Remembering Carmen E-Book

Nicholas Murray

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 278

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Set in London, Nice, The Greek Isles and Tuscany, this is a beautifully crafted and utterly convincing portrait of infidelity and its repercussions. Characters live in the worlds of classical music, journalism, fashion-modelling and architecture in search of contentment in an increasingly complex yet superficial world. This is a

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

one

two

three

four

Copyright

Remembering

C A R M E N

~ Nicholas Murray ~

~ one ~

Deftly, like an actress who has practised her moves in a clattering morning rehearsal room, the latest one slips from his bed, trailing her nakedness in her wake.

Seconds later, he hears the rush of water from the shower, imagines her in the steam, foresees the inexorable steps in the grooming sequence, traces in anticipation the rapid smile – perhaps even the concession of a rapid kiss – and then the swift, accurately paced departure. The door’s click. The footfall on the stair. The consequent silence.

In this way he has passed the weeks, the months, since Carmen.

It may be that love comes once and once only, preceded by rehearsal, followed by regret. How snugly, thinks Christopher, I fit into this oh-too-neat paradigm. The years before Carmen were unsettled and unsatisfactory. Since her departure, since the onset of her absence, he has felt himself to be living in the aftermath of his own life, an odd survivor in the interstices of old routine. She has been the ghost flitting unnoticed in the background of these casual, unconsidered intimacies. She has left her legacy which he measures out like an old skinflint, hoping that the diminished remnant will outlast him as a symbolic residue – nugatory, almost weightless – to be turned over admiringly when he is gone.

Carmen, he says, this is what you have done to me: made me your reluctant memorialist. What happened to our reckless disregard for time and place? At what point did we abandon our exalted indifference?

~

A clear recollection: the terrace of a white hotel facing the sea. He cannot escape the compulsion to begin at the beginning. But is this the beginning? They quarrelled, even about this.

They sit (in Christopher’s disputed version) in separate chairs, facing a low wall in whose cavity is planted an aromatic hedge. On the table in front of his cane seat (upholstered with loose calico cushions) a basket rests on the white linen cloth. Wrapped in a soft napkin are a warm bread roll, a flaky croissant. He mixes a cup of strong coffee with boiled milk from a plump little jug. He hacks unsuccessfully at one of the rectangular lozenges of butter which slides about in a flat dish, its hardness assured by two tiny cubes of ice. He knows now that she will have been waiting, calmly, for the sun to soften her ration. She will have been less inept than he at spooning apricot preserve on to the exposed fibre of a torn croissant. The crisp linen will not have been soiled with a variety of clumsy stains.

It is important to establish which of them spoke first. “Typical male,” was her response to his proposal – in the course of their later dissection of this contested scene – that he had been the first to break the morning silence with some vacuous pleasantry. Their tables are identical. Christopher has brought only a key attached to a heavy brass ball. Carmen is unfolding the new day’sLe Monde. Perhaps he says something like this (in English, which from an overheard prior interchange with the waiter, he has established to be her native language):

“Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of the rain.”

Christopher gestures to the glorious brightness of the morning sun, which glows with promise in a rinsed, blue sky. He calls on it with the uncertain aplomb of a barrister summoning a witness in whom he has no confidence. Carmen is wearing dark sunglasses which she chooses not to remove. She turns in his direction, saying nothing at first. It is as if she is trying to establish whether such a banal reflection merits the effort of a reply. Then she removes her glasses, placing them in the hollow of the newspaper in her lap. Christopher thinks that much of their subsequent career together is predicated in that brief exchange.

“That’s certainly how it looks.”

Perhaps, even then, he had misgivings, sensing in her tone a sort of sly mockery, an exquisitely refined contempt. But these falterings do not last. He looks at her carefully, struck by the way in which she holds herself, proudly, confident of her ungainsayable beauty, but without arrogance. She balances the consciousness that she has the power to turn heads with an easy carelessness. That is what he comes to love in her: her gift of prodigality. She has more than this to spare. She lacks his desperate habit of trying always to conjure the most from the least. His ambition. Her skin is pale, in contrast to the tanned skin all around her, and her short black hair (which reminds him of an old-fashioned photograph of Mary Quant) is neatly sculpted. She wears a simple but almost certainly expensive white dress which exposes her slender arms. Everything about her suggests immaculate grooming and perfect self-control. By contrast, he feels himself to be a dishevelled Bohemian, an English lout on the Mediterranean coast. She is pleased, in retrospect, when he uses this formulation in conversation with her.

Later, he produces a photograph. Intended to clinch the matter (the prosecuting barrister’s humour restored) the strategy backfires. Christopher has been the photographer, and therefore he is not present in the scene. But the picture is of her and the snap is in his possession. No further questions. But there turn out to be further questions from Carmen. She fires them off, languidly (they are to do with certain unrecognised details on the terrace, a preposterous and intrusive terracotta pot with swathes of embossed vineleaves, certain minor implausibilities in themise en scène) but when he tries to respond she waves a hand. She is bored. It is easier to agree with him. Perhaps then he will go away.

