The gathering at the Prime Minister’s was noisy, and she didn’t catch everything the junior minister was saying, but it made her feel that she might have done something, something more important than she thought. When she told Phil (he hadn’t wanted to come, all political powers stinking equally and irredeemably in his eyes), he looked sceptical: ‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re always complaining you haven’t any time to yourself as it is. You think you’re going to take on some makework committee which just fritters away public money on itself – when there are important things to spend it on. The deforestation of the Amazon, the hole over the South Pole. I can’t wait till I see this: Gramercy Poule, the new voice of national conscience, the new catalyst of change. You’re so naïve, Gramercy, if you think you can do anything from the inside. Steer clear. You’ll only get the smell of them on your clothes.’
His taunts firmed her resolve, and so, when the letter arrived, she didn’t throw it aside and forget to answer it, as she did begging letters from charities asking her to be a patron or festivals inviting her to open their events.
A smiling older woman, with a slight lips and an accent from somewhere, introduced herself as the committee’s secretary, waving at the coffee and tea urns. The chamber was very hot: double-glazing against the traffic didn’t altogether keep out its roar, but it would be hard to hear anything if the windows were opened. The sandwiches on caterers’ oval, crypto-silver and doilied platters were drying fast. The new committee was gradually assembling: some of the other names were familiar, but the only person Gramercy knew was Robert Chowdury, the choreographer who had a company that fused strict Bharati discipline with modern expressiveness in the tradition of Martha Graham. They kissed each other: Gramercy had missed Rob’s last show, performed in the ruined shell of the old COCA, the Centre of Contemporary Arts, known to its aficionados (of whom Gramercy was one) as the Concrete Cavern; it was being demolished as too harsh and brutalist for the new feel-good times that were coming round and was to be replaced by a huge, translucent fibreglass bubble.
‘It was sad,’ said Rob quietly. ‘A beautiful space, austere, uncompromising – we danced in it for its last hours. I like to think we sent the building on its way more serenely, like the body that passes over more easily when professional mourners have performed their laments.’
‘I’m so sorry I missed it.’
‘Darling, don’t you worry – you’ve got your own stuff going on, I know. But it was a good piece.’ His veined eyelids dropped as he remembered it. Confidingly he lent closer to Gramercy. ‘We were trying to catch today’s violence and destruction, not to repeat it, you know, but to repulse it, to make it over. Terminators, terminations: these are Western words. A friend said to me the other day, after watching one of the endless massacres on the telly: “A society that doesn’t know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.” I counted yesterday, during the news. There were five shots of corpses, or parts of corpses.’
‘They’re censoring the pictures now, they’re so terrible even tabloid editors draw the line,’ said Gramercy. ‘I heard that the ones the newspapers won’t print can be visited on the Internet. Do you think if we saw them we’d have to stop killing? If we saw the worst?’
‘Do you?’ It was disconcerting how Rob kept his eyes closed so much of the time. What was in his head?
‘I used to sing that rough, tough material, as if it was being pulled out of my guts. But I’m not as keen to do that stuff any more, don’t quite know why. Before it was like homeopathy: you forestalled ugly people by being ugly, getting in ahead with your ugliness – you know, snarling and screaming like a Rottweiler not because you wanted to be a Rottweiler but because you wanted to pre-empt other people getting Rottweiler-ish with you.’
Rob’s eyes opened wide, suddenly. ‘That’s good, darling, that’s really good.’ He paused. ‘What d’you think we’re doing here?’ He swept the room with his newly staring glance. Apart from Rob, who was one of the first fashionable hybrid exotics in the capital – Gramercy’d met him with her parents (he went back to happenings and love-ins and multi-media events with swirling coloured oil projections) – the committee was a shaken bingo dispenser of different numbers: Gramercy recognised a popular poet with braids bristling like a lizard’s crest down his back, who was celebrated for his whispered incantations; a human rights lawyer who was also a rabbi who regularly offered a soothing, and at the same time agonised comment on current affairs on the morning radio; an abrasive television presenter who grinned from ear to ear when he dished it out on his nightly show and another, twice-weekly, early evening slot; a peeress with freckles on her nose and cheeks and ample arms who pioneered reform of women’s health issues, especially among groups inhibited by religious custom. Plus some names that echoed but that Gramercy couldn’t place.
