Remembering Carmen (19 page)

But he was not permitted to be so dispassionate in his assessment of Jimmy. No doubt his unhurried charm, the universal adulation, were temptations too strong for anyone to resist. Women were drawn to him for reasons so obvious as hardly to need stating. And why would he have wished to turn them away? His wandering lifestyle was not an encouragement to settled domesticity – even if his temperament had been disposed to it – and the intense but short-lived affair, the plucking of the most interesting and fragrant blooms, suited him admirably. Christopher was merely unlucky and found it hard to draw up a convincing indictment, however bitter (and coarse its expression) his resentment could be at times.

He was shocked, during a particularly vivid verbal skirmish with Carmen, to discover from her that Jimmy had dismissed him as indistinguishable from his clients, seeing him as one of those fast-living new vulgarians whose money was being scattered so conspicuously around the capital. Christopher was hurt by what struck him as its injustice (later, of course, he saw that his immersion in this world would naturally have led anyone to assume on his part an unalloyed endorsement of it). He was also hurt by its ingratitude. After all, he had been generous enough to applaud his talent, might he not have conceded that he too was a little different? But perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was more enmeshed in its values than he cared to admit. Those unleashed energies, the sense of excitement, the heady atmosphere of change in the city had undoubtedly captivated him but he saw it as a more professional, a purer (the word, he concedes, may provoke a sneer but it catches something of how he saw his avocation) engagement with the task in hand. He did not nod his head to the page-turner at the keyboard of a concert grand but he made, he crafted, something with his imagination and his talent.

When Christopher spoke in this way Carmen would snort derisively. He retorted that her own gifts were hardly a vindication of her early promise, of the analytic philosopher that she was poised briefly to become in her early twenties. She came back with heavy fire and they locked themselves into one of their fiercely staged conflicts which resolved nothing, but which blazed magnificently.

He was out when she returned from the States. He had begun early on a new bistro in Lexington Street and came back to a scribbled note on the kitchen counter: “Back from US. Jet-lagged. Gone back to my place to sleep. Speak to you later.” It was her usual minimalist style and left no clues. He was inclined to think it a front for some more permanent disengagement, whose terms would be confirmed later when they had found the opportunity to ‘speak'. As he walked back to Whitfield Street the skies had begun to darken. A violent summer storm seemed imminent. From the sound of traffic as he passed along the narrow corridor, he realised that the window of the tiny room Carmen used for her writing when she was staying with him (she had always insisted on keeping her flat, it seemed to him, as a safety net) was open. Lightning flashed as he stepped into the room to secure the window. The unnatural, sharp, electric brightness showed, what he would have seen in any light, that her possessions had gone. Nothing was plugged in to the sockets. Her minimal office apparatus (bear mascot, mug of pens, several box files) had been hastily scooped up. He knew that if he went into the bedroom he would find the drawers and hangers empty of the few clothes she kept there. There was a brusque completeness about her withdrawal that was also utterly characteristic: conducted at a run, without regard to how it might affect anyone else.

Carmen, he muttered to himself, I have called you generous, which, when our love was at its most extreme pitch, you were. You would surrender, and evoke, everything. I have never felt more intensely alive than during those episodes (pitifully few in retrospect) when we could, like Donne's lovers, eclipse the world. But you could also be cruel, Carmen, with a harshness that seemed to hold no mercy to anyone, least of all yourself. I think, indeed, that at those moments, you were punishing yourself. The rest of us were merely collateral victims, of little account in the tally of war. Perhaps there was no other way. Perhaps this peremptory evacuation was the kindest way to do it, as if, in the nature of the case, there could be no more tender stratagem.

