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

Part Three

It surprised no one to learn that Michael Beard had been an only child, and he would have been the first to concede that he never quite got the hang of brotherly feeling. His mother, Angela, was an angular beauty who doted on him, and the medium of her love was food. She bottle-fed him with passion, surplus to demand. Some four decades before he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, he came top in the Cold Norton and District Baby Competition, birth-to-six-months class. In those harsh post-war years, ideals of infant beauty resided chiefly in fat, in Churchillian multiple chins, in dreams of an end to rationing and of the reign of plenty to come. Babies were exhibited and judged like prize marrows, and in 1947 four-month-old Michael, bloated and jolly, swept all before him.

However, it was unusual at a village fete for a middle-class woman, a stockbroker's wife, to abandon the cake and chutney stall and enter her child for such a gaudy event. She must have known he was bound to win, just as she later claimed to have always known that he would get a scholarship to Oxford. Once he was on solids, and for the rest of her life, she cooked for him with the same commitment with which she had held the bottle, sending herself in the mid nineteen sixties, despite her illness, on a 'cordon bleu' cookery course so that she might try new meals during his occasional visits home. Her husband, Henry, was a meat-and-two-veg man who despised garlic and the smell of olive oil. Early in the marriage, for reasons that remained private, she withdrew her love from him. She lived for her son and her legacy was clear: a fat man who restlessly craved the attentions of beautiful women who could cook.

Henry Beard was a lean sort, with drooping moustache and slicked-back brown hair, whose dark suits and brown tweeds seemed a cut too large, especially around the neck. He provided for his miniature family well and, in the fashion of the time, loved his son sternly and with little physical contact. Though he never embraced Michael, and rarely laid an affectionate hand on his shoulder, he supplied all the right kinds of present – Meccano and chemistry sets, build-it-yourself wireless, encyclopedias, model airplanes and books about military history, geology and the lives of great men. He had had a long war, serving as a junior officer in the infantry in Dunkirk, North Africa, Sicily and then, as a lieutenant colonel, in the D-Day landings, where he won a medal. He had arrived at the concentration camp of Belsen a week after it was liberated, and was stationed in Berlin for eight months after the war ended. Like many men of his generation, he did not speak about his experiences and relished the ordinariness of post-war life, its tranquil routines, its tidiness and rising material well-being, and above all its lack of danger, everything that was to appear stifling to those born in the first years of the peace.

In 1952, at the age of forty, when Michael was five years old, Henry Beard gave up his job in a merchant bank in the City and returned to his first love, which was the law. He became a partner in an old firm in nearby Chelmsford and stayed there for the rest of his working life. To celebrate a momentous change and his liberation from the daily commute to Liverpool Street, he bought himself a secondhand Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. This pale blue machine lasted him thirty-three years, until his death. From the vantage of adulthood and with some retrospective guilt, his son loved him for this grand gesture. But the life of a small-town solicitor, absorbed by matters of conveyancing and probate, settled on Henry Beard even greater tranquillity. At weekends he mostly cared for his roses, or his car, or golf with fellow Rotarians. He stolidly accepted his loveless marriage as the price he must pay for his gains.

It was about this time that Angela Beard began a series of affairs that stretched over eleven years. Young Michael registered no outward hostilities or silent tensions in the home, but then, he was neither observant nor sensitive, and was often in his room after school, building, reading, glueing, and later took up pornography and masturbation full-time, and then girls. Nor at the age of seventeen did he notice that his mother had retreated, exhausted, to the sanctuary of her marriage. He only heard of her adventures when she was dying of breast cancer in her early fifties. She seemed to want his forgiveness for ruining his childhood. By then he was nearing the end of his second year at Oxford and his head was full of maths and girlfriends, physics and drinking, and at first he could not take in what she was telling him. She lay propped up on pillows in her private room on the nineteenth floor of a tower-block hospital with views towards the industrialised salt marshes by Canvey Island and the south shore of the Thames. He was grown-up enough to know that it would have insulted her to say that he had noticed nothing. Or that she was apologising to the wrong person. Or that he could not imagine anyone over thirty having sex. He held her hand and squeezed it to signal his warm feelings and said there was nothing to forgive.

It was only after he had driven home, and had drunk three nightcap scotches with his father, then gone to his old room and lain on the bed fully dressed and considered what she had told him, that he grasped the extent of her achievement. Seventeen lovers in eleven years. Lieutenant Colonel Beard had had all the excitement and danger he could stand by the age of thirty-three. Angela had to have hers. Her lovers were her desert campaign against Rommel, her D-Day and her Berlin. Without them, she had told Michael from her hospital pillows, she would have hated herself and gone mad. But she hated herself anyway for what she thought she had done to her only child. He went back to the hospital the next day, and while she sweatily clung to his hand, told her that his childhood had been the happiest and most secure imaginable, that he had never felt neglected or doubted her love or eaten so well and that he was proud of what he called her appetite for life and hoped to inherit it. It was the first time he had given a speech. These half- and quarter-truths were the best words he had ever spoken. Six weeks later she was dead. Naturally, her love life was a closed subject between father and son, but for years afterwards Michael could not drive through Chelmsford or the surrounding villages without wondering whether this or that old fellow tottering along the pavement or slumped near a bus stop was one of the seventeen.