She saw Jeff Noakes, and he made gesture for them to come over, to the side of the room, where a barrel-chested man was sunk into a wheelchair, talking with bright eyes and many quick gestures of his long brown hands.
‘We’re still under terrible pressure,’ the chairbound professor of politics, Sanjit May, was saying. His voice was honeyed, the ironies moving at a depth below the formal phrasing. ‘Since I joined the department two years ago, we’ve been audited and inspected and overhauled and remodelled: not much time to teach students to think, we’re so busy doing “presentations”. I used to feel like the White King looking on bemused while the Red Queen laid about her. Now it seems we shall all turn out to be nothing but a pack of cards.’
The minister shook his head sympathetically, and murmured, ‘But we’re getting it all sorted – you’ll see. Have faith.’
He then introduced them.
‘Have you come far?’ Jeff Noakes was asking Gramercy.
‘Sort of, from Fellmoor.’
‘You live there?’ Sanjit May looked up at her sharply.
‘Yes, on the edge of Fellmoor. A village called Feverel. Some of the time,’ she answered, too warmly, making up for his alarming crookedness with a show of bluff cheerfulness. ‘I do have somewhere here, but I’m not there much.’
Jeff Noakes left them together.
‘I loathe the country,’ Sanjit was saying. ‘I find it so dull. What do you do there? You don’t look rustic.’
‘She isn’t,’ said Rob, with a gurgling laugh.
‘But I am,’ Gramercy put in, laughing. ‘I have dogs and rabbits and hedgehogs – a whole hospital of all kinds of animals. Plus frogs and foxes and all the usual wild animals.’
‘Are you a Green?’ the professor demanded, suspiciously. ‘Would you give your life for a tree?’
Gramercy was beginning to give a considered answer, outlining Phil’s views and her experiences in the country, but her interlocutor fixed her with a look of asperity:
‘You’re not one of those priggish vegans? Do you rub marigold oil on your forehead and evening primrose on your body? Favour infusions of St John’s Wort before bed?’
‘No, no, none of that!’ Gramercy warded off his bile with a giggle. ‘My partner is – that way inclined. I like microwaves and curry. Even beef,’ she ventured.
‘My God, you probably ride to hounds. Well, we’re here to discuss National Identity. Tally-ho and tantivy: the battle cries of the shires. You, however, have mixed loyalties, I imagine. Between the darling sick hedgehogs and the squiresses in scarlet up on sixteen-handers, with colossal withers.’
He didn’t wait for her to reply; Gramercy felt more like Alice every minute.
‘I’m glad to hear you’re a carnivore, however. There’s a bit more to life than worrying about your body and what it takes in and puts out. And believe me, I know.’ He crooked a finger towards his convex ribcage. ‘The inner man – generic use, mark, I’m not leaving you out – that’s all that matters. You young people are obsessed with fitness.’ If he
weren’t so dedicated to the scathing mode, thought Gramercy, she would have caught a sigh.
‘Let’s start,’ Jeff Noakes waved them to the table, piled with stapled papers. ‘Some of which have been circulated to you by post,’ said the secretary. ‘But some have been tabled at this important workshop.’ She pointed to a scattering of books and reports. ‘For background – to take away with you, or, if you prefer, we’ll send them.’
The politics professor’s wheelchair got snagged in the carpet. He pushed at the wheels to pull it free, but the corner wouldn’t disengage. Gramercy was confused: she was the nearest to him, as Rob had already taken his seat and had his eyes shut again. She felt Sanjit May was so commanding he wouldn’t ever want anyone to help him, and she held back, stuck through a sense of the man’s dislike of fussing, of his angry independence.
‘C’m’on, Greenwich Village, whatever your name is,’ he was looking up at her from his hooked neck, jerking it to indicate the back of the chair. ‘Get hold of the controls and pull me out of this.’
