Remembering Carmen (7 page)

“No, it's something else.”

As they spoke, Carmen could see a change coming over Alice. Slowly, her trademark composure, the achieved poise that fashion editors could not stop falling for after all these years, crumpled, collapsed inward like a plastic beaker tossed on to a bonfire. For the first time Carmen saw a new side of her. She saw a kind of exhaustion, a sudden glimpse of vulnerability, uncertainty, confusion. Not perhaps so very different from expressions she had seen at moments of stress on the faces of other friends, but so wholly at odds with what she expected from Alice that it shocked her. Carmen waited for Alice to explain in her own time.

“I don't know whether any of this will make sense. I know that I will be accused of ‘over-reacting'. The highly strung pedigree racehorse panicking in the viewing enclosure. That's usually how they deal with my outbreaks of feeling which, as everyone knows, I am not supposed to have. The glittering ‘icon' is not meant to show any passion, to lose her cool. But what everyone forgets is that it is all a performance. It is put on. And sometimes one wants to put it off, to allow the real me to escape.”

“That's usually a mistake, believe me. But we're all playing roles. Look at the stuff I churn out.”

Alice looked at Carmen and laughed. It was an interval in the gloom. She had obviously read some of her friend's pieces, probably in magazines where the text threaded itself around the bodies of Alice's younger friends. Carmen reflected that she didn't expect Alice to show quite such ready endorsement of her self-deprecation.

“No, it's something more than the usual ritual self-loathing.”

“Which comes with the turf.”

“Exactly.”

Carmen looked at Alice's hands. They were so perfectly shaped – giving the manicurist so little to do in the way of enhancement of their effect. She stretched them out in front of her as if she were calculating the value of an asset, an object. Her beauty, Carmen felt (not for the first time) was unsettling. Could one be almost too perfect?

“It happened about three weeks ago. I was coming up an escalator at Bond Street – just like you said a moment ago. It was that same poster.”

“The one in the white knickers and the gold jewellery. The Egyptian slave look.”

“Someone had...”

She faltered. Carmen wasn't sure whether to take her hand, to offer her some physical reassurance, but neither of them had ever been the touchy-feely type. Instead, she waited for Alice to pick herself up, to put herself back on course.

“Someone had scribbled some graffiti... across the... crotch.”

She broke down. She whispered across the table the vile little obscenity that some twisted mind had framed. Short, vicious, impregnated with hate for her sexuality, her womanhood. She took a deep slug of white wine and struggled to continue.

“It's not the first time, of course, it's often no more than an adolescent joke. One has to be used to it. It's a professional hazard and often a relatively minor one. After all, if you flaunt your body across the hoardings and the bookstalls, you can hardly justify maidenly outrage. The house rule is to take it all on the chin, to minimise it, to avoid being uncool. But there was something different about this. There was a kind of
virulence
about it that chilled me. Where do words – thoughts – like that come from? Are they just random, a lone nutter? Or is this widespread? If so, it frightens me.”

“I'm sure there have always been people like this around.”

“But I sense that it's ... deeper, somehow. I got a kind of chill off that, as if it were the tip of something, or a curtain pulled back on something very nasty indeed.”

Carmen looked hard at Alice. She wasn't sure she was handling this very well. The obvious feminine solidarity was there. All women have known harassment and worse. Alice knew Carmen was on her side. And, naturally, these were topics she had sounded off enough about in her pieces over the years. But there was something else at work here. She was seeing the gradual removal of a brilliant, gilt-flecked veil and beneath it was a woman fearful and exposed. The Alice sitting across the table from her was not the Alice that the world knew. It was not the Alice that Carmen knew.

“The fact is, Car, I'm frightened. Frightened at what I've done.”

“At what
you
have done!”

“Haven't I colluded in this, turned myself into an image of upmarket sexuality, offering an eyeful to every passenger on the Underground?”

“Oh, Alice, please! This is all wrong. You are a beautiful woman. You have added beauty to the world – think of those Bruce Neubauer pics. They're in the Museum of Modern Art for Christ's sake! Women shouldn't be required to cover themselves up, to deny their sexuality, their pleasure in how they are, just because a minority of men...”

Alice looked up and smiled through her tears.

“You once would have said a majority of men.”

Their laughter dispatched much of the tension that had been building up. This time Carmen did find herself stretching her hand across the table, giving those beautiful hands a gentle squeeze.

“The fact is that I am through with this business. I suppose you never make a decision for one reason alone. It's been building up for some time. The disgust at the business is always there. Liked piped music in a department store. But I can see that I have only a limited amount of time. I am thinking of selling that tiny Manhattan apartment – do you remember, you stayed there – and making Paris my main base. And, yes, I have been talking to publishers, but about a sort of reminiscence.”

“Well, you have met just about everybody.”

“I think I can survive. There are all sorts of things I want to do and I'd rather choose to do them now than wait for them to be forced on me as a kind of survival strategy. I'd like to spend the next phase of my life doing some proper living. Perhaps that nasty little creature with the indelible pen has done me a favour after all.”

Alice was slowly recovering, gathering up the scattered fragments of herself, re-establishing the customary poise. It was a subtly mingled process, physical and emotional, utterly riveting to watch. She kept drawing herself up, straightening her back, stretching out her arms, breathing deeply, running one of those slender beautiful fingers across her brow. When she had finished, when the process was complete, she turned her attention to Carmen.

“And what have you been up to? How's life with Christopher?”

“Oh, we've had our usual ups and downs. It's fine just now.”

“Has there been anyone else?”

She interpreted Carmen's silence.

“So you've been a naughty girl again?”

“We've always been very open. Actually, that's not the right word. In some ways we're not open at all. We have always made a point of allowing ourselves as much...”

