‘You just want us all to cheer you like we did last week, don’t you, Charlie?’ observed Ben the engineer, who was crueller and less patient than the other men. And for the rest of the journey, Charlie felt his shame prickling in the roots of his hair.
They didn’t dislike him. He knew that. When he met them individually at the plant, they would be perfectly pleasant to him, even Ben, and some could be quite affectionate. Jake, who was also the oldest of them, could be positively paternal. But what saddened him was that all of them could see through him and knew him for what he was, which was to say, nothing special. He didn’t dispute their judgement. It was how his dad and his brothers saw him too, all three of them more able and more worldly than Charlie. Still, it would be nice to find people who saw something else in him – and not just his mum and grandma, who doted on Charlie as the baby of the family, but were generally agreed to be nothing special either.
Charlie and the other men all worked in a small power station on the edge of a forest, where straw and other farm waste were incinerated to generate electricity. Some of the men had responsibility for various pieces of machinery, others for driving the fork-lift trucks that were used for unloading bales of straw from lorries and moving them about the plant. Charlie’s job was mainly sweeping up and scrubbing down. He was heading across to the main building where he’d receive his instructions for the morning when Jake called him back. ‘Don’t take any notice of Ben, Charlie,’ he said, patting him on the arm. ‘He’s a sarky sod. I think it’s great the way you speak out for Brexit. You should be proud of yourself. You’re standing up for your country. You’re standing up for what the people voted for.’
FOUR
Harry emailed his wife Janet and asked to meet. Her response was wary: What are we going to talk about that we haven’t talked about before? Harry had been extremely awkward over the past few months. He’d refused to accept a separation that he hadn’t chosen and he still lived in what had been their home, hating it, but carrying on anyway, all by himself in the rooms of the tastefully renovated house which had, a hundred years ago, housed an entire Edwardian family.
I’m not going to be difficult any more, I promise, he told her. I really do want to move things on.
They met that evening in a pub in a part of London known then as Wood Green. (I’ve looked for the building but it no longer exists. The Wood Green area was badly damaged by street fighting during the Warring Factions.) Harry arrived at 6.50, determined not to irritate his wife by being late. Janet arrived at 7.10. She had a rather long face suited to seriousness – when they first met she’d reminded Harry of the twentieth-century author Virginia Woolf – and as she stood just inside the door, looking round for him in the big, shabby, wood-panelled room, her whole body seemed to him to be braced in anticipation of having to ward off unreasonable demands and unwelcome pressure. When he stood up and called out to her, she approached him uneasily and stood as stiffly as a statue as he greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. He’d already bought her a glass of Merlot and she eyed it without enthusiasm as she sat down. ‘I can’t stop very long,’ she told him. She had grown up in Scotland and still had a trace of a soft middle-class Edinburgh accent.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But I honestly don’t think this needs to take much time.’ He drew a breath. There were so many intense and contradictory emotions wrapped up in the simple fact of being in her presence.
She did that particular kind of shrug that means, ‘I’m in your hands. I have no idea what this is about.’ Harry felt as if he was standing on the bank of a cold river, steeling himself to dive in.
‘Okay, well, I wanted to say first of all that you were quite right about all this, and you were very brave. And I was wrong and a coward.’
She studied his face for several seconds. ‘I suppose you’ve met someone, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t. I haven’t even tried yet.’
She seemed unsure whether to believe him or not. Their last communication had been an exchange of text messages only a couple of weeks ago, and he’d been as difficult and hostile as ever. She couldn’t imagine what else could possibly have brought about such a sudden change of heart.
‘But I’d like to meet someone else,’ he said, ‘and I know you would too. You’re absolutely right. You’ve been right all along. We’ve wasted far too long over this. Danny would always have stood between us in one way or another.’
There were tears in her eyes now, and that brought tears into his.
‘And another thing you’ve always been right about . . . ’ he said. Here he had to pause to collect himself. ‘Another thing you’ve been right about is that what happened to Danny is my fault.’
