Free Remembering Carmen by Nicholas Murray

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 This manifestation of solidarity with superseded writing materials quickly fizzled out – though not before an abrasive, counter-revolutionary younger novelist had asked reporters in the street outside whether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.
    What was she doing in Nice? Christopher tried to believe the offered version, that she was with an ‘old friend’. Perhaps if he had listened a little more carefully to the gossip he would have heard of Jimmy’s connection, that apartment which he rented out. But that would have been merely to bring nearer by a few weeks or months a reckoning that was inevitable. Now, of course, he had the full story but then he suffered in confusion and not knowing. It’s hard not to fall in with the moralists, he reflected, and see this as the mandatory payback, the redemption of the mortgage deed, the punishment for pleasure.
    During that first period apart – a week then seemed longer than seven days in duration – he slept badly. He would wake in the small hours and sometimes dress