Ian McEwan
Solar

Part One

He belonged to that class of men – vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever – who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave, how to take the long view, how to take the blame. Weren’t marriages, his marriages, tidal, with one rolling out just before another rolled in? But this one was different. He did not know how to behave, long views pained him, and for once there was no blame for him to assume, as he saw it. It was his wife who was having the affair, and having it flagrantly, punitively, certainly without remorse. He was discovering in himself, among an array of emotions, intense moments of shame and longing. Patrice was seeing a builder, their builder, the one who had repointed their house, fitted their kitchen, retiled their bathroom, the very same heavy-set fellow who in a tea break had once shown Michael a photo of his mock-Tudor house, renovated and tudorised by his own hand, with a boat on a trailer under a Victorian-style lamp post on the concreted front driveway, and space on which to erect a decommissioned red phone box. Beard was surprised to find how complicated it was to be the cuckold. Misery was not simple. Let no one say that this late in life he was immune to fresh experience.

He had it coming. His four previous wives, Maisie, Ruth, Eleanor, Karen, who all still took a distant interest in his life, would have been exultant, and he hoped they would not be told. None of his marriages had lasted more than six years and it was an achievement of sorts to have remained childless. His wives had discovered early on what a poor or frightening prospect of a father he presented and they had protected themselves and got out. He liked to think that if he had caused unhappiness, it was never for long, and it counted for something that he was still on speaking terms with all his exes.

But not with his current wife. In better times, he might have predicted for himself a manly embrace of double standards, with bouts of dangerous fury, perhaps an episode of drunken roaring in the back garden late at night, or writing off her car, and the calculated pursuit of a younger woman, a Samson-like toppling of the marital temple. Instead, he was paralysed by shame, by the extent of his humiliation. Even worse, he amazed himself with his inconvenient longing for her. These days, desire for Patrice came on him out of nowhere, like an attack of stomach cramp. He would have to sit somewhere alone and wait for it to pass. Apparently, there was a certain kind of husband who thrilled at the notion of his wife with other men. Such a man might arrange to have himself bound and gagged and locked in the bedroom wardrobe while ten feet away his better half went at it. Had Beard at last located within himself a capacity for sexual masochism? No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have. Conspicuously, he went to Lisbon to look up an old friend, but it was a joyless three nights. He had to have his wife back, and dared not drive her away with shouting or threats or brilliant moments of unreason. Nor was it in his nature to plead. He was frozen, he was abject, he could think of nothing else. The first time she left him a note – Staying over at R’s tonight. xx P – did he go round to the mock-Tudor ex-council semi with the shrouded speedboat on the hard standing and a hot tub in the pint-sized back yard to mash the man’s brains with his own monkey wrench? No, he watched television for five hours in his overcoat, drank two bottles of wine and tried not to think. And failed.

But thinking was all he had. When his other wives had found out about his affairs, they raged, coldly or tearfully, they insisted on long sessions into the early hours to deliver their thoughts on broken trust, and eventually their demands for a separation and all that followed. But when Patrice happened across some emails from Suzanne Reuben, a mathematician at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she became unnaturally elated. That same afternoon she moved her clothes into the guest bedroom. It was a shock when he slid the wardrobe doors open to confirm the fact. Those rows of silk and cotton dresses, he realised now, had been a luxury and a comfort, versions of herself lining up to please him. No longer. Even the hangers were gone. She smiled through dinner that night as she explained that she too intended to be ‘free’ and within the week she had started her affair. What was a man to do? He apologised one breakfast, told her his lapse meant nothing, made grand promises he sincerely believed he might keep. This was the closest he came to pleading. She said she did not mind what he did. This was what she was doing – and this was when she revealed the identity of her lover, the builder with the sinister name of Rodney Tarpin, seven inches taller and twenty years younger than the cuckold, whose sole reading, according to his boast, back when he was humbly grouting and bevelling for the Beards, was the sports section of a tabloid newspaper.

An early sign of Beard’s distress was dysmorphia, or perhaps it was dysmorphia he was suddenly cured of. At last, he knew himself for what he was. Catching sight of a conical pink mess in the misted full-length mirror as he came out of the shower, he wiped down the glass, stood full on and took a disbelieving look. What engines of self-persuasion had let him think for so many years that looking like this was seductive? That foolish thatch of earlobe-level hair that buttressed his baldness, the new curtain-swag of fat that hung below his armpits, the innocent stupidity of swelling in gut and rear. Once, he had been able to improve on his mirror-self by pinning back his shoulders, standing erect, tightening his abs. Now, human blubber draped his efforts. How could he possibly keep hold of a young woman as beautiful as she was? Had he honestly thought that status was enough, that his Nobel Prize would keep her in his bed? Naked, he was a disgrace, an idiot, a weakling. Even eight consecutive press-ups were beyond him. Whereas Tarpin could run up the stairs to the Beards’ master bedroom holding under one arm a fifty-kilo cement sack. Fifty kilos? That was roughly Patrice’s weight.

She kept him at a distance with lethal cheerfulness. These were additional insults, her sing-song hellos, the matinal recital of domestic detail and her evening whereabouts, and none of it would have mattered if he had been able to despise her a little and plan to be shot of her. Then they could have settled down to the brief, grisly dismantling of a five-year childless marriage. Of course she was punishing him, but when he suggested that, she shrugged and said that she could just as easily have said the same of him. She had merely been waiting for this opportunity, he said, and she laughed and said in that case she was grateful to him.

In his delusional state he was convinced that just as he was about to lose her he had found the perfect wife. That summer of 2000 she was wearing different clothes, she had a different look around the house – faded tight jeans, flip-flops, a ragged pink cardigan over a T-shirt, her blonde hair cut short, her pale eyes a deeper agitated blue. Her build was slight, and now she looked like a teenager. From the empty rope-handled glossy carrier bags and tissue paper left strewn on the kitchen table for his inspection, he gathered she was buying herself new underwear for Tarpin to remove. She was thirty-four, and still kept the strawberries-and-cream look of her twenties. She did not tease or taunt or flirt with him, that at least would have been communication of a sort, but steadily perfected the bright indifference with which she intended to obliterate him.

He needed to cease needing her, but desire was not like that. He wanted to want her. One sultry night he lay uncovered on the bed and tried masturbating himself towards freedom. It bothered him that he could not see his genitalia unless his head was propped up on two pillows, and his fantasy was continually interrupted by Tarpin, who, like some ignorant stagehand with ladder and bucket, kept wandering onto the set. Was there another man on the planet apart from Beard attempting at this moment to pleasure himself with thoughts of his own wife just thirty feet away across the landing? The question emptied him of purpose. And it was too hot.

Friends used to tell him that Patrice resembled Marilyn Monroe, at least, from certain angles and in a certain light. He had been happy to accept this status-enhancing comparison, but he never really saw it. Now he did. She had changed. There was a new fullness in her lower lip, a promise of trouble when she lowered her gaze, and her shortened hair lay curled on her nape in a compelling, old-fashioned way. Surely, she was more beautiful than Monroe, drifting about the house and garden at weekends in a haze of blonde and pink and pale blue. What an adolescent colour scheme he had fallen for, and at his age.

He turned fifty-three that July, and naturally she ignored his birthday, then pretended in her jolly new style to remember it three days later. She gave him a kipper tie in Day-Glo mint green, telling him the style was being ‘revived’. Yes, the weekends were the worst. She would come into a room where he was, not wishing to talk, but perhaps wanting to be seen, and she would look about in mild surprise before wandering off. She was evaluating everything afresh, not only him. He would see her at the bottom of the garden under the horse chestnut, lying on the grass with the newspapers, waiting in deep shade for her evening to begin. Then she would retire to the guest room to shower, dress, apply make-up and scent. As if reading his thoughts, she was wearing her lipstick red and thick. Perhaps Rodney Tarpin was encouraging the Monroe notion – a cliché Beard was now obliged to share.

If he was still in the house when she left (he tried so hard to keep busy at night), he found it irresistible to ameliorate his longing and pain by observing her from an upstairs window as she stepped into the evening air of Belsize Park and walked up the garden path – how disloyal of the unoiled garden gate to squeak in the same old way – and climbed into her car, a small and flighty black Peugeot of wanton acceleration. She was so eager, gunning the engine as she pulled away from the kerb, that his douleur redoubled because he knew she knew he was watching. Then her absence hung in the summer dusk like garden bonfire smoke, an erotic charge of invisible particulates that caused him to remain in position for many pointless minutes. He was not actually mad, he kept telling himself, but he thought he was getting a taste, a bitter sip.

What impressed him was his ability to think of nothing else. When he was reading a book, when he was giving a talk, he was really thinking of her, or of her and Tarpin. It was a bad idea to be at home when she was out seeing him, but since Lisbon he had no desire to look up old girlfriends. Instead he took on a series of evening lectures about quantum field theory at the Royal Geographical Society, joined radio and TV discussions, and at occasional events filled in for colleagues who were ill. Let the philosophers of science delude themselves to the contrary, physics was free of human taint, it described a world that would still exist if men and women and all their sorrows did not. In this conviction he was at one with Albert Einstein.

But even if he ate late with friends, he was usually home before her, and was forced to wait, whether he wanted to or not, until she returned, though nothing would happen when she did. She would go straight to her room, and he would remain in his, not wanting to meet her on the stairs in her state of post-coital somnolence. It was almost better when she stayed over at Tarpin’s. Almost, but it would cost him a night’s sleep.

At 2 a.m. one night in late July he was in his dressing gown on his bed listening to the radio when he heard her come in and immediately, without premeditation, enacted a scheme to make her jealous and unsure and want to come back to him. On the BBC World Service a woman was discussing village customs as they affected domestic life among Turkish Kurds, a soothing drone of cruelty, injustice and absurdity. Turning the volume down, but keeping his fingers on the knob, Beard loudly intoned a fragment of a nursery rhyme. He figured that from her room she would hear his voice, but not his words. As he finished his sentence, he turned up the volume of the woman’s voice for a few seconds, which he then interrupted with a line from the lecture he had given that night, and made the woman reply at greater length. He kept this going for five minutes, his voice, then the woman’s, sometimes artfully overlapping the two. The house was silent, listening, of course. He went into the bathroom, ran a tap, flushed the lavatory and laughed out loud. Patrice should know that his lover was a wit. Then he gave out a muted kind of whoop. Patrice should know he was having fun.

He did not sleep much that night. At four, after a long silence suggestive of tranquil intimacy, he opened his bedroom door while keeping up an insistent murmur, and went down the stairs backwards, bending forward to beat out on the treads with his palms the sound of his companion’s footfall, syncopated with his own. This was the kind of logical plan only a madman might embrace. After seeing his companion to the hall, saying his goodbyes between silent kisses, and closing the front door on her with a firmness that resounded through the house, he went upstairs and fell into a doze at last after six, repeating to himself softly, ‘Judge me by my results.’ He was up an hour later to be sure of running into Patrice before she left for work, and of letting her see how suddenly cheerful he was.

At the front door she paused, car keys in her hand, the strap of her book-crammed satchel cutting into the shoulder of her floral blouse. No one could doubt it, she looked shattered, drained, though her voice was as bright as ever. She told him that she would be inviting Rodney for dinner that evening, and that he would probably stay the night, and she would appreciate it if he, Michael, would stay clear of the kitchen.

That happened to be his day for travelling to the Centre out at Reading. Dizzy with fatigue, he began the journey staring through his smeared train window at suburban London’s miraculous combination of chaos and dullness, and damning himself for his folly. His turn to listen to voices through the wall? Impossible, he would stay out somewhere. Driven from his own home by his wife’s lover? Impossible, he would stay and confront him. A fight with Tarpin? Impossible, he would be stamped into the hallway parquet. Clearly, he had been in no state to take decisions or to devise schemes and from now on he must take into account his unreliable mental state and act conservatively, passively, honestly, and break no rules, do nothing extreme.

Months later he would violate every element of this resolution, but it was forgotten by the end of that day because Patrice arrived home from work without supplies (there was nothing in the fridge) and the builder did not come to dinner. He saw her only once that night, crossing the hallway with a mug of tea in her hand, looking slumped and grey, less the movie icon, more the overworked primary-school teacher whose private life was awry. Had he been wrong to berate himself on the train, had his plan actually worked, and in her sorrow had she been forced to cancel?

Reflecting on the night before, he found it extraordinary that after a lifetime of infidelities, a night with an imaginary friend was no less exciting. For the first time in weeks he felt faintly cheerful, even whistled a show tune as he microwaved his supper, and when he saw himself in the gold-leaf sunking mirror in the cloakroom downstairs, thought his face had lost some fat and looked purposeful, with a shadow of cheekbone visible, and was, by the light of the thirty-watt bulb, somewhat noble, a possible effect of the sugary cholesterol-lowering yoghurt drink he was forcing himself to swallow each morning. When he went to bed he kept the radio off and lay waiting with the light turned low for the remorseful little tap of her fingernails on his door.

It did not come, but he was not troubled. Let her pass a white night re-examining her life and what was meaningful, let her weigh in the scales of human worth a horny-handed Tarpin and his shrouded boat against ethereal Beard of planetary renown. The following five nights she stayed home, as far as he could tell, while he was committed to his lecture and other meetings and dinners, and when he came in, usually after midnight, he hoped his confident footfalls gave the impression to the darkened house of a man returning from a tryst.

On the sixth night, he was free to stay in, and she chose to go out, having spent longer than usual under shower and hairdryer. From his place, a small, deeply recessed window on a first-floor half-landing, he watched her go along the garden path and pause by a tall drift of vermilion hollyhocks, pause as though reluctant to leave, and put her hand out to examine a flower. She picked it, squeezing it between newly painted nails of thumb and forefinger, held it a moment to consider, then let it drop to her feet. The summer dress, beige silk, armless, with a single pleat in the small of her back, was new, a signal he was uncertain how to read. She continued to the front gate and he thought there was heaviness in her step, or at least some slackening of her customary eagerness, and she parted from the kerb in the Peugeot at near-normal acceleration.

But he was less happy that night waiting in, confused again about his judgement, beginning to think he was right after all, his radio prank had sunk him. To help think matters through he poured a scotch and watched football. In place of dinner he ate a litre tub of strawberry ice cream and prised apart a half-kilo of pistachios. He was restless, bothered by unfocused sexual need, and coming to the conclusion that he might as well be having or resuming a real affair. He passed some time turning the pages of his address book, stared at the phone a good while, but did not pick it up.

He drank half the bottle and before eleven fell asleep fully dressed on the bed with the overhead light on, and for several seconds did not know where he was when, some hours later, he was woken by the sound of a voice downstairs. The bedside clock showed two thirty. It was Patrice talking to Tarpin, and Beard, still fortified by drink, was in the mood to have a word. He stood groggily in the centre of the bedroom, swaying a little as he tucked in his shirt. Quietly, he opened his door. All the house lights were on, and that was fine, he was already going down the stairs with no thought for the consequences. Patrice was still talking, and as he crossed the hall towards the open sitting-room door he thought that he heard her laughing or singing and that he was about to break up a little celebration.

But she was alone and crying, sitting hunched forward on the sofa with her shoes lying on their sides on the long glass coffee table. It was an unfamiliar bottled, keening sound. If she had ever cried like this for him, it had been in his absence. He paused in the doorway and she did not see him at first. She was a sad sight. A handkerchief or tissue was twisted in her hand, her delicate shoulders were bowed and shaking, and Beard was filled with pity. He sensed that a reconciliation was at hand and that all she needed was a gentle touch, kind words, no questions, and she would fold into him and he would take her upstairs, though even in his sudden warmth of feeling, he knew he could not carry her, not even in both arms.

As he began to cross the room a floorboard creaked and she looked up. Their eyes met, but only for a second because her hands flew up to her face and covered it as she twisted away. He said her name, and she shook her head. Awkwardly, with her back to him, she got up from the sofa and, walking almost sideways, she stumbled on the polar-bear skin that tended to slide too easily on the polished wooden floor. He had come close to breaking an ankle once and had despised the rug ever since. He also disliked its leering, wide-open mouth and bared teeth yellowed by exposure to the light. They had never done anything to secure it to the floor, and there was no question of throwing it out because it was a wedding present from her father. She steadied herself, remembered to pick up her shoes and, with a free hand covering her eyes, hurried past him, flinching as he reached out to touch her arm, and beginning to cry again, more freely this time, as she ran up the stairs.

He turned off the lights in the room and lay on the sofa. Pointless to go after her when she did not want him, and it did not matter now, because he had seen. Too late for her hand to conceal the bruise below her right eye that spread across the top of her cheek, black fading to inflamed red at its edges, swelling under her lower lid, forcing the eye shut. He sighed aloud in resignation. It was inevitable, his duty was clear, he would have to get in his car now and drive to Cricklewood, lean on the doorbell until he had brought Tarpin from his bed, and have it out with him, right there beneath the coach lamp, and surprise his loathed opponent with an astonishing turn of speed and purpose. With eyes narrowing, he thought it through again, lingering on the detail of his right fist bursting through the cartilage of Tarpin’s nose, and then, with minor revisions, he reconsidered the scene through closed eyes, and did not stir until the following morning when he was woken by the sound of the front door closing as she left for work.

He held an honorary university post in Geneva and did no teaching there, lent his name, his title, Professor Beard, Nobel laureate, to letterheads, to institutes, signed up to international ‘initiatives’, sat on a Royal Commission on science funding, spoke on the radio in layman’s terms about Einstein or photons or quantum mechanics, helped out with grant applications, was a consultant editor on three scholarly journals, wrote peer reviews and references, took an interest in the gossip, the politics of science, the positioning, the special pleading, the terrifying nationalism, the tweaking of colossal sums out of ignorant ministers and bureaucrats for one more particle accelerator or rented instrument space on a new satellite, appeared at giant conventions in the US – eleven thousand physicists in one place! – listened to post-docs explain their research, gave with minimal variation the same series of lectures on the calculations underpinning the Beard-Einstein Conflation that had brought him his prize, awarded prizes and medals himself, accepted honorary degrees, and gave after-dinner speeches and eulogies for retiring or about-to-be-cremated colleagues. In an inward, specialised world he was, courtesy of Stockholm, a celebrity, and he coasted from year to year, vaguely weary of himself, bereft of alternatives. All the excitement and unpredictability was in the private life. Perhaps that was enough, perhaps he had achieved all he could during one brilliant summer in his youth. One thing was certain: two decades had passed since he last sat down in silence and solitude for hours on end, pencil and pad in hand, to do some thinking, to have an original hypothesis, play with it, pursue it, tease it into life. The occasion never arose – no, that was a weak excuse. He lacked the will, the material, he lacked the spark. He had no new ideas.

But there was a new government research establishment on the outskirts of Reading, hard against the roar of the motorway’s eastbound section and downwind of a beer factory. The Centre was supposed to resemble the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, near Denver, sharing its aims, but not its acreage or funding. Michael Beard was the new Centre’s first head, though a senior civil servant called Jock Braby did the real work. The administrative buildings, some of whose dividing walls contained asbestos, were not new, and nor were the laboratories, whose purpose had once been to test noxious materials for the building trade. All that was new was a three-metre-high barbed-wire and concrete post fence, with regularly spaced keep-out signs, thrown up around the perimeter of the National Centre for Renewable Energy without Beard’s or Braby’s consent. It represented, they soon found out, seventeen per cent of the first year’s budget. A sodden, twenty-acre field had been bought from a local farmer, and work to begin on drainage was in the planning stage.

Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action. And of course he knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range, and that humankind was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities. But he himself had other things to think about. And he was unimpressed by some of the wild commentary that suggested the world was in ‘peril’, that humankind was drifting towards calamity, when coastal cities would disappear under the waves, crops fail, and hundreds of millions of refugees surge from one country, one continent, to another, driven by drought, floods, famine, tempests, unceasing wars for diminishing resources. There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world, and therefore made more sense, or was just a little less irrelevant. The end of the world was never pitched in the present, where it could be seen for the fantasy it was, but just around the corner, and when it did not happen, a new issue, a new date would soon emerge. The old world purified by incendiary violence, washed clean by the blood of the unsaved, that was how it had been for Christian millennial sects – death to the unbelievers! And for Soviet Communists – death to the kulaks! And for Nazis and their thousand-year fantasy – death to the Jews! And then the truly democratic contemporary equivalent, an all-out nuclear war – death to everyone! When that did not happen, and after the Soviet empire had been devoured by its internal contradictions, and in the absence of any other overwhelming concern beyond boring, intransigent global poverty, the apocalyptic tendency had conjured yet another beast.

But Beard was always on the lookout for an official role with a stipend attached. A couple of long-running sinecures had recently come to an end, and his university salary, lecture fees and media appearances were never quite sufficient. Fortunately, by the end of the century, the Blair government wished to be, or appear to be, practically rather than merely rhetorically engaged with climate change and announced a number of initiatives, one of which was the Centre, a facility for basic research in need of a mortal at its head sprinkled with Stockholm’s magic dust. At the political level, a new minister had been appointed, an ambitious Mancunian with a populist’s touch, proud of his city’s industrial past, who told a press conference that he would ‘tap the genius’ of the British people by inviting them to submit their own clean-energy ideas and drawings. In front of the cameras he promised that every submission would be answered. Braby’s team – half a dozen underpaid post-doctoral physicists housed in four temporary cabins in a sea of mud – received hundreds of proposals within six weeks. Most were from lonely types working out of garden sheds, a few from start-up companies with zippy logos and ‘patents pending’.

In the winter of 1999, on his weekly visits to the site, Beard would glance through the piles sorted on a makeshift table. In this avalanche of dreams were certain clear motifs. Some proposals used water as a fuel for cars, and recycled the emission – water vapour – back into the engine; some were versions of the electric motor or generator whose output exceeded the input and seemed to work from vacuum energy – the energy supposedly found in empty space – or from what Beard thought must be violations of Lenz’s Law. All were variants on the perpetual-motion machine. These self-taught inventors seemed to have no awareness of the long history of their devices, or how they would, if they actually worked, destroy the entire basis of modern physics. The nation’s inventors were up against the first and second laws of thermodynamics, a wall of solid lead. One of the post-docs proposed sorting the ideas according to which of the laws they violated, first, second or both.

There was another common theme. Some envelopes contained no drawings, only a letter, sometimes half a page, sometimes ten. The author regretfully explained that he – it was always a he – declined to enclose detailed plans because it was well known that government agencies had much to fear from the kind of free energy that his machine would deliver, for it would close off an important tax resource. Or the armed forces would seize on the idea, declare it top secret, then develop it for their own use. Or conventional energy providers would send round thugs to beat the inventor to a pulp in order to maintain business supremacy. Or someone would steal the idea for himself and make his fortune. There were notorious instances of all these, the writer might add. The drawings could therefore only be seen at a certain address by an unaccompanied person from the Centre, and only with the involvement of intermediaries.

The table in ‘Hut Two’ consisted of five builder’s planks set on trestles, supporting sixteen hundred letters and printed emails, sorted by date. To save the Minister’s face, all would need an answer. Braby, a stooping, large-jawed fellow, was furious at the waste of time. Furious, but compliant. Beard was for forwarding them all to the Minister’s department in London, along with a few model replies. But Braby thought he was in line for a knighthood and Mrs Braby was keen, and upsetting a minister known to be close to Number Ten could blow the gong away. So the post-docs were set to work, and the Centre’s first project – designing a wind generator for city roofs – was delayed by months.

All the more time for Beard, not yet a refugee from the near-silent endgame of his fifth marriage, to study the ‘geniuses’, so named by the post-docs. He was drawn by the whiff of obsession, paranoia, insomnia and, above all, pathos that rose from the piles. Was he finding, he wondered, a version of himself in certain of these letters, of a parallel Michael Beard who, through drink, sex, drugs or plain misfortune, might have missed out on the disciplines of a formal education in physics and maths? Missed out, and still craved to think, tinker, contribute. Some of these men were truly clever but were required by their extravagant ambitions to reinvent the wheel, and then, one hundred and twenty years after Nikola Tesla, the induction motor, and then read inexpertly and far too hopefully into quantum field theory to find their esoteric fuel right under their noses, in the voids of the empty air of their sheds or spare bedrooms – zero-point energy.

Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigour defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here, the mystically inclined could find whatever they required, and claim science as their proof. And for these ingenious men in their spare time, what ghostly and beautiful music it must be – spectral asymmetry, resonances, entanglement, quantum harmonic oscillators – beguiling ancient airs, the harmony of the spheres that might transmute a lead wall into gold, and bring into being the engine that ran on virtually nothing, on virtual particles, that emitted no harm and would power the human enterprise as well as save it. Beard was stirred by the yearnings of these lonely men. And why should he think they were lonely? It was not, or not only, condescension that made him think them so. They did not know enough, but they knew too much to have anyone to talk to. What mate waiting down the pub or in the British Legion, what hard-pressed wife with job and kids and housework, was going to follow them down these warped funnels in the space-time continuum, into the wormhole, the shortcut to a single, final answer to the global problem of energy?

Beard devised a rubric inspired by the US Patent Office which advised the geniuses that all plans for perpetual motion and ‘above unity’ machines should be accompanied by a working model. But none ever was. Mindful of his ambitions, Braby watched over the post-docs closely as they worked through the piles. Every submission had to be answered individually, seriously, politely. But on the planks there was nothing new, or nothing new that was useful. The revolutionary lone inventor was a fantasy of popular culture – and the Minister.

With numbing slowness the Centre began to take shape. Duckboards were laid over the mud – a huge advance – then the mud was smoothed and seeded, and by summer there were lawns with paths across them, and in time the place resembled every other boring institute in the world. The labs were refitted, and at last the temporary cabins were hauled away. The adjacent field was drained, and foundations were dug, and building began. More staff were taken on – janitors, office cleaners, administrators, repair men, even scientists, and a human-resources team to find such people. When a critical mass was reached, a canteen was opened. And housed in a smart brick lodge next to red-and-white striped barrier gates were a dozen security guards in dark blue uniforms, who were cheery with one another, stern with almost everyone else and who seemed to believe that the place essentially belonged to them, and all the rest were interlopers.

In all this time, not one of the six post-docs moved on to a better-paid job at Caltech or MIT. In a field crammed with prodigies of all sorts, their CVs were exceptional. For a long while Beard, who had always had face-recognition problems, especially with men, could not, or chose not to, tell them apart. They ranged in age from twenty-six to twenty-eight and all stood above six feet. Two had ponytails, four had identical rimless glasses, two were called Mike, two had Scots accents, three wore coloured string around their wrists, all wore faded jeans and trainers and tracksuit tops. Far better to treat them all the same, somewhat distantly, or as if they were one person. Best not to insult one Mike by resuming a conversation that might have been with the other, or to assume that the fellow with the ponytail and glasses, Scots accent and no wrist string was unique, or was not called Mike. Even Jock Braby referred to all six as ‘the ponytails’.

And none of these young men appeared as much in awe of Michael Beard, Nobel laureate, as he thought they should. Clearly, they knew of his work, but in meetings they referred to it in passing, parenthetically, in a dismissive mumble, as though it had long been superseded, when in fact the opposite was true, the Beard-Einstein Conflation was in all the textbooks, unassailable, experimentally robust. As undergraduates the ponytails would surely have witnessed a demonstration of the ‘Feynman Plaid’, illustrating the topographical essence of Beard’s work. But at informal gatherings in the canteen these giant children became frontiersmen of theoretical physics and spoke round the Conflation, treated it as one might a dusty formulation by Sir Humphry Davy, and made elliptical references to BLG or some overwrought arcana in M-theory or Nambu Lie 3-algebra as if it were not a change of subject. And that was the problem. Much of the time he did not know what they were saying. The ponytails spoke at speed, on a constant, rising interrogative note, which caused an obscure muscle to tighten in the back of Beard’s throat as he listened. They failed to enunciate their words, going only so far with a thought, until one of the others muttered, ‘Right!’, after which they would jump to the next unit of utterance – one could hardly call it a sentence.

But it was worse than that. Some of the physics which they took for granted was unfamiliar to him. When he looked it up at home, he was irritated by the length and complexity of the calculations. He liked to think he was an old hand and knew his way around string theory and its major variants. But these days there were simply too many add-ons and modifications. When Beard was a twelve-year-old schoolboy, his maths teacher had told the class that whenever they found an exam question coming out at eleven nineteenths or thirteen twenty-sevenths, they should know they had the wrong answer. Too messy to be true. Frowning for two hours at a stretch, so that the following morning parallel pink lines were still visible across his forehead, he read up on the latest, on Bagger, Lambert and Gustavsson – of course! BLG was not a sandwich – and their Lagrangian description of coincident M2-branes. God may or may not have played dice, but surely He was nowhere near this clever, or such a show-off. The material world simply could not be so complicated.

But the domestic world could. In Beard’s tally of sheared wedlock, none was so foolishly prolonged – by him – and none so reduced him or engendered such ridiculous daydreams and weight-gain and unwitnessed folly as this, his fifth and last. During those long months there was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis. He was hearing voices after all, and seeing elements in the situation – Patrice’s sudden, lambent beauty, for example – which he decided later did not exist. The somatic consequences had a textbook quality. A sequence of minor ailments mocked the immune system that was supposed to protect him. Pathogens swam in hordes across the moat of his defences, they swarmed over the castle walls armed with cold sores, mouth ulcers, fatigue, joint pain, watery bowels, nose acne, blepharitis – a new one this, a disfiguring inflammation of the eyelids that erupted into white-peaked Mount Fuji styes that pressured his eyeballs, blurring his vision. Insomnia and monomania also distorted his view, and on the edge of sleep, when it came at last, he heard a newsreader’s voice reminding him of his sorry state, but not in words he could actually hear. Beyond this, he suffered the rational despair of a cuckold whose wife, despite her fading black eye, still moved about the house with a triumphal air, falsely cheerful, drifting away the moment he attempted a serious conversation. The mouth is famously over-represented in the brain, and he felt a tiny sore along a crack in the centre of his lower lip as a hideous cicatrice, the mark of his fate. How could she ever kiss him again? She would not be engaged or challenged or accused, she would not be loved, not by him.

Yes, yes, he had been a lying womaniser, he had it coming, but now that it had arrived, what was he supposed to do, beyond taking his punishment? To which god was he to offer his apologies? He had had enough. After morosely clinging to stupid hopes, he began to watch the post and emails for the invitation that would take him far away from Belsize Park and shake some independent life into his sorry frame. About half a dozen a week arrived throughout the year, but so far nothing had interested him among the inducements to give lectures on the shore of a plutocratic north-Italian lake, or in an unexciting German schloss, and he felt too weak and raw to discuss the Conflation before one more colleague-crowded conference in New Delhi or Los Angeles. He had no idea what he wanted, but he thought he would know it when he saw it.

Meanwhile, it was soothing, mostly, to take once a week the grubby morning train from Paddington to Reading, to be met at that Victorian station squashed in among the stubby tower blocks and be driven a few miles in a prototype Prius to the Centre by one of the indistinguishable ponytails. Leaving home, Beard was a tensed one-note vibrating string, whose oscillations diminished the further he left his home behind and the closer he approached the expensive perimeter fence. The vibrations came to rest as he acknowledged with raised forefinger the friendly salute of the security guards – how they loved a supremo! – and swept by, under the raised red-and-white barrier. Braby generally came out to meet him and even, with barely a touch of mandarin irony, held open the car door, for this was no cuckold arriving, but the distinguished visitor, the Chief, counted on to speak up for the place in the press, encourage the energy industries to take an interest, and squeeze another quarter-million from the blustering Minister.

The two men took coffee together at the start of the day. Progress and delays were listed and Beard noted whatever was required of him, then toured the site. In an off-the-cuff way he had proposed right at the start that it would be easier to procure more funds if he could claim for the Centre a single eye-catching project that would be comprehensible to the taxpayer and the media. And so the WUDU had been launched, a Wind turbine for Urban Domestic Use, a gizmo the householder could install on his rooftop to generate enough power to make a significant reduction in his electricity bill. On town roofs the wind did not blow smoothly from one direction the way it did on high towers in open country, so the physicists and engineers were asked to research an optimal design for wind-turbine blades in turbulent conditions. Beard had leaned on an old friend at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough for access to a wind tunnel, but first there were some intricate maths and aerodynamics to investigate, some sub-branch of chaos theory that he himself had little patience with. His interest in technology was even weaker than his interest in climate science. He had thought it would be a matter of settling the maths for the design, building three or four prototypes and testing them in the tunnel. But more people had to be hired as related issues wormed their way onto the agenda: vibration, noise, cost, height, wind shear, gyroscopic precession, cyclic stress, roof strength, materials, gearing, efficiency, phasing with the grid, planning permissions. What had seemed a simple wheeze had turned into a monster that was eating up all the attention and resources of the half-built Centre. And it was too late to turn back.

Beard preferred to go around alone to witness guiltily the consequences of his casual proposal. By the early summer of 2000 the post-docs each had a small cubicle of their own. Breaking up the group had helped, as had the nameplates on the door, but Beard put it down mostly to his own perceptiveness, the way each of the young men, after seven or eight months, was drifting into focus. He had made a mere half-dozen trips from Reading station in the Prius when, looking up from a speech he was to give that night in Oxford, he realised that, of course, the same driver had picked him up each time. He was one of the two who actually had a ponytail, a tall, thin-faced lad with a mouth overstuffed with large teeth and goofy smile. He came from outside Swaffham in Norfolk, Beard learned in this, his first focused conversation, and had been at Imperial, then Cambridge, then two years at Caltech in Pasadena, and none of these fabled places had diluted the pure inflections of his rural accent and its innocent swerves and dips and persistent rising line, suggestive to Beard of hedgerows and hayricks. His name was Tom Aldous. He told the Chief in that first chat that he had applied to work at the Centre because he thought the planet was in danger, and that his background in particle physics might be of some use, and that when he saw that Beard himself was going to lead the team, Beard of the Beard-Einstein Conflation, he, Tom Aldous, excitedly assumed that the Centre would have as its prime concern solar energy, particularly artificial photosynthesis and what he called nano-solar, about which he was convinced…

‘Solar energy?’ Beard said mildly. He knew perfectly well what was meant, but still, the term had a dubious halo of meaning, an invocation of New Age Druids in robes dancing round Stonehenge at Midsummer’s dusk. He also distrusted anyone who routinely referred to ‘the planet’ as proof of thinking big.

‘Yes!’ Aldous smiled with his many teeth into the rear-view mirror. It would not have occurred to him that the Chief was not an expert in the field. ‘It’s all out there, waiting for us to understand how to use it, and when we do, we’ll be amazed we ever thought of burning coal and oil and the like.’

Beard was intrigued by the way Aldous said ‘loike’. It seemed to mock what he was trying to say. They were going along a four-lane ring road with flowering hawthorns in the central reservation uselessly casting their scent at the passing traffic. The previous night, with no expectation of sleep, he had lain on his bed in his dressing gown reading while she stayed out all night. It was an unpublished bundle of letters to various colleagues from Paul Dirac, a man entirely claimed by science, bereft of small talk and other human skills. At six forty-five, Beard had set down the typescript and had gone to the bathroom to shave. Sunlight was already sloping through the front-garden birch and patterning the marble floor beneath his toes. What a waste, a failure of good governance, to have the sun so high so early in the day. He could not bear to count, he thought as he took his razor to the new sprouting hair between his eyebrows to give himself a younger look, all the hours of daylight he had ever missed in summer. But what could he have done, what was there for any young man at seven in the morning at any time of year, beyond sleep or getting to work? Now his sleep deficit stretched back weeks.

‘Do you think we could ever get by,’ he asked, stifling a yawn, ‘without coal and oil and gas?’

Aldous was taking them at a clip around a giant roundabout as big and busy as a racing circuit, that slung them centrifugally out upon a descending slip road and down onto the motorway, into the redoubled roar of onrushing vehicles, and trucks the size of five terraced houses whining in file towards Bristol at eighty-five miles per hour, and everyone else lining up to shoot past. Exactly so – how long could this go on? Beard, weak and tender from sleeplessness, felt belittled. The M4 demonstrated a passion for existence which he could no longer match. He was for the B-road, a cart track, a footpath. Shrinking inside his Harris tweed jacket, he listened to Tom Aldous, who spoke with the lilting confidence of a prize pupil providing the answers he thinks he knows his teacher wants.

‘Coal and then oil have made us, but now we know, burning the stuff will ruin us. We need a different fuel or we fail, we sink. It’s about another industrial revolution. And there’s no way round it, the future is electricity and hydrogen, the only two energy carriers we know that are clean at the point of use.’

‘So, more nuclear power.’

The boy took his eyes off the road to lock with Beard’s in the mirror – but for too long, and the older man, tensing on the back seat, looked away to encourage the driver’s gaze back on the mayhem outside.

‘Dirty, dangerous, expensive. But you know, we’ve already got a nuclear power station up and running with a great safety record making clean energy converting hydrogen to helium at no cost, nicely situated ninety-three million miles away. You know what I always think, Professor Beard? If an alien arrived on earth and saw all this sunlight, he’d be amazed to hear that we think we’ve got an energy problem. Photovoltaics! I read Einstein on it, I read you. The Conflation is brilliant. And God’s greatest gift to us is surely this, that a photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron. The laws of physics are so benign, so generous. And get this. There’s a guy in a forest in the rain and he’s dying of thirst. He has an axe and he starts cutting down the trees to drink the sap. A mouthful in each tree. All around him is a wasteland, no wildlife, and he knows that thanks to him the forest is disappearing fast. So why doesn’t he just open his mouth and drink the rain? Because he’s brilliant at chopping down trees, he’s always done things this way, and he thinks that people who advocate rain-drinking are weird. That rain is our sunlight, Professor Beard. It drenches our planet, drives our climate and its life. A sweet rain of photons, and all we have to do is hold out our cups! D’you know, I read this guy saying somewhere that less than an hour’s worth of all the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy the whole world’s needs for a year.’

Unimpressed, Beard said, ‘And what was this guy taking as his measure of solar irradiance?’

‘One quarter of the solar constant.’

‘Too optimistic. You’d need to halve that again.’

‘My point stands, Professor Beard. Solar arrays on a tiny fraction of the world’s deserts would give us all the power we need.’

The Norfolk lad’s bucolic tone, so at odds with what he was saying, was beginning to aggravate Beard’s raw condition. He said sullenly, ‘If you could distribute it.’

‘Yes. New DC lines! That’s just money and effort. Worth it for the planet! For our future, Professor Beard!’

Beard snapped the pages of his speech to indicate that the conversation was at a close. The essence of a crank was, firstly, to believe that all the world’s problems could be reduced to one, and be solved. And secondly, to go on about it non-stop.

But Tom Aldous was not done with him yet. As they arrived at the Centre and the gates were raised, he said, as though there had been no break in the discussion, ‘That’s why, I mean, no disrespect, that’s why I think we’re wasting our time with this micro wind-power stuff. The technology’s already good enough. The government just needs to make it attractive to people – it’s stroke-of-the-pen stuff, the market will do the rest. There’s so much money to be made. But solar – cutting-edge artificial photosynthesis – there’s great basic research to do on the nanotechnology. Professor, it could be us!’

Aldous was holding open the door and Beard was climbing wearily out. He said, ‘Thank you for your thoughts. But really, you should learn to keep your eyes on the road.’ And he turned away to shake Braby’s hand.

