Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ELEVEN

  ‘I Wonder if we’re really the good guys?’ Harry writes.

  He is sitting by the window in a café that called itself The Truly Delicious Coffee Company. It’s about fifteen minutes’ walk from his flat in what Harry describes as ‘one of the charmingly gentrified toytowns of North London’. He seems to have quietly abandoned the painting idea, but he’s taking on very little in the way of new architectural work. Having come in here to reply to emails on his laptop, he’s ended up writing in his diary, which he now spends so much time on that it’s almost become the focus of his life. He likes sitting in cafés to do it. He likes the hum of other people round him.

  ‘I mean, pretty well everyone thinks they’re the good guys. And everyone has their own particular shtick to support them in this belief. Millionaires say they’re good because they’re creating wealth, the landed gentry claimed to be good because they were the backbone of the country. For Christ’s sake, even slave-owners had stories to explain why what they did was good and necessary and for the benefit of everyone.

  ‘And let’s face it, when it comes to our lot, we’re the story-telling tribe. We’ve got the novelists, we’ve got the film-makers and the copywriters, we’ve got the historians and the cultural theorists and the political scientists. All those novels and plays that valorize the experience of people like us: our sensitivity, our refinement, our emotional intelligence . . . All those movies where the protagonists live in nice book-lined Victorian houses . . . When it comes to telling stories about ourselves, we’ve got more resources than all the other tribes put together. The only trouble is that most of those resources are directed towards—’

  ‘Hello, Harry! I thought it was you!’

  He looked up. He knew straight away that he recognized the rather elegant woman standing there, but he had no idea where he might have met her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I . . . ’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t worry! We’ve only met once and it was nowhere near here. It was out on the marsh near Blakeney.’

  ‘Letty! Of course. Lovely to see you! I’m so sorry. I knew you were familiar but . . . ’

  The last and only time he’d met her, she’d had on an anorak and a woolly hat. Now she was wearing a very chic blue coat, make-up, a smart short hairdo.

  ‘No need to apologize. Different context. I saw you in here about twenty minutes ago when I was walking past, and it was the same for me. I knew I knew you, but I couldn’t think where from. And then you were still here when I came back this way, and it clicked. So I just had to come and say hello. I can see you’re busy, though. I won’t keep you.’

  ‘No, don’t worry about that. Nothing important. Can I get you a coffee?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I haven’t got very long. But, yes, that would be very nice.’

  He bought her a latte and asked her about her son Alex, who it seemed had been having a difficult time in his new school, and about her work, which, at the present time, was mainly to do with disbursing funds to community-based drama groups. ‘Not that there’s much money to go around with this ghastly government. But what about you?’

  ‘Me . . . ? I’m in a funny in-between kind of place. I’ve cut back on my work a bit to give myself time to think. I suppose I’m trying to decide what I should do with the remaining years of my working life. My life in general, come to that. Given that I have no children or family to support or provide me with a purpose.’

  This last bit turned out to be a somewhat more personal disclosure than he’d intended, and brought him to an unexpectedly thin patch in his protective surface layer. What was he doing at his age, sitting in cafés, and writing page after page that no one but him would ever read? It was the kind of thing that seventeen-year-olds did.

  ‘It may well be,’ he added, speaking rather quickly in order to arrive as soon as possible on firmer ground, ‘that my role in life is simply to carry on doing what I’ve been doing for years, which is help people to make their homes a little nicer. And, God knows, there are worse things than that. But still, it feels like a good time to take stock.’

  Letty’s response was kind; she could tell that he’d come close to some real distress. ‘Well, I guess we all worry sometimes about the real value of what we do. I’m always wondering about how much difference it makes in the great scheme of things whether or not this or that little drama group gets some funding to help it put on a show which, let’s be honest, not many people will see. But I suppose we just have to hope our little efforts add together into something worthwhile.’

  It is interesting that, even as the Catastrophe crept up, and they, by their own behaviour, knowingly drew it closer, people back then still liked to think that they were contributing in some way to making the world a better place.

  ‘Of course it’s all very uncertain at the moment with this Brexit craziness,’ Letty added. ‘Isn’t everything awful at the moment? Brexit, and now Trump as well, for goodness’ sake. I’m just so grateful I’ve got the place in Blakeney to go to when things just feel too crazy to cope with. My sanity transfusion, I call it. It works every time.’

  ‘I didn’t realize you had your own place there.’

  ‘Well, it’s not just mine. It was my parents’ place – they had a boat up there once as well – but these days my brothers and I look after it between us.’

  ‘We had a place there when we were kids. And a boat too, actually! Up to the mid-eighties, we were up there most weekends during the summer.’

  ‘How funny! We must have run into each other. Did you go crabbing in the harbour?’

  ‘Of course! Ellie and I were always down there with our strings and our old bacon rinds. Mum and Dad had to come and haul us back in when it was getting dark.’

  ‘Me and my brothers, too. So there must have been times when you and I were on the wharf together, just a few yards apart.’

  ‘I suppose there must! No doubt we checked out each other’s buckets. Do you remember that? The way that children you didn’t know would come just close enough to be able to peer down appraisingly into your personal hoard of crabs? Those carefully opaque expressions as they looked?’

