"Solar" - читать интересную книгу автора (McEwan Ian)

Part Two

He was running out of time. Everyone was, it was the general condition, but Michael Beard, bloated by an unwanted lunch, shifting under his seat belt, could think only of the diminishing hours of his day, and of what he stood to lose. It was two thirty and his plane, already one hour late, still lumbered oafishly clockwise in a stack above south London. Too troubled to continue reading, gnawing ineffectually from time to time and from an awkward angle on a tender spike of cuticle in the corner of his thumbnail, a whitlow in the making, he watched his familiar corner of England rotate below him. What else could he do? This was not the time for lofty retrospection or overviews, just when he should have been rushing down streets, along corridors, but much of his past and many of his preoccupations were down there, three thousand metres below the expensive seat that others, as usual, had paid for.

Here was a commonplace sight that would have astounded Newton or Dickens. He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime – it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging, widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks towards the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood, and the outsized hospital where his mother died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary, and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine. Then his gaze was rotated southwards through a silvery haze over the Weald of Sussex towards the soft line of the South Downs, whose gentle folds once cradled his raucous first marriage, a synaesthesia of misguided love, infant excrement and wailing of their lodgers' twins, and the heady quantum calculations that led, fifteen years and two divorces later, to his prize. His Prize, that had half blessed, half ruined his life. Beyond those hills was the English Channel, trimmed with frills of pinkish cloud that obscured the coast of France.

Now a fresh tilt of the aircraft's wings turned him into the sunlight and a view of west London and, just below the trembling engine slung beneath the wing, his improbable destination, the microscopic airport, and around it, the arterial feeds, and traffic pulsing down them like corpuscles, M4, M25, M40, the charmless designations of a hard-headed age. Benignly, the glare from the west softened a little the industrial squalor. He saw the Thames Valley, a pallid winter green, looping between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern Hills. Beyond, lost to view, was Oxford and the laboratory-toiling of his undergraduate years, and the finely calculated courting of his first wife, Maisie. And now here it came again, for the sixth time, the colossal disc of London itself, turning like an intricately slotted space station in majestic self-sufficiency. As unplanned as a giant termite nest, as a rain forest, and a thing of beauty, gathering itself to great human intensity at the centre, along the rediscovered river between Westminster and Tower Bridge, dense with confident, playful architecture, new toys. Briefly, he thought he saw the plane's shadow flitting like a free spirit across St James's and over the rooftops, but this was impossible at such a height. He knew about light. Among those millions of roofs, four had sheltered his second, third, fourth and fifth marriages. These alliances had defined his life, and they were all, no point denying it, calamities.

These days, whenever he came in over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. The giant concrete wounds dressed with steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon – the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession. The hot breath of civilisation. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from his wondrous, and wondrously dirty, machine, believed in his better moments that he had the answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was running out of time.

Even as his Essex childhood swung back into view – he was so late! – he could trace the route he should have been making among miniaturised streets as neatly etched by winter sun as a printed circuit. He thought he could see the very building in the Strand he was supposed to be in now. Then it was gone. And there were two other roofs, tipping away from him unseen to the north-west. One sheltered his icy, neglected, chaotic Marylebone apartment. His mind's eye permitted him to see in a darkened room the half-eaten meal he had abandoned three months ago with a half-forgotten friend for some night errand. He had not been back and had not seen her since. The place was a midden. In the bedroom next door, in the unheated air, he saw the sensual disorder of the bed, the pillows on the floor, the orange standby lights of the hi-fi still glowing, and scattered about the place, the books and journals he was reading at the time (he struggled to remember them), and that day's newspapers, a champagne bottle and, in two glasses, the evaporated tidemarks of the inch or two they had failed in their hurry to finish. Over these, over the plates in the dining room, the pans in the kitchen, on the garbage in the pail and spread across the chopping board, and even on the coffee grounds in the dried-out filter paper, there would be vigorous, differently hued fungal growths in creamy whites and soft greyish-greens, a blossoming on the abandoned cheese, the carrots, the hardened gravy. Airborne spores, a parallel civilisation, invisible and mute, successful living entities. Yes, they would have long settled to their specialised feasts, and when the fuel ran out, they would dry to a smear of charcoal dust.

The other roof sheltered Melissa Browne, his somewhat neglected love, and it was under this second that he intended to spend the night. She was so kind to him, so soft, so patient, so pretty, the only viable love in his life. Like many women, she thought he was a brilliant scientist, a genius in need of rescuing. But he was such a careless, faithless, disorganised friend, too elusive, too stonily intent on never marrying again. He hadn't phoned. She was cooking dinner. He didn't deserve her. Guilt and a fresh surge of impatience, a vile brew, made him groan. Did he actually make a sound above the engine's note? And here were the South Downs again to remind him he must never yield, he must never change his mind. His frame could not withstand a sixth marriage.

Whichever direction his gaze fell, this was home, his native corner of the planet. The fields and hedgerows, once tended by medieval peasants or eighteenth-century labourers, still visibly patterned the land in irregular quadrilaterals, and every brook, fence and pigsty, virtually every tree, was known and probably named in the Domesday Book after all-conquering William in 1085 conferred with his advisors and sent his men all over England. And ever since, named again with greater refinement, owned, used, costed, traded, mortgaged; mature like a thick-crusted Stilton, as richly stuffed with varied humanity as Babel, as historical as the Nile Delta, teeming like a charnel house with ghosts, in public discourse as dissonant as a rookery in full throat. One day this brash and ancient kingdom might yield to the force of multiple cravings, to the dreamy temptations of a giant metropolis, a Mexico City, São Paulo and Los Angeles combined, to effloresce from London to the Medway to Southampton to Oxford, back to London, a modern form of quadrilateral, burying all previous hedges and trees. Who knew, perhaps it would be a triumph of racial harmony and brilliant buildings, a world city, the most admired world city in the world.

How, wondered Beard as his plane at last quitted the stack on a banking hairpin tangent and lined itself up north of the Thames to begin its descent, how could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a soft fruit – we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!

Half an hour later, the Berlin flight was docked and he was fourth man off, towing his carry-on luggage, walking stiffly at speed, with unmanful little skips and hops (his knees, his body, indeed his mind, were no longer capable of simple running), down the sealed capillaries, the carpeted steel tubes that fed him through the airport's innards towards the immigration hall. Far quicker to pound alongside the hundred-metre moving walkway than squeeze by the dreamy, motionless voyagers and their luggage blocking the runs. At least a dozen young men off his plane, hurrying more effectively, overtook him along this stretch, lean, crop-headed business types, raincoats flapping over their forearms, unhindered by their weighty shoulder bags, talking easily as they flew by. An avenue of ads for banking and office services, weakly humorous, effortfully eye-catching – clearly, advertising was an industry for third-raters – increased his irritation in the unventilated, overlit corridors. He knew it too well, the special kind of mental suffocation that came from contact with aggressive low intelligence. Now, planetary stupidity was his business. And by failing to be punctual, he was being stupid too. At best, he would be seventy-five minutes late. Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics – time reversal. And commanding yourself to be stoical did not get you there any sooner.

For an unnaturally large fee, he was to address an energy conference attended by institutional investors, pension-fund managers, solid types who would not easily be persuaded that the world, their world, was in danger and that they should align their investment patterns accordingly. Through inertia, blind professional custom, they were bound to their old familiars, oil, gas, coal, forestry. He was to persuade them that what they currently made profitable would one day destroy them. On these occasions it was necessary to speak in general terms, of course, but if Beard, already the owner of a dozen patents, could shift them, even by the smallest of fractions, his own company must benefit. They were waiting for him in the Savoy, in two connecting suites facing out over the river, and though they had received advance apologies for his lateness, soon they were bound to melt away to their next meetings, and this frail miracle of appointment-diary co-ordination, four months in the conjuring, would give way to even greater scepticism and fatal withdrawal. Another reason to be in London was to sign the option tomorrow at the US Embassy on a four-hundred-acre site in the south-western scrub desert of New Mexico, a sand-grain speck in the baking vastness. And when the investors were happy, the funds were in, the tax breaks settled, the construction on a scaled-up prototype would begin. Thinking about it made him dizzy with impatience.

Ten minutes of hurry, then Beard, breathless, sweating under his coat, was standing stalled in immigration, buried in a line ten men deep, hundreds long, inching forward among supplicants waiting to be granted entry to their own country. Long minutes passed, and he could feel himself becoming less reasonable. There came to him an image of precious fluid – blood, milk, wine – draining from a tank. He could not restrain a growing sense of thwarted entitlement: someone should have been there to bring him to the front, ahead of the ordinary crowd, to waive the formalities, conduct him to a limo. Did no one here know who he was? Wasn't he a VIP after all? Yes, he was, just like everyone else. At moments like this, his misanthropy sensitised him to the people packed tight around him, no longer fellow travellers, but adversaries, competitors in a slow race. And he could not help himself, he was on the lookout for one of those cheats who edge up on the periphery of vision, moving while pretending not to, cutting in with a sly shuffle, a subtle turn of the shoulder. Burdening others by stealing time.

He had reached the place where the amorphous overlapping ten queues narrowed down to three in order to line up for the immigration desks. And here he came, a gaunt parchment-faced fellow in a loden coat (Beard had always despised the style), sliding in from the left, trying to use his height to squirm ahead, angling his oversized briefcase at knee height to use as a wedge. Abruptly, driven by shameless rectitude, Beard stepped forward to deny the man space, and felt the briefcase bang against his knee. At that moment Beard turned and sought out his gaze and said politely, though his heart beat a little harder, 'Terribly sorry.'

A rebuke poorly disguised as an apology, pretending manners to a man he would rather at that moment kill. It was good to be back in England.

But looking into the man's face revealed just how ancient a cheat this was. Eighty-five at least, with sepia liver spots from papery forehead to puckered throat, and an air of slack-jawed vacancy, and pendulous lower lip faintly trembling and wet. Of course, the old had to get ahead. They had less time. They were almost dead. Their hurry was greater than his, and forgiveness, even an apology, was in order. But the old man had faded away, fallen back somewhere behind, out of sight, in disgrace. Too late to offer him a favourable place in the queue.

And so it was that Beard, heartless scourge of the frail, appeared before an official somewhat chastened, loathing himself a little and therefore not so surprised that his photograph or his height, his date of birth or his next of kin should be the cause of suspicion and a degree of expert frowning. The official snapped the pages of his passport in rapid sequence, glanced at Beard, flipped them back, then, following a moment's consideration, set the document face down on a scanner. She was in her late twenties, possibly less than half his age. Parents' country of origin he guessed to be Ethiopia. If she slid off her high stool now, stepped down from her station and kicked off her high heels, she would still stand six inches taller than him.

He was rotund, slow-moving, pinkly hot – and late. She was sleekly attuned to her current task, guarding the portals of her nation against undesirables. He watched her as she stared at his details on her screen, as her right hand, faintly purplish about the palm, fluttered insouciantly across her keyboard in pursuit of some other angle on him, a deeper perspective, he suddenly hoped. From the high internal scaffolding of the immigration hall a silence appeared to descend like thickening snow, a delicious chill, and all sense of hurry left him. This fine-textured, light-absorbent, light-loving skin, these high-pitched cheekbones (he saw only one) with a delicate dip and sculpted curve, these brown eyes resting gravely on his case, this happy marriage, as he saw it, of intelligence and grace. Millennia ago, under cool canopies in some secret desert redoubt, the genes of a gazelle had entered the local human pool. Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it. It lingered as he gazed at the black left hand and wrist, long and narrow like a salad tosser, resting inert by the foxed covers of his upturned passport.

He remained a bold fool in these matters – habits long fixed, not a crumb wiser than his twenty-five-year-old self, no prospects of improvement, so all his past wives agreed – and in the moments before she spoke he indulged the familiar notion of asking if the immigration officer was free for dinner. He asked many women, total strangers, to dinner, and not everyone said no. His involvement with Patrice had begun over such a feast, and set in train such disgraceful events, that even now, ten years on, he still remembered what he ordered. It predicted all that was to come, it was a curse: a skate with capers and burned butter, an over-salted salad of wild rocket, a yeasty Pinot Grigio, surely corked, and he too fatally entranced to call the sommelier across.

The young woman met his eye and said, 'You've travelled a lot in the Middle East.'

Her 'lot' was glottal, the statement intoned as a question. What linguists called uptalk, so he had recently learned. Lately he had become something of a language snob, an inverted language snob, whose age and limited connections prevented him from understanding much about accent and status in England these days. The year before, he had begun an affair with a London waitress whom he took to be the lively feral creature of some forsaken housing estate. But it turned out she had grown up in the Surrey Hills in a Lutyens house hidden among high laurels, and her father was an ennobled mathematician, a fellow member of the Royal Society. Beard had fled. Now here he was again, thrilling to his own idea of something demotic, or racy.

He said neutrally. 'Yes. that's right.'

'Libya. Egypt, Sudan. And the rest. Business is it?'

He nodded.

'And what is that?'

He had been asked many times at desks like this. He said, 'Energy consultant.'

'Is that oil?'

Again, the hint of the elided glottal tugged at something unwholesome in him.

'No. Solar.'

'CSP is it?'

Not quite right, but he nodded. She knew. In a dazed moment of virtuous hope and carnal self-interest, his imagination leap-frogged past dinner to the time when she had served out her notice with the immigration service and, smoothly competent, was travelling by his side, working with and for him, living for and with him and his vision of a world cleansed and cooled and energised by photovoltaics, by concentrated solar power, above all by his own artificial photosynthesis, and by systems centralised or distributed and grid-tied. He would teach her all he knew about thin film, heliostats, feed-in tariffs. She would be efficient in hours; out of them, generous, athletic, with low tastes.

He was starting to say conversationally, 'So you take an interest in €¦' as she spoke over him.

'Thank you, Mr Beard.' She was offering him his passport with her right hand, reaching over her neglected left where it lay unmoving on the desk. Of course! Unusable, wasted, withered. His ridiculous fantasy surged further, swelling into protective, nurturing affection for her congenitally useless left arm. She would eat dinner with a fork in her right hand; naturally, he would do the same.

His invitation was on his lips as her gaze slipped from his face towards the head of the queue behind, her smile fading as she called, 'Next.'

This was the weakness he had to live with, his own withered arm, the mental playlets, wholly infantile, that generally led nowhere, occasionally brought him trouble and only very rarely joy. But similar daydreams – manic moments, brief neural bursts, compacted but cloudy episodes that braided the actual with the unreal, and threaded gaudy beads of the impossible, the outrageous and contradictory along thought-lines of indeterminate logic – had long ago brought him to formulate his Conflation. The poetic, the scientific, the erotic – why should the imagination care which master it served?

He hurried across baggage reclaim, past the creaking carousels and bored crowds beneath the information screens, through deserted customs, past the sinister one-way glass and the stainless-steel examination tables like bare mortuary slabs, then out along the lines of dead-eyed drivers and their boards – Kuwait Balloon Adventures, Bishop Dolan, Ted of Mr Kipling – and crossed the departure hall, fully aware that he was not quite making a direct line to the stairs that led down to his train, nor was he quite aiming for the down-at-heel airport shop that sold newspapers, luggage straps and related clutter. Was he going to be weak and go in there as he always did? He thought not. But his route was bending that way. He was a public intellectual of a sort, he needed to be informed, and it was natural that he should buy a newspaper, however pressed for time. At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.

He knew this shop too well, and it seemed he was walking directly towards it now. He was simply going in to take a look, test his will, buy a newspaper and nothing besides. If only it were pornography that he was trying to resist, then failure could do him no harm. But pictures of girls or parts of girls no longer stirred him much. His problem was even more banal than top-rack glossies. Now he was at the counter, sorting the pound coins from euros in his hand, with four newspapers under his arm, not one, as if excess in one endeavour might immunise him in another, and as he handed them across for their bar codes to be scanned, he saw at the edge of vision, in the array beneath the till, the gleam of the thing he wanted, the thing he did not want to want, a dozen of them in a line, and without deciding to he was taking one – so light! – and adding it to his pile, partly obliterating a picture of the prime minister waving from the doorway of a church.