By the standards of the day, he was a precocious lad when he arrived at Oxford. He had already made love to two girls, he owned a car, a split-screen Morris Minor which he kept in a lock-up off the Cowley Road, and he had an allowance from his father that was far in excess of what other grammar-school boys received. He was clever, sociable, opinionated, unimpressed by, and even a little scornful of, boys from famous schools. He was one of those types, infuriating and indispensable, who was at the front of every queue, had tickets to key events in London, within days knew strategically important people and all kinds of shortcuts, social as well as topographic. He looked much older than eighteen, and was hard-working, organised, tidy, and actually owned and used a desk diary. People sought him out because he could repair radios and record players and kept a soldering iron in his room. For these services, of course, he never asked for money, but he had the knack of calling in favours.

Within weeks of settling in, he had a girlfriend, a 'bad' girl from Oxford High called Susan Doty. Other boys studying maths and physics tended to be closed, mousey types. Outside lab work and tutorials, Michael kept well clear of them, and he also avoided the arty sort of people – they intimidated him with literary references he did not understand. He preferred instead the engineers, who gave him access to the workshops, and the geographers, zoologists and anthropologists, especially the ones who had already done fieldwork in strange places. Beard knew many people but had no close friends. He was never exactly popular, but he was well known, talked about, useful to people and faintly despised.

At the end of his second year, while he was trying to accustom himself to the idea that his mother would soon die, Beard overheard someone in a pub refer to a student at Lady Margaret Hall called Maisie Farmer as a 'dirty girl'. The phrase was used approvingly, as though it were a well-established category of some clinical accuracy. Her bucolic name in this connection intrigued him. He thought of a generous strapping lass, manure-streaked, astride a tractor, and then did not think about her again. The term ended, he went home, his mother died and the summer was lost to grief and boredom, and numbing, inarticulate silences at home with his father. They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now. When he saw from the house his father at the bottom of the garden, examining the roses too closely, he was embarrassed, no, horrified, to realise from the tremors along his shoulders that he was weeping. It did not occur to Michael to go out to him. Knowing about his mother's lovers, and not knowing whether his father knew (he guessed he did not), was another impossible obstacle.

He returned to Oxford in September and took a third-floor room in Park Town, a down-at-heel mid-Victorian crescent arranged around a central garden. His walk to the physics buildings each day took him past the front gates of the dirty girl's college by the narrow passageway to University Parks. One morning, on impulse, he wandered in and established at the porter's lodge that a student with the name of Maisie Farmer indeed existed. He discovered later in the same week that she was in her third year, doing English, but he did not let that put him off. For a day or two he wondered about her, and then work and other matters took over and he forgot all about her again, and it was not until late October that a friend introduced him to her and another girl outside the Museum of Natural History.

She was not as he had imagined and at first he was disappointed. She was small, almost frail, intensely pretty, with dark eyes and scant eyebrows and a musical voice with a surprising accent, a hint of cockney, which was unusual in a woman at university in those days. When, in answer to her question, he told her what his subject was, her face went blank and soon she walked on with her friend. He bumped into her alone two days later and asked her to come for a drink and she said no, and said it immediately, before he had quite finished his sentence. It was a measure of Beard's self-confidence that he was surprised. But what did she see in front of her? A stout fellow with an accountant's look and an earnest manner, wearing a tie (in 1967!), with short hair side-parted and, the damning detail, a pen clipped into the breast pocket of his jacket. And he was studying science, a non-subject for fools. She said goodbye politely enough and went on her way, but Beard walked after her and asked if she was free the next day, or the day after that, or at the weekend. No, no, and no. Then he said brightly, 'How about ever?' and she laughed pleasantly, genuinely amused by his persistence, and seemed on the point of changing her mind. But she said, 'There's always never. Can you make never?' to which he replied, 'I'm not free,' and she laughed again and made a sweet little mock punch to his lapel with a child's-sized fist and walked off, leaving him with the impression that he still had a chance, that she had a sense of humour, that he might wear her down.

He did. He researched her. Someone told him she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. A third-year literature student in his college who owed him a favour (procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. He read Comus and was astounded by its silliness. He read through Lycidas, Samson Agonistes and Il Penseroso – stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He fared better with Paradise Lost and, like many before him, preferred Satan's party to God's. He, Beard that is, memorised passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He read a biography, and four essays he had been told were pivotal. The reading took him one long week. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of Paradise Lost. He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term's money on an eighteenth-century edition of Areopagitica. When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He repaired it with Sellotape.

