Remembering Carmen (21 page)

“I don't see what's ‘tricky' about them at all. ‘Utterly predictable' might be a better way of putting it. He simply gave an obviously cohesive and fashion-driven (which is to say conformist) group exactly what it wanted. That's sales tactics not creative programming. And I don't see what is ‘sophisticated' about
Girls School
.”

Kate had named one of the most popular programmes on the networks.
Girls School
followed the lives of six young women in an expensive boarding school in Hampshire. They shared a small dormitory which had been rigged up with constantly running cameras. The six had become the most talked about young women in Britain with their names and personalities introduced into the comment pages, editorials and political analyses of the serious broadsheet newspapers as well as filling an unprecedented number of column inches each day in the tabloids. Most notorious of all was ‘Sexy Sabina' whose impromptu removal of her T-shirt in one of the early episodes had driven the popular media into a frenzy of excitement. This week speculation was running high on whether Sabina was involved in a lesbian relationship with ‘Posh Patsy', a keen netball player who had been seen in the last episode disappearing into the showers with Sabina. The latter's lewd smirk as she turned round to camera had been on the front page of most of this morning's newspapers. Apart from one or two disapproving opinion pieces by random pundits and a ratings-boosting attack on the morality of the programme makers by a Church of Scotland Minister, the broadcasts had been hugely popular. Pete was determined to defend the programme and the role of the senior executive who had commissioned it.

“Kate, I print a review of X's new volume of poems on the Saturday books page and it sells 50 more copies if it's lucky. This programme goes out and is watched by millions. You can't ignore figures like that.”

“Why can't you ignore them? You could boost ratings still further by broadcasting non-stop live coverage from a Paris brothel. Where does it end?”

Carmen decided to break into the discussion.

“Kate's right. Once you're launched on the ratings game there's an irresistible logic. Irresistibly downwards.”

“That's the typical response of the cultural élite.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“Be serious, Carmen. You people always think you know best, that you can second guess what people want.”

“Oh, I think the producers of
Girls School
are much more adept at that.”

“So what do you want? Come back, Lord Reith, all is forgiven? Let the people have what some repressed Calvinist with interesting private sexual tastes thinks is good for it?”

“Carmen! I've got it!” Kate interrupted. “
Lord Reith Uncovered
. Next season's ratings-buster.”

“Very funny. But I still think you are patronising people.”

“I wondered when that word was going to surface. The people doing the patronising are the people who think that all we want to see from our sitting room sofas is the fleeting glimpse of some teenage girl's bum. Who think that real scripted drama, challenging stuff, is too good for us.”

Kate nodded slowly and drew deeply on her cigarette. She blew out a jet of smoke which drifted into the yellow glare from one of the corner spotlights. Tim had just brought up the scoop so that the musicians could scramble into it. They rose upwards slowly, then began to play again. Kate watched with wide eyes.

“The real point is that all three of us are churning out crap and we don't want to admit it.”

“I don't know about you, Pete, but I'm glad to admit it. I've never tried to conceal my contempt for what I'm forced to do.”

“And where, precisely, does that get you?”

“Nowhere, but at least it means I don't have to drape everything I do in sanctimonious bullshit. Actually, I think TV is a lost cause. They've blown it. And I worry that publishing will follow.”

“On that note, I think I'll revisit the bar.”

Watching Pete go, Kate sighed again and drew once more on her cigarette. Fixing her gaze briefly on a couple who were wrapped around each other in the blue light of the diagonally opposite spotlight, she turned inquisitively towards Carmen.

“I was surprised to see you here, Car.”

“In some ways I am just as surprised to see myself here.”

“Just wanted to have a last look around?”

“Maybe. If I've got to start again I might as well keep my social muscles in good shape.”

“Musn't get flabby. Have you spotted anyone interesting?”

“Not in that sense. I don't think that's on the agenda tonight. What about yourself?”

“Oh, always ready to take an opportunity should it present itself. Ah, isn't that Jimmy arriving?”

“What?”