He now thinks: I stayed, Carmen. I stayed. It was you who would leave, in your own good time.

Christopher wonders if his rival was there all the time, like the swirl of ectoplasm in a sepia photograph of an Edwardian seance, flourished in evidence of the existence of the paranormal. A blur of movement. A presence. Not much of a conversationalist, the ineffable Jimmy, his affable monica suggestive of camaraderie, ribbed white sailor’s jerseys in the fug of the saloon bar, the clink and slam of dimpled pint pots. The ear-splitting bellow of the male guffaw. Christopher is of the opinion now that she was always disposed to these manly men. She looked on them with contempt but they seemed to satisfy some need in her. A need to mock. She loved to watch their antics. Their vanity played straight into her hands.

Christopher thinks: I am portraying a calculating bitch, a smirking ice-maiden with savage, glittering eyes of cold sapphire, but you were none of these, my love. My Absence. You had everything that I had ever wanted and more. When you opened out there was nothing you could not give. Your generosity had the power to terrify me. With what could I match it? In what coin could I ever repay you? But you did not reduce me. You never did that. I was strong in your strength. We were a partnership, you and I. We were an ‘item’&sot; – the word we whooped to in a hotel bar in Lincolnshire, leaving its perpetrator (a lank local estate agent) tapping his car-keys on the counter as if they held the open sesame to this cave of laughter from which he was barred.

Could that figure in the photograph have been Jimmy, in disguise? Wrapped in the white togs of an expensive waiter, smarmy and belated, capturing crumbs with a folded napkin, whisking off the detritus ofpetit déjeuner, setting up the goods for the next round of sluggards who had emerged blinking on to the terrace like nocturnal animals rudely disturbed? Unlikely. He was no prankster. He moved lumberingly, like an elephant approaching its stack of logs in a forest clearing, confident that his usual assets – the set of attributes known to teen magazine editors as ‘hunk’, the sleepy, come-sleep-with-me blue eyes, the blond mop, the delicious languor that waits for insect food to drop unasked into its brimming pool – would see him through. They had always done so in the past.

Christopher thinks now that Jimmy was pre-ordained. Perhaps he had been standing there, just beyond the white margin of the photographic print, all the time. They had simply not noticed. It was his job to call time, to step out of the shadows and say enough is enough. You have had your time in the sun. All debts must be paid. The party is over.

But Christopher reflects: it is not over, Carmen. I am not over you.

~

Carmen considers that her father is to blame. He was a skilled electrician with a taste for collecting playing cards and for light opera. He built himself a plywood bunker along one wall of the living room in which were stacked the vinyl discs of his collection. As children, Carmen and her siblings ran their cars along, or (she was a conventional girl) brought their dolls to interrogate, the white painted plinth on which this intimidating rack of potential sound was raised. The rippled moulding, thickly coated with white gloss paint, sank into the plum-coloured carpet like an abandoned monument sunk in the circumambient sand. Sometimes, when she returned with her mother from exhausting Saturday afternoon assaults on the city department stores, they would open the front door to a wall of sound – a high soprano warbling out her synthetic passion – at a time when other men would be tense before the football game, a light alloy cylinder of weak lager crunched in their excited fist. This spectacle drove her – later – towards the most rebarbative versions of the twentieth century avant-garde string quartet.

And so it was, that the pink, dribbling thing was held up, stowed away to await the arrival of its father (who was lighting a vast industrial chicken shed in East Lancashire), at which moment it was produced by the plump nuns, swathed in folds of white linen. “Carmen!” he called down the echoing corridors of the nursing home. And that was that. That was her christening. Carmen’s mother, as in all things, acquiesced.

Later, she was passed into the care of another branch of the peak-bonneted sisterhood who taught her to trill, once a year: “A happy, holy, feast-day, Reverend Mother.” Then she left, gladly, their pious groves, read philosophy, fell in with bad company, which was good for her, went off the rails (briefly) and was rescued by a man who was far too old but whose money she took a relish in spending, sometimes with his consent. Foolishly allowing the word “marriage” to slip from the corner of his mouth during one particularly vivid drinking-session, he lost her for good. She came to London where she prospered as a journalist in the young women’s magazine sector. She had a knack for delivering what the loose-spendingmidinettewanted to read, two weeks after she should have realised that she did not. When a mild feminism was permissible, she did mild feminism. When feminism went out, at the turn of the century, it went out of her copy. She was quick, adaptable, and delivered the goods. It didn’t matter what the goods were as long as they were the goods and were wanted at the time of writing. Carmen was less successful – speaking now of her private life – in those areas about which the magazine – and its star contributor – regularly gave out advice, stricture, encouragement, viz. Relationships. Indeed she was lousy. So inept that one morning she clicked on a cheap-airline website and booked herself a week (longer vacations by this time of the new, enlightened century were frowned upon) to Quelquepart-sur-Mer. On her own. One morning at breakfast some idiot started talking to her about the weather.

