The edge in his voice made her flinch. She was no better than he was at facing anger.
‘No, of course it’s not a crime to be good at things,’ she said, with a rather forced shrug, looking away for a moment to avoid his suddenly fierce gaze. But then she returned to the attack. ‘But why do you have to be so fucking serious about it? That’s what gets me. I don’t mind you saying my drawing’s good. I know I’m quite good at drawing. I do pictures of our customers to make them laugh. But it’s just for fun, isn’t it? That’s all. It’s just for the fun of it. But for you it’s got to be art. It’s got to be something serious. It’s got to be this big important thing that you’re going to develop, so you can make pictures that everyone will look at in a gallery and whisper about, and frown, and say how extraordinary it is, like they’re in a church or something.’ She’d put on her ‘posh’ voice again to say the word ‘extraordinary’. ‘What’s wrong with you people that everything you do has got to be important and serious and extraordinary?’
Harry said nothing for a while and then, to Michelle’s surprise, he crossed the room for that old picture of his ancestor and laid it down on the coffee table in front of her. ‘I blame this guy. He was a farm labourer on a big estate in Gloucestershire, but he was very able and hardworking, and he impressed his boss so much that he lent him the money to go to university and study the law. Eventually he became a successful solicitor and ended up marrying his boss’s youngest daughter.’
Michelle had picked up the picture and was looking down at it as he spoke.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Harry said, ‘Gideon’s boss had made his fortune from a slave plantation in St Lucia, but we don’t talk about that. The important part of the story is that Gideon made himself respectable by having a good brain and through sheer hard work. And he brought up his eleven children to work hard too, and improve themselves, and make good marriages and get the best possible education, so as to be sure of keeping the position in society that he’d established for them. And they brought their kids up that way in turn, and so on, and so on, except that after a generation or two we couldn’t really congratulate ourselves any more on having clawed ourselves up from the gutter, so we had to find other ways of making ourselves feel like we were something special: our connoisseurship, perhaps, our sensitivity, our advanced liberal values.’
She was smiling now, he saw to his relief. ‘And that’s called being middle class,’ he said, with a bow. ‘That’s how we’re brought up. I was even brought up to remember that my ancestor Gideon, this miserable, driven-looking old bastard, was the one who made it all possible!’
She handed him the picture and he returned it to the mantelpiece. ‘So there’s your answer, Michelle. That’s why we’re like this. That’s why we’re so fucking earnest and self-important and obsessed with bettering ourselves, and that’s why, I suppose, we secretly envy people who aren’t middle class for being free of all this pressure and all this stuff we’re supposed to live up to.’ He sat down on the sofa beside her. ‘Bettering ourselves! I wonder if the world would be in the mess it is today if people in the past had just relaxed a bit more and not kept trying to make things better all the time.’
Michelle looked at him with widened eyes and gave him her lopsided smile. ‘Bloody hell, Harry! Have you finished? I wasn’t expecting a fucking lecture!’
‘I wasn’t expecting to give one, to be honest,’ he said.
They clinked their glasses together and drank, and began to kiss with warm wine-tasting lips until the timer on his oven pinged to say the fish was ready.
‘I felt like everyone in that room was seeing me as a silly ignorant common little woman, who didn’t know enough to understand about being quiet and respecting the art,’ Michelle writes later. ‘And it made me think how Mum must have felt when Dad got angry with her because she didn’t know something, or she didn’t get something, or she forgot something. I remembered me and Dad sitting at the tea table, and her out in the kitchen fetching the ketchup or the mustard or something she’d not remembered to put on the table. “How in God’s name did I end up with someone like you, Kath?” he went when she came back in. He usually pretended it was just a joke but sometimes he’d get really angry. “You haven’t got two brain cells to rub together, have you?” he said once and then he stood up right in the middle of a meal and left the room, leaving Mum to clear the table. I didn’t offer to help her either. I went and watched TV with Dad so I didn’t have to see those pathetic little tears in her eyes, and I didn’t even try to tell him off for what he’d done. “You’ve got a halfway decent brain,” he said. “For God’s sake use it, girl! Don’t end up in a place like this. Don’t end up with someone you can’t respect.” And I just looked at the telly and didn’t say anything at all.’
