‘You are right about the Patriotic League,’ I concede. ‘The Patriots don’t emerge as an entity for some years. But I’d argue that, even back in 2016, we can see the battle lines of the Warring Factions era beginning to emerge. A realignment of classes is taking place, and the new stories that are beginning to be told are already prototypes of the positions that will later serve as flags on the battlefield. For instance, the meanings of words like ‘liberalism’ or ‘the Left’ are mutating rapidly. And something resembling the Liberal faction of the future is beginning to part company with what will become the Democrats.’
Cally makes that side-to-side movement of her head that signifies that one acknowledges a point only with very major reservations.
‘And, most obviously of all,’ I tell her, ‘we see the resurgence of a narrative of national and cultural solidarity that will provide the ideological raison d’être of the Patriots. You can hardly deny that, Cally! It’s right there in the record. And that being so, is it really so fanciful of me to imagine that early prototypes of the Patriot militias were already beginning to form?’
‘Well, okay, but the ideas you’ve put into their mouths are completely unrealistic,’ she says. ‘We’re familiar with Tianming these days because we’ve only recently emerged from Chinese rule, but I very much doubt that someone like Finch would have come across it back then, let alone refer to it in a gathering of that kind.’
‘Probably not. But he would have made that same point in another way.’
‘I wonder. And in any case, the language would have been much more inflammatory. Foreigners are a menace . . . Anyone who disagrees with us is a traitor . . . That kind of thing, not all this reasoned argument.’
‘True. All the various groups were working themselves up into an absolute lather back then. But I wanted to strip away the lurid iconography of villains and heroes they indulged in and try to understand what was going on beneath it.’
Cally sighed. ‘It’s a strange project, Zoe, and I can tell you for certain that the Guiding Body won’t like it. They won’t mind you telling the story again, but they’ll want it told their way. You know that. They’ll want you to identify their precursors and then make them unambiguously into the heroes of the story.’
‘Of course. Everyone always wants that. Many people think that’s what history’s for.’
EIGHTEEN
Hello Michelle,
Did you have a good Christmas? I hope you don’t mind me writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I stayed at yours in October when my car broke down, and I was wondering if you’d like to meet up again? We seemed to get on so well and I thought perhaps it would be nice to meet up for lunch somewhere and see if we get on in different circumstances? I quite understand if you’d rather not, and please don’t feel obliged in any way. But this is just to say, that if you felt like it, I would like to see you very much indeed.
Happy New Year,
Harry
I don’t know if this was the final version, but it is the last of several drafts in his notebooks. He sent it off, or something like it anyway, on the 28th December, via the accommodation website he’d used to find Michelle in the first place.
He was half-expecting a reply the same day, because in one of the stories he’d constructed in his mind, Michelle felt pretty much the same as he did. But there was no reply that day, or the next day, or the day after. Every night he records the absence of a reply, and analyses what it means to him. ‘In many ways, I’m relieved. This has been such a strange episode, such a powerful obsession. Part of me will be very glad to have finally laid it to rest.’ But at the very same time he hopes she will reply, and keeps imagining the heart-stopping moment of seeing her name appear in a list of new emails.
He went to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of some friends of his called Jerry and Dave. They were friends of Janet’s too, and there was a distinct possibility that he’d see her there, though he hoped he wouldn’t. He had a great deal to drink and talked to a lot of people, quite often about Brexit.
‘It’s just crazy, isn’t it?’ said a very small bald man whose name he didn’t catch. ‘And so unnecessary, that’s the maddening thing! It was all about settling a quarrel in the Tory Party. Nobody really wants it.’
Harry’s contrariness had by now become an almost involuntary tic. ‘Apart from slightly over half of the electorate, obviously,’ he observed.
He waited for the standard responses to this, and ticked them off one by one as they duly arrived . . . Dishonest campaign (tick), A lot of people didn’t vote (tick), It was really just a protest vote (tick), A lot of them are changing their minds already (tick), Younger voters voted remain and they’re the ones who are actually going to have to live with it (tick). Did the little bald man really think he wasn’t already familiar with these well-rehearsed positions?