It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in salt, industrialised powdered foodstuffs, preservatives, enhancers, hydrolysing and raising agents, acidity regulators and colouring. Salt and vinegar flavoured crisps. He was still stuffed from his lunch, but this particular chemical feast could not be found in Paris, Berlin or Tokyo and he longed for it now, the actinic sting of these thirty grams – a drug dealer's measure. One last jolt to the system, then he would never touch the junk again. He thought there was every chance of resisting it until he was on the Paddington train. He stuffed the bag in the pocket of his jacket, took up his burden of papers and his wheeled luggage and continued across the concourse. He was thirty-five pounds overweight. About his future lightness he had made many general resolutions and virtuous promises, often after dinner with a glass in his hand, and all parliamentary heads nodding in assent. What defeated him was always the present, the moment of vivid confrontation with the affirming tidbit, the extra course, the meal he did not really need, when the short-term faction carried the day.

The flight from Berlin was a typical failure. At the start, as he lowered his broad rear into his seat, barely two hours after a meaty Germanic breakfast, he was forming his resolutions: no drinks but water, no snacks, a green-leaf salad, a portion of fish, no pudding, and at the same time, at the approach of a silver tray and the murmured invitation of a female voice, his hand was closing round the stem of his runway champagne. A half-hour later he was ripping open the sachet of a salt-studded, beef-glazed, toasted corn-type sticklet snack that came with his jumbo gin and tonic. Then there was spread before him a white tablecloth, the sight of which fired some neuronal starter gun for his stomach juices. The gin melted his remaining resolve. He chose the starter he had decided against: quails' legs wrapped in bacon on a bed of creamed garlic. Then, cubes of pork belly mounted on a hill-fort of buttered rice. The word 'pavé' was another of those starter guns: a paving slab of chocolate sponge encased in chocolate under a chocolate sauce; goat's cheese, cow's cheese in a nest of white grapes, three rolls, a chocolate mint, three glasses of Burgundy, and finally, as though it would absolve him of all else, he forced himself back through the menu to confront the oil-sodden salad that came with the quail. When his tray was removed, only the grapes remained.

He bought his ticket and settled himself at a table on the half-empty train. Sitting opposite was one of those young men in their thirties with shaved head, chubby face and gymnasium-thickened neck who were, to Beard's undiscerning eye, impossible to tell apart. This man, however, was distinguished by piercings in his ears. For some unacknowledged seconds there was an under-the-table negotiation, a polite ballet, for leg space. Then the younger man proceeded with the message he was tapping into his phone, and Beard, scanning the front pages, experienced the familiar mental narrowing of home-coming. These were surely the very papers he had read before he left, weeks before. Here were the same headlines, over the same photograph, asking the same question. When would Blair go? Tomorrow? Straight after the next election, assuming he won? A year in, or two, or after a whole fourth term? Was this not exactly the same number of Shia citizens in Baghdad, slaughtered by al-Qaeda as they queued to buy bread? That story apart (Beard was riffling through his pile), the tsunami had taken over a quarter of a million lives, which had raised for some, just as it had last month, the question of God's existence. Elsewhere, the country was, as ever, pronounced to be in ruins, its governance, finances, health service, justice and education systems, military, transport infrastructure and public morals in a state of terminal inanition. From habit, he looked out for climate-change articles. Nothing today. Solar? Nothing – but there would be soon.

He set the papers down on the seat beside him and attended to his palmtop, scrolling through the fifteen messages it had absorbed since his departure from Berlin Tegel. Fourteen related to his project. His American partner, Toby Hammer, confirmed that the documents were at Grosvenor Square. The ranch owner wanted his option money transferred to an account in El Paso and not the one in Alamogordo. The local Chamber of Commerce politely requested a 'cleaner' estimate of the number of jobs the installation would provide for the citizens of Lordsburg. Whenever he saw the name of that small town, his mood improved. He wanted to be there now, on its northern edge, gazing over the dazzling immensity towards the spot, out along the straight road to Silver City, where their work would begin. Lordsburg Holiday Inn wanted him to know that his booking next month was confirmed, in the usual room, and at a lower rate for a faithful customer. For the third time that month, a note from Jock Braby, wanting to meet. He would have heard the rumours of good results at Imperial and now he would be wanting some share of the success. And this, from the man who had arranged Beard's sacking from the Centre. An afterthought from Toby Hammer. He had found a cheap source of iron filings. Only one personal message: Don't forget dinner at 8. Main course is you. I love you, Melissa.

I love you. She had written and said this many times, but he had never said it back to her, not even in moments of abandon. And not because he thought he did not love her. He was never quite sure on that count. Long ago he had learned never to declare love to anyone. With Melissa he dreaded the question these three words of supernatural torque must raise. Would he commit to her for the rest of his life and father her child? She longed for the baby that circumstances had denied her. But his entire case history convinced him that if he went along with the plan, he was bound to bring disappointment to this artless, pretty young woman, who was eighteen years younger than him. She was at that age when a childless woman should be in a hurry. If he would not step up to perform his duties, he should bow out. She surely would need a period of adjustment, and then time to find a replacement. But she did not want him to go, and he could not bring himself to leave. And yet – to be an inadequate husband all over again, for the sixth time, to be father of an infant at sixty. Ridiculous regression!

It was agony to discuss the matter with her. The last occasion, in a restaurant in Piccadilly, she was wet-eyed when she said that she would rather not have a child than lose him. Unbearable. The stuff of agony-aunt columns. He could not believe her. If he really loved her, he thought, he should free her and leave her now. But he liked her and was weak. How could he refuse this improbable gift? Who else as young would take on so tenderly a man as faintly absurd, short, tubby, ageing, as scalded by public disgrace, corrupted by a whiff of failure, consumed by his cranky affair with sunbeams?

So he made the poorest choice of all. Barely a choice, more a kind of instinctual funk. Without quite cutting loose, he had kept his distance – he was working abroad anyway. He had seen other women, and all the while half hoped for and wholly dreaded the call she would make to tell him of the eager, talented buck prowling at the peripheries of her existence, about to make, or having just made, an entrance. And then, if he was weak enough, he would hurry back to defend what he would suddenly decide was his, and she would be grateful, the buck would be dispatched (the buck stops here!), the mess would remain, and he would be one step nearer the wrong decision.

He put away the palmtop, leaned back in his seat and half closed his eyes. Right before him on the table, shimmering through his barely parted lashes, were the salt and vinegar crisps, and just beyond the packet was a plastic bottle of mineral water belonging to the young man. Beard wondered whether he should be looking over the notes for his speech, but general travel fatigue as well as the lunchtime drinks had rendered him, for the moment, inert, and he believed he knew the material well enough, and on a card in his top pocket were various useful quotes. As for the snack, he wanted it less than he did, but he still wanted it. Certain of those industrial compounds might stir his metabolism into wakefulness. It was his palate, rather than his stomach, that was looking forward to the acidic tang of the dust coating each brittle slice. He had shown decent restraint – the train had been moving for several minutes now – and there was no good reason to hold back.

He pulled himself up in his seat and leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands propping his chin for several reflective seconds, gaze fixed on the gaudy wrapper, silver, red and blue, with cartoon animals cavorting below a Union Jack. So childish of him, this infatuation, so weak, so harmful, a microcosm of all past errors and folly, of that impatient way he had of having to have what he wanted instantly. He took the bag in both hands and pulled its neck apart, discharging a clammy fragrance of frying fat and vinegar. It was an artful laboratory simulation of the corner fish and chip shop, an enactment of fond memories and desire and nationhood. That flag was a considered choice. He lifted clear a single crisp between forefinger and thumb, replaced the bag on the table, and sat back. He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain.

Like a master of wine at a grand tasting, he had closed his eyes. When he opened them he was staring into the level grey-blue gaze of the man opposite. Feeling only slightly ashamed, Beard made a gesture of impatience and looked away. He knew how he must have appeared, a plump fool of a certain age communing intensely with a morsel of junk food. He had been behaving as though alone. So what? As long as he harmed or offended no one, that was his right. He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one. In a simple assertion of selfhood, rather than to satisfy his contemptible needs, he put out a hand to take another crisp, and as he did so, met again the other man's stare. It was narrow, hard, unblinking, expressive of little beyond a ferocious curiosity. It occurred to Beard that he might be sitting across from a psychopath. So be it. He could be a bit of one himself. The salty residue from the first round gave him the impression that he was bleeding from the gums. He slumped back in his seat, opened his mouth and repeated the experience, although this time he kept his eyes open. Inevitably, the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first, and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once.

It was at this moment, as he glanced up, that he witnessed his fellow passenger sitting forward, gaze still eerily fixed, elbows on the table, perhaps in conscious parody. Then, letting one forearm drop, crane-like down onto the bag, the man stole a crisp, probably the largest in the packet, held it in front of his face for a second or two, then ate it, not with Beard's fastidiousness, but with an insolent chewing motion, with lips parted so that one could glimpse it turning to paste on his tongue. The man did not even blink, his stare was so intense. And the act was so flagrant, so unorthodox, that even Beard, who was quite capable of unconventional thought – how else had he won his Prize? – could only sit in frozen shock and try, for dignity's sake, by remaining expressionless, to betray no sign of emotion.

The two men were locked into each other's gaze, and now Beard was determined not to look away. No question, the man's behaviour was aggressive, the act was naked theft, however trivial the goods. And if it came to physical struggle, Beard did not doubt that he would be on the floor in seconds, with broken arms or head. But there was also a possibility of another element, of something playful behind this steeliness and mockery of an older man's ridiculous pleasure in junk food. Or a tease, in the old-fashioned situationist mode, of a stuffy bourgeois. Or worse, the fellow believed that Beard was gay, and this was a come-on, a kind of modern opening known only to certain subgroups for whom his purple silk tie, as a hypothesis, was an accidental signal, an open invitation to seduction. Wasn't an earring in one ear or the other, he had forgotten which, once a significant marker of sexual orientation? This man had two earrings in each ear. The physicist knew much about light, but about forms of public expression in contemporary culture he was in the dark. Finally, returning to his initial surmise, Beard continued to wonder if his fellow passenger was a psychiatric case on an unlicensed drug holiday from the lithium, in which case it was a bad idea to continue to stare into his eyes. At this, Beard looked away and did the only thing that came to mind. He took another crisp.

What did he expect? As soon as this crisp was on Beard's tongue, the man's hand dropped again, and this time he took two, just as Beard himself had intended, and ate them in the same jaunty, vulgar manner. It would surely not be a good move to snatch the bag away from the table – too physical, too abrupt. Dangerous, to be breaking new ground, inviting a scuffle. Would anyone save him if it came to that? Beard glanced around the compartment. Passengers were reading, or staring numb-faced into space, or out the window at the wintry west-London suburbs, oblivious to the drama. What interest was there in two men silently sharing a snack? It was paradoxical, but as Beard saw it, there was more sense in continuing what had already begun. It did not occur to him to avoid confrontation with a stronger man by giving way and letting him have the bag to himself. Beard would not be bullied. He may have been short and overweight, but he had a developed sense of justice and always stood his ground. He was capable of being reckless. There had been some ruinous consequences. He took another slice of fried potato. His opponent, his stare still fixed on Beard, did the same. Then again, and again, for two further rounds, their hands came down on the bag, in steady, deliberate rather than rapid succession, and never quite touched. When there were only two crisps left, the young man retrieved the bag and, in a parody of politeness, offered them to Beard. The only response to this, the final insult, was to turn away.

It was an outrage. The train was beginning to slow, people were reaching for their coats, a computerised voice reminded passengers not to leave the train without their luggage. In a move that secured his triumph, the young man balled up in his fist the plastic bag and stuffed it into the waste bin under the table. Diligently, he used a hand to wipe the table clear of crumbs and grains of salt. Beard's humiliation was complete. This was how it was to grow older, to be pushed around by the young, the strong, and have no redress. With a warming touch of self-pity, he sensed that every injustice, every historical oppression, unwarranted invasion, chaotic warlordism, every tyrannical break with the rule of law was compacted in this moment, and he was bound by self-respect and his duty to underdogs everywhere to make a show of resistance. Otherwise, he could never live with himself. He lunged forward, seized his opponent's bottle of water, snapped off its top and drank deeply – he was thirsty anyway – drank it down to the bottom, every last drop of its twenty-five centilitres. He tossed the bottle on the table with a defiant, come-and-get-me look. The blue bottle cap rolled onto the floor.

The young man thought for a moment, then stood and stepped into the aisle, revealing his full height, somewhere around six two. Beard, already beginning to regret his defiance, remained in his seat, determined not to cringe. The man reached up, and with one smooth movement of his overdeveloped arm, he swung Beard's luggage to the floor, setting it down gently by its owner. If this was an act of contrition, Beard was not moved, and he returned a snarling look of contempt. His adversary hesitated a moment, gazing down at the older man with an expression of sorrow or pity, and then he turned and loped away down the compartment.

Beard let him get well clear before he stood. He never wanted to see the fellow again. A full minute passed before he stepped out onto the platform. Trembling a little now, with anger or shock, or a little of both, he had some difficulty getting himself into his coat – its belt was tangled around a sleeve. His shoelace was loose. As he kneeled to retie it with fingers not yet fully obedient, he remembered his heap of newspapers and decided to leave them where they were. At last, more or less composed, he made his way along the platform towards the ticket barrier. This was the moment that would remain with him, and come to stand for every recalculation he would ever make about his past, every revised or improved perspective he would ever gain on his own history, his own stupidity and other people's motives. He had stopped twenty feet short of the barrier. He set his wheeled luggage on end and reached under his coat into his jacket pocket for his ticket. There was something else in there, something plastic, bulky, lightweight, crunchy. There came to him a confused childhood memory of a magic trick at a village fete, when some master of the art had pulled from ten-year-old Michael Beard's ear an egg, or rabbit or chicken, something physically impossible, just like this: his crisps, the ones he had already eaten. He pulled the bag clear and, stupefied, stared at it, the Union Jack, the dancing cartoon animals, willing them to melt away. And that other bag? What a cascade of recalibration of every instant, every impulse, of the nature of the man he never wanted to see again, and of how he, Beard, must have seemed – a vicious madman.

He was so entirely in the wrong that for the moment it felt like liberation, strangely like joy. There could be no excuses, he had no defence. He also felt a mirthless impulse to laugh. His error was so unambiguous, so unsullied, he stood so completely revealed to himself, a naked fool, that he felt purified and redeemed, like a penitent, like an elated medieval flagellant with a newly flayed back. That poor fellow whose food and drink you devoured, who offered you his last morsels, fetched down your luggage, was a friend to man. No, no, that was not for now, the agony of retrospection must be postponed.

Despite the need to hurry to his appointment, he remained on the busy platform a good while, below the distant glass roof and its clattering echoes, while passengers stepped around him, and he held the bag of crisps against his chest, feeling himself, quite mistakenly, intensely illuminated.

In the taxi from Paddington to the Savoy he reminded himself to be careful, for he was feeling accident-prone and was about to speak in public, and afterwards, in the conference interval, was contractually bound to mingle, and might well confront journalists, men and women whose outward appearance of humanity and intelligence masked cold-hearted predation. They knew from past successes that he could be coaxed into indiscretion, or an expansive hypothesis – wasn't free-thinking his duty? – which would appear crazed or dimwitted in print, once stripped of all conditionals, all hedging, all playfulness. A speculative remark had already cost him the headline 'Nobel Prof: End Is Nigh'.

His own end – it seemed like that at the time – came only last year, and the curious thing was that people had already started to forget. This amounted to a kind of forgiveness. It was generally known there had been a fuss, a stirring of the news currents around Michael Beard, but the details were blurring. He had been proved wrong about something, or was he in the right all along? Did he assault someone, or was he the victim? Didn't that someone get arrested? Back then, as the storm broke, a colleague, an eminence in computer modelling, told him that the picture of the Nobel prizewinner being led handcuffed through a jeering crowd was carried in four hundred and eighty-three newspapers. This fact remained with Beard, his humiliation had been planetary, but it seemed to have remained with no one else. New material had befuddled the public memory, fresh scandals, sporting events, confessions, war, celebrity gossip and the tsunami had wiped clean his slate. A twelve-month torrent, swelling steadily, had carried him to safer ground.