Then, naturally enough, he bumped into her again, this time by the gates of her college, where he had been waiting for two and a half hours. He asked if he could at least walk with her across the Parks. She didn't say no. She was wearing an army-surplus greatcoat over a yellow cardigan and black pleated skirt and patent-leather shoes with strange silver buckles. She was even more beautiful than he had thought. As they went along he politely enquired about her work and she explained, as though to a village idiot, that she was writing about Milton, a well-known English poet of the seventeenth century. He asked her to be more precise about her essay. She was. He ventured an informed opinion. Surprised, she spoke at greater length. To elucidate some point of hers, he quoted the lines 'from morn / To noon he fell', and she breathily completed them, 'from noon to dewy eve'. Making sure to keep his tone tentative, he spoke of Milton's childhood, and then of the Civil War. There were things she did not know and was interested to learn. She knew little of the poet's life, and, amazingly, it seemed that it was not part of her studies, to consider the circumstances of his times. Beard steered her back onto familiar ground. They quoted more of their favourite lines. He asked her which scholars she had read. He had read some of them too, and gently proved it. He had glanced over a bibliography, and his conversation far outran his reading. She disliked Comus even more than he did, so he ventured a mild defence and allowed himself to be demolished.

Then he spoke of Areopagitica and its relevance to modern politics. At this she stopped on the path and asked significantly what a scientist was doing knowing so much about Milton, and he thought he had been rumbled. He pretended to be just a little insulted. All knowledge interested him, he said, the demarcations between subjects were mere conveniences, or historical accidents, or the inertia of tradition. To illustrate his point, he drew on scraps he had picked up from his anthropologist and zoologist friends. With a first touch of warmth in her voice, she began to ask him questions about himself, though she did not care to hear about physics. And where was he from? Essex, he said. But so was she! From Chingford! That was his lucky break and he seized his chance. He asked her to dinner. She said yes.

He was to count that misty, sunny November afternoon, along the Cherwell river by the Rainbow Bridge, as the point at which the first of his marriages began. Three days later he took her to dinner at the Randolph Hotel, and by then had completed another whole day of Milton. It was already clear that his own special study would be light, and he was naturally drawn to the poem of that name, and learned its last dozen lines by heart, and over the second bottle of wine talked to her of its pathos, a blind man lamenting what he would never see, then celebrating the redeeming power of the imagination. Over the starched tablecloth, wine glass in hand, he recited it to her, ending '…thou Celestial light / Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight'. At these lines he saw the tears well in Maisie's eyes, and reached under his chair to produce his gift, Areopagitica, bound in calf leather in 1738. She was stunned. A week later, illicitly in her room, to the sound of Sergeant Pepper playing on the Dansette record player he had repaired for her that afternoon with smoking soldering iron, they were lovers at last. The term 'dirty girl', with its suggestion that she was general property, was now obnoxious to him. Still, she was far bolder and wilder, more experimental and generous in love-making than any girl he had known. She also cooked a fine steak and kidney pie. He decided he was in love.

Going after Maisie was a relentless, highly organised pursuit, and it gave him great satisfaction, and it was a turning point in his development, for he knew that no third-year arts person, however bright, could have passed himself off, after a week's study, among the undergraduate mathematicians and physicists who were Beard's colleagues. The traffic was one-way. His Milton week made him suspect a monstrous bluff. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily in his course. That very week of the Randolph dinner, he had studied the Ricci scalar and finally understood its use in general relativity. At last he thought he could grasp these extraordinary equations. The Theory was no longer an abstraction, it was sensual, he could feel the way the seamless fabric of space-time might be warped by matter, and how this fabric influenced the movement of objects, how gravity was conjured by its curvature. He could spend half an hour staring at the handful of terms and subscripts of the crux of the field equations and understand why Einstein himself had spoken of its 'incomparable beauty' and why Max Born had said it was 'the greatest feat of human thinking about nature'.

This understanding was the mental equivalent of lifting very heavy weights – not possible at first attempt. He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to come to terms with some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected there was nothing they talked about there that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superiors, these lie-a-beds, and he had let them intimidate him. No longer. From the moment he won Maisie, he was intellectually free.

Many years later, Beard told this story and his conclusions to an English professor in Hong Kong who said, 'But Michael, you've missed the point. If you had seduced ninety girls with ninety poets, one a week in a course of three academic years, and remembered them all at the end, the poets, I mean, and synthesised your reading into some kind of aesthetic overview, then you would have earned yourself a degree in English literature. But don't pretend that it's easy.'

But it seemed so at the time, and he was far happier during his final year, and so was Maisie. She persuaded him to grow his hair, to wear jeans instead of flannels, and to stop repairing things. It wasn't cool. And they became cool, even though they were both rather short. He gave up Park Town and found a tiny flat in Jericho, where they set up together. Her friends, all literature and history students, became his. They were wittier than his other friends, and lazier of course, and had a developed sense of pleasure, as though they felt they were owed. He cultivated new opinions – on the distribution of wealth, Vietnam, the events in Paris, the coming revolution, and LSD, which he declared to be extremely important, though he refused to take it himself. When he heard himself sounding off, he was not at all convinced, and was amazed that no one took him for a fraud. He tried pot and disliked it intensely for the way it interfered with his memory. Despite the usual parties, with howling music and terrible wine in sodden paper cups, he and Maisie never stopped working. Summer came, and finals, and then, to their stupid surprise, it was all over and everyone dispersed.

