Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  TWENTY-SIX

  On the way back from Gerald’s, Jake dropped Charlie off at his grandmother’s house. It was her seventy-fifth birthday and she was having a party.

  ‘Hello, Charlie, my love!’ she greeted him as she reached up for a kiss. ‘You made it!’

  The tiny little old woman held him tightly round the neck. He’d always been her favourite, since he was a baby. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Gran!’ he told her. ‘It’s not every day your best grandma turns seventy-five!’

  The rest of the party were already there. His mum was carrying plates of food out from the kitchen and, through the kitchen door, he could see his pretty auntie, the subject of many fantasies during his teens, sliding a tray of sausage rolls into the oven. Charlie turned into the living room to the left. It was a room he’d known all his life, and had remained almost unchanged, as if it was an exhibit in a museum. There were grey leather armchairs and a slightly worn fitted carpet in a darker grey flecked with white and pink. Dozens of family photographs covered the walls and the surfaces, interspersed with little china puppy-dogs, a Spanish bull, a gondolier music box, a coy shepherdess, a set of china cats, a doe and two fauns made of glass linked together by little chains, and a plastic Welshwoman in traditional costume bought on a coach trip to Betws-y-Coed. The back of the room had been knocked through into a small and slightly damp conservatory, in which there were more ornaments in a glass case, two cane chairs with pale blue cushions, a life-sized china dog with big brown eyes and a table on which a buffet was now being set out by the women: green salad, tomatoes, Scotch eggs, cheese on sticks, drinks. One of his cousins was out there with his little nephew and niece, looking at a picture book with them in a big wicker chair while the two of them munched on crisps.

  Two women were sitting on the sofa, his uncle’s girlfriend and his sister-in-law. But Charlie headed for the men, who were standing in a group with their beers, laughing in a rather forced way. His father was there, and his uncle, and his brother Gary, but with them was another man he’d not met before. The stranger was a different kind of person from the rest of them, Charlie could see that immediately. It was as if his doctor or the headmaster of his old school had turned up for a family gathering. The way the man dressed, the way he moved, the way he talked, all marked him out from everyone else in the house. He was the reason for the strained laughter, and it was obvious that the man sensed this himself because he looked very ill at ease there, being towered over by Charlie’s great pear-shaped lump of a dad, and his burly uncle, and his big broad-shouldered brother Gary. The three of them looked uncomfortable too. They would have been fine together otherwise, bantering and joking away, but they were struggling to deal with the newcomer.

  ‘Well done, Charlie, you made it!’ his dad called out with unusual enthusiasm, as if relieved to have reinforcements. ‘Come and meet Harry, mate. Come and meet Michelle’s friend Harry.’

  Charlie shook the newcomer’s hand. ‘All right there, mate?’

  ‘Harry’s driven up from London,’ his father said.

  ‘I suppose you came on the M11, did you?’ Uncle Trevor asked.

  ‘That’s it,’ Harry said.

  ‘It’s usually all right, I find,’ Trevor observed.

  ‘It can get a bit slow around Stansted,’ said Charlie’s pear-shaped dad. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with the words, DON’T ASK ME, I ONLY WORK HERE.

  Michelle carried some plates through to the conservatory and then came to stand beside Harry, slipping her arm through his. ‘Harry grew up in Norwich,’ she told the men. ‘He supports Norwich City.’

  ‘A Budgie, eh?’ exclaimed Charlie’s dad, as Michelle returned to the kitchen, his eyes lighting up with relief at the discovery of a topic that he and Harry could talk about.

  ‘Norwich City?’ Trevor shook his head. ‘Well, good luck with that, mate. Good luck with that, because let’s face it, you are going to need it.’