On his weekly round, therefore, he hoped to avoid running into Aldous alone, for the young man was always trying to convince him of photovoltaics, or his quantum explanation of photovoltaics, or to oppress him generally with friendliness and enthusiasm, and seemed oblivious to Beard’s surliness whenever he repeated the case for dropping WUDU. Of course it ought to be abandoned, when it was devouring nearly all the budget and growing in complication as it diminished in interest. But it had been Beard’s idea, and reversing it would be a personal disaster. So he was coming to dislike this young man, his big-boned goofy face and flaring nostrils, his ponytail, his wrist bracelet of grubby red and green string intertwined, his holier-than-thou diet of salad and yoghurt in the canteen, his habit of bringing his tray over unasked and sitting as close as possible to the Chief, who could only be depressed to learn that Aldous had boxed for Norfolk in the county championships, had rowed for his college at Cambridge, had come seventh in a San Francisco marathon. There were novels Aldous wanted him to read – novels! – and developments in contemporary music he thought Beard should be aware of, and movies that were of particular relevance, documentaries about climate change which Aldous had seen at least twice but would happily see again if there was a chance of making the Chief sit through them too. Aldous had a mind that was designed, through the medium of a Norfolk accent, to offer tireless advice, make recommendations, urge changes, or express enthusiasm for some journey or holiday or book or vitamin, which itself was a form of exhortation. Nothing eroded Beard’s goodwill more than to hear again that he must spend a month in the Vale of Swat.

In the building where once brick dust and fibreglass insulation had been tested for non-beneficial effects, he wandered between labs and listened to progress reports from engineers, designers and mysteriously termed energy consultants, who were responsible for a long document called ‘Discovering Micro Wind 4.2’, of which he could not bring himself to read even the first paragraph. During that summer so many were taken on by the Department of Human Resources, which had just been taken on itself, that each week he was obliged to explain who he was to half a dozen strangers. There were very few who were not busy with WUDU, and as he went about, Beard became more downhearted. For all the toil, nothing was ready for testing at Farnborough, no one had really addressed the turbulence problem, and no one was thinking much about what might happen when the wind did not blow because no one had the first idea about storing electricity cheaply and efficiently. That would have been a radical project, designing a powerful new battery for domestic supply, but it was too late to suggest it now, with everyone committed to WUDU, and besides, battery research was what Tom Aldous kept suggesting. Far better to build a boutique nuclear reactor on the Dorset Jurassic Coast than to wreck a million roofs with the shearing and vibration, the backward force and twist and torque of some worthless gadget for which the wind was rarely strong enough to motivate a useful current.

How could it be, Beard wondered with a touch of self-pity as he left one office and went glumly towards the next, that a chance remark of his had sent everyone rushing on this pointless quest? The answer was simple. In response to his proposal, there had been memoranda, detailed proposals one hundred and ninety-seven pages long, budget outlines and spreadsheets, and he had initialled his approval on each without reading them. And why was that? Because Patrice was starting her affair with Tarpin and he was not able to think of anything else.

He was going back along the corridor, passing Braby’s office on his way to talk to a materials specialist, and there was Braby himself, waiting for him just inside his door, and waving him in excitedly. Behind him, taping a drawing to a whiteboard, was one of the two ponytails called Mike.

‘I think we’ve got something,’ Braby said as he closed the door behind Beard. ‘Mike’s just brought it over.’

‘Don’t get the wrong idea, Professor Beard,’ Mike said. ‘I didn’t draw this. I found it.’

Braby took hold of Beard’s sleeve and tugged him to the board.

‘Just look at it. I need your opinion.’

On a large sheet there was one formally executed drawing surrounded by half a dozen sketches – doodles with a solid but wavering line of the kind one might see in Leonardo’s notebooks. Watched intently by the other two, Beard was staring at the centrepiece, a thick column containing a mess of lines and cutaways that resolved at last into a quadruple helix making one complete turn, and at the base, in less detail, a boxy representation of a generator. One of the doodles showed a roofline, with a TV aerial and the helix set on a short vertical pole strapped to the side of a chimney – not a good mounting at all. For two minutes he stared in silence.

‘Well?’ Braby said.

‘Well,’ Beard muttered. ‘It’s something.’

Braby laughed. ‘I thought it was. I don’t know how it works, but I just knew it was.’

‘It’s a variant on the Darrieus machine, the old egg beater.’ In the long-ago days when he was happily, or less obsessively, married, Beard had spent an afternoon reading up on the history of wind turbines. At that stage he had thought the physics was relatively simple. ‘But what’s different here is the blades are canted into a helix with a twist of sixty degrees. And there are four of them to spread the torque and perhaps help it self-start. Probably do well out of an upward-tilting airflow. Might be good on a roof, you never know. So, who came up with this?’

But he already knew the answer and his weariness redoubled. To listen to the Swan of Swaffham celebrate a breakthrough, the dawn of a new era in turbine design, would be more than he could bear today. It would have to be next week, for what he wanted at that moment was to sit somewhere quiet and think about Patrice, excite himself to no purpose. That was how bad it was.

Mike scratched at the base of his ponytail, which showed traces, like blanket stitching, of mutinous grey. ‘It was on Tom’s desk. We guessed he must have left it out for us to see. Then we got excited, couldn’t find him anywhere. We made a copy for the engineers and they already like it.’

Jock Braby did an agitated turn about his office, returned to his desk and snatched his jacket off the back of a chair. The snob in Beard made him want to take the civil servant aside to tell him that it was not done, not since the Bletchley era, or at least, since Beard’s own undergraduate days, to have a row of ballpoints in one’s jacket top pocket. But he only ever thought his advice, he never gave it.

In a state of muted excitement, Braby was dignified, stooping from a height towards his companions and speaking in a measured, husky tone, as though at a sword’s touch he had just straightened the knee from a royal cushion. ‘I’m going to talk to Aldous, then I’m going to take him with me to Design. We need proper drawings. They can sit down with him and get to work, and meanwhile, Mike, you and the other boys can do the maths, you know, Brecht’s Law and so on.’

‘Betz’s Law.’

‘Quite so.’ And he was gone.

When Beard was done with his rounds, he settled alone with a few chocolate biscuits on a plate and a mug of stewed coffee from an urn in the deserted common room, behind the canteen, for a long time the only comfortable place in the Centre, and let his thoughts return to the object of his obsession, fixing, with a near-pleasant heaviness in his limbs, on certain details he had lately neglected. But first he had to heave himself out of his chair and cross the room to turn off the murmuring television, forever tuned to a news channel. Bush v Gore, absorbing the precious attention of the disenfranchised majority of the world’s population. He settled down again and took a grip on his plate.

Patrice was by far the most beautiful of all his wives, or rather, she was in her angular fair-haired way, so it seemed to him now, the only beautiful wife he had ever had. The other four had missed beauty by millimetres – a nose too thin, a mouth too wide, a minimally defective or recessive chin or forehead – and they had appealed, these lesser wives, only from a particular perspective, or by an effort of will or imagination, or through self-deceiving desire. Certain details then, concerning Patrice. For example, the narrowness of her buttocks. A single large hand could span them. The creamy tautness of her skin between protruding points of pelvic bone. The startling polymorphism that had formed her fine, straw-blonde pubic hair. Would he ever see any of these treasures again? And now, unsensual as it was, he had to consider the bruise beneath her eye. She would not talk to him, and he might never know the truth. He could deal only in probabilities. Suppose his plan had worked, that the woman in his room, whose footfalls he had drummed with his palms on the stairs, had not enraged but endeared and bound Patrice to him, made her anxious at what she thought she was about to lose, prompted her to tell Tarpin that the affair was over, that she was returning to her husband – and provoked his fury. In that case, her blackened cheekbone signalled that she was almost his, Beard’s, again. Too much wish-fulfilment in that. What then?

Mechanically, he conveyed biscuits from plate to mouth. Perhaps the entire entanglement was going to take an improbable course. Most things were improbable. There were bruised and broken women who could not stay away from their violent men. Organisers of women’s refuges often lamented this quirk of human nature. If she was addicted to her fate there would be more blows to the face. His beautiful Patrice. Unbearable. Unthinkable. What then? She could be sickened as much by Michael’s sympathy as by Rodney’s violence, and want to be shot of them both. Or, he could go into his bedroom one night and discover her already there, waiting for him, naked on the marital bed, on her back as of old, legs parted, and he was going towards her, murmuring her name, and now he too was naked. It was going to be easy, and when he reached her side he cupped her left… But he was no longer alone, and he did not have to look up to know whose shape was in the doorway.

Without pouring himself a coffee – he allowed himself no stimulants and thought Beard should do the same – Aldous sat down beside the Chief and, skipping preliminaries, said, ‘I seriously urge you to read the piece on thin-film solar in next week’s Nature.’

Some of the blood supply that should have been in Beard’s brain was still in his penis, though draining quickly, otherwise he might have had the presence of mind to tell Aldous to go away.

Instead, he said, ‘Braby’s looking for you.’

‘That’s what I heard. You’ve all seen my turbine drawing.’

‘He’s probably in his office now.’

In a show of professional exhaustion, Aldous removed his baseball cap, leaned back in the armchair and closed his eyes. ‘I should have destroyed it.’

‘It has some promise,’ Beard said, much against his will. He distrusted anyone off a baseball field in a baseball cap, whichever way round it was worn.

‘That’s the point. Actually, it’s revolutionary. Talk about smooth torque! Optimal angle of attack for any direction of wind flow. Turbulence problem solved! Don’t get me wrong, Professor Beard, it’s brilliant. But d’you know, if the Centre takes it up, that’ll be three wasted years of development, doing work that a commercial firm could be doing with a view to making money. And it’s not important enough, micro wind is not going to solve the problem, Professor. The wind doesn’t blow hard enough in most towns. We need a new energy source for the whole of civilisation. There really isn’t much time. We should be doing the basics on solar, before the Germans and Japanese run away with it, before the Americans wake up. I’ve got some ideas. Even with our crappy climate, there’s infrared. But why am I telling this to you, of all people? We need to take another look at photosynthesis, see what we can learn. I’ve got some great ideas there too. I’m putting together a file for you. And now I’ve just seen Mr Braby heading towards Design with my stupid drawing in his hand. Oh Christ!’

He clamped a hand over his closed eyes in another show – this time, of undeserved suffering stoically endured.

‘I’m a simple man, Professor Beard. I just want to do what’s right by the planet.’

‘I see,’ Beard said, suddenly unable to face the final biscuit as it appeared in his grasp. He put it back on the plate and with some effort pushed himself out of his chair. ‘I need to be getting back now. You’ll need to drive me to the station.’

‘No point,’ Aldous said, and was out of his chair and crossing the room in three strides to the TV set, where he changed stations and paused, waiting for one item to give way to another, then turned up the volume. It was as if he had conjured the story for his own purposes, driven an elderly couple to destitution and despair and persuaded them to throw themselves hand in hand in front of the London to Oxford train. The local news report showed nothing more gory than the lines of frustrated passengers at Reading station being turned away and others waiting for special coaches that had failed to turn up.

The young man was guiding Beard towards the door, as one might a mental patient in need of a bath. ‘I live not far from Belsize Park and I’m going home now. It’s not a Prius, but it’ll get you to your door.’

He did not know how Aldous knew where he lived, but there was no point asking. And because Beard now intended to go home, back to the headquarters of his misery, he had no interest in sending Aldous to see Jock Braby.

Within minutes the Chief was sitting in the front of a rusty Ford Escort, pretending to listen to an insider’s account of what he might expect to find in next year’s International Panel on Climate Change report. Now the driver’s line of gaze had to deviate a whole ninety degrees from the road to engage with his passenger, sometimes for seconds on end, during which time, by Beard’s calculation, they had travelled several hundred metres. You don’t have to look at me to talk to me, he wanted to say, as he watched the traffic ahead, trying to predict the moment when he might seize the wheel. But even Beard found it difficult to criticise a man who was giving him a lift, his host in effect. Rather die or spend a life as a morose quadriplegic than be impolite.

After outlining what he expected to read next year in the third IPCC report, Aldous told Beard – and was the fiftieth person to do so in the past twelve months – that the last ten years of the twentieth century had been the warmest ten, or was it nine, on record. Then he was musing on climate sensitivity, the temperature rise associated with a doubling of CO2 above pre-industrial levels. As they entered London proper, it was radiative forcing, and after that the familiar litany of shrinking glaciers, encroaching deserts, dissolving coral reefs, disrupted ocean currents, rising sea levels, disappearing this and that, on and on, while Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril – that moronic word again – but because someone was telling him it was with such enthusiasm. This was what he disliked about political people – injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.

So climate change was consuming Tom Aldous. Did he have other subjects? Yes, he did. He was concerned about the emissions from his car and had found an engineer in Dagenham who was going to help him convert it to run on electricity. The drive train was good, the problem was the battery – he would need to recharge it every thirty miles. He would just about make it into work if he travelled no faster than eighteen mph. Finally, Beard forced Aldous into the human arena by asking him where he lived. In a studio flat at the bottom of his uncle’s garden in Hampstead. Each weekend he drove to Swaffham to visit his father, who was ill with a lung infection. The mother was long dead.

The story of the mother was about to begin as they pulled up outside the house. Beard was interrupting to speak his thanks, keen to bring the encounter to an end, but Aldous was out of the car and hurrying round to open the passenger’s door and help him out.

‘I can manage, I can manage,’ Beard said testily, but with the recent weight-gain, he almost could not, the wretched car was so low-slung. Aldous accompanied him up the path, again in psychiatric-nurse style, and when they were at the front door and Beard was reaching for his key, asked if he might use the lavatory. How to refuse? Just as they stepped into the house he remembered that it was Patrice’s afternoon off, and there she was, at the head of the stairs, in rakish blue eyepatch, tight jeans, pale green cashmere sweater, Turkish slippers, coming down to meet them with pleasant smiles and the offer of coffee as soon as her husband had made the introductions.

For twenty minutes they sat at the kitchen table, and she was kind, she cocked her head sweetly as she listened to the story of Tom Aldous’s mother and asked sympathetic questions, and told the story of her own mother, who also died young. Then the conversation lightened, and her eyes met Beard’s whenever she laughed, she included him, she listened with a half-smile when he spoke, appeared amused when he made a joke, and at one point touched his hand to interrupt him. Tom Aldous was suddenly blessed with expressiveness and humour, and made them laugh with an account of his father, a formidable history teacher, now a cantankerous invalid, who fed his hospital lunch to a ravenous red kite. Aldous kept turning away and grinning, and self-consciously running his hand up his neck to touch his ponytail. At no point did he remember that the planet was in peril.

And so the married couple harmoniously entertained the merry young man, and by the time he stood to leave it was clear that something wondrous had happened, there had been a fundamental shift in Patrice’s attitude towards her husband. After seeing Aldous to his car, Beard, not daring to believe that his plan, summoning a woman on the stairs with his bare hands, had actually worked, hurried back into the house to learn more. But the kitchen was deserted, the cups with their dregs were still in place on the table, the house was quiet again. Patrice had retreated to her room, and when he went up and tapped on her door she told him plainly to go away. She had only wished to torment him with a glimpse of the life they once had. It was her absence she wanted him to savour.

He did not catch sight of her until the following evening, as she left the house, leaving behind a trail of unfamiliar scent.

The weeks passed and little changed. The autumn term began at Patrice’s primary school. In the early evenings she marked work and prepared classes, and three or four times a week left the house around seven or eight to be at Tarpin’s. When the clocks went back in late October and she went up the garden path in darkness, her absence was all the more complete. Nothing came of her intention to have her lover round to dinner, at least, not while Beard was in the house. Occasional meetings took him out of town for the night, and when he returned he saw no sign of Tarpin’s presence, unless it was in the deeper sheen of the oak dining-room table or the neatness of the kitchen, with every pot and pan unusually stowed.

But in early November he went into the walk-in larder at the rear of the house, near the back door, in search of a light bulb. It was a cold and windowless room with brick-and-stone shelves where various household hardware and junk and unwanted presents had spilled into the space intended for provisions. On the far wall was a single ventilation slot which showed pinpricks of daylight, and directly underneath, on the floor, was a dirty canvas bag. He stood over it, letting his outrage grow, and then, noticing that the top was undone, parted it with his foot. He saw tools – different-sized hammers, bolsters and heavy-duty screwdrivers and, lying right on top, a chocolate-bar wrapper, a brown apple core, a comb and, to his disgust, a crumpled used paper tissue. The bag could not have been left behind when Tarpin was working on the bathroom, for that was many months back and Beard knew he would have seen it. It was clear enough. While he was in Paris or Edinburgh, the builder had come straight from work to see Patrice, had forgotten his tools the next morning, or did not need them, and she had stowed them in here. He wanted to throw them out immediately, but the handles of the bag were black and greasy, and Beard felt revulsion at touching anything of Tarpin’s. He found the bulb and went into the kitchen to pour himself a scotch. It was three in the afternoon.

Early the next day, a cold Sunday, he found Rodney Tarpin’s address on an invoice and, after deciding not to shave and drinking three cups of strong coffee, and pulling on a pair of old leather boots that added an inch to his height and a thick woollen shirt that put muscle on his upper arms, he drove towards Cricklewood. On the radio, exclusively American affairs. Commentators were still picking over last month’s bombing of the warship USS Cole by a group called al-Qaeda, but the main item was the same old thing, it had run all summer and autumn and was wearing on his patience. Bush versus Gore. Beard was not an American citizen, he had no vote in this fight, and still was obliged by the news service, for which he was compelled to pay a fee, to attend to every bland development. He was aggressively apolitical – to the fingertips, he liked to say. He disliked the overheated non-arguments, the efforts each side made to misunderstand and misrepresent the other, the amnesia that spooled behind each ‘issue’ as it arose. To Beard, the United States was the fascinating entity that owned three quarters of the world’s science. The rest was froth and, in this case, a struggle within an elite – the privileged son of a former president jostling with the high-born son of a senator. With the polls long closed, it seemed, Gore had phoned Bush to retract his concession of defeat, Florida was too close to call, there would be an automatic recount – ‘Circumstances have changed since I first called you’ was the understatement Al Gore had used.

In office, both men would be bound by the same constraints, both pinned down by the same facts, by advisors from the same graduate colleges, schooled in like-minded orthodoxies – Beard had little interest in the detail. It could make no significant difference to the world at large, was his considered opinion as he rolled through Swiss Cottage, if Bush rather than Gore, Tweedledum rather than Tweedledee, was president for the first four or eight years of the twenty-first century.

The previous afternoon and evening with the scotch had bequeathed a reckless clarity, as well as a pleasant sensation of invincibility. Now he saw that he had been taking matters too seriously. Unfaithful wife? Then get another! Cricklewood had a hung-over, pacified look with few pedestrians about, and the Sunday-morning tranquillity reminded him that his mission was simply to appease his curiosity. He had a right to know where Patrice spent half her week and how his adversary lived. A mile further on, through a sequence of side turns, Tarpin’s road turned out to be a four-lane urban motorway a mile long, connecting two arterial routes, a provisional, accidental place where the houses, pre-war semis, had an embattled, windswept look. He parked in a lay-by right outside the drive and stared at the place he had seen in the photograph, at the slats of dark-stained pine bolted to the front elevations to create a sixteenth-century look, at the motor boat slumped uncomfortably on its trailer – it could have been a rowing boat hiding under the wind-shredded plastic cover – at the coach lamp on a black post by the front door, which was in the Georgian style, and, a bold recent addition, lying on its side on the concrete, surrounded by neatly weeded beds, a red phone box. Between the near-black timbers, the house was painted brilliant white, the floral curtains behind the leaded panes were trimly ruched and drawn open.

Beard had no strong views on interior or exterior design, no prejudices against garden coach lamps and the like, and the attempt to give a nineteen-thirties suburban house an Elizabethan appearance seemed to him innocently patriotic. If he had not loathed Rodney Tarpin, he would have thought that the place suggested decency, hard work, simple-minded optimism. He knew from conversations way back that Mrs Tarpin had left last year with the three children and was living with a Welsh quantity surveyor on the Costa Brava, so there was some pathos too in the way Rodney was keeping the place up. But this was where Patrice came regularly to be fucked, and every detail, even the little wishing well and the posse of dwarfs clustered by its handle, seemed hostile. He hated them in return. Was Tarpin going to erect the phone box in Patrice’s honour? He could hear her pretending to like it. Darling, that’s so original, so creative… Enough! He got out of the car.