Even his own recollection of the events, their precise emotional tone, was beginning to fragment. To be the focus of press attention was to experience a form of vertigo and bewilderment. Mercifully, his own particular memory stain was fading to an indistinct watermark. But certain details remained sharp, kept alive by the retelling. He believed that anecdotes were a blight on conversation, and yet still he went on telling them. He often related how it was not the case that the feel of handcuffs on the skin was of cold steel, as one reads in detective novels. Those placed on him had been warmed by a long morning inside the armless gabardine jacket of the arresting policewoman. It was the intimate snugness of the fit around his wrists, the feel of transferred body warmth, that was sinister. Likewise, the cliché was that whenever you read a press story on any subject of which you had personal knowledge, there was at least one salient fact wrong. But that was not his experience. He marvelled at the unearthing of a quantity of accurate facts about himself. The distortion was in the way in which they were juxtaposed, wrought into fresh implication, millimetres beyond the reach of a libel lawyer. And he was impressed too by the research, by how these restless newspaper types had, in a matter of a day or two, penetrated deep into the obscure quarters, into the slums of an overcrowded personal life, drawing in one instance a bounty of malice from his third wife's older brother, a near-mute recluse who had always loathed Beard and who lived without a telephone by a dirt track along a deserted north-westerly peninsula on Bruny Island off the coast of Tasmania.

The press upended Beard's life as one might a wastepaper basket. A couple of shakes, and there tipped into view all kinds of half-forgotten scraps. In other circumstances it might have been a service worth paying for. Independently of each other, his ex-wives, good old Maisie, Ruth, Eleanor, Karen and Patrice, refused to talk to the press. That touched him deeply. Of the past lovers, most were loyal, and only a rump spoke up: one lab assistant, one office administrator. There were also two scientists, failures, nobodies, both of them. Intriguingly, there were also some impostors. The Last Trump sounded, and from their graves and catacombs this pint-sized crowd of ex-lovers and pretenders crawled towards the light, to stand before their Maker, a journalist with a chequebook, and denounce Beard as a woman-hater, an exploiter, a louse.

But being silent or loyal got no one off the hook. The coverage was total. Until the attention of the press was distracted by a football scandal, he was its plaything. One front page rendered him in cartoon form as a leering goat, beckoning with limp hoof as it lounged against the caption: 'See Inside: Beard's Women'. Even as he opened the paper with sickening heart and scanned a gallery of faces, which included colleagues, old friends, the wives, Melissa, something in him stirred and an inner voice, steely, beyond humiliation, murmured that he had not done so badly in three or four decades, that all these women had the gleam of quality, of high self-possession. As for the impostors, the chancers, there were actually three, all not quite beautiful. But how could he not be interested in the fictitious nights they spent with him? He was flattered.

In all, however, it was a miserable time. It had started out innocently enough, with a mouse-click of assent to an invitation to be the titular head of a government scheme to promote physics in schools and universities, to entice more graduates, more teachers, into the profession, to glory in past achievements and make intellectual heroes out of physicists. When the invitation came, he was busier than he had ever been in his life and he could so easily have refused. He had an artificial-photosynthesis project at Imperial College, with fifteen people working for him. He was still at the Centre, though mostly for the purpose of drawing his fee. And it was important, he felt, to keep his new work out of Jock Braby's reach. Beard had started his company, he was acquiring patents on catalysts and other processes, and he had found Toby Hammer, a wiry ex-drunk, a fixer and go-between, who knew his way round campus bureaucracies and state legislatures and the homes of venture capitalists. Beard and Hammer had been looking for a solar-rich site, first in the Libyan Sahara, then in Egypt, then Arizona and Nevada, and finally, as a decent compromise, in New Mexico. Now Beard was alive with purpose and was shedding many of his old sinecures. But this request came through the Institute of Physics and was difficult to refuse.

And so he sat for the first time with his committee in a seminar room in Imperial College. His colleagues were three professors of physics from Newcastle, Manchester and Cambridge, two secondary-school teachers from Edinburgh and London, two headmasters from Belfast and Cardiff, and a professor of science studies from Oxford. Beard asked the members to introduce themselves in turn and explain a little about their background and their work. This was a mistake. The physics professors went on too long. They were impressed by their own work and they were instinctively competitive. If the first was going to speak in great detail, then so were the second and the third.

It was not old habits alone that made Beard impatient to hear from the professor of science studies, for the subject itself was a novelty to him. She was the last to speak, and introduced herself as Nancy Temple. Her face was round, not exactly pretty, but pleasant and open, and its pink blush had a childlike, well-defined edge curving down from cheekbone to jawline. He thought it could do no harm to ask her out to dinner. She began by noting that she was the only woman in the room, and that the committee reflected one of the very problems it might want to address. Round the table, everyone, including Beard, who had invited all of those present except Nancy Temple, murmured his emphatic assent. Her voice had the hypnotic sing-song inflections of Ulster. She confirmed that she had grown up in a middle-class suburb of Belfast and attended Queen's University, where she studied social anthropology.

She said she could best explain her field by outlining a recent project, a four-month in-depth study of a genetics lab in Glasgow as it set out to isolate and describe a lion's gene, Trim-5, and its function. Her purpose was to demonstrate that this gene, or any gene, was, in the strongest sense, socially constructed. Without the various 'entexting' tools the scientists used – the single-photon luminometer, the flow cytometer, immunofluorescence, and so on – the gene could not be said to exist. These tools were expensive to own, expensive to learn to use, and were therefore replete with social meaning. The gene was not an objective entity, merely waiting to be revealed by scientists. It was entirely manufactured by their hypotheses, their creativity, and by their instrumentation, without which it could not be detected. And when it was finally expressed in terms of its so-called base pairs and its probable role, that description, that text, only had meaning, and only derived its reality, from within the limited network of geneticists who might read about it. Outside those networks, Trim-5 did not exist.

During this presentation, Beard and the physicists from universities and schools listened in some embarrassment. Politely, they avoided exchanging glances. They tended to take the conventional view, that the world existed independently, in all its mystery, awaiting description and explanation, though that did not prevent the observer leaving thumbprints all over the field of observation. Beard had heard rumours that strange ideas were commonplace among the liberal-arts departments. It was said that humanities students were routinely taught that science was just one more belief system, no more or less truthful than religion or astrology. He had always thought that this must be a slur against his colleagues on the arts side. The results surely spoke for themselves. Who was going to submit to a vaccine designed by a priest?

When Nancy Temple came to the end of her speech, Newcastle and Cambridge spoke up simultaneously, more in wonder than in anger. 'Where does that leave Huntington's, for example?' one said as the other was asking, 'Do you honestly believe that what you don't know about doesn't exist?'

Beard, chivalrous to the hilt, thought it his duty to protect her and was about to step in, but Professor Temple was replying in a tolerant manner.

'Huntington's is also culturally inscribed. It was once a narrative about divine punishment or demonic possession. Now it's the story of a faulty gene, and one day it will likely transmute into something else. As for the genes we know nothing about, well, obviously, I have nothing to say. Of the genes that have been described, clearly they can only come to us mediated by culture.'

It was her calmness that provoked the uproar, and this time the chairman intervened firmly – he was an old hand at this game – to remind the committee that time was limited and guide its attention towards item two on the agenda. The brief was to convene twelve times in thirteen months and then make recommendations. Now was the time to pencil in some provisional dates.

Later that afternoon, the committee arranged itself behind a long table in a room at the Royal Society for the press launch of what had been named by a government public-relations department as Physics UK. It had its own logo displayed on an easel, a flighty monogram of the letters E, M and C squared impaled upon an 'equals' sign, to resemble an asymmetric garden shrub. Beard introduced his colleagues, made some opening remarks and invited questions from the journalists, who, slumped over their recorders and notebooks, seemed depressed by the seriousness of their assignment, its scandalous lack of controversy. Who was going to take a brave stand against more physicists? The questions were dull, the answers diligent. The whole project was lamentably worthy. Why do the government the favour of writing it up at length?

Then a woman from a mid-market tabloid asked a question, also routine, something of an old chestnut, and Beard replied, as he thought, blandly. It was true, women were under-represented in physics and always had been. The problem had often been discussed, and (he was mindful of Professor Temple as he said it) certainly his committee would be looking at it again to see if there were new ways of encouraging more girls into the subject. He believed there were no longer any institutional barriers or prejudices. There were other branches of science where women were well represented, and some where they predominated. And then, because he was boring himself, he added that it might have to be accepted one day that a ceiling had been reached. Although there were many gifted women physicists, it was at least conceivable that they would always remain in a minority, albeit a substantial one, in this particular field. There might always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics. There was a consensus in cognitive psychology, based on a wide range of experimental work, that in statistical terms the brains of men and women were significantly different. This was emphatically not a question of gender superiority, nor was it a matter of social conditioning, though of course it played a reinforcing role. These were widely observed innate differences in cognitive ability. In studies and metastudies, women were shown to have, on average, greater language skills, better visual memory, clearer emotional judgement and superior mathematical calculation. Men scored higher in mathematical problem-solving and abstract reasoning, and in visual-spatial awareness. Men and women had different priorities in life, different attitudes to risk, to status, to hierarchies. Above all, and this was the really striking difference, amounting to roughly one standard deviation, and the one to have been studied repeatedly: from early in life, girls tended to be more interested in people, boys more in things and abstract rules. And this difference showed in the fields of science they tended to choose: more women in the life sciences and the social sciences, more men in engineering and physics.

Beard noticed that he was losing the room's attention. Phrases like 'standard deviation' generally had this effect on journalists. A few people at the back were talking among themselves. In the front row, a gentlemanly reporter of a certain age had closed his eyes. Beard pressed on towards his conclusion. There was surely much to be done to get more women into physics and to make them feel welcome there. But in one possible future, it might be a waste of effort to strive for parity when there were other branches of study that women preferred.

The journalist who had asked the question was nodding numbly. Behind her, someone else was starting to ask an unrelated question. The morning would have passed into oblivion like any other had not at that moment the professor of science studies suddenly stood, blushing pink, squared her papers against the table with a loud rap and announced to the room, 'Before I go outside to be sick, and I mean violently sick because of what I've just heard, I wish to announce my resignation from Professor Beard's committee.'

She strode away towards the door, amid a din of voices and of chairs pushed back across the parquet as the journalists leaped to their feet. Professionally engaged at last, delighted, desperate, competitive, they hurried after her.

As the room emptied, Professor Jack Pollard, the quantum-gravity specialist from Newcastle, who had given the Reith Lectures not so long ago and seemed to know everything, said in Beard's ear, 'You've put your foot in it now. She's postmodern, you see, a blank-slater, a strong social constructivist. They all are, you know. Shall we have a coffee?'

At the time, these terms meant little to Beard. He had one thought. This was not the way to tender a resignation. Then an even simpler second thought. He should leave as quickly as possible, even though he knew that Pollard wanted to gossip. In different circumstances, Beard would happily have sat with him in a caf̩ for an hour. There was a community, a shifting international group who knew each other jealously, affectionately, possessively, and had, with notable defections and deaths, travelled together since the heroic old days of classical string theory in pursuit of its grail, the unification of the fundamental forces with gravity. They had eventually seen the limitations of strings and embraced superstrings and heterotic string theory to arrive by these threads in the cavernous maternal shelter of M-theory. Each breakthrough had generated a new set of problems, inconsistencies, physical implausibilities. Ten dimensions, then, with a backward glance at the super-gravity men, eleven! Dimensions tightly wrapped on six circles, the rediscovery of Kaluza and Klein from the nineteen twenties, the delightful intricacies of Calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds! And the singular drama of the universe in its first one hundreth of a second! Beard had played no creative part, and did not quite have the mathematical reach, but he knew the gossip. And the jokes Рthe string theorist caught in bed with another woman who exclaimed to his wife, 'Darling, I can explain everything!' What a long hard road it had been, and so it remained Рthe outer edge of human intellectual grasp interwoven with all-too-human stories. The theorist who neglected his dying wife, and still failed to restate the problem. The obscure post-doc who resolved a set of contradictions in a liberating insight that wrecked his health. The famous convention that shamefully neglected an old eminence. The brown-nosing mediocrity who got the super-grant. The bust-up between two giants who once shared a lab.

Yes, he would have loved a chat, but he sensed a contraction around him, something like gathering darkness or its emotional equivalent. He was in trouble, and he should fade away before he made things worse. He apologised quickly to Pollard and the rest, took his briefcase and walked from the room, across the hall and left by the main entrance. Outside, sunlight and the city's background hum appeared to shrink his concerns. A mountain range might have had the same effect. Perhaps this was a fuss about nothing. As he passed he caught snatches of Nancy Temple's pavement press conference, delivered with lilting reasonableness: '…resurgent eugenics…sinister claims about human nature…neo-liberal attack on collectivity…' Nice punchy lines for the tabloids. Some of the journalists crowding around her were using the roof of a parked car as a writing desk, others were already phoning the story in. Perhaps she did not know that the excitement was in part about the government. One of its committees was in trouble. Another Blair failure.

Beard ignored the voices calling out his first name as he crossed the road. Never help feed a press story about yourself. But the next day he wondered if he should have turned back when he read of himself 'scuttling away in shame' under the headline 'Nobel Prof Says No To Lab Chicks'.

At first it seemed that this particular story had no staying power, no legs. After a minor eruption of morning headlines, there was silence for two days. He thought he had come through. But during that time one tabloid was busy with its research. On Saturday, Beard's 'love life' was revealed and artfully braided with the 'no to girls in white coats' story. On Sunday the other papers picked it up and piled in and he was reinvented as 'the bonking boffin', a 'Nobel love-rat', and a kind of learned satyr – 'the prof-goat'. There were references to the Aldous murder case, but Beard's earlier incarnation as the harmless, dreamy cuckold, the innocent fool, the dupe of a flighty wife, was conveniently forgotten. Now he was a loathed figure, seducing women even as he drove them out of science. In the more serious press, he was described as a physicist turned 'genetic determinist', a fanatical sociobiologist whose ideas about gender difference were shown to be indirectly derived from social Darwinism, which in turn had spawned Third Reich race theories. Then, daringly building on this, a journalist, more in the spirit of playful diary-page spite than genuine conviction, suggested that Beard was a neo-Nazi. No one took the charge seriously for a moment, but it became possible for other papers to take up the term even as they dismissed it, carefully bracketing and legalising the insult with quotation marks. Beard became the 'neo-Nazi' Professor.

An article in one left-of-centre paper argued that most important differences between men and women were cultural constructs. In response, Beard wrote a feebly sarcastic letter, a mere six lines, four hours and a score of drafts in the making, protesting that these days men could not get pregnant and that it was all society's fault. It was published, but no one seemed to notice.

A week later, the same paper hosted a debate between Beard and Temple and others on 'Women and Physics' at the ICA. By now he was determined to put the world right about his views. He shared the platform with various academics from the humanities, mostly men, all hostile. For reasons that were not explained, Professor Temple was not there and had sent along a colleague in her place. And where were all the scientists? he kept asking the organisers before the event. No one seemed to know.

The main theatre was sold out. In another room a second crowd watched on monitors. Press coverage had done its trick of creating a hunger. People wanted to see for themselves a modern monster in the flesh and be horrified. There were even gasps when he got to his feet. To a rising swell of scornful moaning, Beard covered the same ground, the same cognitive studies again, but in greater detail. When he mentioned the metastudies reporting that girls' language skills were greater on average than boys', there was a roar of derision and a speaker on the platform rose fearsomely to denounce him for the 'crude objectivism by which he seeks to maintain and advance the social dominance of the white male elite'. The moment the fellow sat down he was rewarded by the kind of cheers that might presage a revolution. Bewildered, Beard did not get the connection. He was completely lost. When, later, he irritably demanded of the meeting if it thought that gravity too was a social construct, he was booed, and a woman in the audience stood to propose in stern, headmistressly tones that he reflect on the 'hegemonic arrogance' of his question. What gave him the right? By what invisible dispensation of power in the current social arrangement did he think that he was entitled to set the question in these terms? He was baffled, he had no answer. 'Hegemonic' was a frequent term of abuse. Another was 'reductionist'. In exasperation, Beard said that without reductionism there could be no science. There was prolonged laughter when someone from the floor shouted, 'Exactly!'