She draws a line, like Harry does, to end that thought. ‘I’m not going to change,’ she writes. ‘Not for Harry, not for anyone. I don’t want a better job, I don’t want to live in a better place. There’s nothing wrong with just being ordinary.’
I don’t doubt that she meant it, but I still don’t quite believe it myself. I can’t help thinking that part of the attraction of Harry was that he offered an honourable way out. To leave Breckham behind her for the sake of a career, as her father had wanted, perhaps seemed too cold and disloyal for her to contemplate. But to leave for love . . . ?
They had a happy day on Sunday. They both agree on that. They stayed late in bed. Michelle did one of her cartoon drawings of Harry. They had lunch in a café and walked in a park. They talked about their childhoods.
But after he’d dropped Michelle off at the station on the Sunday evening, Harry felt strangely numb and didn’t know what to do with himself, ending up sitting at his dining table, flicking through Twitter on his phone.
‘I will never forgive the people who’ve done this! Never!’ someone or other had tweeted apropos of Brexit, and received ninety-seven responses: ‘And all because Leave voters can’t cope with the fact that we are no longer in the 1950s’ . . . ‘I refuse to hear excuses for these people who have trashed my children’s future’ . . . ‘None of them is capable of reasoned argument. Not ONE. And believe me, I’ve tried’.
The sealed-off silence of his flat oppressed him. He went out for a walk, wandering through streets lined with spacious Victorian houses, much like the one he grew up in. Some had their curtains drawn, with the TV flickering inside. In others, no one was in and the curtains were open so he could look into the unlit front rooms with their bookshelves, dark shapes of pictures on the walls, silent pianos just visible in the streetlight.
A fine rain began to fall. He found himself in one of the long commercial roads that laced the city. He passed laundries, halal butchers, convenience stores, a hardware shop with a display of mops and buckets in green, purple and blue. Mattress World was closed and so was Sunbed World, but electric signs glowed and flashed on either side of them: Open! Open! Open! Red, blue, white, yellow gleamed on the wet pavement. Shopkeepers sat behind their tills in caves of electric light, surrounded by their stock: practical people, Harry thought, who left it to others to speculate about the big questions, and focused on keeping going day by day. A white and purple sign shone out atop the flaking façade of a former cinema to proclaim the Sacred Waters Tabernacle. Two old men emerged from an Islamic Centre in what had once been a Nonconformist chapel.
‘No one really knows what this world is,’ Harry said to himself. ‘We just stick to whatever story makes us feel most at home.’ Flattened chewing gum pocked the shining red and blue pavement outside a Tube station. People went in, others came out, and there was a brief moment in which he saw all of them glowing with purpose, each in their own way confronting the strangeness of being alive with whatever resources their particular history had bequeathed to them.
A new message arrived with a ping. He fished the phone from his pocket and found a new text from Michelle.
I love you too, Harry. Seems mad to say that so soon, but you said it
to me, and I want you to know I feel the same.
He thought about the shame he’d felt only yesterday when they’d run into Letty in the Tate, the intensity of it, the way it took over his mind and his body, a primitive, urgent, biological force whose function was to preserve a social order. It had been so completely outside his control; that was what shocked him most about it.
He felt like a dry leaf that, at any moment, a gust of wind could pick up and blow away.
Michelle dreamt that night about that huge black bird.
TWENTY-THREE
Charlie was going over to Sir Gerald’s every week now. The Colonel had recruited some other ex-army men to act as trainers, and they took the group for runs in the nearby forest, or drove them across assault courses, or set them punishing training regimes involving tractor tyres. Charlie was good at all this. He was physically strong and he had stamina, and he loved the sense of purpose and the comradeship. He made friends with another young man called Ed.
