Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  His sister laughed. ‘Poor Harry. You’ve gone short of love for a very long time, haven’t you? You’re like a starving man who’s unexpectedly been given a meal. And the cruel thing is you don’t need to be hungry at all.’

  To Harry’s own surprise he burst into tears. Ellie went to shut the door through to the dining room and then sat beside him and put her arm round his shoulders.

  ‘There’s food all around you, bro,’ she said. ‘You just need to learn how to eat again.’

  He went up to bed soon afterwards, not wanting to have to deal with Phil and the boys when their game was over. But he was far too agitated to sleep and his entry for 26th December is one of the longest in the entire collection of notebooks. He is haunted throughout it by the awareness that he has two distinct images of Michelle in his mind that don’t connect up with one another, like two halves of a stereoscopic photograph that can be seen separately but refuse to align into a single 3D picture. On the one hand there is the perfect Michelle who fits his own longing like a key in a lock: the one he couldn’t help himself from calling sweetheart and darling because of the torrent of long-buried love she’d drawn out of him. On the other hand there is the Michelle he’d barely been able to look in the eye. ‘I feel like King Midas,’ he writes, ‘except the other way round. I see gold but I’m afraid to touch it, in case by doing so I turn it into dust.’

  He remembers that there were two Janets as well, but then corrects himself. Actually, there were three: one that he’d loved, one that he’d hated, and one that he’d simply coexisted with, as you coexist with a workmate or a next-door neighbour.

  ‘We don’t really know anyone,’ he thinks. ‘Even the people we know very well, we don’t know well enough to see as a single whole. And as to the rest of the world, well, we’re just guessing, we’re just projecting our own fears or desires on to whatever little fragments we think we’ve glimpsed. Dear God, I don’t even know myself! Essentially what I was doing this evening was laying out the mess inside my head and asking Ellie to tell me what it meant and what I really wanted.’

  He draws two lines across the page.

  SIXTEEN

  Charlie was invited out to Gerald’s house in the week between Christmas and New Year. Jake passed the invitation on and picked him up in his car. The village of Breckham St Mary was about four miles away from the town of Breckham and, if it had been a little bigger, it would have been the kind of place that Harry refers to as ‘Tory toytowns’. The pretty old houses were built in a mixture of mellow brick and flint. The pub had a thatched roof. There was a large and handsome church, also faced with flint, with a tower and high, graceful leaded windows of clear glass which, as Jake and Charlie arrived in the village, were pouring out a soft golden light to warm the night around them as if the church were the village’s glowing hearth. The overall effect was like being inside a Christmas card. All that was missing was snow.

  Gerald’s house and grounds stood opposite the church and behind a high brick wall. They reached it through an ornate gateway topped by a big carved animal with bat-like wings that looked down at them from a perch above the capstone. A number of cars were parked on the gravel in front of the house and a row of tall pointed windows, not unlike those in the church, gave out a glow that dimly illuminated them in a way that felt slightly dreamlike because it created a kind of island in the darkness. The upper reaches of the house were black against the stars. The Christmas-card world was surprisingly close to the world of Gothic horror.

  A servant, or what Charlie took to be a servant, met them at the door and led them through to the dining hall, which was two storeys high with a gallery at one end that once had been used by musicians to entertain the owners of the house and their guests. Grotesque heads and coats of arms decorated the roofbeams and the gallery’s wooden balustrade, and tall leaded windows alternated with big, dark portrait paintings. There was a young man with a moustache in a polished breast plate, a severe old patriarch in an Edwardian suit, a tall, haughty woman dressed in lace . . . But where one might have expected a long table, there were rows of plastic chairs, most of them already occupied. About forty men were there, some of them Charlie’s age, some nearer in age to Jake. He recognized a number of them from school or from the pubs in Breckham, or both. There were no women among them – though this didn’t strike Charlie as odd because, in his world, men and women tended to do things separately – and everyone there was white apart from one young man with freckles and curly hair who looked as if one of his parents was black. Some of the men were talking to one another, but in subdued, self-conscious voices. They were all a long way away from where they felt at home.

