on new Mediterranean cuisine in an old Zion chapel somewhere off the Tottenham Court Road. A scruffy Greek restaurant whose long lease had expired was now an aseptic gallery of costly artists' prints. Christopher waxed fat on all this ripping up and tearing out. He was quick and worked well to the blueprints provided. He had assembled a good team with whose help he would rip through the latest commercial premises, sizing, squaring, anticipating problems, juggling with solutions, taking pleasure in accommodating imperfections, protrusions, departures from exact angles. His clients were bracingly ruthless – unlike the slow, ruminative, rustic commissioners of unnecessary window-work whose fickle minds had changed from week to week. They were appreciative of his quick, provisional, extemporising skills. Every day on which interest was paid, and turnover deferred, worked on their angst, agitated their whole sensibility. They walked into the devastation of floorspaces, lean and hungry, wanting to know how much longer he would be, what corners could be cut, what dead branches could be lopped from the specification to speed fresh growth. At their heels the next set of professionals waited, champing at the bit, eager to pay their tribute of finishing skill to the whole project, to bring nearer the moment when the tills started to ring, the cards began to be swiped through the jaws of the Visa machine like a sharpening blade. Christopher felt like a pioneer hacking back the undergrowth at the edge of the last settlement. He was riding high. He was intoxicated. He was part of the energy and action in this city.

He asks himself: what happened, Carmen? How did we contrive to cancel this bacchanale? He asks the questions but he already knows the answers. The answer.

Christopher was hardly aware of Jimmy when he slid, deftly, into their lives, smiling, unrolling the soft, luxurious carpet of his charm, the famous charm that had caused so many to give themselves to him, prodigally, eagerly, without restraint and against their better judgement, when judgement was not the issue. Christopher and Carmen had opening night tickets at Kerkyra in Museum Street. Carmen swept in from work with her glossy black hair – longer now – clamped at the back in a sapphire ring of elasticated silk, turning every head in the crowded room. A type with long hair tied in a pigtail was plucking a mandolin in the corner. The lighting was subdued. Christopher's olive-green counter was strewn with seductive nibbles and ranged with complimentary glasses of house Mantinia. Waitresses hung back, ready for their assault. A new wave of Greek cuisine – taking the old staples and giving them an expensive gloss – was sweeping the capital. Captain Corelli's in Old Compton Street had shown the way but dozens had followed. Christopher himself had three commissions in the queue – mostly quick refits of a kind he could turn around in three days, bribed by the first of them to get the lads lined up for a classic weekend job: in on Friday night at six and the corks popping at Monday night's opening.

Out of the cool clatter of cutlery and glassware, Jimmy approached their table, smiling suavely, large hands extended. You noticed the hands, of course, for they were Jimmy's trademark, his USP. That memorable CD cover of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern, with the elongated, delicate hands poised over the keyboard, had been a catchy icon after it won a
Gramophone
award and was advertised on the Underground – itself a rather remarkable achievement for three alumni of the Viennese School. Jimmy knew how to manage his success, how to play the admiring fish. He knew just how far to go and when to hold back. It was a performance as impressive in its way as his conduct at the piano. Like everyone else, Christopher and Carmen ate, eagerly, out of his hand. Unlike some celebrities who keep a dim recollection of those they have met – their real interest centring on themselves – Jimmy had remembered Carmen from the hotel on the Riviera. Christopher could see that Jimmy was homing in on her – although he was scooped up into the general embrace – and she warmly rose to take those magnificent hands. He smiled, offered them the gracious tribute of himself, wordlessly, for several seconds, then, after a quick acknowledgement of his encounter on the Riviera with Carmen, nodded with the faintly arch grace of a
maître d'
, and backed away to his table where he rejoined the glittering couple with whom he had come to dine. Christopher could not help noticing that he was unaccompanied.