They both got firsts. Michael was offered the place he wanted at the University of Sussex to do a PhD. They went to Brighton together and found a fine place to live from September, an old rectory in an outlying village on the Sussex Downs. The rent was beyond them and so, before returning to Oxford, they agreed to share with a couple studying theology who had newborn identical twins. The Chingford newspaper ran a story about the local working-class girl who 'soared to the heights', and it was from these heights, and to hold together their disintegrating milieu, that they decided to get married, not because it was the conventional thing to do, but precisely because it was the opposite, it was exotic, it was hilarious and camp and harmlessly old-fashioned, like the tasselled military uniforms the Beatles wore in promotional pictures for their sensational LP. For that reason, the couple did not invite or even inform their parents. They were married in the Oxford registry office, and got drunk on Port Meadow with a handful of friends who came for the day. Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Henry Beard, DSO, living alone in the old house at Cold Norton, did not learn of his son's marriage until after the divorce.

His son was thinking of that time now, forty-one years later, as he waited, jet-lagged at 5 p.m., in the circular bar of the Camino Real hotel in El Paso, Texas, for Toby Hammer to appear. The waitress came by again and Beard ordered another scotch and a second bowl of salted nuts. Under the high, stained-glass cupola, American and Mexican voices echoed and merged and he overheard no one's conversation. He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. And he was almost there now, here, in the dining room of the Randolph, in suit and tie, and the white shirt he had ineptly ironed himself. After a drink he could still bring back fragments of Milton's 'Light' – 'and ever-during dark / Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men' and something something 'and wisdom at one entrance quite shut out'. He used a poem to get a girl, and she was gone, two years dead from cancer of the liver, in fact. But he had never shaken off the poem. He was thinking how he never took Maisie to meet his father, and never invited the old man to stay at the handsome rectory in Sussex, just left him to his sorrow while the new age dawned and the arrogant, shameless, spoiled generation turned its backs on the fathers who fought the war, dismissing them for their short hair and tidy ways and indifference to rock and roll.

It took more than one drink to arouse guilt in Michael Beard. This was his third, or fourth. He had been waiting more than an hour. Outside in the streets it was forty-three degrees, in here it felt like minus ten. Only the drink kept him warm. He had made the journey and been in this bar many times in recent years. London to Dallas to El Paso, picking up at the airport the outsized SUV, the only kind of vehicle that could comfortably accommodate his bulk. Then recuperating here or meeting up with his associates before the three-hour drive west along the Mexican border to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Today, Hammer was coming in from San Francisco. Freak summer storms were delaying flights over the Rockies. Beard could have gone on without him, but he preferred to wait. He thought he might even stay the night and see Doctor Eugene Parks in the morning and hear the result of his tests. It was a superstition he could not banish, that a wise old American doctor like Parks could be counted on to deliver a clinical judgement with the proper neutrality of a disinterested foreigner, without the moral undertones, the hint of blame or poorly suppressed outrage Beard had come to expect from his medical countrymen. You may get dressed now, Professor Beard. I'm afraid we really must address your lifestyle. His lifestyle, he wanted to say as, humiliated, he struggled back into his underwear, was to bring to the world artificial photosynthesis on an industrial scale. If the world with its sclerotic credit markets would only let him.

His drink arrived, piled above the brim with ice cubes, squandered energy in convenient, transparent form, and a half-kilo of nuts on a trencher under a blanket of salt. It was not Doctor Parks's style, to reprimand his clients for the way they lived. And he was sympathetic to Beard's project, being an ardent believer in climate change, and having bought a piece of real estate in Newfoundland which, he was certain, would be capable of sustaining a vineyard within ten years. When the Texan summer temperatures regularly hit fifty centigrade, that would be the time to pack up and head north. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans, he told Beard, now buying up land in Canada.

As he transferred all but one of the ice cubes from his drink to his old glass, Beard saw the blemish on the back of his hand and stared at it, willing it to disappear. Three years ago there had been something there, and it had taken him a good while to go and have it diagnosed. It turned out to be a benign skin cancer, easily frozen off with liquid nitrogen. Nine months ago, it had come back and looked different, and he suspected he would not be so lucky this time. So he did nothing while it grew and darkened to a livid blotch with black edges. Generally, he remembered it when his spirits were low. Such cowardice and irrationality he would once have thought beyond him. Somewhere in Doctor Parks's office, in a file, was the truth in the form of a biopsy report. It could be collected tomorrow, or it could wait until he came back through this way. What would suit Beard best would be to go tomorrow for his general check-up and not be told, unless the result was good. In America, such things could be arranged.