Carmen looked around in time to catch sight of Jimmy stepping off the angled stairs on to the roof, like someone disembarking on a helipad. He always cut a dash. He knew how to arrive. Already people were moving towards him, disposing themselves around him, responding to his presence, taking up positions. Perhaps this was what differentiated them. Jimmy was a performer, with a performer's sense of how he looked, how the audience could be played, what moves at this time and in this place would work and which would be best held over for another occasion. The space was too small, the guests too carefully picked for anyone to lose themselves here. It was only a matter of time before Jimmy made his way to her. She knew he would be unruffled, calm and self-possessed, cool as a cucumber. Whether she could match his cool was quite another question. And then she felt a light touch on her shoulder.

Christopher handed her a plate of small spinach pies from which he had already helped himself.

“I'm glad you came, Car.”

“I nearly didn't.”

“I would have understood.”

“Would you? I seem to have lost my capacity to do that, to understand people. Or perhaps it's a loss of faith. Faith in anyone's capacity to understand.”

“Gloomy reflections. We're all meant to be partying.”

“True. You've made it look very dramatic.”

“Is it OK? Not too naff?”

“I wondered about the guys in the scoop but then I decided it was a stroke of genius.”

“There wouldn't have been much room if they had set up on the roof itself.”

He edged towards the tables and put down the plate then came back to her. She felt that he wanted to say something. She too wanted to say something but she had no idea what words would have come out if she had been able to do any more than make small talk about the quality of the food, the set-up. He was soon drawn away from her by the arrival of some new guests. She was shocked at how different he seemed to her already. During their brief conversation she felt she had been talking with complete detachment to someone who was indistinguishable from any of the other guests. As she watched him from a distance he seemed a little isolated in his pool of light. More alone than she had ever seen him. She wondered, idly, if any of these lively, laughing women had their eyes set on him. For his part, he seemed indifferent to that possibility.

Thinking she had better circulate, Carmen moved forwards, in the direction of the top of the stairs. Jimmy had passed across to the opposite corner of the roof. Just then Carl and Joanna arrived, looking a little uncertain, she clinging to him as if for security in an unsettling place. They were relieved to see her, for they would not have known many faces in this crowd. Carl kissed Carmen very formally on the cheek and Joanna suddenly squeezed her hand. There was something refreshingly innocent and unworldly about the two of them, set down in this group of far too clever, cynical, calculating people – of whom, naturally, she was a representative example. They talked about very little. She got them a drink and handed each a plate which they proceeded to fill assiduously, almost certainly grateful to have found something to do. Carmen guessed they would not stay long.

Stepping now from the stairs into the blue light was a new performer, gratefully acknowledging the silent applause of thrown glances. She moved towards Carmen with her arms extended. The latter greeted her with equal extravagance, hamming it up.

“Alice! I'd no idea you were coming.”

“Neither had I, darling. Something came up and I flew in this morning. Isn't this a gas? This is the work of... Christopher?”

Carmen understood in an instant the meaning of Alice's momentary hesitation. She was letting her know, in that meaningful pause while she played with the idea of introducing a qualifier, a tag, that she knew that Christopher needed a new designation. She wanted to whisper with an answering facetious laugh: ‘My ex.' But the term was so excruciating she could never have used it, particuarly in the presence of Alice, whose gift was to render everyone around her a fraction more conscious of the need to be a little less tolerant of the usual robust conversational crudities. But how did she know? Carmen guessed that Christopher had spoken to her earlier in the day when she phoned before leaving Paris or later from the airport. He would have been brief and tactful, economically informative. This set her thinking. How many other people here knew? How many were following this little amatory drama? Had she become a spectacle? A source of amusement?