‘I guess they could rejoin the EU later then, couldn’t they,’ Harry observed, ‘in five or ten years’ time, when enough of the older voters have died to be sure of a majority?’
The small man was mildly disconcerted by this response. ‘I suppose so. But we’d never get our opt-outs back.’
‘But why would we need opt-outs if we think the EU is a good thing? Why wouldn’t we want to be a member on the same terms as everyone else?’
Jerry had come to join them by this point, a slim, dark-haired man who edited an arts magazine. He and his partner Dave had both been part of Harry’s friendship group at Cambridge. ‘You’re both very bad men!’ Jerry told them. ‘You know perfectly well that Brexit is officially banned from this party.’
Harry pretended to look remorseful.
‘Oh, all right, go on then,’ Jerry said, rubbing his hands, ‘let’s indulge ourselves. I won’t tell Dave if you won’t. Let’s have a really good moan.’
The small man was up for that and, as he and Jerry talked, Harry counted off various other standard observations. This is a representative democracy and parliament doesn’t have to abide by the referendum (tick), for instance, followed surprisingly quickly by: We need another referendum (tick). After these two there appeared, in quick succession: Embarrassed to be British (tick), But of course Scotland is wonderful (tick), EU being so patient with us (tick), Shambles (tick), Utter shitshow (tick), It’s the EU people living here I feel sorriest for (tick) and the NHS would crumble without them (tick). Harry had become very conscious lately of how much of conversation, any conversation, was not about exchanging ideas or information but about collectively rehearsing a position and obtaining little strokes of mutual validation.
‘When I was a kid,’ he writes later, ‘I used to wonder how grownups could bear just to talk for hours on end, without playing, without doing anything at all. But of course they were doing something, and the thing they were doing was very much like the grooming behaviour of chimpanzees. We humans reinforce the bonds that link us together, not by eating each other’s ticks and fleas, but by harmonizing our views and providing each other with agreeable little endorphin hits of fellow feeling.’
Harry imagined other parties across the country where other tribes were doing the same thing. Why can’t they just get on with it and leave? (tick), Remoaner civil servants are dragging their feet (tick), It’s an establishment conspiracy (tick), EU are playing us for fools (tick), If only the Remoaners would get behind the country (tick), Apparently democracy is only a good thing if it comes out the way they want (tick).
Quite probably Michelle was at a party right now where they were talking just like that. Perhaps she was being chatted up at this very moment by the handsome and sun-tanned proprietor of the local Toyota franchise, and wasn’t even thinking about the peculiar email she’d received a few days ago from that architect from London she’d spent that embarrassing night with. Of course she wasn’t going to reply to him! She was an attractive woman with options. Why would she take a risk with a man like Harry, when she must get plenty of offers from attractive men in the world she knew?
Harry swallowed. ‘Funny that a wealthy nation of sixty-five million people can’t recruit enough doctors and nurses from its own population, though, isn’t it?’
The small man and Jerry looked at him, puzzled. ‘My guess is that most British people don’t fancy the appalling conditions that junior doctors have to work in,’ Jerry offered.
The small man agreed. ‘The working hours these days are just awful, from what I gather.’
‘I suppose there’ll never be an incentive to improve those conditions,’ Harry said, ‘if we can just hoover up doctors who’ve been ready-trained for us elsewhere. I sometimes wonder about the countries they come from, though. Can they afford to train up doctors for us? Don’t they need doctors themselves?’
‘I don’t know the answer to that, I’m afraid,’ the small man said. Jerry made a humorous face to express his own equal ignorance.
‘We have an agreed conversational path,’ Harry writes the next day, ‘and we all walk along it together. It’s rather like the narrative strand of a story. It feels real, it creates the illusion that there’s a hinterland behind and around the events you’re being told about, but really all you’re being given is a single line of words, and nothing at all on either side.’
