But that was in the past and no longer applied. He could suit himself from now on. In fact, why not take a few days away from London right now, go up to the Norfolk coast with his sketchpad and paints, and try to generate a few ideas? He booked himself a room in a pub in the village of Blakeney. It was an hour or so away from Norwich where he’d grown up, and, during their childhood, his parents had owned a small terraced house there as a second home, where he and Ellie had spent countless holidays and weekends.
I have been able to reconstruct his likely route from his home in the north of London to Blakeney via the then M11 motorway, and then the A11, the A14 and a number of smaller roads. The M11 still exists today – those old roads will be there for many thousands of years – but of course it’s no longer used for its original purpose. In fact, for a considerable proportion of its length, the western side of the old M11 now forms the southern end of the No 5 China– England Friendship Radial Vactrain tube, while part of the eastern carriageway has become the straggling linear settlement known as Eleven Town, which explains its curious name.
But there’s plenty of footage still accessible to a professional like myself of what these highways were like in Harry’s day. And I’ve watched, almost hypnotized, as, second by second, torrents of metal and rubber hurtle past, three streams in one direction and three in the other, cars and trucks weaving back and forth, while all of them bullet forwards at 70 miles an hour, propelled by the fossil hydrocarbons that, in every single vehicle, are exploding thirty times a second in their rows of cylinders while the exhaust pipes drip incontinently and spurt out smoke. How many hundreds of thousands of litres of fuel must have been burnt on that road every day? But the cars hurtle on regardless.
The latter part of the journey took him off those big busy roads on to smaller, winding ones, passing through woods and farmland, villages and small towns, until the coast came into view. At that time, the village of Blakeney sat at the edge of the dry land, with a wide expanse of marsh between it and the sea. The marsh, with its grey-green vegetation and its labyrinthine creeks, was, as Harry saw it, neither land nor sea but another category again, a place where larks coexisted with crabs, and crumbling houseboats lay stranded in banks of flowers. Grey creeks wound through it and when the tide was out, millions of molluscs and worms waited beneath the soft grey mud for the water to wash back in, when they could extend once again their various siphons and tentacles and feathery limbs to graze on the fresh plankton that each tide delivered. And the molluscs and worms in turn were food for birds. Gulls, ducks, geese, egrets, oystercatchers, herons, curlews, terns in their thousands thronged the creeks, honking and squawking.
There is little left these days of that in-between realm. Storm erosion and rising seas have swept almost all of it away, leaving only a few mudflats that emerge when the tide is very low. Of the birds and shelled creatures Harry saw, many are now extinct, and the village has seen a similar decline. In Harry’s day, delicatessens, restaurants, gift shops and art galleries served the prosperous visitors who came, as Harry’s family had done, to sail or watch birds or play on the beaches, but when I visited the place, there were no holidaymakers, only rather wretched local people – many of them old-fashioned white people of the kind who burn in the sun until they look like boiled ham – trying to eke out a living from nothing very much at all. I only stayed about an hour before I felt the need to get away from the constant pestering of beggars, hawkers and would-be guides.
Harry had gone there to paint, but he didn’t do much painting. His mood was too unsettled. Instead, he went on long, fast walks, along the marsh and across it, out on to the wide beaches, and back inland through the woods and villages. One day he got chatting to a woman about his own age on the marsh, an amateur artist like himself, with an easel and watercolours, trying, not very successfully, to capture some sense of that enormous and nearly featureless expanse on a little rectangle of cartridge paper. He sat down beside her and they talked about painting, and about the area, and had what Harry calls ‘the now-standard groan about Brexit: Never needed to happen . . . Colossal blunder . . . Internal problems in the Tory party . . . Referendums not suitable to questions of this kind . . . Public not qualified to decide . . . Lamentable lack of respect for evidence and expertise . . . Enlightenment values under threat . . . Rise of the populist right . . . ’
He learnt that she was an arts administrator whose home in London was only a mile or so away from his new flat. She was divorced and had a son – Alex, aged eleven – who was staying with his father while she came up here for a painting trip. He liked her. She was warm and lively, and it was delightfully easy to get a laugh out of her. She was pleasant to look at too, and rather clearly very much liked the look of him. (All the photos I’ve found in the social media archive confirm that Harry really was quite a good-looking man.) ‘I’m Letty, by the way,’ she told him, after they’d been talking for the better part of twenty minutes, and the conversation hovered around the possibility that one or other of them would suggest they meet up again for a drink or a meal. But something made Harry back away from this – he describes the feeling, a little oddly, as ‘claustrophobia’ – and I suppose she picked up on his reservations and held back herself because in the end he carried on his walk with a friendly but non-committal, ‘Nice talking to you, Letty. Hope we’ll run into each other again.’