She did so, arriving at the same time as the secretary rushed up, all concerned in the way that Gramercy had felt would irritate. So she tipped the chair off the ruck in the carpet. He was surprisingly hefty – the slackness of his poor dead body, she realised – and for a moment she thought, He’ll fall backwards with all that weight, and I’ll not have the strength to withstand it, and he’ll be lying on the carpet like a goldfish after the cat’s knocked off the bowl.
Once Gramercy and Sanjit were in place, side by side, at the table, Jeff Noakes introduced the chair, who turned out to be the amply formed health issue peeress, and then took his leave, making a telephone finger and thumb sign at Gramercy as he left, mouthing ‘We’ll speak’. She almost blushed.
‘Welcome to you all,’ began Baroness Ghopil. ‘We have some very important work to do, and we’re pleased that so many of you have agreed to take part and have been able to attend today. Just feel free to talk, to disagree, to interrupt; minutes will be taken, but everything said here is confidential. So speak your minds. You’re all here because you’ve already contributed, and we need your expertise in this difficult area: who are we now? What does it mean to belong here?’ She smiled, dimpling, and breathed: ‘Whither Albion? One might well ask.’
The discussion began swiftly; Gramercy was surprised by the alacrity with which her fellow panellists caught Baroness Ghopil’s eye and how, in her smiling, companionable, big-bosomed way, she marshalled the speakers one after another. She was skilled at chairing: a longtime trustee of many philanthropic organisations, including the generous Bethesda Foundation, which was sponsoring the publication of the workshop’s results.
The discussion soon crystallised around certain questions: was the idea of the melting pot outmoded? Was the tossed salad still viable?
A columnist whom Gramercy sometimes read declared his faith: ‘The constitution, the flag, the idea of citizenship: these are the bonds that tie the nation together! This is the ideal secular model – everyone is proud to be a citizen, even if they only arrived last week. You have to be one of many to be part of the one: hyphenated identities are the goal, not grafts of one species on to another to make a new variety. We don’t want genetically modified people, do we? We want the organic originals, healthily rooted in new soil, which brings out the best qualities in them. The past culture a nutrient of the present, not a poison.’
There were murmurs; Sanjit beside her whispered, ‘Oh, such happy hyphenated citizens of Shiloh, kept on reservations, fat and drunk on casino profiteering!’
The journalist flushed slightly as the mood of the gathering became restless: ‘I know that the state of the blacks, the history of slavery, the inner cities are a blot on all this . . .’
August Farrell, the poet with the Leonardo-like braids, broke in: ‘Let’s be very cautious about using this model: it simply is not possible to say that slavery is a blot, that we can just set aside, or use a spot stain removal to lift it out of Shiloh’s history. Exclusion happens there through economic forces, through de facto segregation in the cities and the countryside – ghettoes, rich and poor. Housing and settlement planning is key to community – a word I loathe, by the way, but in the absence of another, have to use.’
The Baroness took him up: ‘Would it be an interesting exercise if we brainstormed around these words – multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, citizen, community – for a while and saw what we could come up with?’
‘Let’s start by shedding “minorities”,’ proposed one voice. ‘That marginalises all of us for a start.’
There was almost unanimous head-nodding.
‘And toss out “ethnic” just as we threw out “racial”.’
‘My preference is “multi-communality”,’ said another.
‘“Communalities”, surely?’
‘I’ve heard,’ intervened Sanjit, ‘that “visible presences” is gaining ground in some quarters.’
Gramercy found herself speaking, for the first time, addressing herself to Sanjit. ‘But that’s putting the viewpoint the wrong way around, isn’t it? Don’t we want to see for ourselves, rather than be seen by others?’
Sanjit followed, ‘As someone who is highly visible for additional reasons, I’m not inclined to like the term. I have to agree with my friend here, Miss Poussin. We want to be seen, but not observed. We want to be paid attention to. That’s not the same as being watched.’
‘If only we could simply use, “Friends, countrymen—”,’ said Rob languidly. ‘And “countrywomen”.’ He exchanged a look with Gramercy.