Harry’s hands were shaking. He’d never conceded this before, never spoken it aloud to anyone at all. Janet had been a very anxious parent and Danny an exceptionally precious, almost miraculous child who’d arrived after many harrowing years of fertility treatment, just at the point when they were thinking of giving up. Janet had worried constantly about his health and often called the doctor. The locum GP who’d been on call that night had suggested that, unless his condition deteriorated, they leave it to the morning before getting Danny seen. Harry had been fine with this, but Janet became convinced that his condition had become worse and wanted to take Danny to a nearby hospital to be checked out. Harry had resisted this.
They could have been seen at the hospital completely free of charge – an extraordinary thing, of course, from our perspective, and pretty much unprecedented in human history – so that, unlike most parents these days, Janet and Harry weren’t faced with the agonizing dilemma as to whether this was the moment to dip into the roll of yuan stowed under their bed, or whether they should hold their savings back for a still more serious emergency in the future. But it was ten past eleven at night, Harry was fed up with Janet’s constant fretting, and he was very tired. He didn’t fancy sitting up for hours, drinking nasty coffee out of cardboard cups under the cold white lights of a hospital waiting room. He told Janet she was being silly and that he’d had enough of these dramas. By the time it had become obvious that their son was very ill indeed, it was too late.
But now, quite unexpectedly, Janet reached out and put her hand over his. ‘Well, the other nine times I insisted on having him checked out, you were right. So you were very unlucky that this was the occasion you finally took your stand. I had a part in this too, Harry. I’d cried wolf once too often. Plus, I’m a grown-up and if I really didn’t agree with you, I could have taken him to the hospital myself.’
These had always been Harry’s defences against the charge that he was to blame for his own son’s death. Just as he’d never accepted responsibility, so she had always denied that her own behaviour had played a part.
Janet laughed. Her hand was still over his and she gave him a friendly squeeze. ‘Look at the pair of us! Blubbing our eyes out together in the middle of a pub!’
Blubbing our eyes out was something of an exaggeration, Harry thought, but his eyes and hers were certainly moist. He took his hand from hers to put it round her shoulders and give her a kiss. She didn’t feel like a statue this time, and she even kissed him back, though she withdrew as quickly as she could without actually being unfriendly.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I hated us being enemies.’
She laughed. ‘You insisted on us being enemies, Harry.’
‘I know.’
‘And yet you also insisted we shouldn’t split up.’
‘I know. It made no sense, did it?’
He studied her face. That sweet seriousness, that intensity. For the first time in many months, or even years, he remembered a time when her Scottish voice had sounded soft and caressing and not prim and taut. A single ember was still glowing even now under all that cold grey ash. Perhaps, after all, they—
‘No, Harry,’ she said, though he hadn’t spoken his thought out loud. She squeezed his hand again. ‘Bless you, but no. Let’s go through with this
, eh? Go through with it as friends, not as enemies. I mean, be honest, we were never that great together, even before Danny. I’ve always been too demanding for you. I’ve always made you feel controlled and overruled. And you’re too pliant for me, and too gentle. I love you for it, don’t misunderstand me, but it drives me nuts. It makes me feel I’ve nothing to kick against. We’d have made the best of it, if Danny had lived. Of course we would. And we wouldn’t have done so badly, I’m sure. But we’ve got a second chance now. It’s the one good thing our tragedy has given us: a chance to start over, now we’re older and understand ourselves so much better than we did when we first met.’
He picked up his wine, turned the glass from side to side in his hand. He knew how often during their marriage he’d privately regretted that the two of them had ended up together, particularly during the miserable years when the programmes of fertility treatment, one after another, had become the focus of their lives and Janet’s consuming obsession. And she was right: controlled and overruled had been exactly how he’d felt. He liked to think he could be assertive when he really needed to be, but should it really have to be such hard work just to hold your own against your life’s partner?