Nancy Temple's replacement was Susan Appelbaum, a visiting academic from Tel Aviv, who lectured in cognitive psychology and was as light as a bird in her red and blue frock, with a twittering voice to match. She was nervous speaking in public and made an awkward start. In the theatre there was suspicion and some confusion. From the point of view of the audience, which seemed to be of one mind in all things, she had points in her favour and points against. As a woman she was a poor hegemon, and being unconfident, poorer still (Beard thought he was getting the hang of this term). Also, after a few minutes, it was clear she was speaking against Beard. On the other hand, she was a Jew, an Israeli and, by association, an oppressor of Palestinians. Perhaps she was a Zionist, perhaps she had served in the army. And once she got under way, the hostility in the room began to grow. This was a postmodern crowd with well-developed antennae for the unacceptable line. Its heart, when not seized by correct utterance from correct quarters, turned cold. The lady from Tel Aviv was forthright about her reactionary position, which included various underlying assumptions she shared with Beard. She was an objectivist, in that she believed the world existed independently of the language that described it, she spoke in praise of reductionist analysis, she was an empiricist and, by her own proud admission, an 'Enlightenment rationalist', which was, Beard sensed from the groaning dissent in the audience, a tad regressive, if not hegemonic after all. There was, she insisted, such a thing as biological sex differences in cognition, but only empirical evidence should shape our view. There was a human nature and it had an evolutionary history. We were not born tabula rasa. By the time her introduction was over, she was having difficulty holding the theatre's attention.

Not many listened to Appelbaum as she confronted Beard's arguments. She knew all the same studies, and many more. Some of them she had conducted herself. The literature was clear – there were no significant differences in cognition that gave males an advantage in maths or physics. Divergences between boys and girls, men and women, only emerged in complex tests where subjects were offered more than one route to a solution: men and women chose differently. The people-versus-things distinction was mythology and had distorted some poorly designed but much-cited experiments. On social factors, on the other hand, the studies were eloquent – perceptions and expectations were far stronger signals than objectively measured differences between men and women. This should have pleased her audience, but they didn't catch it, they weren't attending as she described experiments in which babies were assigned random gender names and adults were asked to judge their various activities. Or parents were asked to predict their children's abilities in a given task. Or academics were required to evaluate fictitious male and female candidates with identical qualifications. These, she said, were statistically significant data that showed that perception of gender was a powerful determinant of attitudes. And there were well-studied self-sustaining loops – people applied to departments where there were people 'like them', and where they were likely to have success.

By the time Appelbaum started in on her conclusion, Beard thought he was the only one listening. Statistics were clearly not a postmodern concern, and nor were historical anecdotes. She referred to the life of Fanny Mendelssohn, recognised at the time as a prodigous musical talent, the equal of her brother, Felix. Famously, her father explained to her in a letter that while music would be her brother's profession, for her, music must remain an ornament, for Sundays. A hundred years ago, many 'scientific' reasons were advanced why women could not be doctors. Today, there remained unconscious or unintentional, widely diffused differences in the ways boys and girls, men and women, were understood and judged. From cradle to first job application and beyond, in a sustained arc of development, these cultural factors were shown by empirical investigation to be vastly more significant than biology. It was plain why there were so few women in physics.

She sat down to no applause. But there was general relief that she was finally done. Ten minutes later the meeting broke up. Beard headed straight for the exit, feeling reprieved. Some might have said that he had just taken a good kicking, others that he had triumphed. What did he know? He was a physicist after all, not a cognitive psychologist. But pleasingly, here at the ICA, he was hated no more than he had been at the start. These people were not going to take their lead from an Israeli. That was hardly fine, but there was nothing he could do about it. And he was fine, he was still in one piece. As he went along the corridor, the crowd parted for him, no doubt in distaste, and he was at the door onto the Mall in seconds and stepping out into bright sunshine and a reception party, about thirty chanting protestors with placards – No To Eugenics! Nazi Professor Out! – and a dozen press, mostly cameramen, and four members of the Metropolitan Police.

Perhaps matters would have turned out better if Beard had not brought out from the event indoors a mood of jaunty defiance. There were half a dozen older women among the demonstrators. One of them nipped out from behind a policeman, took a tomato from a brown paper bag and threw it at Beard. She was ten feet away and there was no time to dodge. A rotten tomato is an item of urban legend. This one, though soft, looked perfectly edible. It flopped against his lapel and clung there a moment. When it fell he caught it in his open palm, and with a quick, impulsive movement chucked it back, an entirely playful gesture, he tried to explain afterwards, without anger or malice. Why else throw it underarm? The tomato, its skin now ruptured, hit the woman full in the face, just to the right of her nose. With a strange sound, a plaintive musical hoot, the woman, who was about Beard's age and almost as plump, brought her hands up to her face, somehow trapping and smearing the tomato against her features, and at the same time sank to her knees.

In colour, it made a dramatic photograph. Taken from behind Beard, it showed him looming over a woman cowering on the ground, the victim of a gory assault. In Germany it was on the cover of a magazine with the headline 'Protester Felled By "Neo-Nazi" Professor'. In the background, not quite out of focus, was the relevant placard. Another picture, also widely used, taken over the head of the kneeling woman, revealed Beard's heartless smile. He could not help himself, he was genuinely amused. The tomato was so soft, his toss so gentle, the woman's reaction so comically overplayed, a policeman so solicitous in bending over her, another so self-important as he urgently radioed for an ambulance. This was street theatre. A policewoman touched Beard's arm and said tonelessly that she was arresting him for assault. A second policewoman stood close, pressing her shoulder against his to let him know that struggle was useless. The handcuffs, alive with the young woman's body warmth, clicked over his wrists to a good-natured cheer from the demonstrators. A half-dozen photographers walked backwards in front of him as he was led towards a patrol car parked on the Mall. As it pulled away they ran alongside, with a great clatter of shoes, snapping Beard in the criminal gloom of the back seat.

The police car drove past the National Portrait Gallery, up the Charing Cross Road and stopped outside Foyles. The arresting officer, who was sitting with Beard, unlocked the handcuffs as her colleague turned round in the front seat and said, 'You can go now, sir.'

'I thought you were charging me with assault.'

'Just removing you from a scene where there was likely to be a breach of the peace. For your own safety.'

'How considerate of you to think of handcuffing me in front of the press.'

'Kind of you to say so, sir. Only doing our job. But thank you, sir.'

The car door was held open for him, and then he was alone on the pavement, wondering if there was a book he needed to buy. There was not. He went home to his flat and lay brooding in the scum-rimmed bath, gazing through steam clouds at the archipelago of his disrupted selfhood – mountainous paunch, penis tip, unruly toes – scattered in a line across a soapy grey sea. He told himself that things are often not as bad as you think. That was true. But sometimes they are worse: a dying story had been revived.

Over the following week images of the shackled Nobel professor, of the humbled victim kneeling before her persecutor, of his unwholesome grin, digitally multiplied themselves around the world like retroviruses. Out at the Centre, Jock Braby seized his chance and forced Beard's resignation. A lecture series was cancelled in outrage, and at various venues his presence was thought likely to harm the good name of an institution or a fellow visiting dignitary or, at the very least, cause trouble from the students and younger faculty. A kindly civil servant phoned to ask whether he cared to choose between resigning from Physics UK and being sacked. A research centre took the trouble to let him know that the name of Beard, now mud, would cease to appear on its letterhead. In the senior common room of an Oxford college, where he went for solace and coffee, three English-literature dons walked out at the sight of him, heads held high, while their own coffees cooled conspicuously by their abandoned chairs. His phone did not ring much – his friends were silent, or, like his ex-wives, reticent, or baffled. However, Imperial College, delighted with the lab he had set up and the funding he had attracted, stood by him. And he received an affable, comradely letter, bearing the stamp of an Austrian prison, from a neo-Nazi serving time for the murder of a Jewish journalist.

For two weeks he thought of nothing else. To stay away from reading newspapers, as Melissa sweetly proposed, was beyond him. When there was nothing new in the two-kilo wedge of the morning's press, he felt a curious, twisted disappointment at an immediate prospect of emptiness, at having nothing to consume him all day. He had discovered a compulsion to read of this alien, the avatar bearing his name, the goat-monster-seducer, denier of a woman's right to a career in science, eugenicist. He was baffled by how he had ended up stuck with this last label. But after a few blustery walks up and over Primrose Hill among the pushchairs and kite-fliers, he came to a tentative conclusion. The Third Reich had projected a prohibitive shadow more than half a century long over genetics where it touched on human affairs – at least, in the minds of those outside the subject. To suggest the possibility of genetic influence, genetic difference, of an evolutionary past bearing down in some degree on cognition, on men and women, on culture, was to some minds like entering a camp and volunteering to work with Doctor Mengele.

When he tried out this notion on biologist friends they were amused. That was old hat, that was seventies stuff, there was a new consensus now, not only in genetics, but in academic life in general. He was too bitter. Have another drink! But what did they know about journalists or postmodernists? As Beard saw it, the solution was simple. Stick to photons – no resting mass, no charge, no controversy on the human scale. His work in artificial photosynthesis was proceeding well, with a laboratory prototype already using light to split water efficiently into hydrogen and oxygen. Civilisation needed a safe new energy source, and he could be of use. He would be redeemed. Let there be light!

For all that resolve, he thought his disgrace would mark him for years. And then what happened? Nothing. His avatar vanished. Overnight, he was airbrushed from the public prints, a soccer match-fixing story took his place, and the slow-healing amnesia began. For a while he was underemployed, then four months later, he gave six short talks about Einstein for the BBC World Service. A research group in Germany seduced him onto its letterhead. Cambridge saw its chance to steal him from Imperial, then Imperial trumped Cambridge and gave him two more researchers and even more money. UCL wanted a slice of him too, offering as a softener an honorary degree, then Caltech pitched in, and some old friends at MIT wanted to bring him across.

How magnanimous was public life, and how well did the lustre of a Nobel laureate reflect upon an academy and oil the wheels of grant acquisition!

By the time his taxi had swung round Trafalgar Square and paused to join in a traffic jam along the Strand, he was over an hour and a half late. Five minutes later, he had made no progress. For the past four hours, it suddenly seemed, his thoughts had been cramped by delay and exasperation, until now, sitting in the motionless cab, the confinement became intolerable. He pushed a twenty-pound note through the slot in the driver's screen and climbed out with his luggage and began to tow it towards the Savoy. Walking might make him later still, but acting like a man in a hurry rather than thinking like one was a relief. And barrelling along with his wheeled burden, overtaking and weaving between pedestrians, was the workout he had been promising himself for years. Richly dishevelled, the knot of his purple tie askew, the expensive wool suit in need of a press, the overcoat too warm for the modern English winter, hurrying lopsidedly along, one leg making a decent show of stepping forward, the other stiffly scooting, he bobbed up the Strand like a fat boy on a pogo stick. Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed. No meeting was worth dying for. The traffic began to move again, and his own cab, now for hire, shot past him as he shuffled towards the hotel.

In the lobby, two conference organisers were waiting. The younger one took his bag, the other, a very old man in a blazer leaning heavily on a walking stick, with a liver-spotted death mask for a face, pointed at his watch and walked with him up the stairs.

'All is fine,' the fellow croaked through the effort of raising his body weight through the luxurious gravitational field. 'We've rejigged the running order. You're on in five minutes.'

Beard heard this in good heart, for he felt by comparison youthful and unassailable, the motion of his feet across the thick carpet was pleasing and the pain had vanished from his chest.

Another official, younger but more senior, of Indian origin, received him by a set of lofty double doors thrown open to the din of teatime chatter. After the preliminaries – a great honour, a thousand thank yous, much anticipated, about lateness please not to worry – the young man, whose name, Saleel, Beard remembered from email exchanges, ran through the composition of the audience: institutional men and women, a few civil servants, a few academics, no journalists.

But Beard was not fully attentive, for his gaze had shifted from Saleel's face to a view over the young man's dark-suited shoulder of the room and its voluble crowd. Arranged on tables covered in white cloths, framed by high windows and a view of the darkening Thames, were square porcelain dishes densely heaped with plump pillows of crustless sandwiches. Even from where he stood he could make out the fat pink stripes of a smoked-salmon filling. Artfully scattered across the tables were slices of lemons, detached yellow smiles of enticement to which no one in the room was paying much attention. He was not at that moment truly hungry, but he was, in his own term, pre-hungry. That is, he could appreciate how pleasurable it might be, in less than an hour, to lift a few of those items onto a plate and contemplate the river while he ate. And just as easily, he could anticipate the regret he would feel if the dishes were removed too soon, when the afternoon tea break came to an end, which it must do when his talk began. Safer to eat a few now.

Saleel was saying, 'A conservative lot, institutional investors, not scientific, of course, so not too technical would be most heartily appreciated.'

By turning his shoulder into the room, Beard was able to prompt his host, clearly a sensitive and intelligent man, to exclaim as he handed over a white envelope, 'But of course, you need refreshment! And please, your emolument.'

A minute later Beard had the plate and, on it, thick-cut smoked wild salmon speckled with dill and ground black pepper between thin white bread slices, nine heavy quarter segments – a precautionary number, since he did not have to eat them all. But he did, and very quickly, without much satisfaction or even a thought for the river, because a soft-spoken man with a stutter wanted to tell him about his son's physics exam, and then a tall man with a stoop and a jutting ginger beard and large accusing eyes set eerily far apart introduced himself. He was Jeremy Mellon, lecturer in urban studies and folklore. Beard, who was on his sixth piece, felt obliged to ask why Mellon was here.

'Well, I'm interested in the forms of narrative that climate science has generated. It's an epic story, of course, with a million authors.'

Beard was suspicious. This was the Nancy Temple tendency. People who kept on about narrative tended to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to be of equal value. But he did not even have to say, 'How interesting,' for people were setting down their cups and saucers and hurrying to find their seats, and the old fellow with a stick was grimacing at him and once more tapping his watch, and there was only just enough time to bolt down the last three wedges of smoked salmon.

Beard was guided to a purpose-built stage and shown to a moulded orange plastic seat behind a vat of bilious red and yellow tulips. He tried not to look at them. He thought there was a general air of unreality about the gathering. A couple of hundred people sat in ranks, in a shallow arc before him. The pinkness of so many faces looked absurd. Their chatter seemed to resound in an echo chamber. The Savoy was swaying, or undulating gently beneath his feet, as though it had slid into the river and was rocking on the turning tide. He succumbed to a fit of yawning, which he suppressed through tensed nostril wings. He had to face it, he was a little queasy, and it did not help that a heavy-breathing technician with mottled skin and odorous tooth decay or pyorrhoea bent close over his face to attach a radio mic.

While Beard sat cross-kneed, with customary, frozen half-smile, pretending to listen to Saleel's long and toofulsome introduction, and even more so when at last he stood to bored applause and took his place behind the lectern, gripping tight its edges in both hands, he felt an oily nausea at something monstrous and rotten from the sea, stranded on the tidal mud flats of a stagnant estuary, decaying gaseously in his gut and welling up, contaminating his breath, his words and, suddenly, his thoughts.

'The planet,' he said, surprising himself, 'is sick.'

There was a groan, followed by a susurrus of dismissal from his audience. Pension-fund managers preferred more nuanced terms. But using the word 'sick', rather like vomiting itself, gave Beard some instant relief.