Alice draped Carmen in her benevolence. She was sheathed from top to toe in a silver trouser-suit – no other descriptor will serve, but it does not begin to do justice to what she wore. This suit, because it was being worn by Alice, flirted, on the right side of danger, with the tinsel flashiness of Versace. To say that Alice was striking, that she turned heads, is equivalent to saying that the raising of a theatre curtain provokes a mood of anticipation, that water flows inexorably downhill. One found oneself, in Alice's presence, searching for the human flaw that would offset the perfection of her body, her skin, her hair, her eyes, her poise, her dress. She was too perfect to the inspecting eye. One wanted the reassurance that she was also human, which is to say imperfect. Perhaps it lay in her very consciousness of her beauty. This could have issued in a monstrous vanity, a coquettish playing with all those eyes on her. Instead, a glamour of intelligent irony shimmered over the surface of her performance (Alice was never off stage). In conversation with her, one sensed that she knew what was the real basis of her allure, its fragility, its subservience to the inevitable work of time. I am lucky, her manner said, and I am going to enjoy this while I can but it will end and I shall be ready for that moment also. I shall not be preparing a disappointment. She inhabited this beautiful casing with vigour and panache but she was undeceived. This gave a pleasant lightness to her manner. It was her special charm. And everyone was charmed by Alice. One should also mention
en passant
that she had a will of tensile steel.

“Carmen, I spoke, in the briefest terms, to Christopher this morning – about how things stand between you. I think he may have been surprised to see you here.”

“Perhaps I should have stayed away. One never knows what is the right thing to do.”

“You did the right thing. There's no point in going off in a sulk. These are your friends; you are entitled to be with them. You have lost a lover not the rest of your life. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I am trying to forget. It was mostly my fault.”

“Nonsense. It's never one partner's fault. I'm not saying the responsibility is always evenly matched – it almost never is, in fact. But do yourself a favour and dump a little bit on the other guy. That's what they're there for.”

“I'll try and take the advice. How are your memoirs going?”

“God, you make me sound like a retired colonel reliving his campaigns. Actually, it's the reason I'm here. To talk money. It's what it all boils down to in the end.”

“I presume there'll be plenty of it.”

“I guess so. When I told them about the diaries I had kept for the past twenty years I could see a few noughts being added. I didn't think too much about it at the time – and God knows how I found the time to keep them, given the whirl in which I lived – but I now realise they are pure dynamite. I met a lot of people, you see, in London, Paris, New York, Milan and so forth. And they were the sort who yield up the right material. Not just people in the trade but all the hangers-on. Politicians, film-stars, writers, acceptable crooks. The catwalk is like one of those strips hung up to catch flies. They can't keep away.”

“Alice, the sales pitch has worked. I'll offer you a six figure advance.”

She waved the idea away with a short laugh. Her life had been spent swimming gracefully in a tank of wealth and universal admiration. She hardly needed any more. World-weariness she didn't do but she was one of the less deceived, the people who know what isn't good for them but who have no intention of acting on the knowledge.

And then he arrived. His sharp white suit as he cut through the crowd made Carmen think, absurdly no doubt, of a schooner's hull slicing the waves. He stood between them, taking Alice's exquisite hand like a restorer of fragile ceramics who knows exactly where not to apply dangerous pressure. She allowed her hand to be kissed and withdrew it slowly. With the same suavity he nodded at Carmen, wisely avoiding any physical contact. She liked to think that she had a certain intuition about these things and she was convinced that they had not been – let us say, recently – lovers. So Alice was not to be the embarassment. That was left to Carmen. For his part, Jimmy was not someone to be embarassed or awkward in any situation. His preferred style was the easy and unfussed and he handled the situation with his customary expertise. None of this stopped her watching how he interacted with Alice. She noted the way in which – through a code of ironic smiles, inhaled breath, sweeping panoptic glances, movements of the lips – they spoke to each other without words. This was the freemasonry of the socially assured, those who have never dwelt at lower, more precarious, altitudes, and, far from sensing herself excluded, Carmen admired its subtle grace – and knew (in Alice's case at least) that it was a delicious hokum, the grocer's daughter from Basildon mimicking, improving upon, the
hauteur
, the finesse, of a European duchess. Their tacit conclusion was that this was not quite their natural milieu, though each of them knew about three or four people. Carmen wanted to leave them to each other, to slip quietly away, but felt trapped, her back against the ultramarine panel, her way forward blocked by the way the two of them had chosen to position themselves.