At the end of a day’s training, they were invited to use the plunge pool that Gerald’s great-grandfather had installed in its own brick building outside the back of the house. It was white-tiled inside and functional, like a butcher’s shop or a public toilet, with water so cold that it made them yelp. But they splashed around in it happily, yelling abuse at each other and flicking each other with towels. Afterwards, Gerald or one of his trainers would gather them together in the hall, where there would be beer and sandwiches and someone to give them a pep talk.
One time it was a woman that Gerald invited to the stage and Charlie, like everyone else, recognized her at once.
‘Fucking hell!’ he murmured to Ed. ‘It’s only Tiffany Flynn!’
They all cheered and hooted, still warm and glowing from their exertions and from the endorphins pumping through their veins. A tall, confident, physically fit woman in her early thirties, Tiffany had until recently presented the sports on one of the major TV channels. A scandal involving cocaine and a married football manager had got her face on the front pages of all the tabloids and led to her resignation.
Gerald laughed. ‘It looks as if my wonderful great-niece needs no introduction!’
Tiffany beamed out at them. ‘Great to meet you, boys!’ she called out, with that same, easy, somehow masculine confidence that she deployed in conversations with football stars and premier-league managers. She was a woman who was at home in an extremely male world, or that at least was how she presented herself.
‘It’s really great to meet you!’ Tiffany told them. ‘I’m totally stoked about what you guys are doing and Uncle Gerald is so proud of you all. So proud, you wouldn’t believe! You’re brilliant.’
Her slightly husky voice was as posh as her uncle’s and, like him, she was completely unabashed about it, and didn’t even try to tone it down. Each one of the men must have known perfectly well that she was completely out of his league, and she didn’t pretend otherwise, but nevertheless she conveyed to them somehow that as a group she was attracted to them, and took pleasure in their company, and relished their admiration.
‘I want to tell you something about my Uncle Gerald. I’ve known him all my life and I love him to bits, but you need to understand that this affable, handsome, polite old buffer you see before you is only part of the story. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all real – you couldn’t wish for a warmer, kinder uncle – but underneath it all, Colonel Sir Gerald Butler is pure steel.’
Standing in his usual place to the side of the stage, Gerald winked at them, made tiger claws and mimed a roar.
‘Any history buffs here?’ Tiffany asked. ‘Any of you know why this part of the world is called East Anglia? You don’t? Well, it’s because fifteen hundred years ago, this eastern part of Britain was conquered and settled by a fighting people from Germany called the Angles. I like to think of you blokes as their heirs. Tough, fighting men with no airs or graces.’
She paused and surveyed them, arms folded, relaxed, head forward a little on her shoulders rather than stiff and straight. She looked from one face to another, smiling, holding eye contact for a second and moving on. She nodded.
‘Yep. You chaps would have been right at home back then, I reckon. And Uncle Gerald would have been at home then too. In fact, I know he would have absolutely loved it. And I’ll tell you what he’d have been in those days. A warlord. I don’t mean what we call a lord now – the sort that’s friends with Tony Blair and sits on committees about urban regeneration and promoting diversity in the arts – I mean a real lord, whose position comes entirely from his ability to win and hold the loyalty of a group of fighting men. I mean, look at him, guys! Can’t you just picture it?’
Gerald pulled a funny face and put up his hands in imitation of the wings on the helmets of mythical Norsemen. The men in the hall clapped and cheered.