'Curing the patient is a matter of urgency and is going to be expensive – perhaps as much as two per cent of global GDP, and far more if we delay the treatment. I am convinced, and I have come here to tell you, that anyone who wishes to help with the therapy, to be a part of the process and invest in it, is going to make very large sums of money, staggering sums. What's at issue is the creation of another industrial revolution. Here is your opportunity. Coal and then oil have made our civilisation, they have been superb resources, lifting hundreds of millions of us out of the mental prison of rural subsistence. Liberation from the daily grind coupled with our innate curiosity has produced in a mere two hundred years an exponential growth of our knowledge base. The process began in Europe and the United States, has spread in our lifetime to parts of Asia, and now to India and China and South America, with Africa yet to come. All our other problems and conflicts conceal this obvious fact: we barely understand how successful we have been.

'So of course, we should salute our own inventiveness. We are very clever monkeys. But the engine of our industrial revolution has been cheap, accessible energy. We would have got nowhere without it. Look how fantastic it is. A kilogram of gasoline contains roughly thirteen thousand watt hours of energy. Hard to beat. But we want to replace it. So what's next? The best electrical batteries we have store about three hundred watt hours of energy per kilogram. And that's the scale of our problem, thirteen thousand against three hundred. No contest! But unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of choice. We have to replace that gasoline quickly for three compelling reasons. First, and simplest, the oil must run out. No one knows exactly when, but there's a consensus that we'll be at peak production at some point in the next five to fifteen years. After that, production will decline, while the demand for energy will go on rising as the world's population expands and people strive for a better standard of living. Second, many oil-producing areas are politically unstable and we can no longer risk our levels of dependence. Third, and most crucially, burning fossil fuels, putting carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, is steadily warming the planet, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand. But the basic science is in. We either slow down, and then stop, or face an economic and human catastrophe on a grand scale within our grandchildren's lifetime.

'And this brings us to the central question, the burning question. How do we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilisation and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous, not by going to the bottle bank and turning down the thermostat and buying a smaller car. That merely delays the catastrophe by a year or two. Any delay is useful, but it's not the solution. This matter has to move beyond virtue. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it's a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are. For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention, the pleasures of ingenuity and co-operation, the satisfaction of profit. Oil and coal are energy carriers, and so, in abstract form, is money. And the answer to that burning question is of course exactly where that money, your money, has to flow – affordable clean energy.

'Imagine if I were standing in front of you two hundred and fifty years ago – you, a collection of country gentlemen and ladies – predicting the coming of the first industrial revolution, and telling you to invest in coal and iron, steam engines, cotton mills and, later, railways. Or a century or so later, with the invention of the internal combustion engine, I foresaw the growing importance of oil and urged you to invest in that. Or a hundred years on, in microprocessors, in personal computers and the internet and the opportunities they offered. So here, ladies and gentlemen, is another such moment. Do not be tempted by the illusion that the world economy and its stock exchanges can exist apart from the world's natural environment. Our planet earth is a finite entity. You have the data in front of you, you have the choice – the human project must be safely and cleanly fuelled, or it fails, it sinks. You, the market, either rise to this, and get rich along the way, or you sink with all the rest. We are on this rock together, you have nowhere else to go…'

He was hearing dismissive whispers from separate quarters of the room, which had begun, he thought, on his words 'warming the planet'. His nausea was rising, that bloated carcass within his own was odiously stirring. While listening to Saleel's introduction he had noticed that the velvet curtain behind him had a gap at its centre – an escape route he might just need. He stopped speaking, inhaled deeply, and made himself stand erect and gaze about the room, trying to identify the dissent. A lifetime of public speaking had taught him the value of the unembarrassed pause. He knew that the solid institutions of the City nurtured a vigorous culture of irrationalist denial, in the face of basic physics and years of good data. The deniers, like people everywhere, wanted business as usual. They feared a threat to shareholder value, they suspected that climate scientists were a self-serving industry, just like themselves. Beard felt towards them all the contempt of the recent convert.

As he drew breath to continue speaking, he experienced a fishy reflux rising from his gorge, like salted anchovies, with a dash of bile. He closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and changed tack.

'I read in yesterday's paper that in just four years' time we'll arrive at the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, and the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of The Origin of Species. The celebrations are bound to obscure the work of another great Victorian scientist, an Irishman named John Tyndall, who began a serious study of the atmosphere in that same year, 1859. One of his interests was light, which is why I feel a special affinity with him. He was the first to suggest that it was the scattering of light by the atmosphere that made the sky blue, and he was the first to describe and explain the hothouse or greenhouse effect. He built experimental equipment that showed how water vapour, carbon dioxide and other gases prevent the earth's warmth from the sun being radiated back out into space, and so make life possible. Remove this blanket of vapour and gases and, as he famously wrote' – Beard drew a card from the top pocket of his jacket and read – '"You would assuredly destroy every plant capable of being destroyed by a freezing temperature. The warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost."

'By the beginning of the twentieth century it was known to a few that industrial civilisation was adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In succeeding years it was understood precisely how a molecule of this gas absorbs and contains the longer wavelengths of radiant light and traps heat. The more carbon dioxide, the warmer the planet. In the nineteen sixties an unmanned satellite showed that our neighbour Venus has an atmosphere that is ninety-five per cent carbon dioxide. And it's more than four hundred and sixty degrees at the surface, hot enough to melt zinc. Without its greenhouse effect, Venus would have roughly the same temperature as the earth. Fifty years ago we were putting thirteen billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That figure has almost doubled. It's more than twenty-five years since scientists first warned the US government of anthropogenic climate change. In fifteen years there have been three IPCC reports of mounting urgency. Last year a survey of nearly a thousand peer-reviewed papers showed not one dissenting from the majority view. Forget sunspots, forget the Tunguska Meteorite of 1908, ignore the oil-industry lobbies and their think-tank and media clients who pretend, as the tobacco lobby has done, that there are two sides to this, that scientists are divided. The science is relatively simple, one-sided and beyond doubt. Ladies and gentlemen, the question has been discussed and investigated for a hundred and fifty years, for as long as Darwin's Origin of Species has been in print, and is as incontestable as the basics of natural selection. We've observed and we know the mechanisms, we've measured and the numbers tell the story, the earth is warming and we know why. There is no scientific controversy, only this plain fact. That may sadden you or frighten you, but it also should position you beyond doubt, free to consider your next move.'

The nausea came in on a fresh wave and threatened to disgrace him. He was sweating coldly, he was aching and weak in his spine. He had to keep talking to distract himself. And he had to talk fast. He was being pursued, he had to run.

'So,' he said, cracking the word through something glutinous in his throat. 'Allow me to make some suggestions. Collectively, according to my enquiries, your various organisations represent around four hundred billion dollars of investments. These are golden days in the global markets and sometimes it seems the party will never end. But you might just have overlooked one sector that is outperforming the rest by doubling every two years. You may have noticed, you may have turned away. Not quite respectable enough, a mere passing fashion, you may have thought, too many of those post-hippie plutocrats from Stanford involved. But also involved are BP, General Electric, Sharp, Mitsubishi. Renewable energy. The revolution has begun. The market will be even more lucrative than coal or oil because the world economy is many times bigger and the rate of change is faster. Colossal fortunes will be made. The sector is seething with vitality, invention – and, above all, growth. It has thousands of unquoted companies positioning themselves with new techniques. Scientists, engineers, designers are pouring into the sector. There are log jams in the patent offices and supply chains. This is an ocean of dreams, of realistic dreams of making hydrogen from algae, aviation fuel from genetically modified microbes, of electricity out of sunlight, wind, tides, waves, cellulose, household waste, of scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into a fuel, of imitating the secrets of plant life. An alien landing on our planet and noticing how it was bathed in radiant energy would be amazed to learn that we believe ourselves to have an energy problem, that we ever should have thought of poisoning ourselves by burning fossil fuels or creating plutonium.

'Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in heavy rainfall. This man is dying of thirst. He has an axe in his hand and he is felling the trees in order to suck sap from the trunks. There are a few mouthfuls in each tree. All around him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the forest is vanishing. So why doesn't he tip back his head and drink the rain? Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types.

'That rain is our sunlight. An energy source drenches our planet, drives its climate and its life. It falls on us in a constant stream, a sweet rain of photons. A single photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron, and so electricity is born, as simple as that, right out of sunbeams. This is photovoltaics. Einstein described it and won a Nobel Prize. If I believed in God, I would say this is his greatest gift to us. Since I don't, I say how auspicious are the laws of physics! Less than an hour's worth of all the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy the whole world's needs for a year. A fraction of our hot deserts could power our civilisation. No one can own sunlight, no one can privatise or nationalise it. Soon, everyone will harvest it, from rooftops, ships' sails, from kids' backpacks. I spoke of poverty at the start – some of the poorest countries in the world are solar rich. We could help them by buying their megawatts. And domestic consumers will love making power out of sunlight and selling it to the grid. It's primal.

'There are a dozen proven ways of making electricity out of sunlight, but the ultimate goal is still ahead, and this is close to my heart. I'm talking of artificial photosynthesis, of copying the methods nature took three billion years to perfect. We'll use light directly to make cheap hydrogen and oxygen out of water, and run our turbines night and day, or we'll make fuels out of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide, or we'll build desalination plants that make electricity as well as fresh water. Believe me, this will happen. Solar will expand, and with your help, and with your and your clients' enrichment, it will expand faster. Basic science, the market and our grave situation will determine that this is the future – logic, not idealism, compels it.'

He thought now he was going to be sick. His mind went blank and, fearful of a moment's pause, he spoke of the first thing that came to mind, and lurched into a personal anecdote. Blandly at first, like a man testing a microphone by itemising his breakfast, he summoned for his audience his journey that afternoon from the airport. Before long he was convinced that the story was not such a poor choice after all. He had yet to make real contact with his listeners, he had said nothing droll, and this was England, where people expected to be amused, however faintly, by speeches on public occasions. He was ahead of the nausea now as he described his purchase of newspapers at the airport shop. When he confessed to a weakness for a certain flavour of crisp there was a stirring of muted amusement in the rows of suited figures. Perhaps it was pity.

He was warming to his tale, convinced that it had a useful conclusion that he would discover in the telling. He set it out, the crowded train, the bottle of water on the table and, by it, the lurid packet opened by himself, and the unnerving stare of a large young man. There were appreciative titters as he described the way the adversaries devoured the snack. Beard did not embellish, but he intensified the moment at which he lunged in revenge at the water bottle and drained it in a few gulps and tossed it back on the table. He lingered on the way the man swung the suitcase down from the rack, and on his own furious refusal to engage with him. He spun them out, those seconds on the station platform before the discovery, which he divulged with a quickening of pulse, and a flush of eager pride when his audience chuckled, or even laughed out loud, as he, boldly miming now, held with outstretched arm the second packet before him, like Hamlet with Yorick's skull. Yes, they all seemed to like him a little more.

He hurried towards his conclusion, his excuse for telling this story. Were his points somewhat forced, or had he stumbled upon two important truths? No time to consider.

'What I discovered on Paddington station was, first, that in a grave situation, a crisis, we understand, sometimes too late, that it is not in other people, or in the system, or in the nature of things that the problem lies, but in ourselves, our own follies and unexamined assumptions. And second, there are moments when the acquisition of new information forces us to make a fundamental reinterpretation of our situation. Industrial civilisation is at just such a moment. We pass through a mirror, everything is transformed, the old paradigm makes way for the new.'

But the rhetorical flourish of these final phrases had a desperate air, his voice sounded thin in his ears, his conclusions were hollow after all. Where now? His body knew precisely. He released his grip on the lectern and turned to step somnambulantly through the gap in the curtain into a gloomy space broken by looming columns of what looked like stacked chairs. To the sound of respectable applause, he bent double while his burden, well lubricated by fish oil, slid soundlessly from him. He remained in that position for a few seconds, waiting for more. There was nothing. Then he went out onto the dais to stand, solemnly dabbing at his lips with a handkerchief, while Saleel gave a vote of thanks.

The pension-fund managers and the rest drifted back to the large reception area where waiters were serving wine. Beard was obliged by the terms of his fee to mingle with his audience for at least half an hour. He stood with a glass of cleansing Chablis as faces above neckties rotated before him. People were well meaning and polite as they told him that his talk was 'interesting', even 'fascinating', but it was obvious that no one's investment strategy was transformed. He learned that earlier in the day an oil analyst had persuaded the room that, with tar sands and deep-sea drilling counted in, there were five decades of known reserves.

A young man of ghastly pallor and brown toothbrush moustache said, 'On top of which, these islands are practically made of coal. If virtue isn't a consideration, why would we risk our customers' money on unproven, non-continuous forms of energy supply?'

And a woman standing next to him, speaking on Beard's behalf, said, 'The Stone Age didn't end because of a shortage of stones.'

He had heard oil sheikh Yamani's feeble line too many times to want to laugh with the rest.

Someone else said, 'There simply isn't enough sun and wind in the UK to drive the economy.'

And another person behind him, invisible to Beard, said, 'So we buy in solar energy from North Africa. Where's your energy security in that?'

He was dealing with these points and accepting a second glass of wine, even though he knew it was time for a scotch, when suddenly the lecturer, Mellon, was there, waiting eagerly with trembling beard for a break in the conversation.

When it came he said, 'I'd love to know where you got that story from.'

'What story?'

'You know. The one about the man on the train.'

'As I said. It happened to me this afternoon.'

'Come now, Professor Beard. We're all grown-ups here.'

The fund managers, sensing that one man was calling another to account, pressed in to hear above the din of voices.

Beard said, 'I've lost you. You'll have to explain.'

'You told it very well, and I can see it suited your purposes.'

'You think I made it up?'

'On the contrary. It's a well-known tale with many variants, much studied in my field. It even has a name – the Unwitting Thief.'

'Really,' Beard said coldly. 'How interesting.'

'Actually, it is. Across the variants are some stable characteristics. For example, the wrongly accused is generally a marginal figure, often threatening – a tinker, an immigrant, a punk, even someone with a disability. Your well-built young man with the earrings fits perfectly. The wrongly accused usually performs an act of kindness for the unwitting thief, and this makes the moment of truth all the more agonising. In your case, he lifts down your luggage. One theory is that the tale of the Unwitting Thief – it's known in the field as UT – expresses anxiety and guilt about our hostility towards minorities. Perhaps it acts in the culture as an unconscious corrective.'

'It must have occurred to you,' Beard said, determined to smile, 'that now and then it actually happens, that people's stories are real. You know, in an age of mass transport, people squashed up together carrying food in identical wrappers.'

'What interests us is the way the tale passes in and out of fashion, goes from lip to lip, falls from view, reappears a few years later in a different form by a process we call communal re-creation. UT was widely known in the States in the early nineteen hundreds. We don't have records of it here until the fifties, and by the early seventies it was everywhere. The writer Douglas Adams put a version of it in a novel in the mid eighties. He always insisted it had actually happened to him on a train – and that's another common feature. By claiming it as personal experience, people localise and authenticate the story – it happened to them, it happened to a friend of theirs – and insulate it from the archetype. They make it original, they claim copyright. UT has appeared in stories by Jeffrey Archer and, I think, by Roald Dahl, it's been told as a true story on the BBC and in the Guardian. It's the plot of at least two films – The Lunch Date and Boeuf Bourgignon, and it's also…'

'I'm sorry to disappoint you,' Beard said, 'but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.'

The folklorist had a certain autistic doggedness. 'Yes, what's new about your version is the crisps. I've heard biscuits, apples, cigarettes, whole canteen lunches, never crisps. I might write it up for the Contemporary Legend Quarterly, if you don't mind. I'll change your name, of course.'

But Beard had turned aside to touch a waiter's elbow.

The pale pension funder with the little moustache said, 'So these stories go the rounds like dirty jokes.'

'Exactly.'

'Have you heard this story about Bristol Zoo and the car-park attendant. You see, for twenty-four years…'

Beard said to the waiter, 'I don't care, as long as it's not a single malt. A triple, straight up, one ice cube, and would you mind bringing it immediately.'

It was six forty-five. There remained only thirteen minutes of contracted mingling. That it would soon be with him, in his hand, his first serious drink of the day, was already reviving his spirits. That, and the prospect of an evening with Melissa. Confident that a waiter in such an establishment would take the trouble to track him down, he walked away from Mellon, who was holding forth on narrative subtypes of blameless theft, and crossed the room to talk to a mild-mannered man in derivatives.