  A small platform had been set up below, and just in front of, the gallery. Gerald stepped up on to it. ‘Gentlemen! Could I have your attention, please!’ He was wearing a blazer with brass buttons and a regimental tie. ‘I’d like to welcome you all to my home. And thank you so much, once again, for taking an interest in my little project. As you know, what we’re trying to do here is to build up an organized body of men willing, if necessary, to defend our country against a possible enemy within. We’re still at an early stage, sorting out our ideas, feeling our way, thinking over the options, but I think tonight’s speaker will be very helpful to you. His name is Steve Finch. I only met him quite recently but I like to think of him as a friend; and he’s been doing a lot of thinking about where we are and where we need to get to. I feel sure you’ll find his ideas very interesting. I know I do.’

  The big man who took Gerald’s place on the stage wasn’t at all how Charlie would have imagined a friend of Gerald’s to look. He was about fifty, his face large, round and suntanned, his head shaved bald, and he had tattoos on his arms and neck. He was well built but somewhat overweight, with a pronounced beer belly that thoroughly filled the dark blue T-shirt that he wore tucked into his jeans. When he spoke it was with a strong Birmingham accent.

  ‘I’m not who you expected to meet in a place like this, am I right?’

  The whole gathering laughed, grateful for the release and pleased to be looking at a man who seemed to come from a world like their own. No one had felt comfortable inside this enormous, strange and slightly sinister-looking house.

  ‘Truth is,’ Finch went on, ‘I wouldn’t have expected to meet myself in a place like this. And I certainly wouldn’t expect a bloke like Gerald here to be calling me his friend.’ Gerald, who was standing just to the side of the stage, made a humorous gesture to indicate that the surprise was mutual but entirely pleasing. ‘Gerald and his kind were the enemy, that’s how I would have seen it in the old days. Because, let’s face it, the man’s a toff and, if there was one thing in the world I hated, it was toffs.’

  Finch contemplated their host. ‘Colonel Sir Gerald Butler . . . Seriously! Who would have believed it? We still disagree about a lot of things, mind you – a whole lot of things, in fact. I’d go so far as to say that he still is my class enemy in a way, but in this world you have to form alliances, and when you form an alliance you have to learn to respect your ally. And I have to say that’s not been hard in this case because there’s a lot to respect about the Colonel. He’s a man who cares deeply about this country and its traditions, for one thing, and he also happens to be a war hero who risked his own life to save one of his men.’

  Finch winked at his audience. ‘But that’s enough of that, eh? Sir Gerald’s head is quite big enough already without me puffing him up even more. I’ll move on, and tell you something about myself and how I ended up being up here on this stage in front of you, in what looks, let’s face it, like the set for a sixties horror movie. As you can probably tell, I’m a working-class boy from the Midlands. My parents were factory workers, so were my grandparents, and so was I when I started out. I worked for a company that made wheels for bikes and motorbikes. The company still exists, as a matter of fact, but it’s shifted all of its production to a factory in Vietnam where people work long hours for only a few quid a month. How abou
t you guys? From what I gather most of the factories near here have closed down too. The Thermos glass factory in Thetford, the Kwalpak suitcase factory in Breckham . . . How do you earn a living these days?’

  He pointed to various members of the audience. There was a delivery driver from Brandon with earrings and a red beard, a shelf stacker in the Breckham Tesco, a young man with acne who cleaned the stands at the race course at Newmarket, a guy from Mildenhall who was out of work . . .

  ‘I’ve been there, mate,’ Finch told him. ‘I’ve been there. My sympathies.’

  He turned his attention to the room at large. ‘Right! Now then, everyone, show of hands: how many of you are in a union?’ Less than half put up their hands. Finch nodded. ‘Not what they were, unions, are they? I was a keen union man myself, just like my dad, and I became a full-time union organizer and an activist in the Labour Party, standing up for the workers against rich bastards like Sir Gerald here. Up the revolution!’