He had promised to phone Darlene in Lordsburg but he did not feel like it now. On a raised platform in a corner of the bar, two men were settling themselves on chairs by a microphone. One began to tune an electric guitar whose jarring sound of bending microtones stirred a memory. Yes, the name of the married theology students he and Maisie had shared with was Gibson, Charlie and Amanda, and they were devout and intellectual, against the fashion of the time, and studied at an institute in Lewes. Their god, by way of mysterious love, or an urge to punish, had conferred on them two babies of a giant size and type who would easily have snatched the prize from Beard in '47, twins who never slept and rarely ceased their identical piercing wails, who set each other off if they ever failed to start up in step, and who jointly propelled a miasma through the elegant house, as penetrative as a curry on the stove, a prawn vindaloo, but rank like sea swamp, as though they were confined for reasons of religion to a diet of guano and mussels.

Young Beard, working in the bedroom on the early calculations that would lead him to his life's work, his life's free ride, stuffed wads of blotting paper in his ears and kept the windows open, even in midwinter. When he went down to make himself coffee, he would encounter the couple in the kitchen in some aspect of their private hell, dark-eyed and irritable from lack of sleep and mutual loathing as they divvied up their awful tasks, which included prayer and meditation. The generous hallway and living spaces of the Georgian rectory were rendered charmless by the hundred protruding metal-and-plastic tools and devices of modern childcare. Neither adult nor infant Gibsons expressed any pleasure in their own or each other's existence. Why would they? Beard privately swore to himself that he would never become a father.

And Maisie? She changed her mind about a PhD on Aphra Behn, she turned down a job in the university library and signed on instead for social-security benefit. In another century she would have been considered a woman of leisure, but in the twentieth she was 'active'. She read up on social theory, attended a group run by a collective of Californian women, and started up a 'workshop' herself, a new concept at the time, and though, in conventional terms, she no longer soared, her consciousness was raised and within a short time she confronted the blatant fact of patriarchy and her husband's role in a network of oppression that extended from the institutions that sustained him as a man, even though he could not acknowledge the fact, to the nuances of his small talk.

It was, as she said at the time, like stepping through a mirror. Everything looked different, and it was no longer possible to be innocently content, for her and, therefore, for him. Certain matters were settled after serious discussion. He was too much of a rationalist to think of many good reasons why he should not help out around the house. He believed that it bored him more than it did her, but he did not say so. And washing a few dishes was the least of it. There were profoundly entrenched attitudes that he needed to examine and change, there were unconscious assumptions of his own 'centrality', his alienation from his own feelings, his failure to listen, to hear, really hear, what she was saying, and to understand how the system that worked in his favour in both trivial and important ways always worked against her. One example was this: he could go to the village pub for a pleasant pint on his own, while she could not do so without being stared at by the locals and made to feel like a whore. There was his unexamined belief in the importance of his work, in his objectivity, and in rationality itself. He failed to grasp that knowing himself was a vital undertaking. There were other ways of knowing the world, women's ways, which he treated dismissively. Though he pretended not to be, he was squeamish about her menstrual blood, which was an insult to the core of her womanhood. Their lovemaking, blindly enacting postures of dominance and submission, was an imitation of rape and was fundamentally corrupt.

Months passed, and many evening sessions, during which Beard mostly listened, and in the pauses thought about work. At that time he was thinking about photons from a radically different angle. Then one night, he and Maisie were woken by the twins as usual, and lay side by side on their backs in the dark while she broke the news that she was leaving him. She had thought this through, and did not want an argument. There was a commune forming in the sodden hills of mid Wales and she intended to join it and did not think she would ever return. She knew, in ways he could never understand, that this must be her course now. There were issues of her self-realisation, her past and her identity as a woman that she felt bound to examine. It was her duty. At this point, Beard felt himself overtaken by a powerful and unfamiliar emotion that tightened his throat and forced from his chest a sob he was powerless to contain. It was a sound that surely all the Gibsons heard through the wall. It could easily have been confused for a shout. What he experienced was a compound of joy and relief, followed by a floating, expansive sensation of lightness, as if he was about to drift free of the sheets and bump against the ceiling. Suddenly, it was all before him, the prospect of freedom, of working whenever he wanted, of inviting home some of the women he had seen on the Falmer campus, lolling on the steps outside the library, of returning to his unexamined self and being guiltlessly shot of Maisie. All this caused a tear of gratitude to roll down his cheek. He also felt fierce impatience for her to be gone. It crossed his mind to offer to drive her to the station now, but there were no trains from Lewes at 3 a.m., and she had not packed. Hearing his sob, she had reached for the bedside light and, leaning over to look into his face, she saw the dampness around his eyes. Firmly and deliberately she whispered, 'I will not be blackmailed, Michael. I will not, repeat not, be emotionally manipulated by you into staying.'

It was a mercy the bar was so large. The two men were singing loudly in unison a comic song in Spanish and there was much laughter each time the chorus came round. For all his time in this corner of the United States, Beard did not understand a word. He raised his hand for another drink and it was with him almost immediately and he was digging it out from under the rubble of ice. Was ever a marriage dissolved so painlessly? Within a week she had left for the hill farm in Powys. In the course of a year they exchanged a couple of postcards. Then one came from an ashram in India, where she remained for three years and from where she sent one day her cheery acceptance of a divorce, all papers duly signed. He did not see her until his twenty-sixth birthday, at which she appeared with a shaved head and a jewel in her nose. Many years later he spoke at her funeral. Perhaps it was the ease of their parting in the old rectory that made him so incautious about marrying again, and again.