‘You’re right,’ he said finally. After all, this was what had come to him on that drive down to Suffolk, this was what had released him that evening from months of unhappiness: the realization that Janet was right and that the freedom he’d often fantasized about was now actually his. ‘I’m dreadfully sad about it, but you’re right.’
‘I’m sad about it too.’
He took a gulp of wine. ‘Okay. Let’s sort out a divorce, in whatever way turns out to be simplest, and let’s sell the house and split the money fifty-fifty. Do you agree? I’ll find myself a flat, like you did. I hate living in that house anyway. It feels like a mausoleum. To be perfectly honest, I’ve only been hanging on in there out of spite.’
She laughed at that. ‘Well, when you’re ready, Harry, and if you’re sure you’re happy with that, it sounds like a plan. It’s not like either of us needs to support the other financially.’
‘You should take more than half of our savings,’ Harry said, ‘such as they are. Seeing as you earn more than me, and work way harder.’
Janet had been an architect too, but hadn’t felt sufficiently challenged, so she’d built up a business that designed and ran large exhibitions and other public events.
‘Just have a think and tell me how you think we should do it,’ he said. ‘I promise not to be obstructive. And the furniture and stuff . . . Well, apart from my books and the things that came from my parents, I’m happy for you to take whatever you think is fair and leave me the rest.’
She laughed again. ‘There you go, Harry. Pliant. Gentle. You know that never in a million years would I agree to you taking whatever you want.’
He smiled and shrugged. ‘Well, I’ve tried to be stubborn these last few months and look how obnoxious I became as a result. It just doesn’t suit me, does it?’
Later, when he was at home again, Harry felt numb. He called his sister, and she congratulated him, and told him she was sure he’d done the right thing. This was reassuring but it left him even more numb afterwards, because telling her had made it more real. Restless and hollow, he ate most of a tub of chocolate-chip ice cream, somehow unable to stop eating at the point of mild nausea and for several minutes afterwards. He tried to watch TV. He knew the numbness was dammed-up tears, but though he screwed up his face a few times and tried to force them out, he couldn’t find the trigger to release them. He was briefly tempted to go out and buy cigarettes but managed to resist the impulse. Instead, sitting in front of the television without taking anything in, he began to play with his phone.
There he is, two and a half centuries ago, at one end of a large sofa in his living room. The heavy curtains are drawn, and the only light in the room is an electric lamp in the corner to the right of the window, and the large TV in front of him that makes the walls and ceiling flicker with its constantly fluctuating bluish glow. There are shelves of books behind him, framed pictures on all four walls, and on the mantelpiece, in a silver frame, stands a large black-andwhite photograph of the cheerful little toddler who died five years ago. To the left of the window an elegant ceramic vase stands on its own small table, and above it hangs a little antique portrait, done in enamels, of a man in his middle years who is dressed, like a Jane Austen character, in the style of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century: a black double-breasted coat, white cravat, sideburns and curly black hair. It is Harry’s great-great-great-greatgrandfather, Gideon Providence Roberts, the bright, energetic farm labourer who, by training as a lawyer and then marrying the daughter of his wealthy patron, had established the Roberts family in the ranks of the respectable classes. Harry has never been fond of the picture but his father gave it to him and he keeps it out of a vague sense of loyalty.
Gideon looks out at his descendant with an expression that is amused, complacent and a little contemptuous, but Harry isn’t noticing him. His face is completely blank as he manipulates the smaller screen in his hand with his thumb, occasionally glancing up at the TV, and then turning back again to the phone: a perfect specimen of early Twenty-First-Century Man, absent from his own body, dislocated from physical space, engrossed instead in a kind of conceptual substitute for space that an electronic mechanism has assembled for him.
He’s looking at Twitter, a ‘social media platform’ of the time. It provides him with a constant stream of little comments, short clips and images, collectively called ‘tweets’, that, on the basis of what it’s learnt about Harry’s interests and preferences, an algorithm has pulled together for him from the vast Niagara of tweets that pours constantly into the platform in scores of languages and from literally every continent on the planet. His timeline, this little stream is called, or, more expressively, his feed. Like chicken pellets, as Harry observes somewhere. Or pigswill.
