Remembering Carmen by Nicholas Murray

which there was no charge to the customer, had a weak relationship to the overall strategy. Hoping that the customer would purchase more expensive bottled mineral waters or juices, the Water Bar needed to be placed at the end of any counter-sequence. It was the place to which one went with a loaded tray when all the transactions were done. It was specified that it should go at the end of the line of arrayed goods. Christopher pointed out to Carl that the narrow shop was also quite short in length compared to many Souper Kitchens. The Water Bar might just fit according to specification but it would be tight. What if – he suggested – it were angled (admittedly a breach of the design principle of an unbroken straight line of temptation) so that it could be made to rest on a platform not unlike his bench-seat which would disguise the marble plinth.
    Carl looked at him wordlessly, like someone surfacing from the deep, turbulent water of a dream. He stared at Christopher intently as if he were trying to gauge his motive. Was he a tempter, a sly Siren voice drawing him towards a perilous reef? Then he turned his head to look at the lump of marble embedded in the base of the wall. He looked down at the plans. There was a further period of silence. Christopher waited for him to make the next move in his own time. The alternating glances quickened. He shook the plans excitedly. He sighed deeply – this was the moment when he yielded to necessity, when he allowed that, at this time and in this place, there could not be realised an absolute perfection – and, with a noise like a swallowed grunt, he tore into his labourers, shouting and gesticulating, egging them on as if they, not he, had been the instrument of this agonising delay. They were pleased enough to get on with something, never having understood his peculiar intransigence in the first place, and they went to it with a will.
    Later, when the fit was done, Carl came round to offer Christopher his thanks. He had his hard-hat in his hands and looked exhausted like an epic hero after battle. He sat on a crate in the middle of his new friend’s restaurant floor, picking small wood-shavings from his ragged and holed jersey, taking occasional draughts from a bottle of water, and watching with approval the lime green panelling being hammered into position around the walls. He said that he did not care for Thai food but he knew a small restaurant nearby in Frith Street where he had proposed to take his wife (by way of compensation for a spate of late nights that had been needed to claw back the lost time occasioned by the difficulties in Beak Street). He asked if Christopher would like to join them. Something in the way he spoke of his wife and of the reasons for this outing alerted Christopher to a possible source of tension in the relationship. Having had his own difficulties with Carmen, he was reluctant to become involved just now as a spectator of marital dysfunction. He had always resented couples who seemed willing to inflict their private antagonisms on others, to rub their noses in it. (He and Carmen tried as far as they could to conduct their rows if not in private then away from the company of their friends.) But he found that he liked Carl. Perhaps Christopher thought that he represented the better side of him, the perfectionist he might have been had he cut fewer corners, accepted fewer Friday night jobs, agreed to fewer impossible deadlines. Christopher was still proud of his work but he knew that the fierce desire of Carl to get it absolutely right was now beyond him. He had stood at that turning, paused regretfully, then chosen the other fork in the road.
    As it turned out his apprehensions had been wrong. Carl’s wife, Joanna, was relaxed and warm. There was no bickering or shrillness or tight-lipped backchat between them – though Christopher sensed a certain scrupulously courteous indifference towards her on Carl’s part. Joanna was,