People used to go from one New Year’s Eve party to another back then, so new folk arrived at the party from time to time, and Harry eyed each set of arrivals to see if Janet was among them. Not that it would be a calamity to see her, of course – the two of them were on perfectly friendly terms – but it would be painful, and it was something he felt the need to brace himself for.
At about eleven fifteen a small group arrived. The first to come into the room was a designer called Rodney, a very tall black man in his mid-fifties with a rugged face and a booming actorly voice. He was a friend of Harry’s, but perhaps even more a friend of Janet’s and she often commissioned work from him. Harry wondered if she was going to be with him. But no, as his companions followed Rodney into the room, Harry’s wife wasn’t among them. One of the group was Rodney’s charming and gentle Italian partner, Franco, the other two were a man and woman Harry didn’t know. As he’d done at previous gatherings, Harry noticed that Rodney was the only guest in the whole room who wasn’t white, and thought about how strange that was in a city where more than a third of the population was black or brown.
Another group arrived at half past eleven (all white also, he notes), but he didn’t know any of them and Janet wasn’t among them. And then, at about quarter to midnight, three more slightly drunk white women came in.
No, Janet wasn’t among them either. He saw that straight away, but as one of them turned and looked down the room in his general direction, he realized it was Letty. She obviously knew Rodney quite well, because, after being greeted by Jerry, she went straight over to him to hug him, and it was only a few minutes to midnight when she finally turned away from Rodney, and noticed Harry for the first time.
‘Oh, Harry!’ She threw her arms round him and kissed him wetly on the cheek. She smelled of warm scent pleasingly mingled with fresh sweat and booze. She must have been dancing at her previous party. ‘How nice to see you!’
He thought this was going to be a standard cheek-peck greeting from which he’d be released straight away, but she held on to him. ‘It really is lovely to see you!’ she told him, leaning back so she could look into his face.
‘You too!’ He beamed at her. ‘How was Provence?’
‘Not that great. Alex was very bored. But we got by. You?’
‘We got by too. My nephews were also bored. But we had some fun, all the same.’
‘So are we going to meet up again? I wasn’t sure, after last time, whether you . . . you know . . . ’
‘I wasn’t sure whether you “you know” either!’
‘Really? I must admit I thought at one point you were going to come out as a UKIP supporter, but apart from that I enjoyed our evening very much.’
‘Me too. And don’t worry, I’m a fully paid-up North London wishy-washy liberal. You really don’t get much wishy-washier than me.’
Michelle wasn’t going to get back to him, he told himself. It had been three days. She would have replied by now if she was at all interested. And that was all for the best, really. The whole thing had been a bit silly. He’d almost certainly spared himself a lot of embarrassment.
‘I’m much too drunk to make arrangements now,’ he said, ‘but yes, let’s sort something out very soon.’
Someone had turned on the TV, letting in the sounds of various festivities from across the country so as to create, as Harry puts it later, ‘however vague and superficial, however stage-managed, a sense of a single nation moving together through time.’
Letty was still holding his arm and as Big Ben struck the twelve strokes of midnight, she pulled him to her and kissed him on the mouth. Then they both turned round to be welcomed by their companions into the year 2017.
NINETEEN
Harry spent most of the next morning in bed, with coffee and a jug of water beside him, readjusting his fluid balance and cossetting his sore head. He played with his phone. He wrote many pages in his diary.
‘It felt good being kissed by Letty,’ he writes. ‘Whatever Ellie says about my lack of enthusiasm, I like her very much and I appreciate the fact that she likes me. That’s enough for the moment, isn’t it? Surely that’s all you can realistically ask for when you hardly know each other.’ Realistic was a good word, he thought. The opposite of obsessing like a teenager about someone you really didn’t know at all. He’d email Letty later today or in the morning at the latest.
