Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ‘But this is all too quick, isn’t it? We need time to think. Time to work out where we might be going. Sex is like a drug. It makes you want more and more of it, and—’

  ‘And stops you thinking straight?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  He was still holding one of her hands in his lap. She moved it slightly so the back of it brushed against his growing erection through the fabric of his trousers, and gave a little snort of laughter. ‘And you’re going to think straight in that state, are you?’ She opened the door of the car. ‘Come into my house, Harry. If we’re making a mistake, well, we’re making a mistake and we’ll just have to deal with it. But you can’t spend all your life telling yourself you can’t have what you want.’

  She didn’t offer him tea or coffee, but led him straight up to the bedroom. She pulled off her polo-neck top while he threw off his jacket, and they stood there and kissed, him in shirtsleeves, her in her bra. When he began to fumble at the zipper on her leather skirt, she dragged him down on to the bed.

  ‘Do you want another child?’ Harry asked her suddenly, pulling back to breathe.

  ‘What? Jesus Christ, Harry, I thought you were the one who didn’t want to move too quickly!’

  ‘I didn’t mean now! I meant, in general. Is that your plan in life?’

  ‘Yeah, I would like to try again.’ She laughed. ‘You know . . . if the right guy was to come along one day.’

  ‘I love the idea of making a baby with you.’

  ‘Well, it’s not going to happen now, mate,’ she told him. But when they joined together, there was a new intensity to it and she pulled him into her as deep as she possibly could, as if to ensure that every drop of him would find its way into her womb.

  ‘But all this will fade soon enough,’ he thought, as she cuddled up against him afterwards, purring and kissing his neck. ‘This bliss. This lovely, simple, sensual heaven. This is just the honey that nature dishes out to make us do what it wants. Then it makes us hungry again and sets us back to work.’

  Michelle frowned. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Do you actually want me?’ he asked her.

  ‘Of course I want you, Harry! I’d have thought that was obvious!’

  ‘Me as me, I mean. My body, my mind. Not me being an architect and going to Cambridge and all that shit, but just me.’

  She sat up abruptly. ‘What the fuck are you saying, Harry? Are you suggesting I’m just after your money?’

  ‘No, of course not. You’re not like that at all. I was just wondering what it really is that draws us to each other, and whether it’s real and something that will last once we’ve seen through each other. Because we will see through each other, you know. That’s how it works. We’ll discover we’re just two human beings.’

  But Michelle was still working through her initial reaction. ‘Just after your money? Because, let’s face it, one thing a car like yours really says is that this is a guy who knows how to flash the cash!’

  His car genuinely bothered her, Harry realized, in one of those fleeting insights that are swept away immediately by more pressing matters. This wasn’t just a joke. It seemed perverse to her that a man in a prestigious and well-paid job would own such an unimpressive vehicle.

  He reached for her hand but she pulled it away.

  ‘I could ask you that exact same question, Harry. Do you really want me? My mind, my body. Well, actually forget the body part. I know you want my body. But do you want me as a person? Or is it just a bit of a thrill for you to leave that posh world of yours up in London and go with a woman who’s common and talks like I do?’

  ‘It is a thrill. I don’t deny it. I’m tired of my own kind of people. Our self-importance, our self-righteousness. It’s much more than a thrill, though. I love the way you aren’t like that. But I’m wondering what you and I would be like when we were too tired for sex, and we knew all there was to know about each other. What would we talk about, do you think?’

  ‘Well, what do you talk about with anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know. Politics. Art. Books. Movies. Football. People we know. Crap mostly, I suppose.’

  She started pulling on clothes. ‘I’ll make us some tea.’

  When he followed her downstairs she had placed two mugs on the breakfast bar.

  ‘You worry too much,’ she told him. ‘If we enjoy seeing each other, then we can see each other. If we stop enjoying it, we can stop. That how it usually works, isn’t it? Where’s the problem? Why do you have to try and figure it all out in advance?’ She put on her super-posh voice, ‘“Oh, but you and I are so different, Michelle!” I mean, for fuck’s sake, Harry, if that really bothers you, then we can end this now. And if it doesn’t bother you, why do you have to keep on and on and on about it all the fucking time?’

  ‘I do, don’t I? It must be really annoying.’

  ‘It is. So do you want us to meet again?’

  ‘Oh God, yes, Michelle! Very much! I couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing you again.’

  She shook her head. ‘You are weird, Harry.’

  ‘It’s true. I am weird. You’re making me see that about myself. But that being so, do you want to see me again?’

  ‘Of course I do, you twat.’

  ‘I’ll go home when I’ve drunk this tea,’ he told her. ‘But why don’t you come down to London next time? I don’t know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to do, but I was thinking maybe we could go to an art gallery or something? I can see from the way you’ve done up your house that you’ve got an eye for colour and design.’

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ she said, but there was suspicion in her voice, and she frowned.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’ve seen those movies,’ she said. That sudden coldness had come back. She would be quite frightening, he realized, when she was really angry.

  ‘What movies?’

