Remembering Carmen by Nicholas Murray Page B

to be pollution. There was a smell of traffic fumes in the air but also, at times, a pleasant languour, tables in the sun, glasses of chilled wine, a sense of some recovered ease, the memory of past summers, lost summers, no doubt imaginary summers, when one could allow oneself a little respite from the demands of the clock and the diary, the peremptory present. Perhaps it was this that lowered his guard, he reflects, that allowed him to forget Carmen for a moment. A moment that proved fateful.
    Perhaps she might not have gone back again to Jimmy – or with such consequences – had he been more attentive, had he not wandered during those few weeks in the city sun. He wants, now, to seek a reason, to make it logical, to suppress the idea that what happened was without reason or necessity or pattern. He wants an explanation but he has none.

Jimmy interrogates himself: did I feel guilty about my role in wrecking the relationship of these two people? Should the hateful Jimmy dress himself in penitential costume and beg forgiveness? But whose forgiveness, and for what misdemeanour precisely? I was hardly, in this instance, an odious seducer, spotting his opportunity like a soaring hawk who plummets to earth to clamp his talons on the soft neck of a helpless prey. Carmen came to me freely. No, no, you will not hear me say “threw herself at me” – that is certainly the language of the professional predator.
    Jimmy struggles to recollect the beginning of his amatory narrative. It begins, he considers, in a series of casual encounters. A small concert at the Wigmore one bright autumn Sunday lunchtime. A supper party in Holland Park thrown by some theatrical people, which turned out to have the flavour of a business meeting, a public relations initiative. A private view. The opening of a ghastly new Mediterranean restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Christopher, whom he always referred to with unfeeling sarcasm as The Gentleman Builder, may, he reflected, have had a hand in the design of that place.
    Perhaps it was the memory of the sort of restaurant preferred by his father, who would ritually take him out for Sunday lunch on the first day of the school holidays to some old-fashioned place characterised by gilt mirrors, heavy silver tableware, antique yet courteous waiters (Jimmy had never understood the new fashion for rudeness) and understated menus, that had prevented his delighting in these instantly-refitted, over-designed, noisy bistros. No matter which European capital they were settled in at the time, his father would find his way to these older places. There was one in Rome with a mosaic floor in the entrance lobby representing a school of dolphin which he could see now was probably a copy of some Roman original and therefore culpable of its own kind of vulgarity, but he was always struck by the great calm of these establishments. Perhaps that was their function: to celebrate a world of settled assurance where the rich and cultivated could move in the knowledge that this was an experience to which they were both accustomed and entitled. He could quite see how, early in the course of a people’s revolution, such places would be singled out for storming.
    Jimmy was introduced to the concept of guilt by his Jesuit teachers (the family arrived in Rome just at the point when he was ready for secondary education and his father, forgetting the ancient faith of his family, chose the Academia San Vicenzo on grounds which Jimmy suspected were purely aesthetic: the school was located in a delightful ochre building next to a church whose cloisters surrounded a beautifully tended garden). It is probably inadvisable to expose small boys to the notion of guilt. They will immediately proceed to take it too much to heart. Nor is it an especially useful mental condition. For not merely does it have little or no effect in halting any misdemeanour, it both saddles those who were prepared to do wrong anyway with