  Ken, Charlie and Trevor all spoke with the same kind of southeastern accent as Michelle, as did Michelle’s mother Kath, but something Harry noticed was that the men’s accent was much more pronounced than the women’s. This was especially obvious with Trevor, to the point that he almost seemed to be parodying his own way of speaking, as if his deliberate intention was to come over as common and uncouth. He remembered noticing Phil and Richard’s voices becoming posher when they were angry, as if, like animals facing a threat, they were trying to make themselves as big as possible. And it seemed to him that these men were doing the same kind of thing, not by making themselves posher – that wasn’t on their menu of options – but by making themselves rougher and tougher instead.

  Harry imagined they would have done this anyway, because it seemed to him to be a thing that certain kinds of working-class men just did, like spitting, or riding a push-bike ironically with your legs splayed open as if to make space for your enormous balls. But he felt sure all the same that they were laying it on extra thick because of his presence. They could tell he was better off and better-educated than them and higher in social rank, and they felt the need to even the balance.

  The funny thing was that it actually worked. That middle-class fear of inauthenticity, that anxiety about being so refined as to have lost all contact with the solid earth, meant that he was actually quite vulnerable to these men’s habitual posture of rough, blokeish masculinity. He found them very limited as company, he was quickly bored by what they had to say, but just as Michelle had seemed small in the Tate Modern, here in Kath’s former council house in Breckham, Harry felt small.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Harry said. ‘Norwich aren’t doing that well at all lately, are they? But you know how it is, I was born in Norwich and I’ve supported the Canaries since I was a kid, so I’m kind of stuck with them, aren’t I? What’s your team, Trevor?’

  ‘Me? West Ham, mate! West Ham till I die!’ A kind of sweaty defiance came into Trevor’s voice as he spoke, and his eyes seemed to gleam, as if (as Harry sourly puts it later) ‘loyalty to a football club really was a thing to be proud of, on some sort of continuum with, say, attacking an enemy machine-gun nest’.

  Harry smiled. ‘West Ham? That was an amazing goal Carroll scored a couple of weeks ago.’

  Trevor shook his head, not to contradict Harry but rather to convey that he hadn’t spoken with anything like sufficient vehemence. ‘You don’t get any better than Carroll. I don’t care what anyone says. He’s a proper, old-fashioned centre forward. He’s bloody brilliant!’

  ‘You blokes not planning to eat anything?’ Michelle called out and Harry gratefully hurried over to the table to pile up a plate and open another can of beer. He hoped that this would also be an opportunity to get into conversation with the women, preferably instead of the men, or at least as well as them. Jules seemed lively and bright and he knew that Michelle was especially fond of her, and though Kath and Michelle’s sister Jen didn’t offer very exciting conversational prospects, they would certainly be more relaxing company than Trevor.

  But it seemed that Trevor had latched on to him. ‘This fucking government’s a joke, isn’t it?’ he said, moving into place in front of him. He tore off a chunk of chicken and washed it down with a swig of beer. ‘They’re just taking the piss.’

  ‘I’m not a fan of them myself,’ Harry offered carefully, not certain what aspect of the government’s behaviour Trevor was referring to.

  ‘The British people have spoken,’ Trevor said, ‘and their job is to get on and do what we fucking told them to do.’

  ‘They’re taking their time about it, aren’t they?’ said Charlie’s dad Ken, who had piled up his plate and come to join the other men.

  ‘We should have been out by now,’ Charlie chipped in. ‘It’s doing my head in, to be honest.’

  Oddly, and slightly menacingly, Trevor was grinning. ‘They’re dragging their feet on purpose. They’re traitors to the British people, if you want my opinion. We ought to line them up and shoot the lot of th
em.’

  ‘Too bloody right,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Well, I have to say I voted Remain,’ Harry said.

  Ken and Charlie glanced uneasily at one another. Trevor roared with laughter.

  ‘You should see your face, Harry!’ he guffawed, giving Harry a friendly pat on the arm. ‘Don’t look so worried, mate! I’m not going to shoot you! You’re allowed to vote for whatever you want. It’s a free country. And if you’d won, well, fair enough, that would be it. But your side lost, didn’t they? And our side won.’