  He laughed grimly. ‘Fun fact about the Labour Party: it was set up by the trade union movement, specifically to get working-class people into parliament. How’s that working out? Let’s look at the last four Labour leaders. Corbyn and Blair both went to private schools. Milliband was the son of a university professor. Brown’s dad was a Church of Scotland minister. Oh dear! Not very working class at all. In fact, none of them could really claim to be any more working class than Gerald here, and at least he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is. Nope, the Labour Party isn’t the party of working people any more, as you probably knew already. It’s sloughed off the unions that set it up. It gets half its support from posh university towns. But then manufacturing is yesterday’s news, or so we’re told. That’s Asia’s job now. Britain isn’t a country that makes things these days, it’s a knowledge economy. It’s all about financial services, and advertising, and IT, and biotech – the kind of stuff that happens in London or in wealthy, techy towns like Cambridge, just down the road from here.’

  He shaded his eyes to look out into the room. ‘So how come you lot are still out here in the sticks in Norfolk and Suffolk? You, mate, are scrubbing beer and tomato sauce off of the stands at Newmarket, but how come you haven’t grown a hipster beard and set up your own PR company in Shoreditch? And you, sir – you over there – why are you stacking shelves in Tesco’s when you should be splicing genes in some swanky lab in Cambridge, or maybe writing software for the driverless vehicles that are going to put our delivery-driver friend here out of work? This is a globalized world, don’t you know? We’re competing in a global marketplace. No room for dinosaurs. You either adapt or die! Didn’t you get the memo?’

  The audience was silent, stunned, resentful. Charlie, who’d always had difficulty detecting sarcasm, was also very confused. Wasn’t this man supposed to be on their side?

  Finch laughed. ‘Ha! Good luck with all of that, guys. Good luck with even living in one of those places! I was in Cambridge yesterday, as a matter of fact. Dropped by for a pint with an old Labour Party mate of mine, and I happened to look in an estate agent’s window. I saw an old three-bedroom council house for sale that was just like the one I grew up in back in Brum – no extensions, nothing, just a bog-standard nineteen-fifties brick semi with three smallish bedrooms – and, I kid you not, it was on the market for . . . wait for it . . . five hundred thousand pounds. You’ll have to excuse my French, your colonelship, but seriously, five hundred thousand fucking pounds! No one cares any more about you dinosaurs out here in the sticks, but sure as hell no one’s going to let you move anywhere else.’

  He studied the faces of his listeners. ‘When I finally started to get all this, my first thought was to go full lefty. The Labour Party had sold us out, I said to myself, but there was still communism. But you know what? That’s a con too. You show me one communist country where working people are really in the saddle and aren’t being screwed over by some tyrant or other, or some bunch of oligarchs with their fingers in the till. So these days I take a different view. There are always going to be bosses. There are always going to be blokes like Sir Gerald in his Elizabethan mansion here, whatever you choose to call your political system. But that doesn’t mean we’ve got no power. I was reading this book the other day—’

  Here Finch broke off, pretending to look hurt, as if someone in the audience had expressed incredulity. ‘I know. Hard to believe. But I did. Get me! I read a book.’ There were a few chuckles, but Finch wasn’t satisfied with that and hammed about to coax a more generous response from his listeners. He pretended to open an imaginary book, very gingerly, as if it might explode at any moment, and then recoiled in amazement at its contents. It was well done and he got his laugh. He had a knack for building up tension and then releasing it.

  ‘It was a book about China, as a matter of fact,’ he went on. ‘Amazing country. Amazing people. I won’t hear a word against them. Those guys were living in cities when us lot were still swinging from the trees. And they’ve had this wonderful idea for more than two thousand years that they call Tianming, the Mandate of Heaven. What it means is that, yes, the Emperor gets to rule the country, and yes, Heaven will help him do it, but only if he looks after the people. If he stops looking after them, if he disrespects their traditions, if he starts to imagine that him being Emperor is just the way things are and, to hell with the plebs, he’s going to do whatever he damn well likes . . . well, then Heaven withdraws its support, the Emperor stumbles, and the people sweep him aside.’