Because his wife had been up this way so many times before him, and because he had once been Tarpin’s employer, Beard felt entitled and at ease as he went up the drive. From one of the black gloss-painted down-pipes came the tinkle of falling water, and from the drain at its base steam rose into the November air. The master of the house was at his ablutions, rinsing from his body the DNA of Mrs Beard. The front door with its Palladian portico had an unused look, so Beard followed a narrow concrete path squeezed between the house and a wooden boundary fence that led to a side door and continued through an open gate into the back garden. He remembered Tarpin boasting of a hot tub and he wanted to see. She may or may not have been in it, but he was in the mood to be thorough, he needed to know everything.

A treeless patch of unmown lawn was separated on three sides from the neighbours by a chain-link fence just beyond which a pylon stood astride the cluttered land that lay between the houses, and he could hear the homely crackle of the power lines. Electrons – so durable, so fundamental. He had spent much of his youth thinking about them. At the age of twenty-one he had read in wonder the Dirac Equation of 1928 in its full form, predicting the spin of an electron. A thing of pure beauty, that equation, one of the greatest intellectual feats ever performed, correctly demanding of nature the existence of antiparticles and placing before the young reader the wide horizons of the ‘Dirac sea’. That was when he was a scientist, and now he was a bureaucrat and never thought about electrons. In the mid nineties he had stood with a small crowd in Westminster Abbey while Stephen Hawking delivered a speech in front of the memorial carved in stone, the exquisitely succinct form of the equation – iγ.δψ = mψ – and Beard had, for the final time, felt a stirring of the old excitement. All gone now.

Closer to the house was a square of hard standing where a rusting clothes tree stood, and bits of a fridge, and stacked white plastic garden furniture, and there it was, right by the stack, a large hardwood box, eight feet by eight, with padlocked lid supporting a coil of black hosepipe. He was relieved that this tub was not the Californian dream he had unconsciously assumed – no sequoias, no cicadas, no Sierra Nevada. But when he walked back towards the side door he remained unhappy, for now it was confirmed – it could only be the sex. What else would bring her to this dingy patch? But then, in his condition, was it not unhappiness that he was looking for?

At that thought he heard a sound above him and, looking up, saw on the first floor a steamed-up steel-framed window swing open, then Rodney Tarpin’s pink, wet face.

‘Oi!’

Abruptly, the face disappeared, and the window remained open, allowing shower steam to billow out, and from inside the house came a muffled sound of bare feet pounding at speed down carpeted stairs. As Beard waited by the side door, arms folded against his chest, he had no plan, he had no idea what he wanted to say. He had spent too much time brooding, waiting, and now he wanted something to happen. It hardly mattered what it was.

Two bolts were drawn back, the aluminium handle shot down, the door flew inwards and his wife’s lover stood before him on the threshold.

Beard thought it important to speak first. ‘Mr Tarpin. Good morning.’

‘What the fuck do you want?’ The stress in his query was on the ‘you’. He wore a not very large red towel tucked around his considerable waist. Water droplets trickled from his head onto his shoulders and meandered down through his chest hair in the zigzag movements of a pinball.

‘I thought I’d come and have a look round.’

‘Oh yeah? So you just walk in here.’

‘My wife does.’

Tarpin seemed put out at the directness of this reference, as though he thought it unfair, or going a little too far. Still faintly steaming, he stepped out onto the path, apparently oblivious to the cold – two degrees centigrade, according to the digital display in the car. Beard was standing seven or eight feet back, arms still crossed, five feet six in his boots, and did not give way when Tarpin planted himself right in front of him. Even barefoot, he was a big fellow, certainly strong above the waist, but thin-shanked below it – a builder’s build – and also flabby across the chest, recent fat smeared over muscle, with a beer and junk-food gut whose lateral extension far exceeded Beard’s own. That towel was hanging by a thread. What was Patrice doing with such a man if not seeking the perfection, the ideal, of her husband’s form? Tarpin’s face was a curiosity. It had a ratty look, not entirely without charm, but it was too small for the head. A small man’s whiskery, inquisitive features had been sunk or projected onto a space they could not fill. Tarpin peeped out from his own skull as though he was wearing an outsized chador. Since Beard had last seen him, the builder had lost a tooth, an upper incisor. Beard was disappointed not to see a tattoo, a snake or motorbike or hymn to his mum. But the physicist, as he fleetingly acknowledged, was an ageing bourgeois in the grip of stereotypical thinking. Tarpin was too old for a body piercing, but sitting right on the skyline of his shoulder, protruding a good half-inch, was a growth of twisted skin, a tag, that resembled a miniature human ear, or a sailor’s minuscule parrot. A few turns of tightly tied dental floss and it would be gone in a week, but perhaps women were touched by such a flaw, by such vulnerability in so large a man with his own business and three employees. Patrice’s tongue would surely have explored its tiny folds.

Tarpin said, ‘What I do with your wife is my business,’ and he laughed at his own joke. ‘And you can fuck off out of it.’

Beard was stalled for a moment, for it was not a bad line, and in this hiatus it occurred to him that what he wanted, no, intended to do, any second now, was to kick Tarpin’s bare shin very hard, hard enough to break a bone. The prospect thrilled him and made his heart beat faster. He could not remember if it was these boots or some others thrown out long ago that had the steel tips. It did not matter. How odd, that the man he had once irrationally half-despised as an intruder into his domestic peace, with his drills, tuneless whistling and unbounded dust-creation, and puerile station jabbering on a tinny radio all afternoon, this hireling was now his adversary in equal combat. Only Beard would have considered it equal. Over many years, his colleagues had noted, and sometimes despaired, that in confrontations – theoretical physics naturally had its share – Beard possessed the gift, or curse, of recklessness.

‘You hit my wife,’ he said, his voice constricted by his racing pulse.

He had already glanced down and seen the angled plane of Tarpin’s shin, white, flecked with sparse black hairs like an ill-plucked turkey. And now Beard, something of a sportsman in his day, despite his height, was shifting his weight onto his left foot. He would remember to spread his arms for balance, and if there was time enough he might half turn and crush a toe beneath his heel.

It did not occur to him how obvious it was that he was about to attack. His rounded chest heaved plainly, his thin arms were raised and tensed, and his face was strained, lost in the solipsism of an exciting plan. It was likely that Tarpin had been in many scraps as an adult. Before Beard could duck, Tarpin had drawn back his arm and lashed the older man’s right cheek and ear with an open-handed smack. Beard’s consciousness exploded behind his eyes, and for seconds afterwards the world was a humming white blank. When it seeped back, Tarpin was still there, clutching at his towel, which had loosened with the movement.

‘The next one’ll hurt,’ he said.

This was the kind of treatment old-fashioned movie heroes used on the woman they loved, to calm them. The builder regarded Beard as unworthy of a proper punch. But clearly, more was on the way. Fortunately, at that moment there came from next door the sound of children’s voices approaching up the path, and whispered exclamations and suppressed giggles at the sight of their near-naked tubby neighbour. Then three shy faces at different heights and three pairs of wide brown eyes peered over the fence. Tarpin hurried into the house. He might have gone to fetch a larger towel, or a coat, and it seemed to Beard a good moment to be on his way. But he had his pride and was careful not to appear in a hurry. As he walked down the drive, past the boat slewed in its cradle and the recumbent phone box, he felt his face stinging and burning in the cold – that slap really hurt – and there was a continuous sound in his ear, an electronic whine, and by the time he reached his car he was giddy and half deaf. As he started the engine he looked across at the house and, sure enough, Tarpin in tracksuit and trainers with flailing laces was coming towards him with a firm stride. Beard saw no good reason to linger in Cricklewood.

In the remaining three weeks of that year, everything began to change. There arrived an invitation to the North Pole – at least, that was how he described it to himself and everyone else. In fact, the destination was well below the eightieth parallel, and he would be staying on a ‘well-appointed, toastily-heated vessel of richly-carpeted oak-panelled corridors with tasselled wall lamps’, so a brochure promised, on a ship that would be placidly frozen into a semi-remote fjord, a long snowmobile ride north of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. The three hardships would be the size of his cabin, limited email opportunities, and a wine list confined to a North African vin de pays. The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change, and conveniently, just ten miles away, was a dramatically retreating glacier whose sheer blue cliffs regularly calved mansion-sized blocks of ice onto the shore of the fjord. An Italian chef of ‘international renown’ would be in attendance, and predatory polar bears would be shot if necessary by a guide with a high-calibre rifle. There were no lecturing duties – Beard’s presence would be sufficient – and the foundation would bear all his expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.

Word soon got round the Centre that he was going to the North Pole to ‘see global warming for himself’, and some said he would be towed by dogs and others that he would be pulling his own sledge. Even Beard was embarrassed, and let it be known that it was ‘unlikely’ that he would get all the way to the Pole, and a good part of his time would be ‘in camp’. Jock Braby was amazed by Beard’s commitment to the cause and offered to arrange a send-off party in the common room.

In the same week as the North Pole summons he began an affair with a not-so-young accountant he had met on a train and asked out to dinner. She was pleasantly dull, worked for a fertiliser corporation, and it was all over in three weeks. Crucially, however, the edge of his obsession with his wife was blunted – minimally, and not all the time, but he knew he had crossed a line. It saddened him, to know that he would soon stop desiring her altogether, for it gave him a view of the obvious truth, that it was already over and that the comfortable house and their possessions would have to be divvied up, and after a year or two he might never see her again. Visiting Tarpin had also helped initiate his disaffection. How could he continue to love a woman who wanted a man like that? Why punish herself so thoroughly just to insult her husband?

What else did he not know about her? One answer came just before Christmas, in a long-delayed conversation that became an understated row of cold finality. She had known for half a year that his mathematician from Humboldt, Suzanne Reuben, was barely a tenth of the story. Patrice had most of the rest of the truth and, pacing and despoiling the sitting-room floorboards in her stilettos, enumerated tersely the names, places and approximate dates, a dossier memorised with an obsessiveness that matched his own. The cheerfulness she had shown around the house, she said, was to conceal her wretchedness, the affair with Tarpin was supposed to save her from humiliation. She demanded to know how Beard was going to explain away eleven affairs in five years. He was about to remind her of his mother, who ran up a higher score, when Patrice left the room. She had come to talk, not to listen. Here it was at last, the confrontation he had been wanting all these months. Now he could not think why. He lay on the sofa, legs propped on the glass coffee table, closed his eyes and felt the first longings for the cold pure air of the treeless Arctic.

In late February he arranged to leave from the Centre for Heathrow, and so the farewell party in the communal room took place while his taxi stood outside, and his bag stuffed with his old skiing clothes waited by the door. Sixty-one people were now employed full-time, and most of them crowded in to hear Jock Braby’s speech, for this was more than a send-off, it was a celebration of the shining steel object mounted on two crates in the middle of the room, a prototype designed and constructed in record time, ready to be tested in the Farnborough wind tunnels, Tom Aldous’s quadruple-helix wind turbine. Many noted how it resembled in more intricate form Crick and Watson’s model without the base pairs, and some tried to remember and adapt Rosalind Franklin’s famous remark that it was too beautiful not to be true, or, in this case, not to work. In his speech, Braby reminded the team that it was too early for congratulations, there was far more work to be done, but he wanted everyone to see just how far the project had progressed, and how revolutionary it would be. With uncustomary lyricism, he summoned an image of a townscape, as seen from a nearby hill, and five thousand roofs glittering in the setting sun with the gyrations of their silver turbines, far more beautiful, he thought, than the TV aerials that had transformed the urban prospect in the nineteen fifties.

Throughout, Tom Aldous kept himself well to the back of the crowd and appeared to be avoiding Beard, which was fine since both men knew the project was doomed and collusion in the fact would have been in poor taste when everyone was so happy. Braby now turned to Beard and wished him well on an eight-week journey he knew would have its hazards and hardships. He reminded the team that the climate models had predicted that the earliest and most radical signs of planetary warming would be observed in the Arctic, and said how proud he was that it was the Centre’s own Chief – many fond chuckles at that word – who was going to brave the harshest conditions in order to see for himself.

Then Beard stepped forward to say a few words. He had no idea how Braby had got hold of the idea that he was going away for eight weeks. His trip was for six nights, but it was hardly appropriate to contradict a colleague in public. Nor did he mention the toasty ship and the tasselled lamps, but instead confessed to being proud and excited to be associated with an institution that was bound for ‘great things’ – he would not allow himself to be more specific – and predicted that one day their Centre would outstrip its American rival in Golden, Colorado. A toast, a round of applause, a quick succession of handshakes and backslaps, and Beard was moving towards his taxi, with Jock Braby himself carrying his suitcase, and as the car pulled away the ponytails whooped and pounded on the roof, but Aldous was not among them.

For all the hours he spent on journeys, he was not a well-adapted traveller, not because he was chaotic or fearful, but because long journeys always brought him up against a certain mental deficiency, an emptiness, a restless boredom that was, he thought, as he buckled himself into his seat, the expression of his true state, habitually obscured by the daily round or by sleep. He was not able to read seriously on an airplane. Even on firm ground he never read full-length books all the way through. He was one of those travellers who stare out the window, regardless of the view, or at the seat in front of him, or flip backwards through an in-flight magazine. At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up to date, in layman’s terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime’s habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page-turn. Another distraction was an overdeveloped awareness of the precise location in the aisle of the drinks trolley, of that muffled clinking sound and its asymptotic approach. And with or without a drink, he was prone at altitude to meandering sexual fantasies or memories, or a mix of both.

But with the cheers of his colleagues still resonating, Beard was doing his best, as his plane set its northward course, to be serious and settle down to read in his magazine a luridly illustrated article about photons and antimatter, and sure enough, within five minutes experienced that cool little leap of the heart when he saw in parenthesis the entire cue – the Beard-Einstein Conflation. Not the Bose-Einstein Condensate, not the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, not pure Einstein, but the genuine article, and in his simple joy he longed all the harder for the trolley, still two and a half metres distant. He was well aware of the singularity by which the tiny vehicle of his talent, a child’s tricycle say, had hitched a ride behind the juggernaut of a world-historical genius. Einstein had upended mankind’s understanding of light, gravity, space, time, matter and energy, founded modern cosmology, spoken out on democracy, on God or his absence, argued for the Bomb, then against it, played the violin, sailed boats, had children, given his Prize money to his first wife, invented a fridge. Beard had nothing beyond his Conflation, or his half of it. Like a shipwrecked man, he had clung to this single plank, and counted himself privileged. How had it come about? Perhaps it was true that the Committee, angrily divided between three front-runners, had settled for its fourth choice. However Beard’s name had slipped through, it was generally felt that it was the turn of British physics anyway, though, in certain senior common rooms, some muttered that the Committee in its compromise had confused Michael Beard with Sir Michael Bird, the gifted amateur pianist who worked on neutron spectroscopy.

Those ungenerous rumours aside, what a brief state of grace, those blessed months of frenetic calculation and revision in the old rectory on the South Downs, trapped in a soundscape formed by the complaints of his first wife, Maisie, and the incessant wailing of the lodgers’ identical babies. What a feat of concentration! So long ago, so hard to recall the driven kind of person he once was or the actual texture of those days. It sometimes seemed to Beard that he had coasted all his life on an obscure young man’s work, a far cleverer and more devoted theoretical physicist than he could ever hope to be. He had to acknowledge the fact – that twenty-one-year-old physicist was a genius. But where was he now? Was he really the same Michael Beard whose paper caused Richard Feynman to explode with excitement and interrupt the proceedings of the 1972 Solvay Conference? Did anyone still remember or care about that famous Solvay ‘magic moment’? As for those shrieking twins, he had seen for himself last year, at the wedding of one or the other, that they were now overweight coves in their thirties, a dentist and a hedge-fund manager, identically pompous. As old as the Conflation.

After drinks and lunch and more drinks, he allowed the magazine to slide from his lap and, gazing at the button that held in place the headrest cover of the seat in front (he did not have a window seat), fell into familiar reveries and took it as a sign of burgeoning mental health that Patrice was not his sole topic. He had been sent biographical notes and pictures of his fellow guests on the frozen fjord and been struck by the smile of a certain conceptual artist whose name, Stella Polkinghorne, was familiar, even to him. Her most recent media storm involved an accusation of an infringement of copyright that had never come to court. She had constructed for the Tate Modern a scaled-up Monopoly set on a playing field in Catford, each side of the painted board a hundred metres long, a space one could stroll about in, with near-life-sized houses on Park Lane and the Old Kent Road, accommodation one could enter to observe an unequal distribution of wealth. In the empty homes of the Mayfair rich, tapestries, woodcuts by Dürer and discarded champagne bottles, while down the Old Kent Road, among the East End poor, junk-food wrappers, discarded syringes, a TV playing soaps. The dice were two metres high, the Community Chest cards were lowered in place by crane, the dog-eared banknotes made of plywood were in tottering 25-metre piles on the grass. In all, an indictment, it was supposed, of a money-obsessed culture. Do Not Pass Go was celebrated, reviled, photographed from the air by passengers on their descent into Heathrow. Children liked stampeding across the board in herds and crawling inside the top-hat token. The makers of the game began a legal case, which they dropped in the face of public derision and rising sales. A local-business association on the Old Kent Road also brought a case, or said it would, and nothing was heard.

Polkinghorne’s disembodied smile presided over Beard’s melancholic reflections on the end of his marriage. He experienced a genial blend of sadness, anger, nostalgia (those early months were bliss), and a warm, self-forgiving sense of failure. And repetition. Five was enough. He would never go through this again, and with that thought came the familiar recognition of his new freedom. When matters were settled, he would buy a small London flat, he would be responsible only for himself, he would guard ferociously his independence and cure himself of this strange lifelong habit of marriage. It was lovers he needed, not wives.

Passively, he let himself be processed through Oslo, then Trondheim. The flight to Longyearbyen was delayed by two and a half hours, during which he sat in a plastic moulded chair and read the Herald Tribune with total concentration and no recall. It was three in the morning when his taxi stopped by giant mounds of snow outside his hotel. He had not eaten in hours. Dressed in sweater, anorak and long johns, he lay in bed, hemmed in on three sides by chunky wooden beams, and ate all the salted snacks in the minibar, and then all the sugary snacks, and when he was woken by reception at eight the following morning to be told that everyone was waiting for him downstairs, the wrapper of a Mars bar was still folded in his fist.

His immediate need was to satisfy his thirst, but the water from the tap on his basin was so intensely cold, so fiery on the lips and he drank so deeply that he developed shooting pains in his face and temples that had not receded by the time he descended with his luggage, still dazed from lack of sleep, to the lobby to meet his group – already breakfasted, already boisterous, already zipping themselves into their special-issue snowmobile suits. In the lobby’s dim solar-powered light and the press of overdressed bodies he did not catch sight of Stella Polkinghorne. Yes, it came back to him now, the manic larkiness of the English in large groups. From different corners of the crowded space came abrupt shouts of individual laughter and cackles in unison. And it was eight twenty in the morning. Forcing a smile, pretending gamely not to be oppressed, he shook many hands, was told many names and remembered no one because his thoughts were on the coffee he was too late for. How could he start his day? The urn was empty, the breakfast table was being cleared away by a girl who did not speak English, did not even understand the planetary word ‘coffee’, even when pronounced loudly, and now one of the organisers, a great elk of a man called Jan, was telling him it was too late for coffee and was guiding him towards his very own pile of outer clothing and saying he must hurry, a snowstorm was expected within two hours and the group needed to get going.

