Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Gosh!’ said the MP, sounding simultaneously shocked and excited. ‘We really are thinking outside the box, aren’t we?’

  ‘Times like these call for that, though, don’t they?’ Lucy said. ‘It’s clear to all of us, surely, that something fundamental needs to change? And the hard fact is that there are much rockier times ahead. Climate change, population growth . . . In the coming decades this is going to be a world that’s much harder for a lot of people than it is now. A lot of difficult and unpalatable choices will need to be made, and we know that it’s precisely at such times that old-fashioned representative democracy is at its weakest. Because, as we’re beginning to find out, people who don’t want to hear bad news are very vulnerable indeed to snake oil salesmen.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said the sociologist, ‘that your guiding body idea would be taking us right back to what the House of Lords originally was: a chamber which exclusively represents the interests of a particular class.’

  ‘That’s not true at all,’ Lucy said flatly. ‘The old aristocracy was there by right of birth, but experts can come from any class and any background. No one would be there as of right. It would be something you had to earn.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ began the sociologist. He was annoyingly attractive with his large dark eyes and his lean limbs. ‘But the fact is that—’

  ‘The upper house is only part of it, though, isn’t it?’ Richard broke in. He’d been sitting quietly up to now, watching Lucy’s confident performance with fatherly pride. ‘Do we not have to think about the franchise itself?’

  ‘Interesting,’ said the American economist. ‘In the first French republic, there were active citizens and passive citizens. They all had the same legal rights, but only the active citizens participated in politics.’

  ‘Gosh!’ exclaimed the MP, as if she’d been shown a shockingly erotic image.

  ‘So we’re talking now about a qualified franchise, are we?’ asked Karina.

  Lucy shrugged. ‘It’s worth considering. Or maybe a weighted one, with votes for all, but multiple votes for the best qualified. It might help, though I’m not entirely sure it would be necessary if we gave sufficient teeth to the new upper house. But we do need to do something because this is a crisis. The liberal order is in danger and we really have got to be willing to think the unthinkable if we’re going to save it. And the truth is this isn’t just about the referendum. Every election involves making judgements about how best to manage a highly complex and highly dynamic global system, which few people really understand at all. That’s okay in comfortable times when people are willing to listen to the advice of people who do have some expertise, but not when they’re angry and fed up and the experts are telling them stuff they don’t want to hear.’

  ‘But a qualified franchise would be going right back to the nineteenth century,’ objected the sociologist. ‘It’s precisely what the Chartists were fighting against!’

  He was a bit of a prig, Lucy decided. The kind of person who let other people make the difficult choices on his behalf, but reserved the right to criticize afterwards.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘In the nineteenth century, the qualification was based on property. You could be as stupid and ignorant as you liked and still get a vote if you owned a big enough house. What we’re talking about here is a qualification based on the ability to understand the issues being decided. That’s an entirely different thing.’

  ‘Not entirely different,’ the sociologist pointed out. ‘There’s a pretty strong correlation between—’

  ‘But let’s not get bogged down in that,’ Richard suggested. He’d risen to his feet a few minutes before to fetch more wine, but had paused to watch this exchange. ‘I’d suggest that the best use of our time right now is simply to generate ideas, allow ourselves to think thoughts which we’d normally dismiss out of hand, and not worry too much at this point about details and snags. Let’s come back to those later.’

  ‘This is all so fascinating,’ Karina said, ‘but I wonder, would everyone like a quick break before we carry on?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Lucy said. Richard went for the wine, the lawyer left the room to use the toilet, the economist began a private conversation with the director of the left-leaning think tank, and the textile designer crossed the room to speak to the fund manager, who happened to serve on the board of the same charity as herself.

  Lucy walked to the north-facing window to look out at the ravishing spectacle of those enormous, empty office buildings blazing with electric light across the water. She loved this golden city, this pinnacle of human achievement. It was like a magnet drawing in wealth and talent and ambition from across the globe. And the more it drew in, the more brilliant it became and the more powerful its magnetic pull.