  Finch gestured the act of sweeping as he spoke.

  ‘And, you know what?’ he said. ‘I think that’s pretty close to the situation we’re in right now. For a long time this country’s been run by people who don’t really care about us, who barely even bother to conceal how much they despise us, and yet think they can do whatever they want and we’ll just put up with it. But they’ve got that wrong, haven’t they? We’re not having it any more.’

  Someone cheered, and Finch gave him a thumbs-up. ‘We aren’t, though, are we, mate? Seriously! You’re not having it. None of you are. That’s why you’re here. Give yourselves a round of applause!’

  They all clapped, and a few men cheered raucously.

  ‘But we’re British people,’ Finch said, ‘so we’re going to be reasonable about it. We’ve given them fair warning. We know that if we don’t have this lot in charge, we’ll have another lot instead, and we could do without the hassle if we can possibly avoid it. So we’re giving them a chance to change their ways. If they show they’re willing to listen to the British people, fair enough. If not, we chuck them out. And I’m not just talking about voting the Tories out and getting Labour in, or anything like that. We’ve seen through that game. I’m talking about getting shot of the whole bloody lot of them: Labour, Tory, Liberal, the whole shooting match. If they don’t get their act together, we sweep it all away.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Jake shouted excitedly. ‘Spot on!’ And he began to clap loudly. Charlie clapped too then, and the rest of the audience quickly joined in.

  ‘That was indeed spot on!’ said Gerald, climbing back up on to the little stage and grasping Steve Finch by the hand. ‘Splendid stuff, Steve! Absolutely splendid stuff! I told you he was worth listening to, didn’t I? Let’s give him another round of applause, eh? Let’s give him a cheer! Come on, chaps, stamp your feet! Let’s really show our appreciation!’

  And the Colonel watched, beaming benignly, as the audience duly delivered a great deal of noise, which echoed from the ceiling of that strange woody place, releasing tension all the while, so that they all began to feel comfortable, in spite of everything, in Sir Gerald’s Elizabethan hall.

  ‘But now it’s time to talk about what happens next,’ Gerald said. ‘What Steve and I have got you here for is to ask you to join a kind of army. I see some of you flinching at that, but don’t worry. I’m not asking you to break the law. No illegal firearms. No dodgy explosives. No paramilitary uniforms. None of that at this stage. But there will be a l
ot of hard work. I want to make you as fit as any soldier in the British Army, and as tough, and as disciplined, and as skilled. I want to teach you about self-defence and hand-to-hand combat. I want to take you to firing ranges and show you how to handle a gun. All perfectly legal, as I say. We’re not rebels, remember. We’re loyalists. We’re preparing ourselves to defend our beautiful country and its way of life against enemies who would do it harm.’

  Gerald beamed at the little crowd. ‘So, chaps! Who’s with me?’

  ‘I am!’ yelled Charlie. ‘I’m with you, mate!’ And to his absolute delight, the whole room cheered him.

  SEVENTEEN

  Cally doesn’t like those bits at all. She thinks I should stick to the diaries and not make stuff up. And she says that in any case, this whole Charlie story is ahistorical. It’s like writing about the Wars of the Roses and giving them tanks. ‘Admit it, Zoe,’ she says. ‘That’s the Patriotic League you’re describing there, the Patriotic League in all but name. You’re conflating completely different periods of history. You know perfectly well that the earliest mention of the Patriots as an organized force won’t be until many years later.’

  We’re drinking the stewed green tea they serve up in glasses in the Institute’s rather dingy tearoom.

  ‘If we confine the historical account to actual records we might achieve greater accuracy,’ I tell her, ‘but we do so at the expense of realism, and our histories will be skewed towards the small minority that records its own life, and the even smaller one that has its life recorded by others. I don’t want to write that sort of history.’

  A huge praying mantis alights on the edge of our tin table and stands there trembling. Cally smiles, but says nothing. Little motes of dust glitter and gleam in the beams of yellow light that are streaming into the room from its three rather grubby south-facing windows, making visible the invisible air.