She was beautiful, she was interesting, she was good (she was truly a good person), so what was wrong with Melissa Browne? It took him more than a year to find out. There was a flaw in her character, like a trapped bubble in a window pane, that warped her view of Michael Beard, and made her believe that he could plausibly fit the part of a good husband and father. He did not understand and could not quite forgive this lapse of judgement. She knew the history, she had some good evidence in front of her, and there was much else she should reasonably suspect, but she remained steadfast in her delusion that she could reclaim him, make him kind, honest, loving and, above all, loyal. Her longing was not, as he thought she saw it, to transform him as he approached his seventh decade, but gently to return him to his natural state, his truest self, the one he failed to lay claim to. This was an unstated ambition. For example, it was not hectoring or denial that would help him lose weight, but lovingly concocted, wholesome, delicious meals, which would ease him back to the shape he had at thirty – his Platonic form. And if her recipes failed, she would have him as he was.

She endured his absences, the silences from abroad, because she was certain he was bound to see the matter her way in the end. Besides, her own life was busy enough. Her patient conviction was touching, and Beard, never a complete cad, felt it like a reproach. During the period of his press bother she had seen him at his worst and was undeterred. She seemed to love him more. With all the passion of a rationalist, she bore him up through the unreasonable storm. But she never brought her reason to bear on her love. If she had, the affair could have been over in minutes. It troubled him to discover that she was one of those women who can only love a man in need of rescue. And she preferred the rescuee to be much older than her. Was he to fall in line then with her sad troupe of past lovers and one ex-husband, elderly dullards, reprobates, losers, louts – exploiters all – whom her kindness had failed to recuperate and who had cheated her out of a child? None of them had banqueted with the King of Sweden, but they were comrades of a sort. Allowing himself to be Melissa's one success would be a proper mark of distinction, but he did not think he was up to the job. He thought he too would cheat her out of a child.

'Why me?' he once asked, when he lay post-coitally supine on her bed. The question seemed ripe, and complimentary in the suggestion that he was not worthy.

'Because,' was her reply, and she moved to sit astride him and brought him on again, her rotund slow-moving Michael, who had long thought that an encore within the half-hour was light years behind him.

She owned a string – if three was a string – of shops across north London selling dance clothes. Professionals from the London companies were her customers, as well as all kinds of amateurs, including young mothers who had tired of yoga classes, and even men as ancient as Beard, inspired to take up tap or tango in one last throw at feeling young. But at the centre of a barely profitable business was an unageing core of tiny dreamers, an inexhaustible corps de ballet replenished down the generations – little girls with an old-fashioned yearning to be in tutus, tights, leggings, pumps, twirling before the mirror and the rail, under the stern eye of a flinty ex-prima donna with a heart of gold. The dream of hard work on scuffed boards, of the first night, the first breathless leap onstage before astonished gasps, had survived the electronic age, the girl bands and TV soaps. The resilience of the fantasy gave an impression of genetic compulsion. The smallest tutu in Melissa's stock would fit an infant girl of twelve months. The mothers of these girls remembered their own dreams and sometimes spent hard to live them vicariously.

But dancing in the modern age was precarious. In public consciousness, it surged and fell like a futures market, and Melissa had to be quick in response down the line to distant warehouses. A sudden TV documentary, and during one week four hundred men were in her shops wanting a certain shirt to tango in. A certain movie, a certain musical, a clip on MTV could drive an insatiable, transient need. One lavatory-paper advertisement with a Swan Lake theme, and there were more little girls than ever, but clamouring now for rainbow tights, or leggings with a laddered look, or a leotard with an artful tear, just like they wore in the film. And then came lean times when no one danced but dancers and the core of little dreamers, and no one even wanted to look like a dancer, and Melissa could only wait. Useless, she said, to make predictions.

As a hedge against these fluctuations, she widened the appeal of her shops. The eight-year-olds who longed to be ballerinas were a small fraction of their age group, but they shared with their cohort an inexplicable taste for the colour pink. Not just any shade, but a particular soft, candied, babyish pink. All three shops made over part of their window displays to this gentle enticement. Beard visited Melissa at work one Saturday morning and stood in the high-pitched throng to witness the strange power wielded by a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Who was instructing the girls, how did they know how to behave, how to crave a pink pencil and sharpener, or pink trainers, bed linen, hair grip, satchel, notepaper? Pedantically, he tracked down a paper by an esteemed neuroscientist in Newcastle whose work suggested a gender difference in retinal sensitivity, with females tending to favour the red end of the spectrum. But that hardly explained the Saturday stampede through the shop, or the radical reduction Melissa was able to make in her bank borrowing within the year. In the pink for months! Then, suddenly, colour exhaustion set in and the magic was gone. Overnight, girls did not need pink things. Unwanted stock could not be unloaded in a knockdown sale. It was beyond explanation. There should have been a younger generation of little sisters fresh to pink, but they were not moved. It was not as if another shade took its place. As a sole motivator, colour itself had faded. Pink went to ground, and then, to her credit, at the moment of its resurgence, Melissa was ready.

Despite this liability and daily worries over staff and suppliers, Dance Studio appeared to Beard a haven of innocent aspiration and pleasures. Once, calling at the Primrose Hill branch to take Melissa to lunch, he waited for her on a stool at the back of the shop and took it all in – Lenochka, the assistant with spiky cropped hair dyed black, lisping Russian-inflected cockney through pierced-tongue jewellery, the piped Tchaikovsky, the scent of sandalwood, a general air of unmockable devotion to children and adults at play. Sitting in the gloom among half-unpacked cardboard boxes he indulged a fantasy (a windowless room sometimes worked on him this way), incrementally erotic, of retiring from the world's ills and gripes and labouring back here, Melissa's partner in all things, cocooned in the stock room, perhaps improving the inventory software or planning special events, with talks and demonstrations, and so placidly tracing the passing years in a swoon of sex and dullness, and one evening, obedient to Melissa's prompting – impossible tawdry dream! – persuading Lenochka to make a threesome on the wide bed in the meticulous flat on Fitzroy Street, and discovering for himself how it felt, a flesh-embedded tongue-jewel's most intimate touch. He surprised himself. He could pass a lifetime right here, dreaming among the unsorted leggings.

That was one haven. The other was Melissa's apartment, a two-minute stroll from the Primrose Hill branch, almost opposite the building where Sylvia Plath once put her head in the oven after setting out bread and milk for her sleeping children. The poet, a daughter of the fifties, was a diligent housewife who kept about her an unpoetically tidy domain, like Melissa's. Beard, on the other hand, was a domestic slob, clean about his person, vain about his clothes, but a dedicated sower of unconscious disorder, for whom the retrieval of his own dropped towel or the closing of a drawer or cupboard door or disposal of a wrapper or apple core would have seemed as purposeful an act as spring cleaning. The lady who once tended his Marylebone flat had walked out without explanation, but he knew why and had not found a replacement. His third wife, Eleanor, once discovered in the pages of a valuable first edition an ancient rasher of his breakfast bacon doubling as a bookmark.

Like many slobs, Beard was appreciative of the order that others created without effort, or any that he noticed. In Melissa's flat, which was spread over two floors, he was particularly happy. She lived such an uncluttered life at home. There were open perspectives untroubled by furniture. The foot-wide beeswaxed floorboards recovered from a Gascony chateau shone with dull perfection. There were no loose objects, all the books were on the shelves in the right order, at least until he visited, and the art on the walls was sparse lithographs, mostly of dancers. There was a single statue, a Henry Moore maquette. Other surfaces justified themselves by their own particular empty dustless gleam. In the bedroom, no clothes were on view, and the bed, unruffled as a millpond, was as big as any he had seen in an American hotel. Melissa's was the sort of place whose ambience Beard could wreck in two minutes by sitting down in it, shrugging off his coat, opening his briefcase and removing his shoes. He never felt at home until he was shoeless. But he was impressed by her apartment, it seemed like the embodiment of mental freedom, and he did his best not to litter it, and was partially successful.

A burglar entering the property, silencing the alarm and taking the trouble to glance about before settling down to work, would never have guessed the nature or even the gender of its owner. The apartment was subdued, cool, masculine in its light browns and battleship greys. Whereas in her shops, as in bed, Melissa was loud, cheerful, generous. She stood only an inch higher than her Michael, was rounded and soft and wide-hipped like a Renoir bather, though not remotely in Beard's plump league. She had black hair that was curly or curled (he would never ask), dark eyes and rich skin colour – nut brown, with a bloom of red across the cheekbones that deepened when she was furious or suddenly happy. She claimed a dash of Tobagan and Venezuelan blood, like Angostura bitters she said, through her great-grandmother. Whatever the truth, she thrived in a heatwave, loathed the cold, defined as under fifteen degrees, and believed she belonged in some other country further south, but it was too late to shift now.

Perhaps she chose the decor in the Fitzroy Street flat to highlight her wardrobe. She wore bold prints (the Tobago inheritance) or deep-hued silks, and had an array of stilettos in reds and greens as well as black, and pastel dancing shoes that never fitted. At home, arranged on a sombre sofa against a neutral wall, she shimmered in her colours, in Beard's eyes, like a new-minted Gauguin in his Marquesas phase.

When he visited, she cooked up a tropical storm. Her well-balanced meals were spicy and much to his taste. Any advantage to his health was easily offset by outsized second helpings. She never served herself much of her own cooking, but she watched him eat from across the table with smouldering satisfaction, telling him that hot spices would burn off his fat and make him an ardent lover, or that she was fattening him up so he could never run away. The latter was closer to the truth. After one of her spreads, feeling neither thinner nor even faintly aroused, he would sit in near silence, sweating in an armchair for half an hour to recover.

How did he ever deserve her? She ran him baths on winter nights and lit candles around the bathroom and squeezed into the oversized roll-top tub with him. She bought him shirts, silk ties, cologne, wine, scotch (she did not drink), underwear and socks. When it was time for him to leave, she booked his flights. In a poor return, he brought back expensive presents from airport duty-free, a modern form of parsimony by way of flagrant convenience and notional tax avoidance, but she did not seem to mind. She loved his physics, the indecipherable sheets of photovoltaic calculation, his 'Arabic', that often spilled across the oak boards, and she made him explain – again – the symbols, the Dirac bras and kets, the tensor products, the Young diagrams. But she too could have been a mathematician. He had seen her complete the morning newspaper sudoku at a speed with which others might fill out a form, hurrying to be done before she rushed to work. She approved of his mission and loyally read climate-change stories in the press. But she told him once that to take the matter seriously would be to think about it all the time. Everything else shrank before it. And so, like everyone she knew, she could not take it seriously, not entirely. Daily life would not permit it. He sometimes quoted this observation in talks.

She talked about her previous lovers with a freedom he could not match. She had never troubled to get seriously involved with a contemporary. Of the various men she described, all were fifteen or twenty years older. The one exception was early on, and he was even more ancient. At the age of twenty she had a year-long affair with a married man, a professional golfer of fifty-six. Now he was seventy-seven, and they still kept in touch. Her preference in partners had a history. She grew up by Clapham Common, in south London, an only child, whose parents divorced when she was eleven. She loved her father and lived with her mother, with whom she often fought. When her mother married the last in a series of 'obnoxious' boyfriends, Melissa went to live with her father across the Common, just as he suffered a stroke. From the age of fourteen she nursed him (intimately, for he was almost completely paralysed) until his death four years later. She told Beard what a therapist friend had told her years ago. Caring for the father she loved at a formative period in her sexual development, then failing to keep him alive, she was guiltily bound in subsequent relationships to the task of finding a replacement, retrieving him from the grave, rescuing him from his misfortune and redeeming her failure.

Beard was equally bound to believe that this was the kind of nonsense that science was invented to protect him from. But he said nothing. So many unexamined assumptions, so many unproven elements! An unconscious that wrote its own craftily concealed stories peppered with inept symbolism? Not a shred of neurological evidence. Repression? Empirically, no such mechanism had been shown to exist. On the contrary, unwanted memories were hard to forget. Sublimation? Likewise, a fairy tale that no serious investigation could sustain. Attending to the toilet needs of her father could just as likely have put her off older men for life, and then there would have been an equally confident Freudian confabulation. Many women who had never nursed a dying father, or had any analogous experience, preferred older men. Why were Melissa's lovers (with one exception) only fifteen or twenty years older, when her father was thirty-seven the day she was born? Could her unconscious, so literal in other regards, not do the simple adding-up?

The truth was simpler. Women knew it in their hearts. Since he was too tactful to say it to her, he was obliged to set it out impartially for himself. Repetition was helpful. Older men were better companions, they were seasoned lovers, they knew the world, they knew themselves. Unlike younger men, they held their emotions in balance. They had read more, seen more, they were warmer, kinder, less boastful, more tolerant, less violent. They were more interesting, they could choose the wine. They had more money. Besides, it irked him to believe that it might not be him she was drawn to, but some symbol of seniority of which he was an acceptable approximation. He was further irked to hear that when she met her first serious love, the errant golfer, he was the same age as her father when he died.

He took a taxi from the Strand to Primrose Hill and was twenty-five minutes early on Fitzroy Street when he rang her bell. He did not have a key – that was a line he did not wish to cross. When she came to the door, in the moment before they embraced, he sensed that something was not right, or was different. Or she was different. He thought he saw the vestiges of an expression being modified to greet him. Then, they were in each other's arms and the idea was gone. She drew with her out onto the cold stone front step a draught of indoor warmth and beeswax from the apartment and, with it, a scent of spices which mingled with her perfume. One of his presents from some bright airport hell. She exclaimed his name, he hers, they kissed, and held apart to take in the other's face and then embraced again.

As he held her, he felt on his palms the heat of her skin through her red silk blouse. How fogged and monochrome memory was against the living moment. When he was away from her he could only recall in shadow play, or was too busy to attempt to recall, the full vibrancy, the plain and overwhelming fact of her. He forgot the particular touch of her mouth and tongue, her frame, and the way she held herself to dissolve their difference in height when they kissed, the fit of her fingers between his, their degree of springy resistance at the joints, their cool smoothness, length, diameter, the bump of a mole below the knuckle of her left pinkie, and how, when they embraced, his chest was alive to the pressure of her breasts. And this was merely the realm of sensation. How she looked, sounded, tasted – familiar, of course, all of it, but only now that she was here, right in his grasp. Memory, or Beard's memory, was a second-rate device. When he thought of her from Berlin or Rome, it was all relation and generalised desire, it was her nature he considered, herself in abstract, and his own pleasure, not the warm honey smell of her scalp, the surprising taut strength in her arms, how low her voice was pitched when she said his name.

'Michael Beard. Get in the house this minute!'

This old joke summoned a certain kind of crusty old-fashioned parent. He never had cause to say it to her – his stew of a flat was not a place to invite a woman like Melissa Browne. She would not feel comfortable there until she had organised it for him, and that was another line he did not want crossed. She took his bag and he followed her in. When the door was closed they stood in the clean expanse of her sitting room, she put her arms around his neck, he drew her firmly to him and they kissed again. For once, it seemed they might dispense with the obligatory fine-tuning small talk, postpone dinner and go directly to her bedroom. But then, at the sound of a hiss followed by a whip-like crack, a vital prompt from the kitchen, she rushed away with a hiss of her own, a staccato 'shit!', and he made his way to the sofa. He was no longer an ardent young man. He could wait patiently.

By the time she returned five minutes later, his scotch and soda in her hand, he was sprawled on his back reviewing a proposed submission from his Imperial team to Nature. The customary detritus of shoes, coat, jacket, tie, open briefcase, papers, open suitcase, spilling clothes and a plastic bag extended across the floor. Tipped so suddenly from the charge of their reunion to the intricacies of molecular plant life, and knowing that, however it happened, he and Melissa would make love within an hour or so, with a meal in prospect too, he felt a rare and settled contentment.

She stood over him, free hand on her hip. 'Make space, Professor.'

He liked her wry, tolerant, lopsided smile. With a grunt, he struggled upright and patted the space beside him and took the glass from her. As she nestled against him, he put the monograph aside and said, 'Just think, your humblest pavement-crack weed has a secret that the best dozen labs in the world are only just beginning to understand.'