“Don't say it. ‘Space'”

“You think I'm living out one of my ‘lifestyle pieces'?”

“Possibly. But I shouldn't have interrupted.”

“No, go on.”

“You mean that you don't feel the need to tell each other everything. I've always been the same. It goes against the textbooks which say you have to share every damn thing. But I want the freedom to be myself in a relationship. To have secrets when I want them. Why should I have to tell everything.”

“Your publishers will be expecting you to.”

“That's different. That's for dosh, darling.”

“You haven't changed.”

“No, I suppose not. I've just decided to give a little more indulgence to the real me – if I know, after all these years, who that is. I've had a good run for my money. If I start to whinge tell me to be quiet.”

They had now reached the end of their meal. The waiters, drawn like moths to a lamp by Alice's beauty, had pestered them throughout with unnecessary inquiries – and that damned pepperpot the size of an elephant's phallus. They asked for the bill and exchanged up-to-date addresses. Alice ordered Carmen to come and see her in Paris. She was flying out first thing in the morning. There would be no time to see Christopher.

“Another time, darling,” the fully-restored Alice purred as she flagged down a cab in New Oxford Street. She stepped into the back of the vehicle and waved regally, before popping her head through the window.

“Oh, by the way, I had a call from that gorgeous hulk, Jimmy, earlier in the week. He's got an engagement in Paris the week after next and he's going to look me up.”

“Lucky you,” Carmen called in a tone whose uncertain emphases were drowned out by the accelerating roar of the cab.

Christopher is sitting with his legs stretched out on the sanded but not yet polished wooden floorboards of his latest project: a cool, open-fronted bar on the edge of Covent Garden in Great Queen Street overlooking the portentous grey mass of a Masonic lodge – or do they call it, he wondered, a temple? Today he has been let down by his builders. Their failure to arrive has thwarted the next phase of his work. He is waiting for them to break open the frontage to create a set of folding glass panels. Without them, he is becalmed, tasting a very unusual hour or two of leisure. This is so rare as to be unsettling.

The sun is streaming through the old shop window that will be removed, perhaps later today, when the moonlighting contractors eventually arrive. It was a shop specialising in writing materials – gold-nibbed pens, unusual inks, heavy cream-coloured paper, portable leather writing cases. The gold lettering still catches the sunlight, traces the shadow of script on the floor in front of him. By the end of today that sheet of glass will lie shattered in the bottom of an iron builder's-skip.

Robertson's, in its day, was a legendary shop where one went when every other outlet had failed to satisfy one's quest. The staff were ancient – as is the rule in such old-fashioned places – and were characterised by a sort of lordly rudeness, as if their job were made disasteful to them by the oafishness of customers who were, increasingly, insufficiently educated in the complex rites of penmanship. They wore black waistcoats with shiny green silk backs, gold half-mooned spectacles, and moved about the shop with immense slowness, their great glistening domed pates catching the subdued light from brass lamps set at intervals between the fluted pilasters. Often, when they had found – after an initial display of scepticism – that they did indeed have the calibre of pencil-lead or the tint of ink sought, they would wrap it up with a wrinkle of distaste, as if they doubted that the purchaser realised the nature of what he or she was buying. They saw themselves as learned clerks in a culture of barbarism, their knowledge and their discriminating subtlety despised by a world which had no present use for such qualities.

When young Mr Angus Roberston, nephew of the founder, and a freshly awarded Harvard MBA, inspected the books, he announced the same day that the business would close at the end of the financial year. He was going into hand-held computers and all this antique rubbish was to be swept into crates and offered to a museum. There was a brief day of street theatre when one or two famously fogeyish writers joined a protest outside the shop. This manifestation of solidarity with superseded writing materials quickly fizzled out – though not before an abrasive, counter-revolutionary younger novelist had asked reporters in the street outside whether the next important battlefront to be opened up would be the defence of the quill pen.

The gold shimmer and fullness of that quill which enfolds the words ROBERTSON & SONS on the now dirty plate glass, catches Christopher's eye as he looks out into the sunlit street, where he notices a new diversion. Some great event is evidently taking place in the grey bunker, for hundreds of bald or grey-haired old men in suits with discreet lapel-pins are flooding out of it into the street. For an organisation once thought to be a secret sodality, they are remarkably conspicuous. What makes them wish to play this game of dressing-up? Why do they not look more cheerful as a result of this riot of elderly male comradeship? The normally quiet street is so choked with people that pedestrians are required to step smartly into the gutter in order to make their way down it without slackening speed.

He stretches out for his litre bottle of mineral water, allegedly captured from a Scottish spring, and dips his hand into a paper bag of soft ciabatta rolls filled with tuna and mayonnaise (these being the only ingredients he can identify with certainty). The day is becoming hotter and there is no sign of his absconding builders.

And so he succumbs to the stab of anxiety, of half-justified jealousy, of silent suffering.

~

Christopher considers that this was the first blow administered by Carmen, the first faltering of what they thought of – of what
he
thought of – as a love that would endure. He exaggerated. He had no hope of such a thing, no faith. The opportunist logicians of classic poetry – seize the day etc etc – were no doubt right. Gather the rosebuds while they are there to be gathered. Take it now. Outwit time. Those were the ground rules he had worked to before he met Carmen. Sometimes speciously, like those poets. Sometimes because he had come to believe it to be true (with partners who did not appear to dissent). But Carmen held out the possibility of something more. There had been nothing like it before, for him. He did not dare to speculate what the experience meant for her. She seemed to give so unstintingly of her self, to shame other people's day to day calculations, their reserve and holding back, their reluctance to let go. She gave all that she could, as if each hour existed for you to prove how much could be poured into it. And how much remained to flow, the barrel never empty.