A few days after the Brexit vote, I am talking to N. over the phone: an intelligent, skilled businesswoman – in fact someone much more skilled at managing the world and its demands, laws and finances than I am (which isn't setting the bar very high, I admit). She is, however, upset, also as I am – concerned about the house she owns, the flat she rents for herself, the economic future for her consultant business, and most of all for her son, who has recently graduated from university and gone to work in London, and his future...
And she and her son are people who really, really have it together. As well as people who have a very good idea how international relations, law and finance all work and are interlinked, as they've both lived in Germany for substantial amounts of time and made complex decisions about citizenship, property, rights, etc.
Though she remains, as always, focused and articulate, in the course of going through various scenarios and plans it is clear that she is also extremely upset – that now familiar sense of the world upending itself, of collapse and disintegration...
•••
On the train back from Sheffield, a woman with glasses and kind, intelligent face is talking to a man on the other side of the table we share. They are talking about choruses, and musicals – the woman is singing with a local chorus for the first time in her life, and enjoying it immensely; the man teaches a lot of students musical theatre, apparently at the school level. I can't resist intruding, talking about the shows and experiences they're discussing, my own experiences, and my students; the woman enjoys our talk, the man might feel a bit more encroached upon.
At Durham he gets out, pleasantly saying good-bye to both of us; she and I talk, then more animatedly around the Brexit vote. She is a judge, going to Edinburgh to preside over a particular case, one about a child in a conflicted family situation; her face is open and warm, but you can also see the dignity, clarity and ethical assertiveness needed for a judge. She is also anxious and angry over the Brexit vote – we talk about consequences, structures, and implicit politics: I admit that some people I know felt as though they were voting against an overly controlling government, but that I would much rather be managed by a number of conflicting organisations arguing their way to some compromise than I would want to be under the heavily oligarchical structure of modern Britain (or perhaps I should say, of modern London; or, as one of my colleagues from London corrected me, of The City – that is, that part of central London dominated by finance and government).
She clearly has a more precise grasp of law and rights than I ever would, so the fact that she looks so concerned, nearly despairing for a large class of people, is arresting...
•••
K. cleans my apartment every month or so, irregularly; she and her husband and two daughters are Bulgarian, and when she is here we always talk about how they are all doing, how school and now university are working out for them. K. is animated and fun, and tends to take care of me, bringing homemade food and asking what I think about various current matters, so of course we talk about Brexit – I do get a bit direct, but we've known each other for years, so I can ask: do her daughters have noticeable accents, are they paying attention to whether they bump into the wrong people in Newcastle, in Sheffield? Because there has been a sharp increase in incidents, with some violence, aimed at immigrants across the entire country in the past weeks.
(As for K. and her husband, they both have fairly heavy accents – I assume they know to be careful in some parts of town...)
We talk about my passports, plans, health care, futures....
K. says it's not a problem, but none of them have British citizenship, so they don't know what will happen to all their plans, to their lives. What is the future for her business, for the family needs that she supports so heroically? (Because I'll tell you, I couldn't do the work she does to keep a family afloat, and they live in a pleasant house.) I get a bit anxiously heavy-handed here, stressing that they should pay attention in bad neighbourhoods...
•••
In the meantime, I have managed to offend my family by firing off an enraged email in response to their Brexit jokes – it really wasn't funny to me (this was a day or so after the vote). M., another American, can see my point of view, as can my analyst – but that's not quite what concerns me: it's not whether I or anyone else are right or not; it is... that general atmosphere of splitting, of disagreement, of confusion...
of panic, of rage, of lowering skies, of fragmenting rights and futures, of disintegrating stabilities.
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters: an extraordinarily vast, complex novel, where he (the most ethical descendent of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Blackshirts, and so someone who has spent his life trying to figure out how to atone for his father's grotesque actions) outlines the desperate confusion of the 1930s: not knowing where right is, where safety is – some of the violence and chaos of the past weeks suggests what is, at least now, a smaller version of the early 1930s...
Well, for now, anyway.
•••
A week later, I meet with N. again – we sit in a restaurant and talk. We are both calmer, but with plans and ideas: multiple futures, financial and legal... waiting, and watching....
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