The place was emptying, and he was not ready. Someone very old with snow in his beard and a damp, unlit cigarette on his lower lip came in muttering ill-temperedly, snatched Beard’s bag, took it out to a sledge hitched to a snowmobile and drove off. Both the waitress and Jan had disappeared, and Beard was the only person in the lobby. This was a long-forgotten experience from his schooldays, not only being late, but feeling ignorant and incompetent and wretched, with everyone else mysteriously in the know, as though in league against him. Fatso Beard, always last, useless at team games. With that memory came added clumsiness and indecision. Although he was dressed in ski clothes of many layers, he was expected to climb inside this extra skin, even to wear his own boots inside another pair. There were inner gloves and giant outer gloves, a heavy balaclava made of carpet underlay to wear over his own, and goggles, and a motorcycle helmet.

He got into the suit – it must have weighed twenty pounds – put on the dusty balaclava, squeezed his head into the helmet, put on the inner and outer gloves, then realised that he would not be able to put on the goggles while wearing the gloves, took off the gloves, clamped on the goggles, put on the inner and outer gloves, then remembered that his own ski goggles and gloves, hip flask and stick of lipsalve on the seat next to him would need to be stowed. He took off the inner and outer gloves, put his stuff in a pocket inside his jacket after much struggling with the zip of the outer suit, put on the inner and outer gloves again and found that in the damp warm air of the lobby, and with his own impatient perspiring, his goggles were fogging up. Hot and tired, an unpleasant combination, he stood suddenly in exasperation, turned and collided with a beam or a column, he couldn’t see which, with a massive cracking sound. How fortunate it was that the Nobel laureate was wearing a helmet. No damage to his skull, but there was now a diagonal crack across the left eyepiece of his goggles, an almost straight line that refracted and diffused the low yellow light in the lobby. To remove the helmet, balaclava and goggles and wipe the condensation from them he had to remove all four gloves, and now that his hands were sweating these items were not so easy to dislodge. Once the goggles were off, it was straightforward enough to bring them to the almost-cleared breakfast table and take a crumpled paper napkin, used, but not much used, to polish the lens. Perhaps it was butter, perhaps it was porridge or marmalade that smeared the already scratched plastic, but at least the condensation was off, and it was relatively simple, after replacing the balaclava, to secure the goggles around the helmet and lower it over his head and put on all four gloves and stand, ready at last to face the elements.

His vision was much restricted by the new breakfast coating, otherwise he would have seen the boots earlier lying on their sides under his chair. Off with the gloves then – he was not going to lose his temper – and then, after some fiddling with the laces, he decided he would see better without the goggles. Clear sight confirmed that the boots were far too small, by at least three sizes, and there was some relief in knowing that not all the incompetence was his own. But he was game, and thought he would give it one last try, and that was how Jan, entering the lobby with a blast of icy air, found him, trying to push his foot in its hiking boot into a fur-lined snow shoe.

‘My God, you thick or which?’

The giant elk man kneeled before him and with impatient tugs removed his hiking boots, tied the laces together and slung the pair around Beard’s neck.

‘Now try.’

His feet slid in, Jan secured the laces at speed and stood.

‘Come on, man. Let’s go!’

Possibly it was his embarrassment that helped fog up the goggles again, but he had a pretty good idea of the direction of the door, and he had the rough outline of Jan’s shoulder to guide him.

‘You drive a snowmobile before?’

‘Of course,’ he lied.

‘Good good. I want to catch the others.’

‘How far is it to the ship?’

‘One hundred fifteen kilometres.’

When they stepped out, the wind slapped his face, no less hard than Tarpin had, and with the same stinging aftermath. The condensation inside his goggles froze instantly but for a small patch, through the marmalade veneer of which he could just make out Jan’s form retreating along a path cut through the deep snow that wound between the shapes of buildings. After ten minutes they arrived at the edge of the settlement before a vast white plain that stretched away into a mist. It may have been an airfield, for there was an orange windsock nearby straining in the horizontal position. Parked by a ditch were two snowmobiles, noisily pumping out a blue-black mist of their own.

‘I follow you,’ Jan said. ‘Minimum fifty kilometres an hour if we want to arrive before the storm. OK?’

‘OK.’

But it was not OK. The wind was strong and they would be driving straight into it. Deep inside his helmet, the tips of his ears were already numb, and so were the tip of his nose and his toes. To see he was obliged to tilt his head and angle his sightline through a diminishing area of semi-clarity, avoiding at the same time the illuminated crack over his left eye. But all this was incidental, blindness and pain he could live with. A more urgent problem was oppressing him as he turned towards his snowmobile. In his hurry and thick-headedness that morning, he had omitted all the usual routines. He had not shaved or washed and, except to drink a pint of freezing water, had not set foot inside the bathroom. Then he had hurried out of the room with his bag. Now it was minus twenty-six, wind force five, they were pressed for time, a storm was looming, Jan was already astride his machine and gunning the engine, and Beard, trapped inside many layers of intractable clothing, needed to urinate.

As best he could, he looked about him. The nearest houses were four hundred metres away, and showed great blank walls with one or two miniature windows – bathroom windows surely. Oh to be there, in a heated tiled room, barefoot in his pyjamas, taking a leisurely piss before crawling back under the duvet for one extra hour. But he could go right here, in the ditch, turn his back to the wind, remove his gloves, grapple bare-fingered with the frozen chunky zip of his one-piece snowmobile suit, grope under his jacket to reach the shoulder buckles of his salopettes and somehow push them down, burrow past sweater, shirt, long silk under-shirt, long johns, underpants, to gain at last the moment of the release he dared not think about. No, it was too difficult, it would have to wait, and besides, he felt better as soon as he was sitting down in the saddle of his snowmobile.

It was an underpowered motorbike on skids and easy enough to drive. One twist of the throttle on the right handlebar and the thing slid forward with the shriek of an overworked engine and a puff of stinking black exhaust. Within seconds he was bouncing across the plain, following through the sight holes of his goggles the tracks left by the rest of the group, which were mercifully side-lit by the rising sun. The wind, suddenly a sixty-mile-an-hour gale, cut through his layers, his nostril hairs stiffened into steel pins, his teeth, all his teeth, ached, his face felt peeled raw. By a miracle of osmosis, every breath he exhaled found its way inside his goggles and froze, and within ten minutes he could see nothing at all but blurry crystals and had to stop. Jan pulled alongside. Surprisingly, he was sympathetic.

‘This you do.’

He raised a flap of flimsy tin casing and wedged the goggles over the engine. They were on a tongue of land, some three hundred metres wide, that ran between two lakes, or perhaps it was a bay, perhaps the sea was close by. Beard was too cold to ask. The endless snow was orange in the morning sunlight, their track ahead led straight towards a low mountain range many miles off, and hovering over it, or behind it, was a long tube of black cloud. He would have stepped away to relieve himself while they waited, but now the wind was even harsher, and perhaps his need was not really so pressing. It was incredible, he thought, no, it was criminal, that the citizens of Spitsbergen should think it reasonable to go about in this climate on a kind of motorbike, when some kind of humanely enclosed vehicle with a heater, a proper windscreen, a seat with a backrest – a car! – might save a life or two. His moment of indignation briefly diverted him and it was only when he was back in the saddle, wearing his deiced goggles, and driving once more into a roar of fiery air, that he realised he had arrived at a point when he must make an immediate choice: stop and piss now, or allow his bladder to rupture, which would cause him to die of an internal infection, or drench himself and freeze to death. But he kept going. He guessed there remained a hundred kilometres to cover, he was doing forty kilometres an hour. Two and a half hours. Clearly impossible.

But still he did not stop. He distracted himself by attempting to recall the last occasion he had urinated. Surely it was at Longyearbyen airport, while he waited for his luggage, late at night, the day before yesterday. Thirty-five hours without a piss. Had he simply forgotten? Was he really that busy?

The moment he understood that it was the cold that had confused him and made him add the extra day, he stopped, and in his eagerness half fell off the snowmobile onto the track. He heard Jan’s machine bump into the rear of his, but he did not look back as he hurried away. It was a different kind of terrain they were on now. Their route made a shallow S through a gully enclosed on each side by thirty-foot walls of rock and ice. A vestigial sense of propriety drew him to the base of one wall, as though to a urinal, where he stood doubled up, with his back to the wind, and used his teeth to pull off the outer glove on his right hand. He heard Jan call out to him, but could not bear to be spoken to now. Biting at the end of each finger in turn, he worked the glove lining off. Immediately, his hand became numb and slow. It took him more than two minutes to unfasten the zip of his snowmobile suit, and then he found that he needed two hands to get through his jacket to the shoulder releases of his salopettes, so he pulled off the gloves on his left hand with his slow-moving right. Once more, his goggles were misting up and freezing over. But he had to admire his own calm, as he delved and tugged through the layers, as his precious body warmth bled out into the vicious cold and the wind whipped round his back, into the cliff and onto his face. Only in the final seconds, when his clumsy pink hand, as cold as a stranger’s, reached into his underpants, did he think he might lose control. But at last, with a joyous shout that was lost to the gale, he directed his stream against the ice wall.

His mistake was to wait a few seconds at the end, as men of his age tended to do, mindful that there might be more. He should have turned his head to hear what Jan had shouted. Or perhaps he could only have avoided the inevitable if he had accepted one of the other invitations, to the Seychelles or Johannesburg or San Diego, or if, as he thought later with some bitterness, climate change, radical warming above the Arctic Circle, was actually taking place and was not a figment of the activist imagination. For when his business was done he discovered that his penis had attached itself to the zip of his snowmobile suit, had frozen in hard along its length, the way only living flesh can do on sub-zero metal. He wasted precious seconds, gazing at his situation in shock. When at last he pulled tentatively, he experienced intense pain. And he was already in pain from the cold.

He remained standing with his legs apart, facing the rock wall. He did not dare do as one might with a sticking plaster, and rip himself away in one stroke. He had read of an American hiking alone in the wilderness who got his arm trapped behind a rock and sawed through his own elbow with a penknife. Beard was not that kind of dedicated person, and after all, an elbow, a forearm, a hand were one of a pair and, to an extent, disposable. As the polar wind raged against the cliff-face and rebounded against his shivering form, he watched in horror as his penis shrank even smaller, and curled tighter against the zip. And not only was it shrinking before his eyes, but it was turning white. Not the white of a blank page, but the sparkling silver of a Christmas bauble.

He was close to panicking, but could not bring himself to call for help. It was additionally difficult not to panic with his head smothered by carpet underlay and a thick helmet and goggles with diminishing visibility. For want of anything else to do, he covered himself with a cupped hand, a hand like a block of ice. He was beginning to feel sluggish, even sleepy, the way people are supposed to be in extreme cold, and his thoughts lurched in slow motion. He saw Jock Braby on TV proclaim an obituary through a forgiving smile. He went to see global warming for himself. Nonsense, of course he would survive. But this was it, a life without a penis. How his ex-wives, especially Patrice, would enjoy themselves. But he would tell no one. He would live quietly with his secret. He would live in a monastery, do good works, visit the poor. As he stood dithering, he wondered for the first time in his adult life whether there might be purposeful design in human lives, and entities like Greek gods, imposing ironies, extracting revenge, imposing their rough justice.

But the rationalist in Michael Beard died hard. There was a problem, and he should attempt to solve it. He was reaching lugubriously into the inside pocket of his jacket. In his post-doc years he had worked for a while in low-temperature physics, but even as a schoolboy, as Fatso Beard, bad at games, a swot at science, he knew the basics. Pure ethanol froze at minus one hundred and fourteen degrees, everyone knew that. Brandy at eighty per cent proof would be forty per cent ethanol by volume, giving a freezing point of… minus forty-five point six. At last, the hip flask was in his hand, the top came off after only a brief struggle, and generously he poured his libation and within seconds he was free.

When he put it away, his unfortunate cock was as hard as ice, but no longer white. It was also stinging, an excruciating hot-needle pain that slowed his efforts to get dressed. After ten minutes, in one piece at last, he turned and stumbled back onto the track and found his guide waiting.

‘Sorry about that. Call of nature.’

Jan caught hold of his elbow. ‘You in bad shape, man. Look, you dropped your boots off your neck. We go both on my bike. We gonna pick up your machine later.’

He let himself be guided to Jan’s snowmobile and it was there that the calamity finally happened. As he raised a leg to hoist himself onto his place behind the guide, he felt, and even thought he heard, a terrible rending pain in his groin, a cracking and a parting, like a birth, like a glacier calving. He gave a shout, and Jan turned to steady him and settle him in place.

‘It’s one hour, is all. You’ll be OK.’

Something cold and hard had dropped from Beard’s groin and fallen down inside the leg of his longjohns and was now lodged just above his kneecap. He put his hand between his legs and there was nothing. He put his hand on his knee and the hideous object, less than two inches long, was stiff like a bone. It did not feel, or it no longer felt, like a part of himself. Jan kick-started the engine and they set off at a crazy speed, careening over ice ridges as hard as concrete, swerving round near-vertical banks like reckless adepts in a velodrome. Why was he not at home in bed? Beard cowered out of the wind behind Jan’s broad back. The burning sensation in his groin was spreading, his cock had slipped round and was nestling under the crook of his knee, and they were speeding in the wrong direction, hurtling northwards towards the Pole, deeper into the wilderness, into the frozen dark, when they should have been rushing towards a well-lit emergency room in Longyearbyen. Surely, the intense cold would work to his advantage, keeping the organ alive. But microsurgery? In Longyearbyen, population fifteen hundred? Beard thought he was about to be sick, but instead he slipped his hands through the belt at the back of Jan’s jacket and let his head drop onto his protector’s spine and fell into a doze, and it was only the sudden silencing of the snowmobile’s motor that woke him, and he saw looming above him out of the ice the dark hull of the ship where he would spend the week.

It turned out that Beard was the only scientist among a committed band of artists. The entire world and all its follies, one of which was to warm up the planet, was to their south, which seemed to be in every direction. Before dinner that night in the mess room, the convenor, Barry Pickett, a benign and wizened fellow, who had rowed across the Atlantic single-handed before he devoted his life to recording the music of nature (the rustling of leaves, the crashing of waves), addressed the gathering of the Eighty Degrees North Seminar.

‘We are a social species,’ he began, with the kind of biological flourish that Beard generally distrusted, ‘and we cannot survive without some basic rules. Up here, in these conditions, they are even more important. The first concerns the boot room.’

It was simple enough. Below the wheelhouse was a cramped, underlit changing room. All coming on board must stop there and remove and hang up their outer layers. On no account was wet, snowy or iced-up clothing to be brought into the living quarters. Prohibited items included helmets, goggles, balaclavas, gloves, boots, wet socks and snowmobile suits. Wet, snowy, icy or dry, they were to remain in the boot room. Penalty for infringement was certain death. There was forgiving laughter from the good-natured artists, pink-faced, sensible folk in chunky sweaters and work shirts. Beard, squashed in a corner with his fifth glass of Libyan vin de pays, dosed up on painkillers and in pain, constitutionally hostile to groups, feigned a smile. He did not like to be part of a group, but he did not want the group to know. There were other rules and housekeeping items, and his attention was drifting. From behind Pickett, from the galley on the other side of an oak-veneered wall, came the smell of frying meat and garlic, and the sounds of spoons against saucepans and the hectoring growl of the international chef chivvying an underling. Hard to ignore the kitchen when it was already eight twenty and there had been nothing to eat for hours. Not being able to eat when he chose was one of the freedoms Beard had left behind in the foolish south.

All day the sun had stood barely five degrees above the horizon, and at two thirty, as though giving up on a bad job, it had sunk. Beard witnessed the moment through a porthole by his bunk, where he lay in agony. He saw the flat snowy vastness of the fjord turn blue, then black. How could he have imagined that being indoors eighteen hours a day with twenty others in a cramped space was a portal to liberty? On arrival, as he passed through the mess room on his way to find his quarters, the first thing he had seen, propped in a corner, was an acoustic guitar, surely awaiting its strummer and a tyrannous sing-along. A large section of bookcase was taken up with board games, and ancient packs of cards. He might as well have checked into an old people’s home. Monopoly was surely among the games, and here was reason for further regret. Jan had helped him off the snowmobile, half carried him up the gangplank, and shown him into the boot room. Moving slowly, with grunts and moans, Beard had set about removing his outer layers, unzipping his snowmobile suit, terrified of what he was about to discover. In the deep gloom of the place it took a while to find an unoccupied station to hang his stuff on, and as he did, on hook number twenty-eight, he heard a pleasant, deep female voice behind him saying kindly,

‘This just dropped out the bottom of your trousers.’

He turned. It was Stella Polkinghorne holding out something thin and grey. It was actually in her hand, between her forefinger and thumb.

‘I think it’s your lipsalve.’

She said her name, he said his, they shook hands. She said she was deeply honoured to meet a great scientist, and he said that he was a long-time admirer of her work. It was only at this point that they released their hands. It was not exactly a beautiful face, but broad and friendly, with blonde hair straggling out from under a woollen cap. He liked the way her curious gaze met his. A broken front tooth gave her a reckless, humorous look. She said she was looking forward to getting to know him, and he said he felt the same about her, and then she hesitated, apparently not wanting to leave and unable to think of something else to say, and nor could he, distracted as he was by pain.

Then she said, ‘I’ll see you then,’ and she went through into the ship.

All afternoon he lay on his bunk in a haze of foolish schemes and regrets, examining and re-examining the damage to his skin, making plans for his immediate departure, and replaying his encounter. He could send an email urgently recalling himself to England. But he could not face the snowmobile journey back to the airport. A helicopter would have to come from Longyearbyen. How much did they cost? A thousand pounds an hour perhaps. Three hours then, worth every penny, to avoid singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’. Looking forward to getting to know him. That could mean anything. No, it meant only one thing. And what luck – he had seen from a schedule on a noticeboard that he was the only guest not sharing a cabin. But he was out of commission, possibly for weeks. He took another look. His injury resembled a scalding, he was swollen and pink, he needed to be alone, he wanted to go home, he should try and sit next to her at dinner tonight. But he would not be here. The helicopter was coming. But it would not fly at night. There were other kinds of sex they could have, or that she could have. What would be the point of that? Perhaps he was getting better. He took another peek.

Finally it had been hunger and the need for a drink that drove him from his cabin. After Pickett’s speech, Beard was not able to move out of his corner in time to sit next to Stella Polkinghorne and instead found himself wedged between the bulkhead and a famous ice sculptor from Mallorca called Jesus, an elderly man with a mournful face and curved yellowish-white moustache who smelled richly of cigars, and had a wheezing, honking sound in his voice like a teddy bear’s growl. After they had introduced themselves, Beard suggested that such a profession might be difficult to pursue in the Balearics. Jesus explained that back in the old days, the ice houses in the mountains kept the fishmongers of Palma supplied with giant blocks of ice in summer, and this was how his grandfather learned the skills he passed on to his son, who passed them on to his. Jesus had won many ice-carving competitions in cities around the world – a recent triumph was in Riyadh – and his speciality was penguins. He imported whisky when he was not carving, had four sons and five daughters, and had founded twenty years ago a school for blind children outside the port of Andratx. His wife and two of the sons ran his olive and vineyard estate in the Tramuntana, high on the sea cliffs fifteen kilometres south of Pollensa, not so far from the famous Cova de ses Bruixes, the Witches Cave. Beard’s pain was lifting, the painkillers had a strong euphoric effect. He had never enjoyed anything quite so good as the steak, French fries, green salad and red wine before him. And Jesus – he had never met anyone with this name, even though he knew it was common in Spain – seemed to him the most interesting man he had met in years.

