Remembering Carmen by Nicholas Murray Read Free Book Online Page A

interest’ magazines – at the bottom end of that particular market. Now, Carmen was keen to use his services, for the good reason that he was very cheap. Her fitful ambition was to break out of the trivia of young women’s journalism (though Christopher always admired her skill in picking up the latest trends, mastering instantly the appropriate language) and launch herself as a serious broadsheet writer, profiling the better class of celebrity.
    The problem she and her editors faced was that of a diminishing number of potential subjects. All the big game had been captured. In addition, the pool of celebrity was being re-stocked with inferior fish. The link between fame and talent having been more or less severed, a subject could be invented overnight, thus staving off shortages. But there was sometimes a problem, even with the more optimistic features editors, in convincing readers that they had heard of the celebrity being wheeled out into position. In short, there was no shortage of minnows but where were the leaping salmon, the savage-toothed pike? One solution to the problem was the sub-genre of rediscovered celebrity. Ancient relics of Bloomsbury who had an anecdote or two to tell about Dorothy Brett or Maynard Keynes or Virginia Woolf (involving with luck a sexual misdemeanour or a scabrous mot ) were particularly well-received. It gave the reader a pleasant frisson to think of how brittle was the platform on which fame rested. Set against today’s ubiquitous trollop was the wizened oldster who had slept with HG Wells and now lived obscurely in Somerset in a cottage thick with books and dusty oils by forgotten Edwardians who were once the outriders of the avant-garde. The appeal was that of ancient manners, patrician hauteur, and old venom recapitulated in perfect sentences. A feminist critic who had been a university contemporary of Carmen’s tipped her off about Lavinia Watersmith, whose solitary novel, Absent From Felicity (1931) was about to be re-issued by a new post-feminist imprint.
    â€œYes, but where is Great Malvern?” Christopher asked Carmen in a tone which nonetheless implied that his consent was taken for granted. He told her that he had a new job starting in three days’ time so they had better move quickly.
    Carmen, a city girl to the core of her being, was unable to answer his question without recourse to a large, flapping road atlas. Since Miss Watersmith’s diary was not, these days, crammed as tight as a city banker’s with important assignations, she was able to accommodate them the following day. They were at Paddington station next morning at 8.30 a.m. Christopher was warned to hold his tongue, avoid calling her “Mizz”, and be on the look-out for good framing shots. There was at least one Carrington painting in the house and, it was rumoured, a rare portrait of Lytton Strachey by a talent so obscure that neither of them could hold the name in their minds longer than the time taken to be told it over the phone by Carmen’s academic buddy.
    Two hours after leaving Paddington, the train pulled in to a delightful station, rather like those one had as a child in a railway set. Yellow stone, cast iron pillars wrapped around by fruiting vines in coloured tin, a few bewildered Japanese tourists, and a mad Worcestershire aboriginal in a white open-necked shirt mouthing imprecations at anyone who would listen, all greeted them as they disembarked. As if to suggest that this was quite far enough for any civilised person to venture, the train immediately prepared to reverse for the return journey to London. There were no taxis in the designated rank so they set off on foot through leafy streets flanked by large, solid houses. A pall of suffocating gentility hung over the town, whose inhabitants seemed universally ancient and well-to-do.
    â€œWe are in the heart of middle class, middle England, my sweet,” Christopher informed Carmen in a tone of thin