  ‘Noocracy,’ the sociologist said, coming up behind her. ‘The rule of the wise. Plato’s philosopher kings. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think I prefer the word epistocracy. The rule of the knowledgeable.’

  ‘I can see two snags. One: being clever or knowledgeable doesn’t make you selfless. Two: there’s one important thing that the cleverest people in the world know far less about than ordinary folk.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what’s that?’

  ‘What it feels like to be an ordinary person.’

  She laughed politely. What an insufferable prig he was!

  TWENTY-TWO

  Harry and Michelle met at King’s Cross station. She was wearing her white coat, grey ankle boots, and a neat grey dress, and carrying a small overnight bag. It was a Saturday and she’d arranged for Jules to help out Cheryl at Shear Perfection. Harry had a taxi take them to Tate Modern. These days the gallery has become the brick ruin we just know as ‘the Modern’ and it’s often flooded. It was very briefly a Liberal stronghold during the later stages of the Warring Factions, and was heavily shelled by the Patriot forces. But back in Harry’s day it was another instance of an industrial structure (in this case an enormous coal- and oil-fired power station) that had been refitted to serve a completely different and more refined purpose, while deliberately retaining some of the proletarian glamour of its original function.

  When Harry and Michelle visited it, there was an exhibition going on of a twentieth-century Cuban artist who no one now remembers, but whose work bore some similarity (at least to my eyes) to the art of Picasso, who is still known, if only to historians like myself. Michelle seemed to enjoy being there. She held Harry’s arm and leant in closely against him to look at the often cartoon-like pictures, pointing out details and happily discussing with him what they represented and why they had been done in this way or that way. She’d never been to a proper art gallery before, she said, unless you counted the museum in Cambridge which she’d visited a couple of times on school trips, but, as she recalled, most of the stuff there was mummies and old statues. ‘If you asked me to name some famous artists,’ she told him, ‘I’d have a job to give you five of them. That’s how much I know.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to know about the history behind a painting,’ Harry said, ‘because that’s sort of the language that the artist is using. But it’s also good to leave all that behind and just see where the image itself takes you, and that’s probably easier for you than it is for me.’

  ‘You were right,’ she told him a bit later, ‘this is way more fun than going to a movie. Once the film starts you might as well not be with anyone at all. But I’m not being funny or anything, but don’t you think a kid could have done some of these?’

  He laughed at that. He found it rather endearing that she should come up with this thought as if it had never occurred to anyone before. ‘Dear God, Michelle, you sound like my grandmother!’

  ‘Well, maybe your gran was right. I mean, this one here . . . Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to look at, and I’m really loving being here, but if you saw it in a junkshop or something, wouldn’t you think some kid had done it?’

  The cartoon-like image i
n front of them included an eye that seemed to be part of a mask, a sideways mouth, two breasts drawn in rough outline and some stylized leaves. To the extent that it was flat and heavily outlined, with no concessions either to three-dimensional space or to naturalism, it did bear some resemblance to children’s pictures. ‘I can see what you mean,’ Harry said, ‘but I really don’t think so. I’ve done enough painting myself to know there’s an awful lot of skill in those brushstrokes.’

  ‘Okay,’ she conceded, ‘but the idea of it.’

  ‘I think even the idea of it is way more sophisticated than anything a kid would come up with. I really am quite certain that if I saw it in a junkshop I wouldn’t think a kid had done it. But I get your point. If I saw it out of context, would I immediately think it was a work of art that deserved to be hung in a famous gallery like this? If I’m honest, I’m not sure. I do wonder sometimes, when I look at art, whether the emperor is really wearing clothes, or whether it’s us who clothe him in our minds? But then that’s true of a lot of things.’

  In fact, it might be true of the two of them, he thought for a brief moment: two strangers, each one clothing the other in meaning. But he didn’t say that. He turned away from the bleakness of that idea, and they moved on to the next picture.