  ‘I think the government accepts that, but the detail of it is really quite—’

  ‘Detail!’ Trevor was still grinning. ‘Don’t give me detail! That’s just an excuse, mate. Just leave! Just fucking leave and get it over with. That’s what people voted for.’

  ‘I just think it’s a bit more complicated than—’

  Jules came to offer them the plate of chicken thighs. ‘You’re not going on about Brexit again, Dad? Sorry, Harry, he’s completely obsessed with it!’

  ‘No worries. Most of my friends are, too!’

  Jules laughed. ‘We’ll all be glad when it’s over, eh?’

  And to Harry’s dismay, she moved away again.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In the morning, Michelle and Harry took Pongo for a walk in the forest.

  Michelle was uneasy. She’d seen the strain on Harry’s face the whole of the previous evening, and she’d been forced to see her family through his eyes: Jen passive and pathetic, her brother loutish and overbearing.

  ‘I’m sorry Trevor had a go at you about Brexit. He’s like a dog with a bone once he gets going.’

  Harry squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. You should hear some of my friends.’

  ‘Are they really as bad as that?’

  ‘Just as bad but on the other side. Don’t worry about it, Michelle.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, but as she told her diary later, ‘How could I not worry about it when I could see he was? He’d been tense in the party. He’d been tense in bed afterwards. And he was still tense in the forest the next day, even though he was trying to cover it up. It was obvious what he was thinking. He was thinking what a bunch of peasants we are, and did he really want to be a part of a family like ours.’

  ‘Trev’s heart’s in the right place,’ she said.

  Harry smiled and nodded but didn’t answer and Michelle wondered whether it was really even true, that thing about Trevor’s heart that she and her mother and sister always repeated. Trevor wasn’t an actively malicious person, it was true, but he was a self-centred, narcissistic man, who treated women like servants, and fell out with them when they showed signs of having an agenda of their own, a man who thought he was entitled to strong opinions about things he knew nothing about, with little self-awareness, and almost no interest in the contents of other people’s heads.

  A hawk soared above them, slipping sideways in the wind, under a heavy grey sky.

  ‘He is really thick, though,’ Michelle said.

  Harry laughed. ‘He’s not the sharpest pencil in the box, I can see, but that’s not a crime. Some people are brighter than others and an awful lot of people aren’t very bright at all. That’s just how it works. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether you’re a good or bad person. I know some very bright people who are absolute shits.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t got to do with whether you’re a good or bad person. Mum isn’t that bright either, but she’s the kindest, gentlest person I know.’

  ‘She does seem nice,’ Harry said – but without great enthusiasm, Michelle couldn’t help noticing, and she saw through his eyes an anxious downtrodden little old woman with very fragile self-esteem and almost no interests apart from her ornaments and her cats and her grandchildren.

  ‘And who am I kidding?’ she thought. ‘It’s not really a case of seeing her though Harry’s eyes at all. It’s me being forced to see things I’d see myself if I hadn’t made up my mind not to notice them.’

  ‘And Jen’s nice too,’ Harry said after a few seconds, perhaps realizing that if he didn’t volunteer opinions of his own, he’d put Michelle into the position of having to list her family members one by one.

  ‘Ken and Charlie seem like nice chaps too,’ he added. ‘Charlie seems to take after your mum. Very gentle.’

  Lumbering along ahead of them, Pongo paused to sniff something and cock his leg over it.

  ‘He is gentle,’ she said. ‘It’s funny. He collects army medals and he’s fascinated by war and all of that, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘And of course Jules is delightful,’ Harry said. ‘Not least because she looks a lot like you. I gather she’s starting university next September.’

  They were walking past Michelle’s favourite spot by that grassy clearing, where she liked to sit and think and have a smoke. She wondered whether to point her tree out to him, but decided against it. What could it possibly mean to him, after all, or to anyone else except for her? It was just one more tree like all the others, at the edge of patch of a grass. And so Harry walked by it with no inkling that he’d been in the presence of a kind of holy place.