In reply to the reciprocal question, Beard said he was a theoretical physicist. It always sounded like a lie. The sculptor paused, perhaps to rehearse mentally his English, then asked a surprising question. Señor Beard was to excuse an uneducated man’s naïvety and ignorance, but was the strange reality described by quantum mechanics a description of the actual world, or was it simply a system that happened to work? Infected by the Mallorcan’s courtly style, Beard complimented him on the question. He could not have phrased it better himself, for there was no better interrogation of quantum theory than this. It was a matter that had dominated years of Einstein’s life and led him to insist that the theory was correct but incomplete. Intuitively, he just could not accept that there was no reality without an observer, or that this reality was defined by the observer, as Bohr and the rest seemed to be saying. In Einstein’s memorable phrase, there was out there a ‘real factual situation’. ‘When a mouse observes,’ he had once asked, ‘does that change the state of the universe?’ Quantum mechanics seemed to imply that a measurement of the state of one particle could instantaneously determine the state of another, even if it was far away. But this was ‘spiritualistic’ in Einstein’s view, it was ‘spooky action at a distance’, for nothing could move faster than the speed of light. Beard the realist was sympathetic to Einstein’s extended, failing battle with the brilliant coterie of quantum pioneers, but it had to be faced: the experimental proof suggested that there really could be long-range spooky correlations, and that the texture of reality at the small and large scale really did defy common sense. Einstein was also convinced that the mathematics needed to describe the universe would ultimately be shown to be elegant and relatively simple. But even in his lifetime, two new fundamental forces had been found, and ever since, the view had been complicated by a messy array of new particles and antiparticles, as well as various imaginary dimensions and all kinds of untidy accommodations. But Beard still clung to the hope that as yet more was revealed, a genius would arise to propose an overarching theory binding all in a formulation of astounding beauty. After many years (this was his little joke as he placed a confiding hand on Jesus’s frail arm), he had finally given up hopes of being the mortal chosen to find this grail.

He said all this over the rising din of twenty climate-change artists settling down to the wine as the plates were cleared away. Jesus failed or refused to detect the self-irony and pronounced solemnly, turning his sad, drooping face to gaze about the crowded quarters, that it was a mistake to abandon hope at any stage of life. All his best penguins, the ones truest to life and most expressive of pure form, had been carved in the last two years, and recently he had started on polar bears, creatures much threatened by rising temperatures and, at one time, well beyond the reach of his artistic powers. In his humble view, it was important never to lose faith in the possibility of profound inner change. Clearly, a scientist like Señor Beard should strive for this theory, for this beauty, for what was life without the highest ambitions?

How could Beard confide to Jesus that he had done no serious science in years, and that he did not believe in profound inner change? Only slow inner and outer decay. He was returning the conversation to the safer ground of penguin as compared to polar-bear ice carving, but as he did so he felt his spirits sinking back. The painkillers were wearing off, the wine, this same wine, now tasted thin and sharp, the cheerfulness around him was reminding him that his marriage was over. He felt weary, and too cynical for the company. His liveliness in conversation was revealed as a fake, a product of shock, drugs and drink.

He brought the conversation to an end and said goodnight to Jesus and, muttering apologies, squeezed along the packed rows to the aisle. All the conversations he passed through were of art and climate change. At the next table a choreographer, a woman he had not seen before, sleek and beautiful and brimming with goodwill, was describing through a French accent a geometric dance she had planned to take place on the ice. He could not stand it, the optimism was crushing him. Everyone but Beard was worried about global warming and was merry, and he was uniquely morose. He cared only for darkness and silence.

He lay a long while on his bunk in the airless cabin, kept awake by the throbbing in his groin – his heartbeat seemed to have migrated down there – and listening to voices and laughter, and wondering if his misanthropy would last all week. The helicopter idea he now saw was absurd. Coming away from his life in remote Belsize Park to this lifeless wilderness had confronted him with the idiocy of his existence. Patrice, Tarpin, the Centre and all the other pseudo-work he did to mask his irrelevance. What was life without the highest ambitions? The answer was exactly this, another night of unmemorable insomnia.

Two hours later he was on the edge of sleep when there came the sound of the guitar being tuned and he groaned and turned angrily on his side. But it was not strumming and singing he heard through the woodwork, but a tenderly played melody that sounded Spanish, reflective, with a touch of lightness and precision, like something of Mozart’s. In the morning he would learn that it was a study by Fernando Sor. Lying in total darkness on his narrow bed he did not doubt that it was Jesus who played, as if to him, and it was to this melancholy air that at last he fell asleep.

It was late in the morning, the sun was up and shining heroically at a slant across the brilliant fjord, while Beard moved effortfully through the dimness of the boot room, trying to find his stuff. He was standing opposite peg number eighteen, on which, the day before, he knew this for a fact, he had hung his snowmobile suit. Directly below the peg was a wire basket where he had stowed his goggles, helmet and smaller items, and below that, under a slatted bench, was the compartment in which he had placed his boots. Even from down here, directly beneath the wheelhouse, he could hear the roar of many snowmobiles – getting them started in the morning was, apparently, an ordeal. A party of six, plus Jan armed with a rifle, was about to set off up the fjord to investigate the glacier. Five and the guide were already out on the ice, stamping their feet and flapping their arms to keep warm, and Beard as always was last. Someone had taken his gear, or some of it. His suit was not on its peg, his wire basket had been shoved along to position nineteen, only his boots – if they were his boots – were in the correct position. His undesirable cracked goggles were lying on the floor.

He took a suit – it was probably his anyway – from peg seventeen. It turned out to be at least two sizes too big, but once it was on he was not inclined to remove it. The boots, however, were a size too small. Among the smaller items in the basket only a glove liner was missing, and he made it up by taking a spare liner from number twenty-three, and promised himself to return it. The crack in his goggles no longer troubled him. He stepped out on deck to ironic applause from the group waiting below on the ice and, wanting to get in the spirit of group life, he made a bow. Even in his hurry, he had time to take in the scene from the top of the shallow ramp of the gangplank. There were many figures scattered on the ice around the ship. The helmets transformed the proportions of their heads, the snowmobile suits swelled their rumps, so that from a distance they resembled infants in a nursery playground. The choreographer and three friends were marking out her geometric dance; two figures were building what looked like a snowman or a statue; a lone person, probably Pickett, was rigging a microphone between two cones of ice; a person with a chainsaw was helping another, surely Jesus, load four ice blocks onto a sledge; someone was kneeling to polish a lens of ice a metre across. Another figure was going about in circles with a red flag and a whistle for the benefit of a movie camera on a tripod.

He had amazed himself by volunteering so soon for another snowmobile ride. Claustrophobia had driven him out, and the tawny light across the fjord as seen from the mess windows, and the fact that it was not permitted to go anywhere without a guide and his gun. He sat astride the last machine and the group set off in single file across the ice in an easterly direction, deeper into the fjord. It should have been fun, to be skimming down a wide corridor of ice and snow, with mountains rising sheer on both sides. But once again, the wind cut through every layer, the cracked goggles fogged up and froze within minutes and Beard could make out no more than a greyish blob of the machine in front. He was directly in the wash of six exhausts. For ten kilometres Jan kept up a wild speed. Where the winds had stripped the snow away, the surface of the fjord was like ridged iron and the snowmobiles rattled and bucked.

Twenty minutes later they were standing in sudden silence a hundred metres from the glacier’s terminus, a broken blue wall that stretched for fifteen kilometres across the valley. The impression was of a ruined city, grubby and dissolute, with rubble, broken towers and giant fissures. At minus twenty-eight, it was too cold today, Jan explained, for displays of ice shearing away in the cause of polar warming. They passed an hour taking photographs and walking up and down. Then someone saw a print in the snow. They huddled round it, and stepped back to allow their guide, whose rifle was over his shoulder, to display his expertise. A polar bear’s print, of course, and very new. The snow was thin where they stood, and it was not easy to find another impression. Jan used his binoculars to scan the horizon.

‘Ah,’ he said quietly. ‘I think we leave now.’

He pointed and at first they saw nothing. But when it moved, it was clear enough. At a distance of a mile or so, a bear was ambling towards them.

‘He’s hungry,’ Jan said forgivingly. ‘Time for skidoos.’

Even with the prospect of being eaten alive, dignity prevailed and they only half ran to the machines. As he reached his, Beard knew what to expect. Everything about this trip had conspired to reduce him. Why would his luck change now? He pushed the button. Nothing. Fine. So let his sinews be stripped from his bones. He tried again, then again. Around him, clouds of blue smoke, and high-pitched roars, the proper expression at last of full-throated panic. Already, half the party was shooting away in the direction of the ship. It was every-man-for-himself. Beard wasted no energy cursing. He pulled out the choke lever, though he knew it was a mistake, for the engine was still warm. He tried again. And again, nothing. He smelled petrol. He had flooded the engine and he deserved to die. Now all the others had gone, along with the guide, whose dereliction of duty Beard resolved to report to Pickett, or the King of Norway. His agitation was steaming up his goggles, and, as usual, the steam froze. Pointless then, to look back, but he did it all the same, and saw frozen steam fringed with a glimpse of the fjord’s ice. It was reasonable to assume the bear was still coming, but he had clearly underestimated its speed over the ground, because at that moment his shoulder was struck a heavy blow.

Rather than turn and have his face ripped away, he hunched his shoulders in expectation of the worst. His last thought – that in his carelessly unchanged will he had left everything to Patrice for Tarpin’s use – would have been a dismal one, but what he heard was the guide’s voice.

‘Let me do it.’

The Nobel laureate had been pressing the headlight switch. The machine came to life at first touch.

‘Go,’ Jan said. ‘I’m behind you.’

Despite the danger he was in, Beard glanced back again, hoping to catch sight, for anecdote’s sake, of the animal he was about to outpace. In the narrow perimeter of semi-clarity that surrounded the goggle’s frozen fog patch there was movement, but it may have been the guide’s hand or a corner of his own balaclava. In the account he would give for the rest of his life, the one that became his true memory, a polar bear with open jaws was twenty metres distant and running at him when his snowmobile started forward, not because, or not only because, he was a liar, but because he instinctively knew it was wrong to dishonour a good story.

Racing away across the rackety ice, he gave out a whoop of joy that was lost to the icy hurricane in his face. How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.

Perhaps that was the best moment of his week. They were back at their base within minutes, it seemed. Already, at one forty-five, there was a deeper chill in the air, and orange evening light illuminated the few artists who had not yet retreated into the ship. His groin was so tender that he waited until the others had gone inside, then he walked backwards up the gangplank. It hurt less that way. He paused in the entrance of the boot room, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the poor light, and soon it was clear enough – someone had hung all his stuff at Beard’s station. In a constructive spirit, he removed the lot, boots and all, to a vacant spot in a corner. When he took off his woollen balaclava, it slipped to the floor with a clunk and seemed to stare up at him in open-mouthed disbelief. What was he doing here? He put his gear away, then he went to the mess room, said a round of hellos to the half-dozen people there, and took a hot drink to his cabin and lay on the bunk.

It was an accident of cartography that placed the South Pole under the North, but he could not dispel the impression that he was near the top of the world and that everybody else, Patrice included, was below him. He had an overview then, and they became a feature of his week, these afternoons in the Arctic dusk, when he reminded himself over the cocoa that his life was about to empty out and that he must begin again, take himself in hand, lose weight, get fit, live in a simple, organised style. And get serious at last about work, though he had no idea what work he could do that was not detached from or eased by his peculiar fame. Must he give forever the same lecture series about his one small contribution, sit on committees, be a Presence? He had no answers, but the musing was comforting and often he fell asleep in the darkness of three o’clock and woke hungry, with renewed appetite for the vin de pays.

After his deliverance from the jaws of a polar bear, he did nothing adventurous all week. Bolder types went off with a guide to hike in the mountains, or make a snow cave, or explored on snowmobiles a steep valley that rose through rocky outcrops on the far side of the fjord. Each day he spent two or three hours outside the ship, pottering about with the others. He was taken on as an assistant, holding an end of a piece of string, cutting blocks of ice for Jesus, helping with Pickett’s microphones, joining in the dance. This involved being filmed walking in single file at a measured pace behind a dozen others for two hundred yards in a straight line, before making a right-angled turn and walking the same distance before the next turn. It was soothing, he was content to think of nothing and be told what to do. In a warmer climate, with better health, he might have tried his chances with the choreographer, slender Elodie, from Montpellier, especially if she had come away without her husband, a bullet-headed photographer who had once played rugby for France. Stella Polkinghorne also had a husband – the convenor, Barry Pickett.

Beard’s life, then, was simplified. Caring little for art or climate change, and even less for art about climate change, he kept his thoughts to himself and was affable, and was surprised to find himself faintly popular. His mind emptied as he went about the ice on his errands. One lunchtime he carried out from the ship cups of tomato soup, which froze as he reached the bottom of the gangplank. They were incorporated into a sculpture. His spirits rose, or ceased to sink. He thought about his fitness again. Only ten or twelve years before, he had played a plausible game of tennis, compensating for his height with a vicious, stabbing little forehand volley at the net. And he had once skied with near competence. Eight years ago he could still touch his toes. Surely, it was not inevitable that he should get heavier by the month until he dropped dead? He arranged to take a daily hike on the fjord, a two-mile circuit around the ship, escorted by Jan carrying a gun. After the second excursion, lying on his bunk in the afternoon with aching legs, he made a mental list of the food he would no longer touch. He was fifteen pounds overweight. Act now, or die early. He swore off all the usual things – dairy produce, red meat, fried food, cakes, salted nuts. And crisps, for which he had a particular weakness. There were other items, but he was asleep before the list was complete. During the last three days of his stay he kept to the new regime.

From the second day, the disorder in the boot room was noticeable, even to Beard. He suspected that he never wore the same boots on consecutive days. Even though he wrapped his goggles (these ones were undamaged) in his inner balaclava on the third day, they were gone by the fourth, and the balaclava was on the floor, soaking up water. That morning he saw several snowmobile suits, also on the floor. They had a trampled appearance, and he decided, without looking too closely, that none could be his. Pickett admitted to him, while they were out recording the sound of the wind in the ship’s rigging, that for two days he had been wearing two left boots. But he was a hardy sort who did not seem to mind. Beard did mind. He was not a communally-spirited person, but there were certain decencies he took for granted – in himself, and therefore in others. He always put his stuff on and below the same peg, number seventeen, and was disappointed to note that others had trouble observing such simple procedures. Gloves were a particular problem, for it was impossible to go outside without them. As a precaution, he stuffed his inside his boots, along with the glove liners. The next day the boots were gone.

He liked the evenings. By the time they started gathering in the mess room before dinner, it had been dark for five hours. There was two hours’ drinking before the first course. The wine was from a neglected region of Libya. He generally started on the white, drank the red until he sickened and returned to the white, and there was generally enough time to switch back before bedtime. After dinner, there was, of course, only one topic. Mostly, Beard listened. Never before had he encountered idealists in such concentration and he was by turns intrigued, embarrassed, constrained. When Pickett asked him on the third night to talk about his work, he stood up to speak. He described the Centre and the quadruple-helix rooftop wind turbine, plausibly claiming it as his own initiative. It was a revolutionary design, he told the room, and he made a sketch to be passed around. It would cut household bills by eighty-five per cent, a saving that would be the equivalent of building – not quite drunk, he summoned a number – twenty-three medium-sized power stations. There were respectful questions, and he answered them judiciously, lucidly. He was among scientific illiterates and could have said anything. There was an impassioned statement of support from Stella Polkinghorne. She said that Beard was the only one here doing something ‘real’, at which the whole room warmed to him and applauded loudly. He had never cared much what others thought, but now – how lowering – he was touched and could not conceal it, to be, for just a few minutes, the darling of the ship.

Otherwise, he listened and drank. After two or three glasses of the white, the red went down painlessly, like water, at least at first. There were themes – some were canonic and chased each other crazily, others were fugal and ran concurrently, as disappointment did with bitterness: the century had ended and climate change remained a marginal concern, Bush had torn up Clinton’s modest proposals, the United States would turn its back on Kyoto, Blair showed no grip on the subject, the long-ago hopes of Rio were lost. Canonically pursuing then overtaking disappointment was alarm. The Gulf Stream would vanish, Europeans would freeze to death in their beds, the Amazon would be a desert, some continents would catch fire, others would drown, and by 2085 the Arctic summer ice would be gone and the polar bears with it. Beard had heard these predictions before and believed none of them. And if he had, he would not have been alarmed. A childless man of a certain age at the end of his fifth marriage could afford a touch of nihilism. The earth could do without Patrice and Michael Beard. And if it shrugged off all the other humans, the biosphere would soldier on, and in a mere ten million years teem with strange new forms, perhaps none of them clever in an apeish way. Then who would regret that no one remembered Shakespeare, Bach, Einstein, or the Beard-Einstein Conflation?

While dark and even greater cold enveloped the ship in the lonely frozen fjord, and the brave yellow gleam from its portholes was the only light, the only sign of life for a hundred miles across the crackling icy wastes, other themes flourished symphonically: what was to be done, what treaties were to be made between the quarrelsome nations, what concessions, what gifts should the rich world self-interestedly make to the poor? In the mess room’s humid after-dinner warmth, it seemed to the owners of full stomachs sealed with wine that it was only reason that could prevail against short-term interests and greed, only rationality could draw, by way of warning, the indistinct cartoon of a calamitous future in which all must bake, shiver or drown.

The statehood-and-treaty talk was worldly in comparison with another leitmotiv that summoned a cooling measure of austere plainsong, a puritanical air from the old conservation days, distrustful of technological fixes, determined that what was required was a different way of life for everyone, a lighter tread on the precious filigree of ecosystems, a near-religious regard for new rules of human fulfilment in order to flourish beyond supermarkets, airports, concrete, traffic, even power stations – a minority view, but heard with guilty respect by all who had steered a stinking snowmobile across the pristine land.

Listening, as he usually did, with Jesus at his side from their corner of the mess room, Beard interjected only once, on the last evening when a gangling novelist called Meredith, appearing to forget there was a physicist present, said that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which stipulated that the more one knew of a particle’s position, the less one knew of its velocity, and vice versa, encapsulated for our time the loss of a ‘moral compass’, the difficulty of absolute judgements. Beard was peevish in his interruption. It was worthwhile to be correct, he told this crop-haired fellow with rimless glasses. What was at issue was not velocity but momentum, in other words, mass times velocity. At such hair-splitting there were muted groans. Beard said that the principle had no application to the moral sphere. On the contrary, quantum mechanics was a superb predictor of the statistical probability of physical states. The novelist blushed but would not give way. Did he not know who he was talking to? Fine, yes, OK, statistical probability, he insisted, but that was not certainty. And Beard, just finishing his eighth glass of wine and feeling nose and upper lip elevate in contempt for an ignorant trespasser on his field, said loudly that the principle was not incompatible with knowing precisely the state of, say, a photon, so long as one could observe it repeatedly. The analogy in the moral sphere might be to re-examine a moral problem a number of times before arriving at a conclusion. But this was the point – Heisenberg’s Principle would only have application if the sum of right plus wrong divided by the square root of two had any meaning.

The silence in the room was not so much stunned as embarrassed. Meredith stared helplessly as Beard brought his fist down hard on the table. ‘So come on. Tell me. Let’s hear you apply Heisenberg to ethics. Right plus wrong over the square root of two. What the hell does it mean? Nothing!’

Barry Pickett intervened to move the discussion on.

That was an isolated discordant note. What was memorable and surprising came every evening, usually late on, in the bright tones of a marching brass band, or the sound of massed voices in unison, elated in common purpose and obliterating for a while all disappointment, all bitterness. Beard would not have believed it possible that he would be in a room drinking with so many seized by the same particular assumption, that it was art in its highest forms, poetry, sculpture, dance, abstract music, conceptual art, that would lift climate change as a subject, gild it, palpate it, reveal all the horror and lost beauty and awesome threat, and inspire the public to take thought, take action, or demand it of others. He sat in silent wonder. Idealism was so alien to his nature that he could not raise an objection. He was in new territory, among a friendly tribe of exotics. Those sentinel snowmen guarding the foot of the gangplank, the recorded sound of the wind moaning through the rigging, the disc of polished ice that refracted the day-long setting sun, Jesus’s penguins, thirty of them, and three polar bears, marching along the ice beyond the ship’s bow, the harsh, impenetrable fragment of a novel punctuated with expletives that Meredith read, or shouted, aloud one evening – all these demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances, were fashioned to deflect the course of a catastrophe.