With some difficulty, he got to his feet and made his way across the rotunda bar towards the lavatory. By local standards, which were high, he was not an exceptionally fat man. Even now he could see a couple who easily outranked him, a man and a woman obliged by their shape to perch on the edge of their armchairs. But Beard was a fat man just the same, and his knees hurt and he felt dizzy from having stood too quickly. As he crossed the lobby, one of the clerks came out from behind the reception desk and hurried after him.

'Excuse me, Mr Beard, sir? I thought it was you. Welcome to the Camino Real? There was a gentleman looking for you?'

'Mr Hammer?'

'No. It was about a week ago? From England? But he didn't leave a message?'

'What did he look like?'

'I guess, kind of large? And said his name was something like Turnip?'

They would have continued with their questions, but at that moment Beard saw Hammer coming through the glass entrance doors, preceded by the porter with a luggage trolley. As the two men embraced, the clerk moved away with a self-effacing grimace and Beard nodded thanks in his direction.

'Toby!'

'Chief!'

Ever since Hammer learned that this was what Beard was once called, he had taken it up, in an ironic way. Others on the project had adopted it too and Beard, of course, was pleased. It almost made up for having been sacked from the Centre.

He was three years older than Beard, and was lean and strong and had the straight back, the clarity of eyes and skin of a man who had not touched a drink in twenty years. Although he walked bandy-legged, like a saddle-weary cowboy, he still played squash and backpacked alone in the High Sierras. Or he said he did. After time in his company, Beard often put himself on a diet that lasted many hours. Hammer's background was in electronics, but in the early eighties he decided to become a drunk and wreck his marriage and drive all his friends away in the customary manner. Once he was through his recovery and had got everyone back, including his wife and children, he began to develop work that had no clear job description. He knew people and introduced them, and fixed up deals. He introduced Beard to the tax-break lawyers and accountants who knew the state legislature, the go-betweens in Washington who patrolled the vast and vague territory between commerce and politics, and people who had a line to the grant-givers of the big foundations, the venture-capital types who knew people who knew friends of men like Vinod Khosla and Shai Agassi. Hammer steered Beard's patent applications through, secured the lease on the land near Lordsburg with a right to buy, learned to find his way around the solar fraternity and knew the engineers and the materials specialists. He had even squeezed money out of the Bush people in their dying days and, recently, far more from the bounty of Obama.

But Hammer could not protect the project from delay, and progressive shrinkage and, at times, near-complete collapse. There was compromise at every stage. The site in Lordsburg was a fourth choice in the American South-West. There were more sunshine hours per year in parts of Arizona and Nevada, but competition from the big utilities had pushed up prices. Other locations had no water, or no good road or nearby connection to the grid, nor such a friendly local Chamber of Commerce. The company he and Beard and others formed had been forced to reconstitute three times over to qualify for tax breaks. Homeland Security were suspicious of Beard's alien status, and letters from prominent American science academies made little difference in the Bush years. Money was hard, even in the good times. Among the venture capitalists who cared about solar, the consensus was that the two best bets were on the tried and tested routes, solar thermal – focusing the sun's heat to make steam to drive turbines – or photovoltaics – generating current directly from sunlight – and in both cases, concentrating the light with magnifying lenses. Reliable and cheap artificial photosynthesis was twenty years away, was the general view.

To disprove it, in early 2007 Beard mounted a demonstration to potential backers in a parking lot outside a lab in Oakland, California. The idea was that in full sunshine a large bottle of water would be split into its constituent gases, which would cause a fuel-cell generator to power an electric jack-hammer with which a man in a green hardhat would destroy a wall which bore the graffito 'oil'. But certain vital parts failed to be delivered, the meeting was postponed for a month, and then only half of the investors showed up and the project got one third of the money and shrank a good deal more.

The technical difficulties grew as the money declined. Tom Aldous had been correct in his general assumptions, and wrong in certain particulars, though Beard could hardly complain now that he owned seventeen patents. For a long time the little lab model that split water in 2005 could not be scaled up or made to work faster. The light-sensitive dyes that drove the process had to be reconsidered. The catalyst was not derived from manganese, but from a compound of cobalt, and another from ruthenium. Choosing and testing the right porous membrane to divide hydrogen from oxygen should have been easy but was not. The time came at last to design and build the prototype that one day would be mass-produced. An outfit near Paris was chosen. The panel, the glorious achievement, was two metres square and cost three million dollars. It was sent away for testing at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and was found to be underperforming by three hundred per cent, and flawed in both design and construction.