  ‘Those ones where some ignorant peasant from the sticks gets taken up by a kind posh person, and suddenly her eyes are opened and she sees what she’s been missing, and she goes to uni or something, against all the odds, and ends up becoming a famous writer or something, all thanks to him.’

  He was about to break in. ‘No, let me finish,’ she told him. ‘You need to hear this. I’m just me, all right? There are a lot of things in my life I’m sad about, but I’m fine with being this kind of person. I like doing my customers’ hair and nails and chatting to them about their cats and their grandchildren and the latest Strictly. I’m happy living where my mum and my sister and my brother live. I’ve not been sitting here waiting for some fucking knight in armour to come up from London and turn me into someone like you.’

  ‘I don’t want to change you into anything. I like you just as you are.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s good. Because you’d be disappointed otherwise.’

  ‘But I thought you might like looking at pictures. It’s a way of spending time together. Something to talk about, you know? Like going to the movies, except you don’t have to keep quiet for two hours and sit in the dark. Of course, if you prefer, I could just do the bowerbird thing and boast about my car.’

  She laughed. ‘That car? You’ve got to be kidding.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lucy greeted the concierge by name – she had known her for several years – and passed on through the hallway to the glass lift. It rose through a shaft that was also glass, so she could see the dark boats passing over the glowing water below her, and the city’s towers and bridges glittering with light. She never tired of that sight.

  Lucy was twenty-eight and a lecturer in political science at the London School of Economics and she was visiting her father who lived, with his second wife and their son, in an apartment on the eighth floor of this building. It had its own balcony garden, and even a small tree, thirty metres above the river bank. Lucy was very bright, and knew it. She was one of the rising stars in her field, but she was aware of the importance of building a reputation beyo
nd her institution and beyond her own academic peer group, and was a frequent, funny, acerbic contributor to several social media platforms. ‘Scholar. Feminist. Politics nerd. Ski fanatic,’ read the self-description on her Twitter home page. ‘I block bores, bigots, bots, bastards, Brexiteers, etc. Preferred pronouns: She/Her’. She had nearly 15,000 followers.

  Her father greeted her at the door and they embraced warmly. She had his red hair and his green eyes though not his short legs, which meant that she was nearly a head taller than he was. The two of them were very close. They shared the same restless energy, the same intolerance of fools, the same bewildered impatience with the kind of people who fretted and dithered and refused to grab hold of their lives. She knew he was immensely proud of her.

  In the creamy living room, with its long curved sofas, Lucy’s stepmother, Karina, was laying out bowls of interesting and unusual nibbles: dried meats, peas coated in something blue, deep-fried plantain chips . . .

  ‘Lucy, you’re here!’ Karina exclaimed. She and Lucy had never had a very close relationship, but they got along, and they kissed each other amiably enough. Her brother Greg came in – her half-brother strictly speaking, and eleven years younger than her – greeted her a little absently, grabbed a handful of the nibbles and retired to his room. Like Lucy, and like his father and mother, he had a tremendous capacity for focused work, and he was obviously in the middle of something. By himself in his room, with his headphones, his laptop and his electronic keyboard, he would work away at ideas for songs for hours at a stretch.

  On three of its four sides, the living room had triple-glazed glass in place of solid walls. At the far end, the glass could be slid back to join the apartment to the small Babylonian garden where that little Japanese tree stood in its blue porcelain urn. To the right the glowing river and the brightly lit towers on the northern bank were framed and made brilliant by the night. To the left, in the neighbouring apartment block, small figures moved, as if in an open doll’s house, among the miniature lamps and furnishings of their own softly illuminated glass-walled rooms.

  The guests began to arrive. First was a Labour MP, from the centrist pro-EU wing of the party (she was a friend of Karina’s from her previous career in the law), and her partner who was an analyst for a merchant bank. Next was an American-born economist who played squash with Richard, along with his textile designer Spanish wife. Then another friend of Karina’s turned up, the director of what was normally described as a ‘left-leaning think tank’ and his husband who was an IT entrepreneur. After that came the couple who lived in the flat below – a fund manager and her lawyer husband – followed by a sociology professor who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Richard had met him at a party.

  ‘Karina and I would like very much for this to become a regular thing,’ Richard said, as he moved round the seated guests with opened bottles of white and red wine clasped in his large hairy hands. ‘Our idea was that this should be a discussion group, a kind of book group if you like, but not necessarily focused on books. We might look at a book sometimes, of course, but we might simply discuss a topic chosen by one of us. Or we could ask people to come and speak with us, in this case my brilliant daughter Lucy. Whatever the format, the focus would be on our current political crisis, but with a view to exploring longer-term solutions, rather than indulging in yet another “Isn’t Brexit awful?” sort of gathering, which we’ve probably all had enough of already.’

  ‘But isn’t it awful!’ the textile designer said in her charming Spanish accent. ‘Isn’t it worse than awful? Let’s at least say that before we begin!’

  Lucy watched them with her bright, interested eyes, checking them out in turn and noticing, for instance, that the sociology professor, a rather good-looking if humourless Asian man, had not been amused by the textile designer’s intervention.