He sipped his scotch while her hand lay between his legs. She was caressing him with an abstracted air.

'I've missed you, Michael. Why weeds?'

'I must have told you before. A leaf is a kind of solar panel for splitting water and fixing carbon dioxide. We could imitate it and make hydrogen. I've missed you too.'

Had he? Now that he was kissing her he realised that he should have, for he was excited and happy. But he had not missed anyone, not since the dark summer of 2000, when he pined like a dog for his last, his final, wife. There were people he vaguely looked forward to seeing, but not since that time had he been afflicted by an absence. These days, as soon as he was alone, he read, he drank, he ate, he was on the phone, on the internet, watching TV, travelling to a meeting – or asleep. He was self-sufficient, self-absorbed, his mind a cluster of appetites and dreamy thoughts. Like many clever men who prize objectivity, he was a solipsist at heart, and in his heart was a nugget of ice, which Melissa sensed and intended to melt.

Of course, it was necessary before they made love to have a conversation about their respective lives these past weeks, their states of mind, their day. His fault for not keeping in touch, hers for not holding him to account. So she told him her news. A musical about a working-class lad wanting to be a ballet dancer was keeping turnover above the seasonal average. But few boys came in. It was all down to girls dreaming of such a boy. She told him of the recent death of a respected choreographer who was never quite famous enough for his own taste. At the memorial service, five dancers performed in the narrow aisle of a Soho church, and even the old man's enemies wept.

Michael's arm was around her shoulders, and she was pressed against him, talking into his chest. She looked after her shops, her customers, her staff, her lover, and she wanted someone to take care of her. As he listened, he looked about him – at the brown chaise longue against the wall, the maquette, the eighteenth-century drypoint of dancers in a Utrecht street, a bowl of smooth stones in a copper dish – hoping to identify what it was that appeared to his unobservant eye so subtly altered. Something was out of kilter. He was sure it was not his own possessions. The air itself seemed disordered, the way it does after a smoker has left and his smoke has cleared.

'I love you,' she interrupted her account of the funeral to say, and she bit him playfully on his arm.

He felt tenderly towards her, perhaps as much as he ever had, but one day he might have to disentangle himself, and it would be harder for both of them if he had once said he loved her. But how he would begin to give her up, and when, was beyond him, and he drew her closer to him. What he whispered sounded lame, but it would do.

'You're beautiful, Melissa.'

She went on with her story and he stroked her head and thought that for the first time since he had thrown up behind the velvet curtain, he could imagine himself hungry, perhaps within the half-hour. He was beginning to wonder about the spices in the air. Was it tamarind he could detect, and garlic, limes, ginger, chicken? Her voice was musical and soft, and even, he thought, a little sad. From time to time she drew his head down for a kiss. She was talking about the shops again, drifting into another story, this time about a hole in a ceiling or a floor and something falling through it, about a bad-tempered dachshund left behind by an ancient prima donna with Alzheimer's. And now he too was drifting. He thought he was an average type, no crueller, no better or worse than most. If he was sometimes greedy, selfish, calculating, mendacious, when to be otherwise would embarrass him, then so was everyone else. Human imperfection was a large subject. Consider just a few of the defects. S-shaped backs that easily buckled, breathing and swallowing recklessly sharing a passage, the infectious proximity of sex and excretion, childbirth pure agony, testicles unwieldy and vulnerable, weak eyesight a general affliction, an immune system that could devour its owner. And that was just the body. Among all the yearning rationales for the godhead, the argument from design collapsed with Homo sapiens. No god worth his salt could be so careless at the workbench. Beard comfortably shared all of humanity's faults, and here he was, a monster of insincerity, cradling tenderly on his arm a woman he thought he might leave one day soon, listening to her with sensitive expression in the expectation that soon he would have to do some talking himself, when all he wanted was to make love to her without preliminaries, eat the meal she had cooked, drink a bottle of wine and then sleep – without blame, without guilt.

She took his empty glass and stood.

'Food,' she said. 'And I'll get you another.'

But she could not bring herself to leave him, not until she had stood right over him and kissed him again. This kiss was long and deep, and then she clasped him to her, and Beard, still seated, fully aroused, his face part shrouded in the scented gloom of her unbuttoned blouse, his view entirely filled by the division and swell of her breasts, had time to wonder why it oppressed him more than usual, all this talking and listening and cooking before anything properly rewarding could take place. Perhaps he had lost patience with the small print of human contact by spending so much time in loud public places, among worldly professors like himself, each bristling with his personal style of academic grandeur. And when alone, he was mostly among the near-abstraction of cobalt ions, protons, catalysts. And when not alone, in mindless dalliances he preferred not to consider now.

She released him from the embrace and as she straightened she said something, a single phrase he did not hear because at the same time her arms brushed against his ears. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders and he looked up, expecting to exchange a reassuring smile that would neutrally close this particular physical episode and dispatch her to the kitchen, and was surprised to see tears in her eyes, gathering thickly, ready to spill. And oddly, she was smiling, but without humour, as though dismissing or mocking her own feelings. For a superstitious moment he imagined he had upset her with his thoughts, impossibly murmured them aloud, or they had been legibly stamped across his face. But every man was an island, his thoughts were safe. It must be something serious, unconnected with himself. As he stood, he took her hands and they were damp, not only on the palms, but between the fingers, sticky, hot, expressive of a strong emotion it was now his duty – all prospect of pleasure receding – to elicit and understand.

'Melissa,' he said. 'What is it, and what did you just say?'

They kissed again, as tenderly as before. Perhaps it would not be so difficult after all to set the evening on its proper course.

Then she gazed at him in wonder and laughed. 'You idiot. I love you. I said I'm pregnant.'

'Ah €¦'

His mind had softly whited out, the manly equivalent of a neurasthenic faint onto the sofa behind him. Pregnant. He struggled with this ripely swelling word – familiar enough, but for the moment devoid of helpful context, like the face, say, of the local newsagent encountered in an improbable place. Then word, meaning and consequences, biology and fate, clicked into alignment like a steel bolt. His cell door had been open for months, years, and he could have walked free. Too late. While his back was turned one of his own sperm, as brave and cunning as Odysseus, had made the long journey, breached the city wall and buried its identity in her egg. Now he was expected to do the same. In forty years he had talked various women, including two of his wives, into terminations. It was a miracle he had come this far without lapsing into fatherhood. But he would have a tough time persuading Melissa. She was watching him now, lips parted in expectation, waiting for him, for the words, Daddy's first words, that might indicate the course of this new life.

'I'll have that scotch.'

'Come with me.'

He put an arm around her shoulder, and together they stepped over his mess and crossed the boards to her tightly organised kitchen. One large green pot, source of the pervasive aroma, was on the stove on a low heat. Otherwise, apart from a carton of rice, there was no sign of cooking, for the surfaces had been wiped down, all peelings trashed, every implement washed and stowed. A mystery, how someone as rich-bloodedly sensual as Melissa could be so aseptically neat. A baby, with its diurnal tides of entropy, would put her to the test. But this baby must not be, and all that was in question was how long it would take him to convince her of the fact. How could she not see it already, the folly of his shouldering this obligation, and the pathos of it – almost seventy years old and the child not yet ten! Then, the unsuitability of the father's character, his own gifts for entropy, his remorseless preoccupation with work, his recent earnings not even in six figures, his awful past, the risks of transcription error in offering his time-degraded seed to posterity, and her eggs surely feeling the chill of thirty-nine winters. And what of his mission? Would it be an exaggeration to say that the planet could suffer if he were deflected from his course? Perhaps not.

He watched her peer into the green pot and seem satisfied, unscrew the bottle and pour his drink, and take an ice cube from a dispenser. If the arguments he was marshalling were overstated, it was because he feared that the decision might already be out of his hands. She wanted this, she had always wanted this. So they weren't arguments at all, they were pleas. If she loved him she would listen, but she loved him and wanted a child, and was bound to ignore him. The situation was grave, indeed gravid. He took the drink from her and did not knock it back in one, as he would have if he had been alone with this problem, but went at it in rapid sips.

She flashed him a smile and set about her brisk arrangements for the rice, and poured olive oil and lemon juice into a bowl and tipped in rocket leaves from a packet in the fridge. This mound of greenery was surely for herself. Folic acid, phytonutrients, antioxidants, vitamin C. Eating for two. Something had to be done.

She said, 'Do you know, I think for once I'll have a glass of white wine.'

He did not want arrangements for an abortion turning into a celebration of a future birth. Nor did he want his foetal child's neural development compromised by alcohol. He felt so unreasonable, he could not speak. She raised her glass to him, and mutely he raised his. Her measure of wine was no larger than his neat scotch.

'Do you like this skirt?'

This question, her tone suggested, was not a change of subject. It was fine cashmere, charcoal grey, with many folds that swung in a delayed spiral when she turned.

'It's lovely,' he said. 'And so are you. You've never looked better.' Not a good idea to encourage her, but he could not help himself. By way of compensation, he said, 'How pregnant are you?'

'Seven weeks.'

'When did you find out?'

'Day before yesterday.'

'Melissa, tell me. Was it an accident?'

She came over to him and pressed her hand against his cheek. He felt again her radiant body heat. She was the oven, he thought stupidly, in which there was a bun. Their bun.

She whispered finally, 'No.'

'You came off the Pill?'

'The last three times we made love I was off the Pill.'

'You should have told me.'

'You would have resisted me.'

'Yes, I would. You know my feelings about this.'

'And you know mine.'

His glass was already empty. He stepped round her to get to the bottle and helped himself. Now they stood almost the length of the kitchen apart and it was easier for him to say, with an edge of hardness, 'You deceived me then.'

She was coming towards him again. It would be difficult to turn her from this calm, seductive mode. He would have happily settled for a row, with delicacy tossed to the winds. Greater distances traversed. But in this homely stillness, she was coming towards him and he could not help his arousal, and he could see she knew that, which excited him more. From his new angle by her pitiful drinks tray – one amaretto, one near-empty Johnnie Walker, one Baileys – her face was differently lit and he saw that the fine-texturing, high-blooming first-trimester hormones had been working on her skin. Already? He had no idea, but he had never seen her look so pretty or young. When she stopped close in front of him he had to remind himself that he had just, and justly, accused her of deception. He could not allow her to seduce him. She had been dishonest. On the other hand, a measure of sexual release would give him immunity, let him think more clearly and make his life-denying case with more brio.

She said, 'I wasted years thinking I shouldn't have a baby until the right man came along. A lot of idiots and bastards took up my time – my fault as much as theirs. I think you're the right man, but Michael, if you don't think you are, it doesn't matter. I'm going ahead anyway. It'll be sad without you, but not as sad as having nothing. You don't have to decide tonight or next month. You can say no and change your mind later. Perhaps you'll change your mind when you see the baby. That can happen. But one thing I'm sure of – I'm not going to have an argument with you. If you're dead against it, you're free to go. And free to come back.'

'I'll be almost seventy when this child is only ten. What use is that?'

'Fine. Don't get involved. But I think you'd count yourself blessed at seventy to love a ten-year-old and be loved by one.'

Blessed? Where had she got a word like that? He had never heard her use it before.

'And there's another thing.'

She said it mellifluously, she was that sure of her ground. She had smoothed out the crags and precipices of this new landscape and he was wandering through it – completely lost, but not in harm's way, or so she seemed to be suggesting.

'You didn't ask to become a father. I'm not asking for financial support. I've got savings and I've got the shops. If you want to contribute, all the better. If you want to be with us, better still.'

Us. Already this pinhead-sized entity had moved in, it had a social presence. Beard felt both wronged and outmanoeuvred. He was too heavy-footed to articulate whatever general principle Melissa was defying with such efficiency. Did he have no rights? He could not command this child's early annihilation. So what did he want? He attempted a return to basics.

'Whether I stay or go, pay or don't pay, I'll have become the father of your child. Against my will. You didn't ask me because you knew what I would say.'

'If you never see the child and contribute nothing, I don't see how much will have changed for you.'

'That's not for you to say, and besides, you're wrong, dead wrong. Do you really think there's no difference between having a child you never see and having no child? You're forcing choices on me that I never wanted to make.'

He pronounced this with some heat and he believed what he was saying, but it seemed too abstract. His real objections, still without verbal form, lay in a fog.

She must have anticipated his reaction. She seemed untroubled as she turned away from him and began to set the table. When she spoke, she put her hand impersonally on his arm and her voice was conciliatory, even though she was not actually looking at him.

'Try to see it from my side, Michael. In love with you, wanting a baby, not wanting anyone else, seeing you only occasionally and never knowing when, knowing you were seeing other women, and you not making any move to come closer or to leave, and four years drifting by like this. If I did nothing, I'd be at the menopause. And that would be the quiet choice you would have forced on me.'

It sounded a rotten deal. But she had been free to kick him out. He placed his hand over hers where it rested on his arm. A kind of apology.

She lifted the casserole from the stove onto a trivet on the table and gave him a bottle of wine to open. It was a Corbières, a decent one, and he would be drinking it alone. Her two inches of white were barely touched. As he sat down he remembered her present, bath oil and bitter chocolate mints from Berlin Tegel. Exactly the wrong moment to hand them over. A silence settled as she served up the stew. She had neutralised his protest with a list of indictments. He had always assumed she knew about his affairs, but it shocked him, no, it stirred him, to hear her say it so calmly. As he lifted his fork he saw vividly, as though back-projected, brain to retina, a tableau of Melissa and a girl he had known briefly in Milan, kneeling up together, companionably naked on a four-poster against a moraine of sheets and pillows, tenderly expectant, in the low-lit style of a pornographic spread. He even saw the centrefold staples. He blinked this arrangement away and began to eat. But his daydream had tensed the walls of his throat and the first mouthful was difficult to swallow. She had made her reasonable case, and he was struggling, he was in the wrong when he knew he was right, he was in knots even while he suspected that the matter was simple: she had changed the subject.

He let a minute or so pass and then, determined to sound grave rather than querulous, he said, 'The point is, Melissa, there wouldn't really be a choice for me if you went ahead with this. How am I supposed to ignore the existence of my own child? Not possible for me. I guess you were counting on that, and this is what I object to. It's a form of blackmail €¦'

The word hung over them, and he thought that at last they would have the liberating row. But she remained calm, the serene mother-to-be, reflecting while she chewed. She was eating more than usual.

'I wasn't counting on you being unable to ignore our baby. If it's true, I'm happy. I knew you'd be angry, and I don't blame you. I thought of saying it was an accident, but I couldn't live with that.'

Not after she had lived with the contraceptive deceit. But he did not feel like saying that, and nor could he bring himself to say that he saw the future well enough. After a happy interlude, and assuming he did not succumb to marriage, he would become, by degrees, a worthless, unreliable pseudo-husband, and this was what would make a worthless, unreliable father of him. It was what she was choosing, it was her right to choose. This was what women had marched for, birth as well as abortion. Perhaps there was nothing he could do. She was absolving him of responsibility, but this was not how it would unfold, this was not how she would feel when their lives had been transformed, when they repeated the tired, angry scenes, with shouting, the baby wailing, a slamming door, his car starting up with a roar. That was when she would know it was all his fault, whatever she said now, while her unsuspecting brain was soused in optimistic hormones, one of evolution's tricks for getting this child past the first post.

As he refilled his glass he felt the fight, his accusatory sting, give way to light-headed fatalism. He wanted to set the problem aside and direct the evening towards its proper course – by way of amiable conversation with this beautiful, nearly young woman, her generous cooking and the dark wine, towards lovemaking, sleepy embraces, sleep. Was he lazy and sybaritic, or was he affirming a decent appetite for life? He knew the answer. He reached across and put his hand on hers.

'I'm glad you were straight with me. Thank you.'