But there’s a shift in tone on the very next line. ‘What’s changed? What’s made me feel suddenly so much warmer towards Letty? Does one kiss really make a difference? Am I that trivial? If so, no wonder a good fuck blew my mind!’
He looked briefly at Twitter. ‘I’m just going to come right out and say it,’ someone called Damon had just tweeted, ‘Nazis. Are. Evil.’ Damon had duly received 322 ‘likes’ and sixty-three replies thanking him for his brave and unflinching stance.
‘Jesus wept,’ Harry muttered, tossing his phone aside (as I imagine it) to pick up his notebook.
After a while he began to brood about Michelle’s New Year’s Eve.
‘His name is Lee. He owns a Toyota dealership, or maybe an up-and-coming garden centre. He’s divorced from the woman he met at eighteen before he made his money and is now looking for a beautiful woman who will adequately reflect his status. He has dark wavy hair, a square jaw, expensive shoes. He works out at the gym four times a week, wears Brut and is a member of the Rotary Club. He votes Tory, owns a brand-new convertible sports car and has a timeshare in Lanzarote with its own private pool where he’ll soon invite Michelle to come and spend a week with him. He likes to spend his money but he knows he hasn’t got much taste, and he’d love for her to help him turn his big hollow new-build pseudo-Georgian house into something more like a—’
Harry draws a line across the page to make himself stop.
‘I wonder how it feels to be Rodney,’ he writes, ‘going to these North London parties where he’s the only black man. I must ask him sometime. He plays on it, of course, setting aside that upperclass accent of his to make acidic comments in his grandmother’s Caribbean dialect. And we all love that. We lap it up, us North London whiteys gathered round him, pink and clueless as babies. It’s like he’s blessing us in some way. It’s like he’s absolving us.’
He flipped through Twitter again. There was a lot of New Year stuff going on in there, but plenty of the usual things too: Brexit, Trump, people expressing outrage about other people’s utterances, or triumphantly accusing one another of not caring, of being hypocrites, of being inconsistent. ‘So many people desperate to prove that they are GOOD and someone else is very, very BAD,’ he thinks. ‘Like a gigantic suburban street in which people wait eagerly behind their lace curtains for something to happen that they can all condemn—’
He w
as interrupted by his phone pinging to indicate an incoming message. It was a text from Letty.
Lovely to see you last night, Harry. How’s your head? Mine’s terrible. Mad week at work coming up, but how about meeting at the weekend?
He stared at the speech bubble on the little screen, examining his feelings. You couldn’t call this elation, he had to admit. You couldn’t deny a certain ambivalence. But he’d been through all that already, hadn’t he? It was just the way things were. You needed to face it and push on through it or you would always be alone.
So he replied:
Let’s do that. Saturday night? My head’s terrible too. Shall we think about a more detailed plan when we’re feeling more human again?
He laid down his phone. ‘This is life,’ he writes, rather defensively, as if his sister was present and had remarked on his obvious lack of enthusiasm. ‘Not miraculous. Not revelatory. Not an orchestra swelling up in a crescendo of ever-increasing bliss. Just people getting to know each other and seeing if they get on. You can’t ask for any more than that.’
He felt tired and closed his eyes. It was eleven in the morning by now but he thought perhaps he’d try to snatch another half-hour of sleep before finally getting up. He had just settled into the uneasy half-dreams of a hungover brain, when the phone pinged again. It was probably Letty, he thought, acknowledging his reply, or suggesting a place to meet. Or maybe Ellie sending him a New Year message. Let it be, and he’d read it later.
But he couldn’t settle back into sleep and so, in the end, he surrendered, sat up and looked at his phone.
Hello Harry, It’s Michelle. I’m sorry I have not replied before, but I haven’t been checking the b’n’b emails over Christmas and I’ve only just seen your message.
It’s nice to hear from you. I was quite surprised to be honest because I really didn’t think you’d be getting back in touch.
Two Tribes Page 13