And this strange construct allows him simultaneously to inhabit a cave of deep solitude as he’s doing now – blank-faced, indifferent to his posture or body language, barely in the room at all – while at the same time participating in a conversation with a large number of fellow-creatures, many of whom have never physically met but who are now simultaneously cooperating in validating one another and competing against one another to be the most entertaining and upto-date, and, from time to time, taking part in skirmishes with other, rival groups from which trophies are brought back for purposes of mockery or outrage. (‘Can’t believe that anyone is still saying this in 2016.’ ‘They call us snowflakes, and then they cry over this!’)
But at the moment Harry’s not thinking about any of this in a critical way. What Twitter is doing for him now is simply allowing him to forget his own corporeal existence. He’s done this a lot over the last eight months. By his own reckoning he’s been spending an average of two or three hours a day on it over that period, a total of between 480 and 720 hours, though he’s confessed this to no one but the pages of his diary.
People on Twitter are talking about Brexit, of course. Almost all of those he follows are Remainers, and from them flows a steady stream of anger and distress about the dishonest campaign, the unnecessary vote, the mess that has ensued, the villainy of the politicians who made it happen, the spectacle that the country is making of itself, the saint-like patience of the European Union . . . The same litany, in other words, that was rehearsed around Richard and Karina’s dinner table in Suffolk. Occasionally Leavers intrude. ‘You lost, get over it!’ they say, or, ‘Why can’t you get behind the country?’ Often these interlopers display a union flag or a flag of St George and sometimes their language is very ugly: ‘Traitors! Enemies of the People! . . . You ought to be strung up!’ Invariably a spat breaks out. The Leavers point to the popular vote as the source of their legitimacy, the Remainers trot out, one by one, all the many very good reasons why this particular vote didn’t count. Insults are thrown. Each side compares their oppon
ents to the Nazis of seventy years ago. Then they each ‘block’ the other, so they won’t have to hear from each other again, while the people who’ve been attacked are commiserated with and reassured that they’ve done brilliantly and are on the side of good.
Harry didn’t join in. He didn’t have the energy. But for forty-five minutes, neither did he have the energy to withdraw. When he finally brought the Twitter session to an end, he was only able to do it by throwing the phone across the sofa as if the object itself had been controlling him.
‘We loved each other,’ he told himself, turning off the TV and standing up. On the wall opposite the window hung a large round mirror. He walked over to it. ‘We loved each other,’ he repeated, looking into the dark eyes of his own dim reflection. ‘We each thought the other was good and beautiful and fun to be with, and we got married, imagining a happy life together, and children. But our only child died, and now our marriage has died as well.’
And finally he wept. This made him feel a whole lot better. He took himself up to bed and, after writing his diary for perhaps half an hour, fell into a deep, comforting sleep.
FIVE
As he’d anticipated, Harry’s moment of elation didn’t last but, in spite of much private agonizing on his part, he and Janet pressed ahead with formalizing their separation. They spoke to solicitors about a divorce. They discussed the details of the carve-up of their possessions, and Harry mostly kept his promise to let Janet decide what was fair. They put their house on the market for a substantial sum, not far short of thirty times the average national wage at the time. It had been a wreck when they bought it, and the two of them – both architects, after all – had restored and extended it very elegantly together.
Harry found a rented flat, so as to give himself time to look around for somewhere to buy. He thought he’d take some time off work and contemplated reducing his working hours on a more permanent basis. He’d always said that what he really wanted to do was paint. In the years after Danny, Janet had immersed herself in her work, setting up the new business which, after only a year, was yielding a considerably higher income than Harry had ever earned. In that context, the idea of him cutting down on work so as to pursue what was, after all, only a hobby had always felt too indulgent to seriously contemplate, even though he muttered to himself that they didn’t need all that money and he would rather she slowed down and relaxed.
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