  ‘I’m interested in constitutions,’ she told them when they’d all been given drinks. She spoke without notes, trusting to her knowledge of her subject, her knack of engaging people, and her ability to think on the spot. ‘Constitutions aren’t just words and pieces of paper. They’re machinery. They’re machines whose specific purpose is to keep various currents and forces in a kind of equilibrium, so that a state retains some sort of stability and doesn’t just fly apart. Some constitutions don’t work and crumble very quickly – there are countries which go through constitutions like boxes of tissues – but others are very durable. The Anglo-Saxon countries have a bit of a genius for this particular kind of machinery, and both the British and American constitutions have demonstrated their ability to evolve and adapt over a very long period of time, while continuing to maintain just enough rigidity to hold together. But even the best of constitutions contain flaws, chinks if you like, which, if they’re allowed to widen, will eventually break them. And we’re starting to see that happen now on both sides of the Atlantic. In each case, the flaw that’s becoming apparent is that, while both constitutions contain many subtle and ingenious safeguards, neither is well defended against decisions that are simply wrong, not necessarily in a moral sense – that’s a subjective judgement, after all – but in the sense that they’re based on assumptions that are demonstrably and objectively false.’

  Lucy looked at the people gathered there on her father’s long cream-coloured sofas. They were all between their late thirties and their fifties. She was younger than any of them by at least ten years. You couldn’t say they were old or past it, but there were almost certainly intellectual barriers by which they felt constrained – relics of the old order of the late twentieth century – but which did not constrain her at all.

  She talked about constitutions in different countries, the various systems of checks and balances that had been devised. She discussed the tension that existed between making a constitution too inflexible to be able to respond to changing times and making it so easy to amend that it was barely any different from any other kind of law. She compared the kinds of constitution that endured and the kinds that failed. Then she returned to the flaw in the British system.

  ‘Representative democracy requires anyone seeking political office to put together a broad coalition that can obtain the support of a sizeable proportion of the population, and that’s generally a good thing. The majority isn’t necessarily right, of course, but widespread consent is key to stable government and that underlying principle is so valuable that we can and should live with bad electoral calls if their only result is a government that can be thrown out again in a few years’ time. What we’re discovering now, though, is that it’s entirely possible within our constitutional arrangements for a majority to vote for something that isn’t easily reversible and which is likely to do long-term, and even permanent harm not only to society as a whole but to the liberal settlement that made the vote possible in the first place. And that’s something we surely shouldn’t try to live with. The difficulty is that, when most of the electorate lack the knowledge, the interest and, in some cases – let’s admit this for once – even the intellectual ability to make informed judgements about complex matters that require specialist knowledge, we’re always going to be vulnerable to this kind of threat. And that’s a serious weakness. Being representative is highly desirable, but sometimes being right is even more important.’

  She paused for a moment to take stock of her father’s guests. They all seemed to be on board so far. She noticed a woman on the same floor in the neighbouring building looking out of her window, a silhouette against the warm glow of her room.

  ‘So how do we protect our system against stupidity?’ Lucy asked. ‘How do we protect it, for that matter, against judgements that even intelligent and thoughtful people might make in the absence of appropriate expertise? The problem is that, while each of the three branches of government acts as a check on the others, we lack a sufficiently robust check on the not often mentioned fourth branch, which is the electorate itself. We’re squeamish about that because we assume that letting the people decid
e things is a cornerstone of the liberal state, and we forget that rationality and respect for evidence are at least as important to the preservation of the liberal order as is what we now call democracy. For, make no mistake, without rationality and science the whole edifice comes tumbling down.’

  ‘Ban referendums,’ said the fund manager. ‘That’s the solution. Go back to being a representative democracy.’

  ‘A step in the right direction,’ Lucy said, ‘but the voters can still elect a parliament that makes stupid decisions.’

  ‘Require party manifestos to be approved by an independent, non-party panel of experts, whose job is to check for accuracy and viability,’ suggested the IT entrepreneur.

  ‘Mandatory training for MPs?’ the lawyer wondered. ‘Or minimum qualifications to become an MP?’

  ‘Or better still,’ said the woman who was an MP, ‘proper, thorough political education in schools. It’s crazy we don’t think that’s necessary for a healthy democracy!’

  ‘I read about a sort of jury-type system that someone’s suggested,’ said the textile designer. ‘Instead of public votes being taken by the whole electorate, a cross-section of the electorate is picked out by some random process, and then these people are provided with intensive training in economics and so forth before they take the vote.’

  Lucy nodded. ‘All good ideas, but how about an entirely new kind of upper house? Scrap the Lords as it stands and start again. No more hereditary peers, no more peerages handed out as thankyous to supporters, or as a way booting nuisances upstairs, but instead a chamber that brings together outstanding thinkers in all of the relevant fields, chosen on a non-party basis by their fellow professionals. Economists chosen by economists, lawyers chosen by lawyers, and so on. A House of Knowledge, a kind of benign, nonpartisan guiding body. And then give it teeth. Give it an absolute veto on legislation, not just delaying powers like the House of Lords has now, meaning that the lower house has to negotiate with it, and has no choice but to fix or change things that the relevant experts can see won’t work.’