~

They had nothing in common. Christopher came to think that this was the secret of their eventual success. Had they been perfectly compatible they should soon have grown bored. Instead they had leisure to discover their dissonances, their gaps, the rich raw material of their quarrels. After that meeting on the terrace (it was his last morning, her first) they both assumed that they would never see each other again. But he met her, four weeks later, in the restaurant queue at the National Film Theatre. She was holding up her tray to receive a plate of mottled quiche and a tumbler of chilled carrot juice. He was bidding for the steak-and-kidney pie. She looked down at his tray with a glance of exhausted compassion. They both spoke at once, which allowed them to laugh, releasing the pressure which had built up unbearably. They shared a table where Christopher did most of the talking. Carmen would spear another fragment of that sickly quiche, hold it on the tip of her cream-coloured plastic fork, as if daring it to confront those perfect white teeth, then look at him with the languid, resentful detachment of someone who now considers it a mistake to have agreed to visit the zoo. He watched her gestures intently while he babbled. Eventually, she agreed to speak, to give the most economical account possible of her subsequent stay at the Hotel Magnifique. She was tactful enough to avoid all allusion to handsome Jimmy. In truth, he never established – after much forensic activity – whether he had been anything more than a disconnected presence in her life in the course of that week.

It turned out that they had chosen the same film –Jules et Jimin 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 (thepain au chocolatnow 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 herflâneur’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 successfulmodus 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 aGramophoneaward 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 amaître 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.

Carmen responded testily to Christopher’s inquries. He could see that she detected the false note, his effort to appear detached, amused. She knew what he was thinking. What he was fearing. The ground was being cleared for a real humdinger but it was too early in the evening to launch the first strike. They attacked instead a small dish of varied dips – crushed walnut, taramasalata, something unidentified which, had he been able to stomach the preposterous prose of restaurant menus, Christopher could have had named. It was perhaps half an hour later – when he was quietly and intently at work on a challenging preparation of lamb – that Jimmy softly reappeared. He was off, it seemed, not staying for the full meal. His manner suggested more pressing business elsewhere. He had done what needed to be done. He dropped on to the tablecloth a flyer for a concert at the Purcell Room: John Cage’s sonatas for prepared piano. They compliantly murmured that they would be there.

Over coffee, the first missile was launched.

“So, tell me more about the divine Jimmy.”

“What is there to tell?”

“He seemed very pleased to see you.”

Carmen looked at Christopher with that magnificent plaiting of pity and contempt that was her invariable starter.

“He’s a professional charmer. He’s pleased to see everyone.”

“They seem to reciprocate. They don’t seem able to resist him.”

“Does that make you jealous?”

“What do you mean?”

“Forgive me, but I can’t help sensing a little male rivalry here.”

“What? The carpenter and the virtuoso? In which arena, tell me, would we be slugging that one out?”

“Don’t be obtuse. You know exactly what I mean.”

He knew exactly what she meant.

“No I don’t. Why should I be jealous of that mountain of blue-eyed smarm?”

Carmen laughed in triumph. She had no further need of riposte.

“Are you going to his concert?”

“We could, I suppose, unless you have got one of your rush jobs on.”

He didn’t like her tone. It was uncertain, trying a little too hard for insouciance. It was patently obvious that she wanted to clock Jimmy again: the triumphant entrance through the narrow door at the rear of the stage (the Purcell, with its subtle intimacy, perfectly adjusted to Jimmy’s special modes of self-display); the enveloping smile thrown out like a gossamer veil over the heads of the audience; the long, magnificent silent foreplay; the hand dragged back through the thick disordered thatch; then the first strike of the keys.

Of course he was fucking jealous.

One always wants to be above this, Christopher reflected. One wants to avoid pettiness. Nothing is more miserable than the accumulation of small resentments, suspicions, deliberate misprisions, with which lovers torment themselves when the going is unsteady. One wants to be magnanimous and at ease. Brimming over.

“So he met you in France?”

“Sure. Though I’m amazed he remembered me.”

I shouldn’t be scrutinising her, he thought, looking for tell-tale signs, shaky formulations, over-eager denials, making light of it.

“Would that be after I left?”

“Oh, please!”

“Sorry, but it’s merely a casual inquiry. I hardly knew you at that time if you recall.”

“You mean you hadn’t yet established your rights of ownership.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Look, Chris, I don’t need this, right? You know perfectly well I can’t stand this creepy possessiveness. I am a free agent and I expect you to be. I thought we weren’t into all that sort of thing.”

“I’m not saying we are.”

“Well what the fuck are you saying, then?”

“Only that Jimmy seemed very familiar.”

“But can’t you see that he is like that with everyone, with all women. It’s his way of doing things.”

“You don’t seem to object.”

“Why should I object? It’s up to him how he behaves. What do you want me to say? He’s a sexist creep? OK, he’s a sexist creep. Satisfied?”

“Fine.”