  ‘I do indeed. It was pretty competitive, wasn’t it? Do you still have your parents’ place?’

  ‘I wish we did. They sold it when we were twelve because they wanted to have more holidays abroad. We lived in Norwich, after all, so we could still go up to Blakeney easily enough. But it was never quite the same.’

  ‘A couple of years ago we talked about selling our place. We nearly went ahead. I could have done with the cash after my divorce, and one of my brothers was thinking about buying a holiday place in Brittany at the time. But I’m so glad we kept it. I love our little seaside house. It’s a wonderful store of happy memories, going all the way back to when I was five.’

  She glanced at her watch again. ‘I really ought to go. Thanks so much for the coffee. It’s really nice to see you. Perhaps we could meet again when we’ve both got more time?’

  Harry had been thinking what a likeable person she was (and very pleasing to look at too), but as soon as she made that offer, he felt himself recoiling from her, just as he’d done on the marsh. This time, though, he was ready for himself. Letty’s invitation was a good thing, he told himself firmly. It was exactly what he needed to put behind him his embarrassing adolescent obsession with Michelle. Of course he had reservations, of course he had anxieties and doubts, but they were inevitable. You always knew that behind the face that was presented to you on first meeting someone there must lurk a more complicated and ambiguous entity, just as behind your own slightly boyish good looks were aspects of yourself that were rather less lovable, or perhaps not lovable at all. But these weren’t reasons to isolate yourself. You had to push through the ambivalence. It was the price you paid for not being alone.

  And after all, it wasn’t as if Michelle was an exception to this rule. He’d drawn back from her sharply enough when she made that commen
t about the Poles. He’d actively disliked her, which had never been the case with Letty. He’d barely been able to look her in the eye.

  ‘That would be great,’ he said, looking Letty in the eye without any trouble at all. Then they exchanged phone numbers and emails, and she headed off to her meeting, smiling back at him through the glass as she hurried off. He decided to call her that evening.

  TWELVE

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ Cally says. ‘He needs to forget about Michelle. It’s getting a bit creepy. He’s just using her to project his fantasies onto.’

  We are on one of the long walks we often do together across London. It’s another of those hot cloudy days where the air is too moist to carry away your sweat.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I say. ‘It would be creepy if he simply indulged his projections, but he doesn’t do that. He knows what’s going on. He knows he’s putting her into a template that she probably doesn’t really fit. He knows she can’t really be his ideal woman, whatever his foolish heart is telling him. In fact, that’s why he’s leaving her alone! Seems pretty responsible to me.’

  ‘It’s not just his fantasies about women he’s projecting on her, though, is it? It’s his fantasies about lower-class people. His friends are busy demonizing them but he’s doing the opposite. It’s another whole layer of sentimentality. Setting someone on a pedestal who you’d normally look down on. He’s a typical bourgeois, this Harry. He knows he’s full of anxieties about his status and importance. He knows he’s a bit pompous. And he likes to fantasize about being free of all that.’

  The conversation is a little painful to me. Cally fits perfectly into a template of my own and she knows that quite well, although she chooses to pretend she doesn’t. Her gracefulness on the one hand, her refusal on the other to take her own gracefulness seriously . . . It’s a combination that has completely melted me since she first began to work at the Institute. But she has always made it clear that she wants me only as a friend.

  ‘Did Lenin really say that?’ Cally asks. ‘I would have thought it was Marx.’

  ‘No, it was Lenin. Of course he was the ultimate middle-class expert. He thought that the working classes needed professionals like him to conduct their revolution for them. In that same passage, just a few lines later, he exhorts the leaders of revolutionary parties to show the masses the “shortest and most direct route to complete, absolute and decisive victory”. As it turned out, this wonderful route of his led through famine and terror and created a new and brutal ruling class which, seventy years later, would kick away even the pretence of communism, appropriate the hitherto socialized means of production, and become a particularly ruthless capitalist oligarchy of the exact kind that Lenin had claimed to be an expert in overthrowing. So much for expertise!’

  My friend smiles. ‘And through all those changes, there’ll have been people loyally waving the same old flag without even noticing its meaning change.’

  We come to the gated area in Hackney, where, behind a high fence topped with razor wire and security cameras, Full Members of the Guiding Body live in large three-storey Edwardian houses not unlike Harry’s childhood home in Norwich. They have twenty-four-hour electricity in there, and hot water, and separate bedrooms for each family member. They even have vehicles for their personal use, almost as if they were back in the twenty-first century.

  ‘Apparently they need to live like that because it helps them to give of their best to their work,’ Cally says, deadpan, pressing her nose against the wire. ‘And of course we need them to work at their best so they can figure out a way of helping all of us to live like they do.’

  I laugh. ‘And that’s why they get genetic enhancement for their kids to make them super bright. So they can help us even better!’

  But the goggle-eyed security guards are looking at us from the gate just thirty metres away, so we turn away from the fence and follow the road that skirts around it.

  ‘By the way,’ Cally says, ‘how did you find out about that Gerald guy?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I tell her. ‘He never existed. I made him up for the story.’