  ‘Mum is kind and gentle,’ she said. ‘But my dad treated her like shit. Funny thing is, she misses him horribly. It’s five years since he passed and she really hasn’t got over it. We all try and look after her. She’d do anything for us, absolutely anything! If you needed an outfit for school or something, she’d stay up all night. But I was horrible to her when I was a kid. All the things my dad said, I’d say to her as well. And if she asked me to do something and I didn’t fancy it, I’d just ignore her. I’d walk away from her and do whatever I wanted, and bloody Dad would back me up. I must have made her life absolutely fucking miserable.’

  ‘But that’s normal,’ Harry said. ‘I was mean to my parents, too. Teenagers are like that.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ They’d been walking separately but she reached for his hand. ‘So . . . ’ she said. ‘What do you think, Harry? Do you think you could cope with them?’

  ‘Your family? Yes, of course I could. They’re good people.’

  She looked up at him, studying his face sceptically. She’d noticed that, throughout this conversation, he’d been putting on a cheerful voice that was slightly too bright and positive to be real.

  ‘It was lovely to meet them, Michelle,’ he repeated, turning to look at her and almost managing to rid his voice of that artificial brightness. ‘I haven’t got such a big family, of course, but I’ve spoken to Ellie about you meeting up with her and Phil and the boys. My nephew Nathan’s rock group is doing a big gig in a couple of weeks and she suggested we go and see them with her and Phil, then go on and have something to eat afterwards. How does that sound? I’ve seen Nathan’s band before and they’re actually pretty good.’

  She nodded. ‘It sounds great. I just hope they like me more than you liked my family.’

  He stopped and turned to face her. They were surrounded by birch trees and bracken laced with spider’s webs.

  ‘I did like them, Michelle. I wouldn’t want to spend all my time with them, I admit. We haven’t got enough in common. But then I wouldn’t have wanted to spend all my time with Janet’s family either. I definitely wouldn’t, in fact. Her parents are really hard work and always have been. But that doesn’t matter, does it? I don’t have to be with your family all the time, do I? It’s you I want to be with, and we get on fine, don’t we?’

  She slipped her arms round him under his coat. ‘You know when you said you’d like us to have a baby? Did you really mean that? Or was it just a nice thought at the time?’

  ‘I completely meant it, Michelle! I can’t think of anything I’d like more than to make a baby with you.’

  She glanced downwards for a moment, and then looked back up at him and laughed. ‘You like the idea of making a baby with me, Harry, I can certainly tell that. But would you really want to live with me, and have my mum as your kid’s gran, and Trevor a
s their uncle?’

  He looked down at her in silence for a moment, and it seemed to Michelle that the fondness in his eyes flickered for a moment, like an electric lamp flickers when it’s got a faulty connection to the mains. It struck her that most of the time when he looked at her, he clothed her in his mind with a certain idea of who she was that he felt he loved, but in those moments when the light flickered, she turned back into a stranger.

  And then it happened to her as well. She saw him as a stranger: a slightly weak man, full of insecurities, who didn’t quite have the confidence to make a decision as to who he was and then stick to it. What did they really have in common?

  ‘We’re not strangers any more,’ Harry insisted, as if he could hear her thoughts. ‘I know you. I don’t just know what you look like and how you behave when you want me to like you. I’ve seen . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . I’ve seen the challenge which life has set you. I know what shape it is and how you battle away at it and won’t let it go. Of course I want to live with you. Of course I want to be your baby’s dad.’

  ‘Where would we live?’

  Harry kissed her. ‘We’ll come up with something.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She studied his face. ‘It’s a bit mad talking like this, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not even two months since we went out for lunch in that pub.’

  ‘But we’re in the middle of our lives. We haven’t got time to hang around. I really love you, you know. I’ve loved you pretty much from the first time we met.’

  ‘But, Harry, you’ve said that and taken it back, and then said it again and taken it back again. I’m not calling you a liar. I know you mean it when you say it, and when you mean it, it’s lovely. But I wonder if you can really see me or just an idea of me you have in your mind.’