  Two women came into the room as they were about to leave it. With a sudden cold shock, Harry realized that one of the women was Letty. He tried to steer Michelle away from the door again, muttering something about a picture they’d missed, but Letty had already spotted him. ‘Oh hi, Letty!’ he croaked, and he would have hastily released his arm from Michelle’s if she hadn’t in the same moment tightened her hold on him, having realized that they as a couple were about to greet someone she didn’t know.

  ‘Hello, Harry.’ Letty looked enquiringly at Michelle.

  ‘This is my friend Michelle,’ Harry said, and Letty inclined her head. She didn’t introduce her companion. It was an older woman, perhaps her mother or an aunt.

  ‘Hello, Letty,’ Michelle said in her perky little Essex voice. ‘I was just saying to Harry that a kid could have done some of these pictures.’

  Letty visibly flinched, and so did Harry. In fact, he cringed. Michelle seemed so small all of a sudden. Not just small physically, though she was shorter and more petite than Letty, but small in her naivety, her lack of culture, her provinciality. Even her way of speaking, which normally delighted him, made her seem to him now like some sort of silly chirpy little Essex sparrow. People like himself and Letty were cultured and educated, connected to a body of shared ideas and knowledge that gave them substance and depth and gravity, and the lack of all that in Michelle made her seem so tiny by comparison that Harry felt the kind of shame that he would have felt if Letty had caught him going out with a sixteen-year-old or one of those young Filipino women that certain middle-aged men found on the internet. An old-fashioned phrase of his father’s came into his mind: Dolly bird. Cultured, grown-up, capable Letty had caught him with his little dolly bird and he was so ashamed that he could feel his face burning and the roots of his hairs prickling and crawling. Yet all the while Michelle clung to his arm.

  ‘It would have to be a pretty talented kid, don’t you think?’ Letty said. She smiled thinly at Harry, her eyes narrowed, and she continued into the room with her companion.

  ‘Who was she and what the fuck was happening there?’ Michelle demanded, as Harry hurried her into the next gallery. She released his arm so she could stand and face him, turning her back to the rest of the room. ‘That’s not your wife, is it?’

  ‘No. She’s someone I met quite recently. In fact, it was just a couple of days before I met you. Out on the marsh at Blakeney.’ Michelle looked blank. ‘It’s in Norfolk,’ Harry said, unable to conceal his irritation at her ignorance even of the county she lived in. ‘On the coast near Sheringham. Later I ran into her in London, and I went out for a meal with her.’

  ‘During the time you said were thinking about me every day?’

  ‘Yes. During the time I was thinking about you every day and trying very hard not to. I thought perhaps she’d help me put you behind me.’

  ‘Did you sleep with her too?’

  ‘No. She went abroad and I didn’t see her again after that meal until we ran into each other again at a New Year’s Eve party. We talked about meeting again, but then I heard from you so I put her off.’

  Michelle studied his face, hard eyed. They were only a few yards into the room, and people were moving round them on either side, like a river parting round some obstruction, glancing at the two of them as they passed. ‘You know what, Harry. I can see it now. You weren’t just embarrassed to be seen with another woman, were you? You were embarrassed to be seen with me.’ People were looking quizzically across at them and giving each other amused little smiles, but she seemed oblivious to all of this. ‘You told me you wanted to be honest with me, so fucking be honest. Tell me if I’m right. Or prove to me I’m wrong.’

  The honest truth was that he was still embarrassed to be with her. It was that Polish builder moment all over again. She was one of the small people and he felt as if everyone in the room must be wondering what he was doing with someone like her and what it said about his maturity and his self-esteem and his attitude to women. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Fair enough. Let’s go outside, shall we, and we’ll talk?’

  Without answering him or waiting for him, she began to walk very quickly through the remaining rooms of the exhibition and out on to the landing, where there was a row of lifts to carry visitors up and down to the several floors of the cavernous industrial building. He hurried after her. They didn’t speak to each other or look at each other’s faces as they descended side by side, or as they strode through the people milling around on the ground floor and out into the space in front of the gallery where a wide footpath, these days usually submerged, ran above the bank of the river.