  Cally laughs. ‘That’s a bit random, isn’t it, Zoe? Why did you do that?’

  ‘Well, we know a realignment of classes was underway, don’t we? Not just in Britain, but right across the Western Hegemony. Old alliances crumbling. New ones forming. I wanted to represent that in the story.’

  ‘Yes, but it didn’t work in that way. It was about gradual changes in the stories that members of each group told one another. Not some old gent shaking hands with a power station worker.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But this is a novel, isn’t it? I’m giving myself a bit of licence. It has to be about characters and conversations.’

  THIRTEEN

  On Saturday night, Michelle was quite active on Facebook, commenting on posts made by her friends, adding some new photos, and offering her opinions in real time on the popular televised dance competition known for some reason as Strictly, which she was watching at her sister’s house. She wrote nothing in her diary that day.

  Harry meanwhile was in a French-Indochinese fusion restaurant called Hanoi Jane. It was located inside three eight-metre-high railway arches. The rear half of the middle arch was the kitchen, which was set behind a counter so that the chef and her assistants could be seen at work. The two outer arches were the dining areas. Harry arrived ten minutes early in a new blue jacket that he’d bought for the occasion, and was led to a table at the front of the left-hand arch, beside a tall window made of a single sheet of tinted glass.

  The place had been laid out so as to create a mood of comfort, intimacy and modernity while at the same time preserving something of the austere industrial quality of Victorian railway architecture. The walls were the same rough, functional, industrial brick that they’d always been, except that a red star had been stencilled on to them, with a Vietnamese slogan beneath it in giant red letters. Apart from the exclamation mark at the end, the slogan was of course completely opaque to all but Vietnamese speakers, but it carried lingering connotations of a tough, brutal war in which a small communist country had fought off American imperialism half a century ago, and it gave the place a distinct ‘alternative’ edge.

  It is an interesting feature of the period that, while middle-class gentrification tended to result in the pricing out of lower-class residents in formerly working-class areas (and, incidentally, the pricing out of non-white residents, given that ethnic minorities were under-represented in the middle classes), the new settlers, if we can call them that, felt a need to preserve a certain ‘authenticity’ or ‘grittiness’ that they associated with the area’s past. (The adjective ‘urban’, with its additional connotations of ‘radical’, ‘alternative’ and ‘edgy’, was often used in branding as a way of capturing this much-sought-after ‘gritty’ and ‘authentic’ quality.) So industrial structures such as dye works, warehouses, power stations and so on were often refitted in such a way as to retain, and make a feature of, their former unadorned functionality.

  Harry himself had designed several conversions on exactly these lines – he didn’t really just work on kitchen extensions – and he admired the clever way it had been done by the designer of Hanoi Jane. But, as he sat there waiting for Letty, he found himself thinking about this practice of deliberately retaining ‘industrial’ features and comparing it to the habit prevalent among his friends and acquaintances of proletarianizing their language. (The affectation of glottal stops, for instance, or the adoption of the once exclusively working-class term ‘mate’ as a means of addressing people.) It seemed to him that his tribe lived in fear that, in the process of refining itself, it had become in some way inauthentic and no longer organically part of its surroundings in the way that it imagined less sophisticated people to be. So it felt this need to wrap itself in the mantle of those it had displaced, hoping that some of their earthy magic would rub off.

  ‘Ellie and I grew up in Norfolk,’ he writes later. ‘I don’
t think either of us has even a trace of a Norfolk accent, yet very occasionally, if they know where we come from, someone or other will claim to notice a slight Norfolk inflection in the way she or I pronounce some word, and we feel ridiculously pleased and proud.’

  But what he was particularly noticing about this kind of place was that Michelle wouldn’t feel at home here. Although it seemed to celebrate the workplaces of industrial labourers, this bare-brick style didn’t really signify ‘working class’ at all, and he was quite certain that she would read it, just as he did, as ‘posh’ and ‘trendy’ and ‘middle class’. So the way his tribe liked to proletarianize itself was not about reaching out to actual living working-class people but about acquiring for itself the imagined magical tributes of those it had replaced. ‘Like tribal warriors,’ Harry thought, ‘devouring the still-beating hearts of their valiant but vanquished enemies.’

  But at this point he was brought back into the world by the arrival of Letty. As he’d done himself, she’d gone to some trouble to look her best for the occasion and was beautifully wrapped in an interestingly asymmetrical dress in deep red, with large gold earrings. They gave each other a peck on the check. She’d never been to the restaurant before and complimented Harry on his choice as they settled down at the table. He told her that his sister’s friend Karina was a food writer and he’d asked her for a recommendation.

  ‘Not Karina Stoke? Gosh!’ Karina was well-known – she had a regular feature in the Guardian’s weekend magazine – and, as he supposed he’d intended, Letty was impressed by Harry’s connection with her.

  The waiter came with the menus and they ordered wine. Harry learnt that Letty had grown up in London and had lived in various parts of the city all her life, apart from three years in Brighton where she studied for her English degree and a one-year stint in Kenya in the nineties with her then husband.