‘How about a neologism altogether?’ offered the journalist. ‘Like polites – for members of a polity together?’
‘Ugh.’
‘Or a historical echo, like “commonweal”?’
‘Danger that way lies,’ murmured someone. ‘We must stay above divisive politics – and Republicanism, well.’
Baroness Ghopil unfurled the shawl of her salwar kameez and folded it tidily on to the back of her chair as she called the meeting to order.
‘We’re not here to plot a revolution, but to find a modus vivendi — and language is not a side issue, but central. However, let’s move on. We have a paper tabled – I never like to do that, but everybody is so very busy it was not possible to circulate it in time. Its author is with us, I believe, waiting outside, is that right?’ The secretary nodded. ‘He will talk to his paper for a few minutes, and then you can discuss the issues it raises. Many of you will know what it concerns already – there has been some tabloid and television interest in this matter, which raises fundamental questions about how we should respond to . . . the “visible presences” or whatever it is you wish to call us former . . . foreigners, outsiders, colonial subjects, or diasporic denizens of our muddled-up world.’ She smiled at the table, but singled out Sanjit and Rob, it seemed to Gramercy, then nodded to the secretary to fetch Kim McQuy.
‘My name is Kim McQuy. I’m a schoolteacher,’ Kim began as soon as he approached the table and looked quickly around the company. ‘I was able to come to talk to you this afternoon because, providentially, it’s half-term.’
Gramercy’s heart lurched: here stood before her, in living flesh and blood, that weirdo activist, the Leto agitator, her very own plagiarist, who’d never deigned to answer the messages she’d left him after accessing his website. Monica had said she was considering a legal letter warning him off, telling him he’d not get another chance. Had she sent it?
‘I teach ten-year-olds at an inner city primary school in Cantelowes which has children who speak fifteen different languages.’
Off screen, he looked more glittery in eye and lip, and very slightly built, with ears that seemed kind of pricked, and she could see that his hands were shaking. He caught her eye, and an eyebrow twitched together with the corner of his mouth; she found herself dropping her gaze, his own expression was so serious, so blazing. He was sitting against the light that hot afternoon, so there was a kind of heated
luminousness around his dark head, which matched the ardour of his speech. As he went on, addressing the committee, his voice became odder, the pitch a little higher, with a quick, urgent catch of the breath. He was standing – although he had been shown a seat at the table.
‘I have a vision – I describe it in the paper you have there. My vision concerns the history of this country, how Albion has always been crossed and crossed again by people coming from here, there and everywhere, sometimes looking for food, shelter, work, but sometimes for experience, adventure, novelty. The diasporas of the last centuries include wave upon wave of refugees, political exiles, persecuted races: the roll call, as you all know, is magnificent.’
In many ways his style was simply that of a born teacher used to facing a class and keeping going to hold their attention; but there were the inflections of the preacher, and his eyes bulged slightly with the effort of his address.
‘Some of us are mongrels, yes. Some of us aren’t. Some of those don’t wish to entertain the mongrelisation of the nation: the process Rushdie has likened to chutnification, the blending of spices and herbs and the fruits of the earth. But it makes no odds whether some individuals are squeaky clean as clean can be – ethnically, because it’s our history that is mongrel, our culture is mongrel, as Defoe realised already a long time ago – even before you were here . . .’ he pointed at the rabbi ‘or you . . .’ he waved towards Baroness Ghopil, ‘or you . . . or you or you—’ He took in Rob, Sanjit, the poet, and ended tapping his breast. ‘Or me.’
Sanjit nodded, then boomed out, ‘“A true born Englishman’s a contradiction, / In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.” But Defoe doesn’t like us much, does he, Mr McQuy?’
Kim swallowed, stiffened. ‘Defoe’s patriotism made him rail at all the failings he saw in the arrogance of people around him. Ingratitude, chiefly, was the vice of the age. But Defoe was brilliant and complicated, and most people aren’t – I’m not. I have simple needs, and that makes me understand others better than many.
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