Free Remembering Carmen by Nicholas Murray Page A

and walk out into the streets. There was always someone about, noise and drunken laughter, police sirens, smashing bottles. In Tottenham Court Road groups of whooping young girls, half-naked whatever the weather, high on alcohol and the lesser designer drugs and loud music and laughter, made their disorderly way home from clubs after the Tube had closed its gates. Bodies re-arranged themselves under blankets in doorways. Rubbish piled up outside the bars and restaurants. If Christopher were late enough he would see the bundles of newspapers being thrown out of vans outside newsagents’ shops, hear the acceleration of traffic that had been subdued for only a couple of hours, sense the new day starting, its arrow pulled back against the string.
    It was the not knowing that was the source of pain. Christopher and Carmen had declared often enough their mutual faith in freedom, in the refusal of petty restrictions. They claimed not to want to know about each other’s activities, where these were of no necessary concern. They dreaded the life of the married couple (dread intensified by total ignorance) whom they supposed to be condemned to perpetual surveillance of each other’s lives, rowing about the slightest tilt sideways of their nuptial bark, unable to act freely as individuals, always having to flaunt in the world’s face the routines of the practised double act, always having to be seen to manage successfully the art of being The Couple.
    We were not like that, Carmen, he whispers, but we foundered also. We had not discovered the secret of loving in perpetuity. You mocked me for even wanting such a thing. Perhaps you were right. You were the free spirit. Your giving was part of this. Knowing that the moment does not last, you threw yourself into transforming it, to exalting it, to making it sufficient of itself. And I shared in those episodes. I knew them. Is that not enough?

    ~

    After Nice, after the self-dramatising coldness which they chose briefly as their substitute for the marital tiff, after the fortunate episode of Greece, they eventually found their balance again. The old passion resumed. Until the arrival of Carl. And through Carl, Joanna.
    This time Christopher was responsible. Carl was an architect in charge of the Souper Kitchen chain’s expansion programme. His job was to ensure that each new shop fitted exactly the specifications laid down in protocols drawn up in the Chicago head office of Souper Kitchen. Colour schemes, counter design, ratios of tables and chairs to floor space, size of neon signs, disposition of soup-urns, all had to be incorporated with exactitude into each new outlet. Chicago was adamant. There must be no deviation from the house-style. Carl threw himself into this task with the zeal of an officer of the Inquisition searching out every shade and nuance of individual heresy. His was the sort of mind that could not bear approximation, the fair-enough-that’ll-do that is the working philosophy of the building trade. Christopher liked to think of him self as a perfectionist of sorts. He took pleasure and satisfaction in the skill with which he surmounted the usual obstacles: residual problems of space and size, wall angle, window position. But he was working always against the clock. And each client was different. Carl’s client, by contrast, was always the same and the specification allowed for no individuation. Christopher would have found this frustrating but Carl approached his constraints with a sort of wild-eyed passion, derived extraordinary pleasure from them. It was exactly the impossibility of half-measures, the prohibition on almost getting it right, which animated him. Where Christopher might have quite enjoyed the inventive challenge of working around an immovable pipe, or an old fireplace which it had been decided to retain as an original feature, Carl would have taken this as a taunt, an affront. With a blaze of anger he would attack the