Such was the music and magic of ship-bound climate-change talk. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall he had learned to call a bulkhead, the boot room continued to deteriorate. By midweek four helmets were missing along with three of the heavy snowmobile suits and many smaller items. It was no longer possible for more than two thirds of the company to be outside at the same time. To go out was to steal. The state of the boot room, the gathering entropy, became a subject of Barry Pickett’s evening announcements. And Beard, oblivious to his own vital role, his generous assistance in setting the initial conditions, could not help reflecting expansively on this post-lapsarian state. Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs. Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. Even harder to impose order once the room was strewn with backpacks and stuff-bags and supermarket plastic bags half filled with extra gloves and scarves and chocolate bars. No one, he thought, admiring his own generosity, had behaved badly, everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in ‘discovering’ their missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the boot room?

On the last morning they ate their breakfast to the din of the entire snowmobile fleet warming up outside. They went out onto the ice, many of them missing pieces of their equipment. Beard was without a helmet. While he waited for the signal to leave, he warmed his goggles on the engine, and wound a scarf round his head. The low orange sun was unhindered, there would be a useful tailwind, and it looked like the journey back to Longyearbyen might even be pleasant, if one were fully clothed. There was a shout from the deck. Between them, Barry Pickett and one of the crew were manhandling down the gangplank a huge plastic and fibre sack of the sort that builders use to store sand in. Lost property. They gathered around the treasure and poked about in it. Beard found a helmet that fitted and knew it must be his. No one was ashamed, or even faintly embarrassed. Here was their stuff. Where had it been hiding all this time?

They said their goodbyes to the crew, and set off in loud and poisonous single file across the fjord towards Longyearbyen, keeping to a stately twenty-five kilometres per hour to avoid the cutting headwind. Hunched low over his machine, trying to draw a little of its heat onto his face, Beard found himself in a mellow state – an unfamiliar cast of mind for the morning. He was not even hung-over. On the frozen shores of the fjord they slowed to walking pace to navigate deep ruts, trenches, in the ice. He could not remember them from the outward journey. But of course, he had been asleep behind Jan’s back. Then they were on a long straight snowy track, passing a hut where, the guides had told them, a great eccentric once lived a lonely life.

If, Beard thought, he ever travelled by spaceship to another galaxy, he would soon be fatally homesick for these, his brothers and sisters up ahead of him, for everyone, ex-wives included. He was suffused with the pleasant illusion of liking people. Entirely forgivable, all of them. And somewhat cooperative, somewhat selfish, sometimes cruel, above all, funny. The snowmobiles were passing through the narrow, high-sided gully, scene of his shame, a moment best buried. He preferred to recall his cool escape from a murderous bear. But yes, he felt unusually warm towards humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion, as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was. But what about the general disgrace that was the boot room? Evidently, a matter of human nature. And how were we ever going to learn about that? Science of course was fine, and who knew, art was too, but perhaps self-knowledge was beside the point. Boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly. Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science or art, or idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law.

These fondly forgiving and self-forgiving thoughts sustained him until they reached the hotel for lunch. How long ago, it seemed, since they had been there. They handed over their snowmobile suits and the rest, said their goodbyes to Jan, and within the hour they were on their plane to Trondheim. Beard was booked with a different airline for the onward flight to Oslo. The others had four hours to wait. In the confines of the small airport, they seemed reluctant to leave each other’s company. They took over the bar and soon started up their music again, the songs, the laments of global calamity, over lunchtime beers and hotdogs. This was where Beard went to find them to say goodbye. He passed twenty minutes in email swaps and embraces. Stella Polkinghorne kissed him on the lips, Jesus gave him his business card. There was a loud hurrah as Beard was leaving the bar. In all, he was reminded that by way of running undemanding errands on the ice and pretending to care about wind turbines, he had attained a degree of unfamiliar popularity. Even the spindly novelist had clasped him to his narrow chest. Beard was still smiling to himself thirty minutes later as his twin-propeller plane bounced down the freezing runway and banked southwards to return him to the mess he had almost managed to forget.

He stayed overnight in Oslo, changed his reservation to a 6 a.m. flight and was three hours early into Heathrow. As his plane made its approach over Windsor Park it was raining heavily, the dawn sky was greenish-black, all headlights were on along the feed-in roads. Outside the terminal building, in the airport taxi queue, he learned there was a traffic pile-up and ten-mile tailback on the M4, so he went back inside, descended the levels and took the train to Paddington and a cab from there. By the time he arrived outside his house the rain had stopped and was dripping heavily from the blackened branches of the pavement rowan trees. As his taxi pulled away, he stood by his garden gate with his luggage and looked about him, marvelling that among such densely crowded buildings at ten on a weekday morning, there was no one to be seen, not even the sound of a voice or a radio. Belsize Park appeared as empty of life as the Arctic. And there was his home, his very own box of miseries, neat, early Victorian, of grey London brick, with stone mullions on the downstairs windows, and standing on its own patch of wintry garden with its one bare birch and, to the side, an ancient apple tree. Not many London houses had a hundred feet of front garden, and a path of flaking brick in herringbone pattern making a shallow curve to the front door, and mossy brick walls marking the boundaries. Architecturally, it was superior to all his other marital homes, and now it would have to be sold, the contents dispersed, its two owners likewise, not because they habitually disliked each other, though she might loathe him now, but because he had had eleven affairs in five years and she had only one. An uneven score, and they must live and suffer by unspoken rules.

The front gate made its usual squeak, more of a valedictory quacking sound, as he pushed it open. He was sad, but he was no longer in anguish. That pleasant woman on the train whose name he could no longer recall, the visit to Tarpin’s, his chaste interlude on the eightieth parallel (he was almost completely healed) were new layers of a protective coating. However minimally, he was a different man. He was full of regrets, he was sorry that he did not know the trick of making Patrice love him, but he was resigned. He was going indoors to make a start on dismantling the stage set of his marriage. His intention was to begin packing that day. During the dark afternoons on the frozen-in ship, he had had time to reflect, and planned to take only personal belongings. She could have the rest, the sofas, rugs, paintings, knives and forks, and if she could persuade her father, a merchant banker, to buy out his half-share, she could have the house as well. Beard would make the disengagement as painless and efficient as he could. For all he cared, she could set up with Tarpin. No shortage of space on the tussocky front lawn for a boat, lamp post and phone box.

The wheels of his luggage made a plaintive ticking against the path. His last homecoming. He was relieved that he was early, that Patrice would not be at home to fail to greet him, to ignore his return, for this was Friday, a full teaching day, when scores of cross-legged children sang in dissonant unison to her piano in the afternoon. Such details of her existence he would soon forget, or be denied.

Arriving at the front door, and bending with effort against the newly thickened cordon of fat around his waist to rummage in his briefcase for his key, he noticed a change. The cream-painted wire basket that held milk bottles and had a dial and red arrow for indicating to the milkman the day’s requirement was not in its usual place. It had been moved, or kicked, more than a foot to the right, leaving exposed a blurred rectangular mark framed in grit on the stone doorstep. Now the basket stood askew at a diagonal, showing its communicative face to the wall. He did not rearrange it. What was the point? Soon he would move into a new place – he had in mind a small, white-walled flat stripped bare of clutter, his domestic Spitsbergen, from where he would devise a new future for himself, lose weight, become agile, and steely with fresh purpose, whose nature was still unclear.

He found his key, opened the front door and, as he pulled his luggage into the hall, was aware of another difference, a slight rearrangement of the air. It was damp, or warm, or both, and scented in an unfamiliar way. More obviously, there was water on the parquet floor, a trail of outrageous wet footprints, or foot-sized puddles, leading from the bottom of the stairs towards the sitting room. Someone – Tarpin, surely, that constant creature of the bathroom – had stepped carelessly from the shower, and was treating the place like his own.

Recklessly, with no other thought than to throw the intruder out, Beard strode along the water trail and entered the room. It could not have been clearer, for there he was on the sofa, with dripping hair, wearing a dressing gown, Beard’s dressing gown in black silk with a paisley pattern, a Valentine’s gift from Patrice, and he was sitting upright, startled, the newspaper unfolded in his lap. But he was not Tarpin – this was the difficult adjustment, and it took Beard seconds to realign. The man on the sofa was Aldous, Tom Aldous, the post-doc, the Swan of Swaffham, the tip of whose ponytail released a droplet, which fell onto a cushion as the two men stared at each other in silence.

Beard’s processes of accommodation were hindered by irrelevant questions and answers. Would he ever want to wear that dressing gown again? He thought not. What were the odds against his meeting both of Patrice’s lovers in a sodden state? Extremely long. Naturally, the silence appeared to last many more seconds than it did, and it was broken at last by Aldous with a titter, a nervous whinnying sound he tried to hide behind his hand. His worst fear had been realised. There may have been a very brief moment when he thought that Beard’s form in the doorway was an apparition, the paranoid consequence of an overproductive mind. Now he knew it was not. He may, in this short interlude, before either man spoke, have seen before him another more persuasive apparition – his career prospects in shreds. Theoretical physics was a village, and on its green, by the village pump, Beard still had influence. Did Aldous, the Centre’s home-grown genius, think he could talk his way out of this? The hand he had used to smother his giggle reached out towards the low glass table that stood in front of the sofa. By a pile of magazines was a coffee cup – tall, in thin white porcelain, one in a set of six bought by Patrice at Henri Bendel’s in New York. Aldous raised it to his lips. If the purpose was to demonstrate that he was untroubled or guiltless, the gesture was undermined by the newspaper sliding from his lap onto the floor into a face-down heap. With his eyes still on the master of the house, he took an insolent sip. Beard took a step closer.

‘Put that down, man. And stand up.’

It was as well that Aldous obeyed, for Beard, seven or eight inches shorter, thirty years older and weak about the arms had no physical means of imposing his will. He had only the rectitude, outrage and whatever authority a cuckold could command. Hands on hips, back straight to attain his entire five feet five, he watched as Aldous struggled to his feet and hastily retied the cord of the dressing gown under which, it was briefly clear, he was naked.

‘So, Mr Aldous.’

‘Look,’ Aldous said with a placating, downward movement of his palms, ‘we can talk about this. Professor Beard, can I call you Michael?’

‘No.’

‘You see, we shouldn’t let ourselves be forced into roles that others have written for us when…’

Beard took another step forward. He did not believe for a moment that there would be violence, but he did not mind giving the impression that he thought there would be. ‘What are you doing in my house?’

The rural Norfolk accent, it seemed then, was well adapted to a special kind of pleading. In such tones the tenantry might once have begged their manorial lord for lower rents in hard times. ‘I was going to finish this coffee, see, get dressed, tidy up and leave. I was going to double-lock the door from the outside like I was told and put the key through the letterbox. If you hadn’t come back early there wouldn’t have…’

‘I said, what are you doing in my house?’

Using his palms again in a gesture of empty-handed frankness, Aldous said, ‘I had dinner with Patrice and I stayed the night. Look, Professor Beard, may I be frank?’

He paused, as if he really did expect an answer. When he did not get one, he continued, ‘We both value rationality. We’ve made careers out of it. So let’s not be swept up into responses that are no longer appropriate to the situation. We both know that your marriage is over. Technically, you and Patrice are man and wife, but you’re not even on speaking terms and haven’t been for ages, and here you are, getting ready to play the injured party, the furious husband catching his wife’s lover red-handed, when in fact you’re probably thinking of moving out anyway. That’s Patrice’s impression, and it’s certainly her wish.’

Beard waited for more.

‘What I mean to say, Professor Beard – I wish you’d let me call you Michael – is that we could skip all the anger and heartache, we could be efficient about this, and we could even be friends.’

‘I see.’ The question he then put to Aldous came without forethought, and as he asked it, he thought it might perform useful mischief, or at the very least give him a moment to think. ‘And what about Rodney Tarpin? What’s happened to him?’

Aldous gave a good impression of a man pretending to be unfazed. Slowly, he retied once more the belt of Beard’s dressing gown. ‘I’m not afraid of Tarpin. And I’ve recorded two of his phone calls, and a postcard he wrote is now with the police. The man’s a maniac, but at least he doesn’t hide it.’

Beard said, ‘He hit Patrice.’

‘That was grotesque,’ the young man cried out, seeing a common cause to bind the professor to him. ‘How could this guy do a thing like that to such a beautiful woman?’

‘And he attacked me. Hit me in the face.’

‘He should be in prison.’

‘At least now he’ll be on your case, not mine. Are the police offering you protection?’

‘Well, you know, they said they’re rather busy at the moment.’

The urge to punish gave Beard a warm glow that was not unlike love. He said, ‘I suppose he intends to kill you. I’d carry a knife if I were you, not that I care either way what happens to you.’

Despite Beard’s efforts, Aldous did not appear intimidated by Tarpin. He said simply, ‘He doesn’t frighten me, Professor Beard.’

‘And I suppose Patrice would have told him where you work – I mean, where you used to work.’

Instantly, the young man’s cool drained away. He was the supplicant once more, a man with his job on the line.

‘Oh now look, Professor Beard. You’re taking this too far. Let’s go back to the central point. Rationality…’

‘Deeply irrational,’ Beard said, ‘to make love to the boss’s wife.’

‘Honestly, it goes deeper than that. I’ve been stupid, I know I’ve got a lot to learn. But I’m talking about, about a substratum of powerful logic…’

Beard laughed out loud. Substratum! This was like watching a chess player fight his way out of an approaching checkmate. He could remember no particular occasion, but he knew he had been in such situations himself, probably in front of an outraged wife, just when she had blown his last excuse and then, brilliantly, on a surge, he had produced a sleight of mind, a knight’s move in the eleventh dimension, a dazzling projection upwards from the flat-world of the conventional game. Yes, he liked a substratum of powerful logic. He listened.

Aldous spoke breathlessly. ‘Three weeks ago I overheard you saying to one of our group that you believed that apart from general relativity, the Dirac Equation was the most beautiful artefact our civilisation had ever produced. I disagree. You do yourself a disservice. There’s nothing like the Conflation, nothing like this elaboration of the photovoltaics – nothing more elegant, nothing truer, Professor Beard. Everyone everywhere reveres it. But no one has thought it through from the angle of applied science, and the crisis in climate change. And I have, I’ve seen the potential of your work in relation to photosynthesis. The fact is, no one understands in detail how plants work, though they pretend they do. No one really understands how photons are converted to chemical energy so efficiently. Classical physics can’t explain it. This talk of electron transfer is nonsense, it doesn’t add up. How your average leaf transfers energy from one molecular system to another is nothing short of a miracle. But this is the point – the Conflation opens it right up. Quantum coherence is key to the efficiency, you see, with the system sampling all the energy pathways all at once. And the way nanotechnology is heading, we could copy this with the right materials, and then crack water cheaply, and store hydrogen on a domestic or industrial scale. Beautiful! But I’m nothing, I’m no one. I want to show you my ideas, and when you’ve looked at them, I know you’ll go for it. People will listen to you. Quantum coherence in photosynthesis is nothing new, but now we know where to look and what to look at. You could steer this research, you could get a prototype funded. It’s too important to let go, it’s our future, the whole world’s future that’s at stake, and that’s why we can’t afford to be enemies.’

Beard had heard rather too much recently of this whole-world talk. He had never been well disposed to biology enlisting quantum mechanics to its cause. And he had an irrational prejudice against physicists who defected to biology, Schroedinger, Crick and the like, who believed that their brilliant reductionism would carry all before them. In fact, greenery in general – gardening, country rambles, protest movements, photosynthesis, salads – was not to his taste.

‘How long have you been fucking my wife?’

Aldous sighed, and seemed about to object. Then his shoulders sagged and he resigned himself. ‘About a month after I first met her.’

‘After I introduced you.’

‘That’s it, Professor. You were away for the night, Birmingham or Manchester. I called in on my way home to see if there was anything Patrice needed…’

‘And there was.’

Again, the wheedling of the rural tenant. ‘Honest, Professor Beard. I had no designs on your wife. She’s way out of my league. I don’t even have a league. She invited me in, then she asked me to stay to dinner – and that was how it began. Later on she told me how it was all over between you, and I sort of persuaded myself that you um…’

‘Wouldn’t mind?’

He knew it already, but it angered Beard, or worse, it pained him, to hear for the second time from Patrice by way of Aldous that she thought the marriage was over. Since the late summer of last year, she had been seeing Aldous, not Tarpin. Or possibly both. The goofy post-doc turned up on her doorstep one August evening and she grabbed another chance to punish her husband.

‘Has anyone ever told you how naïve you are, Aldous?’

The young man seized on the word with joy. ‘I am naïve, Professor Beard! I do science and nothing else. I’m naïve because I don’t meet people, I don’t go out. I go home and work in the studio in my uncle’s garden, often through till dawn. That’s how I’ve always been. But my work is at your disposal. I’ve been making a file for you. For you and no one else. Please say you’ll read it. This is so important.’

Until then the two men had faced each other over a distance of several feet, Aldous standing close to the sofa, with arms clasped in front of him, as if to defend himself against a possible fate or to prevent Beard’s dressing gown from swinging open. Beard began to back away. He was tired of listening to Aldous, he wanted to be alone.

He said, ‘Now you can leave. I’ll be at the Centre tomorrow and I’ll see you in Jock Braby’s office at eleven.’

As Beard crossed the room, Aldous was pleading, almost shouting. ‘No one will ever hire me again. You know that, don’t you? This is too important for private revenge.’

As he reached the sitting-room door, Beard turned and said, ‘Before you go, clear up the mess in the hall.’

‘Professor Beard!’

Aldous was starting to run at him, arms outstretched, his head shaking in denial, his lips stretched across his huge teeth, and it was probably his intention to throw himself at Beard’s knees and beg for mercy. He certainly would have had it, for Beard had no wish to set his domestic humiliation before Braby, and therefore the whole Centre. The Chief betrayed, made an ass of by one of the ponytails. But Aldous never reached Beard, he barely made it two metres into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. As his right foot landed on the bear’s back, it leaped forward, with its open mouth and yellow teeth bucking into the air. Aldous’s legs flew up before him and there was a moment when his considerable length was parallel to the ground, and then his legs rose even further and, though his arms flailed instinctively downwards to break his fall, it was the back of his head that made first contact, not with the floor, not with the edge of the glass table, but with its rounded corner, bluntly penetrating the nape of his neck.

A deep, smothering silence settled on the room, and several seconds passed.

‘No, no, please no,’ Beard muttered as he crossed the room.

Aldous lay at full stretch on the floorboards, as though laid out by an undertaker, with only minimal space between arms and torso, eyes wide open, lips parted, the dressing gown covering him decently. Beard kneeled down by the young man’s shoulder. No breathing, no pulse. There was a halo of blood under his head about nine inches across, and for some reason it did not grow larger. Then Beard saw that blood was seeping away, no, cascading down the gaps between the boards. Blood loss alone would have finished Aldous.

‘Oh fuck… oh fuck…’ Beard whispered to himself over and over. Something impossible had happened and he was willing it away, undoing it, reversing it, simply because it could not be. It was too improbable. But with each second the new reality advanced on him, pushed his efforts aside and settled into place. It was true. He also thought of what he should have been doing, of heart massage, of mouth-to-mouth. Like all laboratory workers, he was required to learn these techniques. But something quite still, possessing authority, not so much a voice as a presence lying safely beyond his distress, suggested that he should not touch the body.