  ‘Is this outside enough for you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes, of course. Listen, Michelle, I’d have been embarrassed to be seen with anyone. Only a few days ago, I agreed with her that we’d arrange another date, and there I was with you. It must have looked as if—’

  Michelle shook her head firmly. ‘But it wasn’t just that, was it?’

  He looked down into her face. He could still see that ‘smallness’ which he now saw was the essence of that entirely different way she had of being a woman from someone like Letty, or Janet or his sister Ellie. (There was something light and birdlike about it, as if her bones were filled with air: perhaps that was why loutish Essex types referred to women as ‘birds’?) He wondered if, all along, he’d really just been turned on by the fact that he could look down on her, and if so what kind of man he really was?

  ‘No, you’re right,’ he admitted. ‘It wasn’t just that. You embarrassed me. It’s not your fault at all, but you did. And okay, if you want the truth, I felt ashamed.’

  ‘Ashamed?’ Her white-hot fury had once again drawn the attention of people all around them, but he was no longer worried about that. He felt himself reeling as if from a physical blow. ‘What the fuck did I do, Harry, to make you feel ashamed? You introduced me to that woman, she was looking daggers at me and I had no idea why but I did my best to be friendly. What more did you expect of me? What the fuck else could I have done? Okay, I’m not one of your sort and she is. But you knew that already, didn’t you? You fucking mention it often enough, for Christ’s sake! But hey, if you want to be with someone like her, well there she is. I’m sure she’s got loads more to offer you than I have. Go after her, why don’t you? Be my fucking guest!’

  ‘No . . . it’s not—’

  ‘Is this why you keep going on about us not having enough in common, and not wanting to waste my time? Because you know that whenever you meet anyone you know, you’ll be so fucking ashamed of me that you’ll go bright red and stammer like you did up there? Because you did, you know, Harry. You went bright fucking red, just because you were with me, and you were so em
barrassed you could hardly speak. Well, I’ll tell you something. If that’s what you’ve been worrying about all this time, you were right to worry. You should have left me alone. You are wasting my time. And if you really cared about my feelings at all, you would have thought about that before you asked me out. Why would any woman want to be with a man who was embarrassed to be even seen with her?’

  He tried to touch her hand but she shook him off. ‘Listen, Michelle,’ he said, ‘please listen. You find my car embarrassing, don’t you?’

  ‘Not like that, though!’ Her grey eyes were bright and fierce, like the eyes of a wild animal that’s been backed into a corner and has no option but to fight to the death. ‘Not so as I’d feel so ashamed if someone saw it that I’d go red in the face and wish I wasn’t with you at all!’

  ‘No, I understand that, but hear me out. You’d prefer it if I had a decent car, yes? Me driving that car makes you uncomfortable?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, I can’t see why you don’t get a decent one.’

  ‘Exactly. Because among the folk you know, having a nice car’s a bit like wearing decent clothes, am I right? It’s a simple matter of self-respect.’

  She shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well, believe it or not, I don’t know anyone else who gives a shit what kind of car I drive. Okay, a lot of my friends have nice cars, but I literally don’t know anyone apart from you who’d even think it was worth mentioning that my car was battered and old. Because that kind of thing doesn’t happen to matter to my kind of people. But my tribe has its own equivalents, and one of them is knowing stuff. That, for us, is as important as wearing decent clothes. And I know it was stupid, Michelle, I know it was petty of me, I know you didn’t deserve it, but I was embarrassed that you knew so little about art that you spouted that tired old cliché about how a kid could do better than that. None of my friends would say a thing like that. Not one. And never mind my grandmother – whatever I said in there, she was a cultured woman and she’d never have said it either – you’d have to go back generations in my family to find anyone who would. So yes, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by what you said, even though I know that, just like cars, that sort of thing doesn’t really matter at all.’