‘I can so picture Uncle Gerald back then,’ Tiffany said. ‘He’d have had his own big hall, a bit like this one, but rougher and without the paintings and the windows. There’d be a big fire burning in the middle of it, with tables and benches down either side of the room. And there in his hall, he’d have had men just like you guys sitting along the benches, drinking the ale he provided and eating his meat until they’d had their fill, while he sat at his high table, up here where I am now, eating and drinking with them. You’d have been his housecarls, his warriors, and if you fought hard for him, he’d look after you, and feed you, and give you bracelets and gold rings to pass on to your women. Of course he’d be different from you, the same as an officer is different from his men. He’d wear fine things and drink from a cup made of gold or studded with gemstones. Well, if he didn’t, you’d have asked yourself what kind of half-arsed lord you’d got yourself, wouldn’t you? But he wouldn’t be somewhere far away. He wouldn’t be living a completely different life. He’d be right there among you, so that you knew him personally, and he knew every one of you.’
She beamed down at them. ‘Imagine it. You’d all be down there getting pissed, and gorging on all that meat, and yelling and joking around, and Uncle Gerald would be up here, maybe proposing a toast from time to time, or challenging you to a drinking contest, or telling the odd joke, like he was your uncle too and not just mine. And then when the feasting was done, and you’d eaten and drunk your fill, you wouldn’t go home, you’d just wrap up in blankets or animal furs and go to sleep right here on the benches, with all your mates around you.’
She had a way of turning half sideways to them as she asked a question, with her hands on her hips, so they could admire her strength and her athleticism. She was taller than most of the men there.
‘So how does that sound?’ she asked them.
‘Fucking great!’ Charlie shouted out. Gerald laughed at that, and twinkled across at him, and a lot of the other men cheered. And in the delicious warmth of that moment in which he was the centre of everyone’s attention, an image glowed dimly in Charlie’s mind. Or perhaps image is the wrong word. It was not so much an image as the tactile equivalent of an image, a kind of shape, and not exactly even that, but more a kind of bundle of feelings. He couldn’t have named it or begun to describe it – no one could have done – but like an old and powerful memory, it was very rich in meaning. And it made him feel like he could have the warmth and safety of being held like a child and the fierce exhilaration of kicking the shit out of someone, both together in the same package. He could have blood and steel along with mother’s breast.
‘I know men like you,’ Tiffany said, and laughed. ‘Ha! You know I know men like you. I know what matters to you. And I know what doesn’t matter to you as well. For example, do “human rights” float your boat at all?’
There was a groan, and Tiffany laughed. ‘I thought not. Rights for who, eh? And how about parliamentary democracy? How about the rule of law?’
They groaned louder this time, and booed, getting the hang of the game now and beginning to enjoy it. Tiffany laughed. ‘You really don’t give a shit, do you?’
They all cheered. ‘You bastards!’ Tiffany told them with great affection. ‘You hard bastards! You absolute brutes. Well, okay, how about culture, then? How about the arts?’
The men jeered and gave hoots of incredulous laughter.
She affected surprise. ‘Oh, so you’re not opera fans? You don’t listen to the culture programmes on Radio 4? You don’t go down to Cambridge for the Shakespeare plays? I’m disappointed in you. It’s only forty minutes from here, after all!’
They laughed raucously and she gave them that lovely tough ironic smile that they all recognized from the TV. ‘Face it, lads, you’re a bunch of fucking savages! What are we going to do with you? It’s the twenty-first century and you’re no different from what you were a thousand years ago. There’s nothing civilized about you at all.’
They cheered and hooted and laughed.
‘Nothing civilized about you at all,’ Tiffany repeated, simultaneously beaming at them with proud affection and sadly shaking her head in a pantomime of weary resignation. ‘You’re a lost fucking cause.’
They cheered again. She smiled and nodded, arms crossed, standing at ease.
‘But do you know why that is?’ she asked them. ‘Do you know why you give so few fucks about civilization? It’s because it’s not your civilization. It’s not even meant for you. It’s theirs. It belongs to the people that run things. It’s their rights, it’s their parliament, their laws, their culture, their paintings and opera houses. They let you have plasma TVs, and cars, and fridges, and holidays in Greece if you’re lucky, or maybe even Florida. And in exchange for that, all they ask is that you keep your great clumsy clodhopping boots off their civilization and let them enjoy it in peace.’
Two Tribes Page 19