They started again with a Chinese company sixty miles from Beijing. The tubes containing the light-harvesting semiconductor, the aqueous electrolytes and the membrane were of plexiglas on top, with a base of conducting stainless steel. The panel that housed the tubes was three metres by two, and each unit cost four million dollars. Once in mass-production, they would cost ten thousand dollars, so the business plan said. According to the lab at Golden, the new panel worked. By then, the world was in recession. Many promises made to Hammer were broken. The option on the land, renewed three times already, was expiring. Toby renegotiated and instead of the four hundred acres, bought twenty-five, right by the water source. There were now two small gas-storage tanks instead of eight giants, only one compressor for the hydrogen, one generator instead of five, and, worst of all, because they were the core and symbol of the project, a mere twenty-three panels tilted skywards instead of one hundred and twenty-five.

But they were finally in place, and the day after tomorrow a new chapter would begin in the history of industrial civilisation, and the earth's future would be assured. The sun would shine on an empty patch of land in the boot heel of south-west New Mexico, strike the plexiglas tubes and split water, the storage tanks would fill with gas, the fuel-cell generator would turn and electricity would be ready to flow to the town in front of friends from Lordsburg, representatives of the national media, people from the power companies, colleagues from Golden and MIT, Caltech and the Lawrence Berkeley labs, as well as a few entrepreneurs from the Stanford area. A press pack, including a special glossy brochure, would be available. All this had been arranged by Hammer and his team. Under a vast marquee that he swore he had got for free from NASA, they would drink champagne, give interviews and talk about contracts. At a given signal, the Nobel laureate would throw a switch and the new era would commence.

Now, in the bright expanse of the hotel's lobby, Hammer gave an account of his trying journey from San Francisco, of a terrifying air pocket that dropped the plane two thousand feet, his neighbour's panic attack, of an inedible sandwich, until Beard's bladder could stand no more and he excused himself. When he came back he found his friend sitting in reception, rattling emails on his laptop.

'Scientific American are coming,' he said, without breaking stride. 'And that thin guy from the New York Times.'

'This had better work,' Beard said. The electric jackhammer had thrown a long shadow.

'Some local business has put together a giant neon sign that says Lordsburg, exclamation mark. They want to situate it a quarter-mile from us, and have it light up when we turn on.'

'As long as they supply the quarter-mile of cable.'

Hammer put his laptop away. He looked weary, even a little depressed. 'They want it on all night. And the Chamber of Commerce has lined up an army marching band from outside Las Cruces.'

'I thought we were having a girl country group.'

'In New Mexico, or this part of it, you have to have the army first. We also have a fly-past from the air-force base. The girls will play later, and of course, we'll be powering their amps.' In what looked like an effort to appear cheerful, he punched Beard's arm. 'Sunlight, water and money make electricity makes more money! My friend. It's going to happen.'

They agreed to have an early dinner and to stay the night and leave straight after Beard had seen his doctor.

'But listen, Chief,' Hammer said as they took their places in the deserted dining room. 'Don't let him make you ill. This is not the time.'

'That's my worry too. A diagnosis is a kind of modern curse. If you didn't go and see these people, you wouldn't get whatever it is they want you to have.'

With wine and water they raised a toast to magical thinking, then they continued a conversation they had been having by email for some months. To an eavesdropper it would have sounded like the essence of commercial tedium, but to the two men it was a matter of urgency. How many orders for panels were necessary to bring the unit cost down to the point at which they could feasibly claim that a mediumsized artificial-photosynthesis plant could generate electricity as cheaply as coal? The energy market was highly conservative. There was no premium for being virtuous, for not screwing up the climate system. Orders for seven thousand panels, this was their best calculation. Much would depend on whether they could reliably power Lordsburg and its environs night and day for a year, through all kinds of weather. And it also depended on the Chinese, how fast they could move, and how plausibly they could be threatened by the prospect of losing the business. In that respect, the recession helped, but it would also depress demand for panels, if not for energy. They went round this topic a few times, quoting figures, plucking others from the air, then Hammer leaned forward and said confidentially, as though the sole waiter on the far side of the restaurant might hear him, 'But, Chief, you can be straight with me. Tell me. Is it true, the planet's getting cooler?'

'What?'

'You keep telling me the arguments are over, but they're not. I'm hearing it everywhere. Last week some woman professor of atmosphere studies or something was saying so on public television.'

'Whoever she says she is, she's wrong.'

'And I'm hearing it everywhere from business people. It seems like it's building. They're saying the scientists have gotten it wrong but don't dare to admit it. Too many careers and reputations on the line.'

'What's their evidence?'

'They're saying a point-seven-degree rise since pre-industrial times, that's two hundred and fifty years, is negligible, well within usual fluctuations. And the last ten years have been below the average. We've had some bad winters here – that doesn't help our cause. And they're also saying that too many people are going to get rich on the Obama handouts and tax breaks to want to tell the truth. Then there are all these scientists, including the one I was talking about, who've signed up to the Senate Minority Report on Climate Change – you must have seen that stuff.'