He got up and went to the telephone. He was shivering. The stillness of Belsize Park intensified as his hand hesitated above the receiver. The same reasonable presence proposed that he think carefully before dialling. He was not a naturally indecisive man. What was wrong with him? His hand felt dead. It took him some moments to catch up with his own good sense and read the situation as others might. Here was how it looked: a man returns from abroad to find his wife’s lover in the house. A confrontation follows. Twenty minutes later the lover is dead from a blow to the back of the head. He slipped, I tell you, he slipped on the rug as he ran across the room towards me. Oh yes? And why was he running, Mr Beard? To throw his arms around my knees and plead with me not to have him sacked, to beg me to join with him to save the world from climate change. There would be sceptics. For the last time, Mr Beard, did you not smear blood on the corner of the table? And what have you done with the murder weapon, Mr Beard? Innocence would come at a high cost. It would have to be earned, fought for. Media interest would be lacerating. Sex, betrayal, violence, a beautiful woman, an eminent scientist, a dead lover – perfect. Patrice, sincerely or maliciously, would be his chief accuser. Two years thinking of nothing else. Nobel laureate, balding boffin, government appointee, in the dock, fighting to stay out of jail.

At the thought he felt weak in his legs, in the tendons behind his knees, but he did not sit down. It was clear. Only those who loved him would believe him. And no one loved him. He should have had children, grown-up daughters, indignant on his behalf, busy in his defence. He walked across the room towards the hall and then came back. He did not know what to do. Then he did. He went out of the sitting room into the hall, stepped carefully over the trail of puddles and walked into the kitchen, to the drawer where tinfoil and clingfilm and greaseproof rolls were kept. Also in that drawer was a carton of transparent disposable gloves.

He drew on a pair. Nothing criminal in that, but once his hands were encased, he felt invisibility, invincibility steal over him, over his entire body. A mental state, to be sure, but what other states did he have? He did not have a plan, he simply enacted one. His body had a plan. And he walked it through, as though experimentally, believing at every stage he could undo it, go back to the beginning, with nothing lost or compromised. Everything he was doing now merely served a precautionary principle. He might return to the phone, he might summon the emergency services. But just in case he did not, he needed to be prepared. In his light-headed way, he was thinking clearly. He went through the kitchen towards the back door, and walked into the windowless vault where the light bulbs and household junk were kept. It was in exactly the same place, against the wall, the dirty canvas tool bag. He turned over the contents and found a hammer, one of several, with a narrow head that seemed about right. While rummaging, he saw other items he thought he might use. The comb, the used tissue, the withered apple core. He arranged the bag to make it look undisturbed, took the four items into the kitchen and put them in a plastic carrier bag. He took a few sheets of kitchen towel and soaked some of them in water, and was about to return to the sitting room when he changed his mind. He went back into the vault and fetched the tool bag and carried it into the hall and set it down by the front door.

Tom Aldous did not look different, but the rug’s frozen laugh appeared sinister to Beard as he kneeled down beside the body. The bear’s hard, glassy eyes each captured a warped parallelogram of the sitting-room windows and looked murderous. It was the dead polar bears you had to watch. He set out the four items from the carrier bag in a neat row, staring at the fragment of dried-out apple core, wondering how it might help him. But he could think of no possible use for it and returned it to the bag. As he took the hammer in his hands he understood that his calculations about the precautionary principle, about returning to the beginning, to the phone, were all wrong. What he was about to do could not be undone. He would be putting his innocence behind him. He dipped the head of the hammer in the puddle of blood, smeared the handle, and set it aside to dry. Next, he took the used paper tissue and bloodied that too, and pushed it under the sofa, well out of sight. The comb was trickier, just as he had anticipated. He pulled away some hair from between the teeth and managed to place some between Aldous’s fingers. Hairs attached themselves to the gloves, but Beard was not concerned. The hammer head was now half-dry and easily took a hair, as did the handle. He put another single hair on the arm of a chair. Then he used the kitchen towel to wipe down and dry thoroughly the edge and corner of the glass coffee table, though there was no blood there visible to the naked eye.

He stood at last and paused, wondering if there were a simple mistake he was making. Not so far. He put the hammer and the comb and kitchen towel in the bag and went to the front door. Still wearing the gloves, he walked unhurriedly down the garden path and stopped by the gate to look around. There was no one about. He took out the hammer and tossed it into the shrubbery by the front wall, and then went back into the house, removed the gloves and put them in with the apple core, comb and kitchen roll, then folded the bag carefully, so its bloodstained handles were not exposed, and shoved it into an outer zip compartment of his suitcase.

As far as he could tell, there was no blood on his person, his clothes or his shoes. He took his luggage and the tool bag and stepped outside, pulling the front door closed with his foot. The unending gentrification of Belsize Park ensured that he found a skip within a few hundred yards. He dumped the tool bag. Within several minutes he was on Haverstock Hill getting into a cab bound for Portland Place.

He assumed that his state of affectless calm was due to shock and would wear off soon. Before it did he hoped to bump into someone who would recognise him. The taxi dropped him outside the Institute of Physics – he had once been a vice-president – and before going in he found a litter bin and disposed of the plastic bag. Inside the Institute, it was more or less as he had hoped. He had some minor business there and got into conversation with one of the administrators, who knew who he was. Beard mentioned that he had been in Spitsbergen, and then, casually, that he had come straight from Heathrow by cab and had been caught up in a traffic jam. The administrator commiserated. He agreed to keep an eye on the suitcase while Beard went to the British Library.

In the cab to the Euston Road his legs, independently of the rest of his body, began to shake. But he crossed the Library’s forecourt like any other scholar, penetrated the building and found a carrel. He called up some papers – historical material relating to a lecture he was due to give – and sweated it out for several hours, waiting for the time, around four fifteen, when he would feel his phone vibrate in his pocket.

Hunched over his documents, he read nothing, but he forced himself to write out some notes. It amazed him, what had happened. Each time he thought about it, it was as if for the first time. He marvelled at what he had done and how he had acted so calmly, without reflection, behaved like a murderer covering his tracks, while obliterating the truth that could have saved him. He was now in deep, the sole witness of his own innocence. In effect, he had panicked, even while he had felt clear-headed. What did he know of forensics? It was at least possible that today’s fresh fingerprints, the ones that were his, were notably different from the ones he had left around the house the weeks and months before. In which case, they would be able to tell that he had been in the house that morning and he would become a suspect.

What other mistakes had he made, what unseen neighbours had observed from a window his arrival or departure? Or seen him throw something into the skip? Was he right to have brought the tool bag away with him? When he was kneeling over Aldous a torrent of his own skin flakes and hair and other microscopic compounds might have poured over the boy, over the dressing gown. But it was his own dressing gown, already filled with the organic traces of his own existence. Not so bad then. If the house was filled with his marks, they were his cover. But only if a fingerprint could not be dated. Somewhere in this building, in the stacks, were a thousand books that could tell him, and he dared not call one up. It would make no difference now if he did.

At three fifty he stood stiff-kneed from his carrel and went to wait in the Library’s café for the call he knew must come. He spent the time preparing himself by trying to remember what it was he was not supposed to know: that Aldous was in the house, that he was Patrice’s lover, that he was dead. There might have been a fourth detail he needed to appear ignorant of, and he was too fretful to recall it. There may even have been a fifth. It was not so easy to concentrate, for the venerable Library and its environs were not quite as hushed and serious as they once were. There were scores of kids, undergraduates, in the café. Their coats and backpacks were piled up in the spaces between the tables, and they wandered the public spaces, the wide staircases, laughing and talking at a relaxed, normal pitch. Perhaps this was some form of open day for schools. The atmosphere was of a student-union building in a modern university – a bar, a pinball machine, table football would not have been out of place. It suited Beard well to feel obscure among the crowds, but he almost missed the call when it came, an hour late by his calculation, and he still had not remembered the fourth and fifth things he should pretend not to know. He had to trust himself and assume they did not exist.

Patrice said, ‘Where are you?’ Her voice was flat, and despite everything, he could not restrain a certain foolish hope: at last, she cared about his whereabouts.

He told her, and then he said, ‘What’s up?’

‘The police are here. You’ve got to come home.’

He said, ‘Patrice, what’s going on?’

She had put her hand over the receiver. He heard the murmur of a man’s voice, and then she said, ‘Just come back now.’

‘Have we had a break-in?’

There were more voices around her. Dozens of people were in the house. She was starting to repeat herself in the same toneless voice when she gave out a sudden cry as if stabbed in the arm, and half shouted, half wailed, ‘It’s Rodney, he’s killed someone…’ and a man’s voice cut in over her saying, ‘Mrs Beard…’ and then the line went dead.

Beard went back to his carrel to gather up the notes he had taken the trouble to write out, then he hurried across the Library court, past Paolozzi’s Newton, and it was only when he was on the street, raising his arm for a taxi, that he remembered what he had decided hours before: it would look better to arrive home with his suitcase. He had the taxi wait in Portland Place while he went into the Institute to thank the administrator. On the way to Belsize Park, Beard wondered whether this – not dashing straight home, but making the detour to collect his luggage – was one of those items, that fourth or fifth thing he was supposed to remember. He could not think it through.

He was interviewed at length on four occasions, and his last account did not waver from the first. Under the sustained pressure of police interrogation, honesty is a fine, unassailable thing, and as a man of science, Beard had an automatic respect for internal consistency. The truth was impregnable. No need to remember what he had said last time when he could return to the source. So yes, his early flight from Oslo brought him into Heathrow at eight. He went straight to the taxi line, and then – this was his only fiction, the rest was mere omission – he was caught up in a long delay on the M4 and did not get to Portland Place until the mid morning. But he had taken many taxis from Heathrow before, and had been in many traffic jams, and memory was wax-soft, and soon his construction formed itself in his mind like any genuine recollection, both vague and certain. He really felt he had lost an hour in the traffic. What did he do during that long taxi journey? He read a paper for peer review. Total concentration. He did not look up to see the pile-up in the middle or fast lanes, or wherever it was. The rest was hard truth – his business at the Institute, his day’s work at the Library, interrupted at last by Patrice’s call when he happened to be taking a break. With painful honesty he acknowledged that he knew about and had been upset by his wife’s affair with Mr Tarpin. But he, Beard, had had many affairs himself, and that, regrettably, was the kind of marriage they had, and probably it was coming to an end. He did not stray from the truth as he described Patrice’s black eye, his Sunday-morning visit to Cricklewood, the confrontation and the slap in the face, and how he, unused to violence, had hurried away for his own safety. Though it embarrassed him, he gave the detective inspector a thorough description of the afternoon he introduced Tom Aldous to his wife, and no, he did not notice anything pass between them, and no, he never suspected that while he, Beard, was in the Arctic, and, who knew, perhaps months before, Patrice was making love to Aldous. And yes, of course he knew the boy, a brilliant young scientist who often picked him up from Reading station. No, not obviously likeable. Too self-obsessed, too narrow, too awkward in company. But many people were like that in his field.

Despite all this truth-telling, the interviews were stressful, and the very first terrified him, for he could not be sure that someone had not seen him arriving at the house at ten and leaving forty-five minutes later. But terror was easily translated into an appearance of understandable stress. Matters eased during the remaining three sessions, all of which occurred after Tarpin’s arrest, but still, a fair degree of concentration was required. One week into the affair, Beard read in a newspaper – the predictable storm was raging, photographers were by the garden gate all day and much of the night – that no one had seen Tarpin on the morning of Aldous’s death. The heavy rain caused the builder to stay alone at home, depriving him of workmates and an alibi. That at least was refreshing. And so were the leaks from the police station to the press about Tarpin’s threatening postcard to Aldous, and the two phone calls that the young man had so wisely recorded. Beard’s final two interviews were mostly formalities, a tidying up of loose ends, so he was smilingly assured. It seemed clear enough, the police had their man. Beard signed his statement with a flourish.

Out at the Centre, however, Jock Braby was not so pleased. Beard went out to talk to him on the eighth day, straight after his third interview. He decided to drive because he preferred not to be followed onto the Reading train by the press. He was the object of great interest, having been cast as the hapless victim, the unworldly fool and dreamer with a fast wife beyond his control. There was a gaggle of photographers and reporters by the Centre’s barrier gates, and the security guards in their peaked caps, deeply impressed and sympathetic, lined up to give Beard their smartest salute as he drove through.

The two men drank tea in Braby’s office and Beard told him the whole story, down to the last detail, just as he had told it to the police.

Braby frowned, and frowned deeper, and gestured through his wall in the approximate direction of the main gates. ‘This isn’t good,’ he said more than twice, and began a long, opaque speech with hesitations and fumbling repetitions, and allusions to ‘funding’ and ‘reputation’, to ‘standing back’ and being ‘helpful’, and it became clear, or less unclear, after ten minutes that what he seemed to want was for Beard to resign, and only after two references to ‘the domestic front’ was it apparent that Mrs Braby was being invoked and that what was at stake was the knighthood and a degree of hearthside tranquillity. The man was, in theory, his junior and he was asking Beard to step down! Must it be assumed to be his fault, when one of his wife’s lovers killed another? But he kept his indignation well hidden and pretended to misunderstand.

‘Jock, whatever they’re whispering around the Cabinet Office at the moment, you’d be a bloody fool to resign. I’ll put in a good word. Keep your head down for a month or two and it will all go quiet again, you’ll see.’

In the circumstances, there was nothing for Braby to do but change the subject. They talked about Aldous, and found common ground in their dislike of him, while acknowledging the loss to the Centre. The police had gone through his cubicle and found nothing of interest relating to the case. A few personal effects had already been dispatched to the distraught father in Norfolk.

Braby said, ‘Michael, there was a file marked strictly for your eyes only. I had a good look. A lot of inorganic chemistry, and maths, ramblings, I’d say, and probably done in company time.’ He handed across a heavy folder. Beard took it, then stood to indicate the conversation was at an end. He was, after all, still the Chief.

Braby walked him along the corridor a little way. ‘I suppose we can honour his memory by developing his micro wind-turbine thingy. We’re all deeply committed.’

‘Oh yes, that,’ Beard said. ‘Of course. It will be his monument.’

They shook hands and parted.

And what of the marriage? After the body had been taken away, the forensic team withdrawn, the house declared no longer a crime scene, the press gone from the garden gate, at least until Tarpin’s trial, and some workmen hired by Beard came in with sander and polisher to remove all traces of the deep floorboard stain in the sitting room, Michael and Patrice returned from their respective lodgings to the marital home in order to empty it of their belongings and put it up for sale and go their separate ways. These were gusty, sunlit days in March, with winds so strong that the unmown grass was flattened silver sides up, and last year’s unswept leaves were piled in drifts against the mossy garden walls. It was weather of a bracing, purifying sort, for Beard at least.

True to his plan, and to Patrice’s satisfaction, he renounced any claim to the contents of the house – the list was oppressively long – and took only his books, clothes and a few personal belongings. Not only was he going to shed weight, and become trim and fit, he was intent on a slimmed-down life in the plain apartment he had yet to find. A simplifying factor was, of course, the fading of his love for, or obsession with, his wife. In one of their rare exchanges, he told her that her love life had brought nothing but destruction, and grief to an ailing father in Swaffham, and deprived the country of one of its most promising scientists. It amazed Beard how convinced he himself now was by the narrative everyone believed, and how easily he could summon the appropriate memories and emotions. Was it not true that if Patrice had not had an affair with Tom Aldous, he would still be alive today? And was it not also true that Tarpin would probably have wanted Aldous dead? There was no pretence on Beard’s part, he was genuinely aggrieved by what Tarpin had done, and it was right to hold Patrice to account. She owed her husband an apology.

Typically, she did not see it that way. She was in deep mourning for what she now believed was the love of her life. Her apologies were due only to the man who could not hear them. She was miserable with guilt at bringing Tarpin into Aldous’s life, for failing to protect the younger man, for not taking the threats more seriously. In addition, the burdens of packing and storage were all hers, since she wanted the stuff, which happened to include the rug and coffee table that had murdered her lover. She moved about the house in silent sorrow, working through her lists with numb efficiency. Her husband was at best an irrelevance, though he suspected that she hated him now for indefinable reasons, or for no good reason at all. Her silence, he decided, was preferable to the lethal cheerfulness with which she had wanted to annihilate him during her Tarpin days.

He was not inclined to help her sort through the goods that were now hers, but he made himself useful in other ways. Since there was nothing legally at issue between them, he suggested they share a lawyer. He knew a good one. Beard also knew the right agent to sell their house. He was well practised in these kinds of arrangements. He moved out first, to a rented basement flat in Dorset Square, on the north side of the Marylebone Road, and it was there, three months later, sprawled on a stained floral sofa that smelled like a dog, that he began to read the folder marked ‘Strictly for the eyes of Professor M. Beard’. It was turgid stuff, organic as well as inorganic chemistry, interwoven with some quantum informational concepts and certain more obscure subsections of the Conflation. These elements edged towards a theoretical description of the energy exchange in photosynthesis. Presumably, the intention, at some point further into the file, was to suggest how the process might be imitated and adapted somehow, but Beard’s attention began to flag, first because the material was impenetrable, second because he needed to buy a flat, and then, five months to the day after Tom Aldous’s death, the trial of Rodney Tarpin began.

He did not stand a chance, and he seemed to know it. In a tone of near regret, the prosecution laid the matter out: Tarpin’s obvious motive, the phoned and written threats, the proven violence, his hair on the murder weapon tossed in the laurels and his hair in the dead man’s grip, the tissue containing his dried nasal mucus and Aldous’s blood, the lack of an alibi. When Beard’s turn came, he spoke to the point. Was he not a citizen who respected the law? He gave a thorough account of his movements on the morning in question, then of his wife’s black eye, of his visit to the accused’s house and the blow to the face he had received. The case against Tarpin was bad enough, but it was Patrice, also appearing for the prosecution, who sank him. At the witness stand she was described by the press as beautiful and deadly, rigid with contempt for the man who had killed her lover. As a witness, Beard was not permitted to be in court to hear his wife’s testimony, and could only read the press reports. He had never known her talk so well, so clearly and to such effect. She mesmerised court and country with her account of Tarpin’s possessiveness and brutality, his jealous rages. He was an obsessive, she said, a deranged fantasist who had urged her to kill Aldous in his sleep if she ever saw the chance. He refused to let her go, and what she had thought would be a brief and casual affair became a nightmare lasting months. She was terrified of his violence but did not dare refuse him sex. He slapped her when they made love.

‘Do you not enjoy that, Mrs Beard?’ she was asked by Tarpin’s dapper counsel during cross-examination.

‘No,’ she said crisply. ‘Do you?’ There was laughter in the public gallery.

Her most quoted, celebrated remark must have been practised in front of the mirror. ‘When he killed my Tommy, the nation lost a genius,’ she said. ‘And I lost the only man I ever loved.’

The jury was out for only three hours and no one, not even Tarpin, could have been surprised by the verdict.

It was during the six days that separated the jury foreman’s announcement and the judge’s sentencing that Beard took up Aldous’s file again. It was the least he could do, to honour the dead, and he was agitated, he needed distraction. Second time around, he understood more, and began to be interested, even a little excited. The task Aldous had set himself was to discover then copy the ways of plants, perfected by evolution during three billion years of trial and error. Deploying techniques and materials still only talked of in nanotechnology, the idea was to exploit direct energy from sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using special light-sensitive dyes in place of chlorophyll and catalysts containing manganese and calcium. The stored gases would be taken up by a fuel cell to generate electricity. Another idea, also taken from the lives of plants, was to combine carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with sunlight and water to make an all-purpose liquid fuel. It was brilliant or insane – he was not sure. Marking each of his pages with last year’s date, he began some notes of his own, and then stopped because the next day, a Tuesday, the court sat, and the accused stood to hear his fate. Tarpin listened to the judge with the same intent and dreamy detachment with which he had followed all the proceedings and had protested, all too feebly, his innocence. According to the press reports, he kept looking in Patrice’s direction (Beard could imagine that inquisitive, rodent look), but she kept her face turned from him.

On the steps outside the court, she told the press and TV cameras that the sentence was not long enough, given the damage he had done. During the following week, some commentators agreed with her, while others thought it too severe for what the French might have called a crime of passion. However, watching the news that night in his socks, lying on the stinking sofa, amid the novel squalor of his bachelor apartment, with Aldous’s pages spread across his lap, Beard considered sixteen years was just about right.