Keeping his hand in place, he told her that he was sorry for his sharp words, that she was certainly no blackmailer, that he was profoundly happy to be with her again, and that she was right, they must not quarrel. She gazed into his face while he talked as she might a hypnotist's. Her eyes glistened again. She got up and came and kneeled by him and they kissed deeply. By the time she went back to her chair, all seemed well, and they continued with the meal. He put away three portions of chicken and chilli stew while he talked about his work and travels, the conference in Potsdam, the latest from New Mexico, how a team at MIT was working on an artificial photosynthesis process similar to his own, but was eighteen months behind. He talked of design simplicity, of the beauty of no moving parts, of an Oxford team's calculations for the optimal shape of a solar reflector, which was not the parabola he had expected.

He was boring her surely, talking to put distance between himself and the baby, to replace it in her thoughts with his own ideas, his own baby. Sometimes she prompted him with a question, but mostly she was silent, gazing at him with deeply irrational forbearance. She was in love with a bald fat man who seemed to her the essence of seriousness and high purpose, who was the father of her child as well as the father she longed to care for, the father who had not yet fallen in love with his fate, but who, she calmly knew, was bound to yield.

In what he considered layman's terms, he explained the recent excitement – not one electron for every photon, but two, and one day perhaps, even three! As she listened, she adopted the expression he always liked, a wry smile puckered into a pout that barely contained the pressure of a delighted laugh. But nothing he was saying was faintly amusing. She deserved better. So he began to tell her about his adventure on the train, and because he was still feeling bloated and overheated, suggested they move back to the sofa.

When he had told the story at the Savoy, he had drawn directly on his memory of the experience. Now there were three elements – the events as he recalled them, the fresher memory of his first account, and the desire to tell an after-dinner anecdote and make her laugh and like him more and dispel for the moment their one real subject. Everything he now emphasised or modified or added was plausible enough, some of it was true. He plagiarised himself, borrowing turns of phrase, pauses and pacing he had deployed at the lectern. He made his fellow passenger larger and more threatening, he made himself the complete bumbling fool, impulsive, greedy, quick to blame. Towards the end, at the moment when his luggage was lifted down, he exaggerated the young man's patient, saintly quality. With a feel for narrative art, Beard suppressed any detail that might have anticipated and diminished the moment of revelation, when he put a hand in his pocket and found the unopened bag of crisps.

Withholding information worked. At the right moment Melissa shrieked in amazement. She took his head between her hands and shook it and said, 'You idiot, you nincompoop! Oh, I wish I'd been there!' Still laughing, she fetched her wine, that same two inches, and then they kissed, and laughed together, and embraced. She pulled away and said, 'You thug!' and then, wonderingly, 'That poor fellow!'

Recovering at last, she moved closer beside him and said, 'But do you know, something just like that happened to Ivan – you remember Ivan in the shop?'

He did not care to hear about Ivan. He stood with some difficulty and, making a mock chivalrous gesture with open hand and faint bow, guided her towards the bedroom and there, in silence, undressed her. She liked to begin this way, naked while he was fully clothed. He knew nothing of such things but he was certain that in some other century she would have been considered the ideal of feminine beauty, of perfection in a welcoming softness of form. Narrow at the shoulder, swelling to the hip, heavy breasts, two dimples at the base of her spine above generous buttocks. He kissed these dimples now. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and she turned and lowered herself to sit astride his thighs, arms looped around his neck. She nuzzled and kissed his forehead, he kissed her breasts. But such beauty was not weightless. A fiery pain in his dodgy knee was intensifying, and he thought he had less than a minute before the next move, before a ligament tore from its anchoring in the bone. But she was telling him she loved him, she was whispering how she loved him, and he had to wait.

Finally, with a moan that passed for passion, he took her in his arms and lowered her on her back on the bed, and drew back the duvet for her. The bedroom was cooler than he would have liked. He was out of his own clothes with long-practised speed and lying beside her, caressing her in a manner some women found too clinically expert. At these reunions, Melissa was usually impatient to get started, but although she held his cock, ringing it with looped forefinger and thumb, pleasing him immensely with gentle movements, now she seemed to want to talk. Intent on stroking and kissing her and on the enveloping thrill of her touch, he paid little attention at first. Her disconnected words loomed then drifted past him, vivid and random, the way coral-reef fish might appear to a diver. Then he came to and realised that she was talking about being pregnant. Why bring that up now? But of course – what else? For her it was no change of subject at all. Sex, babies, breasts, love, down through the generations an unbroken golden thread. Not a rope to bind his arms and feet, or with which he could hang himself from the nearest beam, just when he thought his life, in its final active stages, was filling with meaning and grand purpose. But he suppressed his impatience, opened his eyes, directed his gaze towards the ceiling, and listened.

'…like loving someone you've never met, but that's not it either. We have met, we've always known each other, right from the beginning. Michael, I didn't know it would be like this, that it would start so soon. It's already begun, I'm already in love with her, with him, this tiny person coming towards us from nowhere, curled up inside me in the dark, growing larger every hour, coming to meet us. Sometimes I love it so hard I get an ache in my chest. I'm so lovesick I keep sighing out loud. This is stupid, but isn't it strange and wonderful, how one person can come out of another, like a Russian doll? So strange and ordinary at the same time. I'm so happy. I'm not making sense. I love you, I love this baby inside me and I hope you'll love it too, I think you will, Michael, you will, say you will, say you love this baby…'

She had drawn him towards her, and they were making love. Plaintively, she repeated, 'Say you will, please say you will €¦' until it was indecent not to comply, and he said, 'I will,' and he kissed her and thought that perhaps he was not lying because he did not know the future and it was not entirely inconceivable that, in his own way, he might love this child, if it ever existed, and whatever he said now, time and events would scramble, and lovemaking was an enclosed, enchanted world with its own language and rules, its own truth.

She took her pleasures easily, she was a loud, big-hearted lover of the back-clawing school, which was to his taste, but not tonight. As they bucked and turned, and her silky skin turned slick and her cries grew louder in his left ear, he found he could no longer abandon himself completely, and he was troubled, distracted. He wished she had not reminded him of her pregnancy. After many uncountable minutes, the moment was approaching when sexual etiquette required that he time himself, get in step with the shrieking downhill dash to her final orgasm, and he knew he was not ready and might not make it. And so, in those closing seconds, he entered a familiar empty theatre, sat in the stalls and auditioned some women he knew, bringing them onstage in merging sequence at the impossible speed of thought. They appeared in experimental attitudes, in different tableaux that magically involved himself. He summoned and dismissed the girl from Milan, then an Iranian biophysicist, and then Patrice, an old stand-by. But at last he settled on the right choice, the immigration officer with the withered arm. He let her step out coolly from behind her station, and there they stood, fucking against her desk in front of five hundred bored passengers ready with their passports. To Beard, sex in public among indifferent lookers-on was a fantasy of unaccountable appeal, and it worked. He made it just in time.

When he returned from this affair to Melissa's bed, she was kissing his face and saying, 'You're my darling. Thank you. I love you. Michael, I love you. You dear, dear man.'

He thought it was a police helicopter that disturbed him as it hovered a couple of streets away, but by the time he was fully awake it was receding northwards across the rooftops and it was a neighbour's deep-throated dog making all the noise. His hand was tangled in Melissa's hair, her right leg was crossed over his. He extricated himself, then lay waiting while she murmured in her sleep on a querulous note. When she was settled he slipped out from under the covers. There was never much darkness in a city bedroom and he crossed quickly to the door and went naked along the hallway to the bathroom.

The black slate floor was heated all night and felt good beneath his cold white feet. Let the planet go to hell. Remembering that there were several mirrors – one of them covered an entire wall – he turned the dimmer switch down before he went to the hand basin to drink from the tap. Then he urinated, and afterwards lowered the wooden seat and lid over the bowl. Before he sat, he put on a scarlet dressing gown she had bought him three Christmases ago, and tied it at the waist.

Orgasm sometimes brought on a bout of insomnia. He might have been more comfortable in the sitting room, but to go in there would be a concession to wakefulness, to the next day, the next subchapter of his existence. His mood was sour. He wanted oblivion, and the bathroom was a provisional place, an anteroom to sleep. He did not understand why he felt so rough. He made a tally of the previous day's drinking – just about average – and began to form the familiar resolution, then dismissed it, for he knew he was no match for that late-morning version of himself, for example, en route from Berlin, reclining in the sunlit cabin, a gin and tonic to hand. And what had he been reading on the plane? What other concerns could a rational man have? Three reports in succession. First, an early draft from oil-industry insiders calculating peak oil production in five to eight years. So little time to turn this matter around. Second, also a draft, to be published in the autumn: a quarter of the planet's mammals under threat, a Great Extinction already under way. Third, an academic paper sifting data on Arctic summer ice, proposing 2045 as the disappearance date.

Was he unhappy, reading of this man-made mess? Not at all. He had been content, a frowning serious man at work, not even thinking at that point of the lunch to come, marking significant passages or his professional dissent with pencil underlinings, arrows, balloons, while an oval window framed the azure stratosphere to his left, and ten kilometres below, the treeless north-German plain, flattened and smoothed by centuries of bloody battle, which yielded eventually to treeless Holland and its Mondrian fields. Also to his left, the southern sun, too high for clouds, sent its photon torrent to illuminate and elevate his labours. How could he ever give up gin?

But he was unhappy now at 4 a.m. on his oak and porcelain pedestal, hunched like Blake's Newton over his toes, too tired to sleep. This was alcohol's contribution to insomnia – he was parched, exhausted, alert. The usual bundle of congealed anxieties appeared before him in the gloom of the overheated bathroom. They were not all abstract concerns. Some were distinctly embodied: his weight, his heart, which he thought beat too irregularly these days, giddiness when he stood up, pains in his knees, his kidneys, his chest, the smothering tiredness that was always on or near him, a red blotch on the back of his hand that some months ago had turned purplish, the tinnitus that he could hear now, an airy, rushing sound which never left him, the pins-and-needles sensation in his left hand, also constant. He felt his symptoms as crimes. He should see a doctor and make a full confession. But he did not want to hear himself condemned.

Then, the squalid basement flat in Dorset Square, accusing him like an abandoned friend: when are you coming back? One oppressive detail was the piles or mounds of unopened mail. There were letters from Tom Aldous's father, who wanted to meet and reminisce about his son. What was Beard supposed to do? This was not the time to take on the burden of an elderly man's distress, of a father still grieving after five years. Then, the precariousness of the project. Would the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley finally open their hearts and bank accounts? Would John P. Hedley the Third, the rancher in New Mexico, change his mind before his proxy and Beard signed the papers in the US Embassy tomorrow? Could he make gases from water even more cheaply, and could he stop them recombining? Must the catalyst be an oxide? If he let his thoughts go towards this problem, he would never sleep. It was easier to think of Melissa's news. Could he have guessed she would be so devious? On this matter, the pregnancy, his three hours' sleep had conferred some certainty. He knew it in his gut, it could not happen, this child could not be, he would not permit it, this homunculus must retreat to the realm of pure thought. That he would talk her round he did not doubt. She cared what he thought of her. That she loved him more than he loved her was the unarguable source of his power.

It was at times like these that he thought of Tom Aldous. Gangling, big-boned, big-toothed Aldous with a head exploding with ideas, not all of them foolish. Poor Tom, long forgotten by the rest of the world. He, Beard, could almost blame himself. He should have hammered to the floor with two-inch nails that ridiculous rug from Patrice's side of the family. He should have opposed her when she insisted on polished boards. He should have objected to that ugly glass table on grounds of safety, not of taste. And though it was hardly his fault that Aldous was in the house when he had no business there, it would have saved his life if Beard had thrown him out right from the start, no mercy, sent him into the cold street in his dressing gown, in Beard's dressing gown, to find his way back to his uncle's place.

But, thought Beard, he must not be too hard on himself. He was the one who was keeping alive the spirit of that young man. Four years ago, in the rented basement flat he now irresponsibly owned, stretched out on the stinking sofa, which was still there, smelling no better, he had seen in ways that no one else could the true value of Tom's work, which in turn was built on Beard's, as his was on Einstein's. And since that time he had sweated, he had done and was still doing the hard work. He was securing the patents, assembling a consortium, he had progressed the lab work, involved some venture capital, and when it all came together, the world would be a better place. All Beard asked, beyond a reasonable return, was sole attribution. For what could precedence or originality mean to the dead? And details of surnames were hardly relevant when the issue was so urgent. In the only sense that mattered, the essence of Aldous would endure.

And what heroic times they had been, the first slow elucidation of the Aldous file, and then, in the evenings, watching from the same supine attitude the TV news, and the latest from the Old Bailey, and seeing his ex-wife-to-be speak up outside the court with trembling clarity and assume the mantle of media darling. As for Tarpin the Builder – that a man guilty of two crimes, fucking Patrice and blacking her eye, should go down for another of which he was innocent never troubled Beard much at all.

No one can predict which of life's vexations insomnia will favour. Even in daylight, in optimal conditions, one rarely exercises a free choice over what to fret about. What needled him now, hours before the winter dawn, as much as health, money, work, an imminent abortion, or an accidental death, was that lecturer, or professor, at the Savoy, Lemon, no, Mellon, with jutting beard and fixed stare, outrageously accusing him of being inauthentic, a fraud, a plagiariser. But Mellon was the real thief, appropriating Beard's genuine experience in order to reduce it to an item of academic interest, a case study in popular delusion, an infectious tidbit doing the rounds like a dirty joke. With the long and easy reach of sleeplessness, he saw his hand close round Mellon's throat and squeeze until he dropped to his knees to make his apology in gasps. Beard could be forceful, but he had never assaulted anyone, not even in childhood. In daydreams, however, he surprised his enemies with astonishing escalations of violence. Now, with a slight acceleration of his pulse, he felt refreshed, more awake than ever. He experienced a resurgence of optimism. His life, after all, had possibilities.

There was, for example, a scheme that fascinated him and he wanted his colleague, Toby Hammer, to take it seriously. Carbon-trading schemes would soon be in place in Europe and one day, perhaps, in the US. The idea was to dump many hundreds of tons of iron filings in the ocean, enriching the waters and encouraging the plankton to bloom. As it grew, it absorbed more carbon dioxide from the air. The precise amount could be calculated in order to claim carbon credits, which could be sold on through the scheme to heavy industry. If a coal-burning company bought enough, it could rightfully claim that its operations were carbon neutral. The idea was to get ahead of the competition before the European markets were fully established. Boats and iron filings needed to be sourced, the proper locations established, and all the legal footwork completed. Toby Hammer needed to get on the job. Some marine biologists, no doubt with secret plans of their own, had heard rumours of his scheme and had been arguing in the press that interfering with the base of the food chain was dangerous. They needed to be blasted out of the water with some sound science. Beard already had two pieces ready for publication, but it was important to hold back until the right moment.

Wrapped in scarlet robes, poised on his throne in the dead of night, he surveyed in princely fashion his recent existence. The iron-filing scheme reminded him of all that was purposeful and decent, and that he must not let himself be dragged down. He would acquire the four hundred acres in New Mexico. They were crossed by ancient power lines on rickety wooden poles, perfectly serviceable, and there was a reliable water source. One day, glass panels angled at the sun, packed with coiled transparent tubes, would cover the grasslands in a shining sea, making hydrogen and oxygen out of light and water for virtually nothing. Compressors would store the hydrogen in massive tanks. Oxygen and hydrogen would recombine to drive the fuel-cell generators. Night and day the plant would supply power to Lordsburg, and illuminate the neon of its tiny strip. Then, as capacity grew, the surrounding settlements would be included – Redrock, Virden, Cotton City and, finally, Silver City. The world would see and come running.

He stirred at last, gathered his dressing gown around him and made his way through the darkened sitting room, stepping over his own mess to get to the kitchen. There he stood in the gloom before the man-sized fridge, hesitating a moment before pulling on its two-foot-long handle. It opened invitingly with a soft sucking sound, like a kiss. The shelves were subtly lit and diverse, like a glass skyscraper at night, and there was much to consider. Between a radicchio lettuce and a jar of Melissa's homemade jam, in a white bowl covered with silver foil, were the remains of the chicken stew. In the freezer compartment was a half-litre of dark chocolate ice cream. It could thaw while he got started. He took a spoon from a drawer (it would do for both courses) and sat down to his meal, feeling, as he peeled the foil away, already restored.