Later, writing his diary in a pub after a meal he’d eaten alone, Harry considered what might have unfolded if he and Letty had spent an evening together. ‘First there’d be the getting-to-knoweach-other phase, and the best behaviour,’ he writes. ‘And then either the embarrassment of realizing you really don’t have that much in common, or, if all is well (and probably more likely), the discovery that you indeed have lots, and all the silly elation that goes with that. (Silly because why wouldn’t you have a lot in common? Human beings come in a finite number of varieties!) And if the latter applies, we’d no doubt have met again and then, all being well, in due course and probably quite soon, there’d be sex and so on. Whooey! How exciting! Getting naked with someone new!’
This really was an exciting prospect, actually, in spite of his efforts to make light of it. He’d not had sex with anyone for quite a while.
‘But pretty soon the best-behaviour phase would be over,’ he wrote, ‘and then there’d be the phase of noticing irritating differences: the quirks and foibles, the idiosyncratic needs, the peculiar friends, the difficult relatives, the hang-ups about intimacy, the lack of synchronicity around sex, the different attitudes to money and standards of cleanliness and TV watching, the relationships with exes, all of which would have to be painfully negotiated and compromised over. Dear God, how daunting! How dull! I feel weary of the whole business before I even start.’
Yet he wondered why he was so resistant, given that he was quite sure he didn’t want to remain single for ever. He wasn’t quite ready, he decided. That was all. It was just too soon to be thinking about things like this.
Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it struck him that, although having to negotiate differences all over again might feel wearisome, his biggest concern was almost the opposite. As he’d continued his walk after meeting Letty (who he had liked, after all, and whose company he’d enjoyed) he hadn’t been able to rid himself for some time of a kind of distaste for the little self-affirming worlds that people with similar backgrounds constructed together around themselves. Relationships, friendships and friendship groups, tribes and classes: they were a shield against the void, of course, and yet they involved so many compromises. And it was the prospect of likeness, the idea of discovering things in common, that made him feel bored in anticipation. The reason an architect could meet an arts administrator on the marsh and immediately recite together a set of views that they shared was not the result of an extraordinary coincidence. It was because they were part of the same tribe, and had been socialized into that tribe, with its own particular set of manners, tastes, beliefs and priorities t
hat both had learnt and internalized. For some reason he was weary of that tribe.
‘But then again,’ he concedes ruefully in his diary, ‘if Letty walked in now and we had a few drinks and got talking, I would almost certainly have a much more pleasant evening than I’m actually going to have on my own, so I’m probably a fool.’
He was forty-six, he had no children. Much of his energy over the last ten years had gone into designing nice extensions for the already nice houses of reasonably prosperous people like himself. Whatever his fantasies about becoming a painter, deep down he doubted if he really had the drive or the patience, and he had serious doubts too, in spite of his technical competence, as to whether he really even had the talent. He had no other marketable skills other than designing buildings, so what choice did he have but to carry on living the life he already lived, among the kind of people who lived in the same sort of way?
He’d brought a book with him, a novel about people in a world much like his own, and he tried to read it but gave up after a page when he realized that his eyes were just scanning the words without taking in their meaning. He briefly considered buying some cigarettes, but managed to resist. Instead, he took out his phone and, connecting to the wireless link to the World Wide Web that the pub provided, he began to scroll through the stream of tweets which that algorithm had deemed suited to him. He plugged himself, in other words, into his feed.
That kept him going pretty much until he was too tired for anything but sleep.
SIX
Two days after meeting Letty on the marsh, towards the end of the afternoon, Harry headed back towards London. But outside the small south Norfolk town of Breckham, his car developed a fault – a problem with the ‘alternator’, as it turned out – and he had to pull over and call a roadside recovery service. By the time the repairman got to him, it was after six o’clock. The repairman couldn’t fix the fault himself because he didn’t have a replacement alternator of the appropriate type, so all he could do was tow Harry’s car to a garage in Breckham, which would be closed until the morning. Harry walked into the centre of the town. In the market square there were one or two handsome Georgian buildings and some older houses faced with knapped flint in the traditional Norfolk style. There were small- and medium-sized branches of many of the various chain stores you’d find in a larger town. There was a tiny museum. The place looked slightly run-down. A couple of shops were boarded up. There was a Pound Shop, a desolate-looking bookmaker’s. There had been more money here once than there was now.
He took out his phone. He needed to make a decision about his evening. He could get a train to London, be back at his flat by ten and come back in the morning to sort out the car, or he could check into a hotel. The first option didn’t appeal to him. It would involve changing trains at Cambridge and again in London itself, meaning that, with the return journey, he’d spend maybe five hours or more sitting on trains and standing on station platforms just so that he could sleep in his own bed. The hotel option didn’t appeal to him either: he’d always hated the kind of hotels you found in little towns like this, with their tired red carpets, their overcooked vegetables, and their pretensions to a kind of gentility that was already dated when Harry was born. Yet he was mildly interested in the town itself, one of the countless small towns of England, neither desperately poor nor particularly prosperous: a place with not much happening and nothing very much in its neighbourhood other than forestry plantations, the odd pig farm, a couple of American airbases and a bunch of other small towns of similar size and character: Thetford, Mildenhall, Brandon, Diss, Soham.