Christopher walked into the bedroom, hardly bothering to confirm the evidence which he had predicted of Carmen's retreat. The thunder cracked and rain slashed against the window panes. He secured another window. As he looked out he saw people running along the pavement, newspapers held above their heads as impromptu umbrellas. A couple in summer clothes – he in a T-shirt; she in a tiny white vest and calf-length slacks – scorned to run, laughing, holding each other, their hair plastered to their skulls, their clothing tightly clinging to their bodies, enjoying the shower, ecstatic at their freedom, their indifference to what mere weather could put in their path. The more provident citizens, huddled under tiny tote umbrellas, edged along the pavement, hugging the wall. Rain drummed on the silver metal tables outside the pub, filling abandoned glasses in an instant. Puddles swelled above drains which could not take more than a fraction of the floodwater. And then, as suddenly as it came, it was over. The sky became lighter. People emerged laughing from doorways, cafés, pub entrances, spreading out their palms for confirmation that the downpour had really stopped. Barmen followed, wiping the chairs with sponges, tipping water from glasses on to the pavement, coaxing the refugee drinkers back out into the street. A girl shrieked as a passing taxi showered her with water from a broad puddle. Two youths were poking the sagging canopy in front of a restaurant, hoping to spill its contents with a terrific splash, until a waiter emerged to chase them off.

And then he saw her, working her way along the street. No umbrella, but she had clearly seen out the storm under cover somewhere along her route. Craftily, he watched her from his position at the first floor window. The sky was clearing rapidly. A crack of blue appeared and even here, in the heart of the dirty, dusty, summer city, he could smell the brief, steaming freshness that was being prepared. Carmen walked towards him, towards a confrontation that he no longer feared. He moved back from the window and sat on the bed to await the sound of her key in the lock. When she chose to ring the bell he knew that it was all over.

She allowed herself to be kissed briefly on the cheek like someone being greeted by a barely known hostess on arrival at a party. Christopher stood back to let her pass. As she sat down on the sofa he looked at her as if she were a perfect stranger and he were wholly disconnected from her.

“Chris, we need to talk.”

“I'm sure we do. How was Jimmy?”

“Chris, this isn't going to be made any easier by sarcasms. Let's try to keep it adult.”

“Adult. That's an interesting term. I must note that one for future reference. And I apologise for the sarcasm. I'm merely a manual worker, a yuppy with a power drill, as the great concert artist would put it. I haven't the time to perfect a more studied utterance.”

“Oh stop talking crap. I take it you know where I have been.”

“And with whom.”

“And with whom.”

“Well, I am waiting to hear about this ‘need', about what makes it imperative that we talk.”

“Ease up, will you, Chris. This is hard enough.”

“Oh yes, it's hard. It's very hard. You've no idea how hard it is. I don't think you've even begun to contemplate how hard it is.”

“OK. OK. I have hurt you. I have made a mistake. With Jimmy it's...”

“All over? Spare me.”

“Well it is. It's over, it's played out.”

Carmen paused. She had been wringing her hands tightly around the strap of her handbag, fighting, it seemed to him, for a way through this that did not take her usual course of a blazing row, the discharge of all batteries. That was not how she wanted it to be.

“I won't be seeing him again.”

“Third time unlucky? I suppose I should be grateful that you have seen the light at last. Should I be grateful?”

And then a new sound in her voice, never heard before, a tone that seemed to come from somewhere at the farthest edge of desperation.

“Chris, I no longer care what you or I or anyone feels. I am tired. I am exhausted by all this. You don't need to be grateful. I don't need to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness. There's nothing left in these gestures. They solve nothing. I've spoiled everything we had. I don't know why I did it. But it's done. Last night I realised suddenly, as if a light had suddenly been switched on, how much you had meant to me and the enormity of what I had done. I haven't come to ask you to take me back. I realise that I have lost that chance. That it's too late.”

“Yes, you're right about that. It's too late. Too late for both of us. Too late for any more talk.”

She loosened her hold on the strap. There was a long silence while she struggled to resume. He decided that he could offer her no help. He hardly knew what to say himself. Words were useless but they were the only building block they possessed. She looked up at him, more anxious and vulnerable than he had ever seen her.

“It is too late isn't it?”

He got up and walked across to the window. The tables outside the pub had filled up again. Some late, strong sunshine was washing the street. The usual number of people was at large. He opened the window but when he looked out he felt as though he was gazing at the street scene through a thick pane of plate glass. His feelings were numbed. He felt a dead, heavy weight inside him.

“Yes, it's too late.”

They were beyond tears. She stood up – bravely he wanted to say – as if it were time to go, as if nothing further could be said. But then she dropped down and threw her bag to one side.

“Chris, does it need to be like this? Can't we forget the mistakes we've both made.”

“You think Joanna cancels out Jimmy? That it's a simple matter of arithmetic, of balancing out the misdemeanours on both sides?”

“Of course not. I'm the main sinner in all this. Of course I am. I've never tried to pretend any different. I suppose I'm saying that it doesn't have to be so... final.”

Perhaps, he was to reflect later, that was the point at which he could have intervened. Changed our history, Carmen. Magnanimous Christopher stooping, with magnificent generosity of spirit, a Christ-like forgiveness, to take the poor sinner in his arms, to whisper the words of comfort and reassurance. To take her back. To erase all that ugly scrawl of error and bitter words and sly betrayal. I could have done it. I could have taken you back, Carmen, but I was – proud, was it? What made me stubborn? Perhaps it was simple weariness. I had had enough, Carmen. I could take no more. And this has been the consequence, to become, as I have said, your sad memorialist, nursing my regrets above this reach of the river, chasing the phantoms of new loves, calibrating at leisure the exact measure of my loss.

After this the conversation went downhill. They bitched and sniped – not as before as a sparky erotic preliminary or playful verbal diversion – but like an embittered married couple whose relationship died years before but who did not have the courage to break out of the compound of dull enmity in which they had had themselves confined. And then they ran out of steam, became subdued. Carmen got up to go and, in spite of the thickness of his anger and resentment, he could see how final this was, how absolute.

“Will you still come to the party?”

“I think not.”

“Your friends will be there. There's no need for us to cut each other dead.”

“Isn't there?”

“Didn't you say earlier that we should be adult? Isn't it a bit childish to be like this? Come to the party. Avoid me if you like but don't let this prevent you from being with other people you care about.”

“I'll think about it. But I really must go.”

Christopher held the door open with the professional disengagement of a commissionaire. Carmen passed through. He would see her only once again in his life. The sound of her feet on the stair echoed. Echoes still.

Jimmy regretted Charlottesville. He regretted persuading Carmen to join him. He told himself that he should have intuited that it would end the way it did. It was not so much that he felt remorse at the hurt done to Christopher. It was the fact that he had almost certainly damaged Carmen.

He was not accustomed to these sessions of self-flagellation. The Jesuits did not really succeed in implanting in him their long, tapering roots of Catholic guilt. He was not long enough in their hands to have remained anything other than a deep-dyed pagan hedonist. He would not say that pleasure was his goal for he did not think of life as a progression towards an end, a completion. He saw it as a journey made more interesting, rich, vitally alive by what happens along the way. Pleasure is by far the most interesting thing encountered – on that journey to nowhere in particular. Like music, it is itself. It is not any other thing. It is not justified by what it leads to – or away from. There, a nice piece of philosophy.

His readiness to accept part of the blame was rooted in his conviction that Carmen had, as a result of her involvement with him, become a casualty. He did not seduce her. She was a strong, intelligent woman, incapable of being made putty in anyone's hands. He did not think he had ever met a woman of such extraordinary resilience and self-dependence. She entered willingly (she may have initiated it; he never remembered the sequence of moves once they had been made) into their fitful attempts at an affair. She knew what she was doing, as they say in the advice columns of the newspapers. She also knew the reputation of her intermittent partner. No one was being taken advantage of in this business. Yet he could have exercised – what should he call it? – a little more vigilance. He could have seen, like an experienced nautical pilot, where the rocks ahead lay. Dazzled by her desirability and zest he let himself ignore the warning signs. Yes, he was culpable. And now she had paid a greater price than he.