It was a town in which most people would have voted for Brexit. That was obvious. He would have known that just from the look of it, even if he hadn’t recently reminded himself of the electoral map of the east of England and, when he tried to imagine living here, he immediately felt suffocated. Along the pedestrianized high street with its brick clock tower built to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, its wrought-iron bandstand, its heavy, woody, slightly run-down pubs, he noticed a shop that specialized in stocking food for Eastern European immigrants, something that had become common enough on British streets over the last decade for him to have learnt the Polish word for ‘shop’.
He had an ‘app’ in his phone – a software tool – that allowed him to find local homeowners who let out rooms to visitors, and he found a house about half a mile from where he was. He called the number and a woman answered. She sounded as if she was in her thirties or forties and spoke with the twangy London-influenced accent of south-eastern England that was sometimes known as Estuary, as opposed to either the distinctive rustic-sounding accent of Norfolk or Harry’s own RP. The room was available, she said, so, pausing to eat some fish and chips on the way, he walked over there.
The house was in an estate originally built by the local government to provide affordable homes for rent. Harry stood across the street from it for a few seconds. As an architect he was always interested in buildings, even when he was a little weary and discouraged, and he looked at the house and its identical neighbours and wondered what it would be like to live all your life in a place like this. Their plain rectangular design was almost wilfully unimaginative, the pale bricks were of the cheapest and least interesting kind, and the one small gesture towards decoration on every house, a sort of panel between the upper and lower windows that was filled with lapped brown tiles, was a tired cliché that surely could never have looked interesting even when it was first invented. It was true that there was no particular reason to think that these houses wouldn’t be at least as comfortable inside as, say, his current flat, but as objects, as elements of the visual world, they offered no nourishment at all.
But did this matter, he wondered, as he crossed the road to ring the doorbell? Was it really a problem for most people that these buildings had nothing to say? And actually was it even true? Was what he saw a thing that people who lived here could see as well, or was it just that he’d been taught since childhood to think like this about these kinds of houses, so different from the large Edwardian semi-detached in Norwich in which he’d grown up?
He heard chimes inside the house. He could see the blue light of a TV flickering in the front room, and hear gusts of studio laughter. He noticed a ‘Take Back Control!’ sticker in a window of the house next door to the left, a small child’s bicycle leaning on the wall beneath it. Then there was movement behind the frosted glass in front of him. A light went on in there, diffracted into stars by the pattern of the glass, and a fragmented approximation to a human form approached the far side of the door. He heard the latch being turned and stepped back a little to give the householder some space.
He wasn’t an especially tall man, but Michelle was half a head shorter than him and very slender. Her hair was dark and straight with a fringe, divided in the middle. Her eyes were light grey and . . . well, Harry’s initial word for them is ‘flayed’, which I found puzzling, but he mentions a kind of wariness that was apparent though she was not in any way unfriendly, and he speaks also of a certain nakedness in her gaze, as if some protective surface layer had been stripped away. She had a small gap between her two front teeth and a narrow but instantly noticeable scar, slightly paler than her otherwise quite brown skin, which started halfway along the right-hand side of her upper lip and extended about a third of the way to her nose. She was wearing jeans and a white, short-sleeved top. Her nails were painted shiny black, and she wore rings on all her fingers. Her smile was slightly asymmetrical, perhaps due to the scar, and, in a rather likeable way, it was also somehow conspiratorial, as if, just by coming face to face, she and Harry had shared some kind of secret. To his surprise (because he wasn’t a teenager any more and not prone to such instant responses) he felt a small but distinct stab of desire.
‘Hi. You must be Harry. Nice to meet you. Shall I show you the room?’ In his diary Harry again notes her south-eastern accent. He doesn’t like to talk about class, but he is very class conscious.
A Dalmatian dog lumbered out of the living room and stood there looking at Harry with large rheumy eyes, its mouth hanging open and its tongue lolling out.
‘Oh yeah, this is Pongo,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re okay with dogs? I did put it on the website that I’ve got him, but people don’t always—’
‘I’m absolutely fine with dogs,’ Harry said. ‘Hello, Pongo.’
The dog stared at him. ‘He’s a rescue dog,’ she said. ‘He’s a bit weird.’
She led Harry upstairs to a small but comfortable bedroom. He told her it was fine and suggested they get the money sorted out. The unusual yellow and brown decor struck him as a bit loud and not entirely to his taste, but it was nicely done and showed some originality and imagination. It wasn’t what he would have expected, and not what he imagined he’d find in the bedrooms of Michelle’s neighbours, though admittedly he had very little experience on which to base this statement. She said she’d leave him to sort himself out and that she’d be in the front room downstairs.
He used her bathroom, and glanced into the two other bedrooms, one of which was very small and being used as a store. He had no sense that anyone other than her was living here. There were strong, bold colours in all three rooms, and a strong, if homespun, sense of design.
Two Tribes Page 4