Beard hesitated, then called for more wine. That was the trouble with some of these Californian reds, they were so smoothly accessible, they went down like lemonade. But they were sixteen per cent alcohol. He could not help feeling that this conversation was beneath him. It wearied him, like talking about or against religion, or crop circles and UFOs for that matter. He said, 'It's zero point eight now, it's not negligible in climate terms, and most of it has happened in the last thirty years. And ten years is not enough to establish a trend. You need at least twenty-five. Some years are hotter, some are cooler than the year before, and if you drew a graph of average yearly temperatures it would be a zigzag, but a rising zigzag. When you take an exceptionally hot year as your starting point, you can easily show a decline, at least for a few years. That's an old trick, called framing, or cherry-picking. As for these scientists who signed some contrarian document, they're in a minority of a thousand to one, Toby. Ornithologists, epidemiologists, oceanographers and glaciologists, salmon fishermen and ski-lift operators, the consensus is overwhelming. Some weak-brained journalists write against it because they think it's a sign of independent thinking. And there's plenty of attention out there for a professor who'll speak against it. There are bad scientists, just like there are rotten singers and terrible cooks.'

Hammer looked sceptical. 'If the place isn't hotting up, we're fucked.'

As he refilled his glass, Beard thought how strange it was, that after being associates for all these years, they had rarely discussed the larger issue. They had always concentrated on the business, the matter in hand. Beard also noticed that he himself was close to being drunk.

'Here's the good news. The UN estimates that already a third of a million people a year are dying from climate change. Bangladesh is going down because the oceans are warming and expanding and rising. There's drought in the Amazonian rainforest. Methane is pouring out of the Siberian permafrost. There's a meltdown under the Greenland ice sheet that no one really wants to talk about. Amateur yachtsmen have been sailing the North-West Passage. Two years ago we lost forty per cent of the Arctic summer ice. Now the eastern Antarctic is going. The future has arrived, Toby.'

'Yeah,' Hammer said. 'I guess.'

'You're not convinced. Here's the worst case. Suppose the near impossible – the thousand are wrong and the one is right, the data are all skewed, there's no warming. It's a mass delusion among scientists, or a plot. Then we still have the old stand-bys. Energy security, air pollution, peak oil.'

'No one's going to buy a fancy panel from us just because the oil's going to run out in thirty years.'

'What's wrong with you? Trouble at home?'

'Nothing like that. Just that I put in all this work, then guys in white coats come on TV to say the planet's not heating. I get spooked.'

Beard laid a hand on his friend's arm, a sure sign that he was well over his limit. 'Toby, listen. It's a catastrophe. Relax!'

By nine thirty, the two men, exhausted by travel, were ready for their beds and went up in the elevator together. Beard's floor was first. He said goodnight to Hammer, then set off with his luggage down many long corridors at right angles, murmuring to himself his room number to keep it fresh in his mind, and stopping occasionally to bend, swaying, in front of wall plaques with designations like '309-331', while his own, 399, was not mentioned or implied anywhere. So he kept going, eventually arriving from a different direction back by the elevator, or one like it, with a similar brown apple core reclining in a sand-filled ashtray. With a welling sense of victimhood he set off again, eventually passing the elevator once more. He was well into his third circuit before he understood that he was holding the room card upside down and his destination was 663, on another floor. He rode up, found his room, dumped his luggage just inside the door and made for the minibar, from which he took a brandy and an outsized bar of chocolate and sat with them on the edge of his bed.

It was, fortunately, far too late to phone Melissa, and too early to phone Darlene, who would be at work. All he had the strength for was the remote. Before it came on, the TV set gave out a homely, muffled crackling sound of warming electronics, as kindly and familiar as a mother's kiss. But not his mother's. He was tired and drunk and all he could do was surf. Here were the usual, unsurprising things – game and chat shows, tennis, cartoons, a congressional committee, moronic ads. Two women to whom he would at that moment have entrusted his life spoke to each other about their husbands' Alzheimer's. A young couple exchanged a meaningful look that provoked a gust of cackling from a studio audience. Someone said, as though in protest, that President Obama was still a saint, still loved. These days Beard described himself as a 'lifelong Democrat'. He often spoke at climate-change events of the fateful moment in 2000, when the earth's fate hung in the balance, and Bush snatched victory from Gore to preside over the tragedy of eight wasted years. But Beard had long ago lost interest in the plenitude and strangeness of America as represented by its television. They had hundreds of channels in Romania now, and everywhere else on the planet. Besides which, if it was on TV, it was no longer strange. But he was too tired to lift his thumb from the channel-up button, and for forty minutes he sat in a stupor with an empty glass and empty wrapper on his lap, then he made himself comfortable on the cushions behind him and fell asleep.

Ninety minutes later he was disturbed by the ring of his palmtop, and came properly awake with it already pressed to his ear as he listened to the voice of the girl whose existence he had done all he decently could to suppress. But here she was, Catriona Beard, as irrepressible as a banned book.

'Daddy,' she said solemnly. 'What are you doing?'

It was six o'clock on Sunday morning in England. She would have been woken by the early light and gone straight from her bed to the sitting-room telephone and pressed the first button on the left.

'Darling, I'm working,' he said with equal solemnity. He could easily have told her he was sleeping, but he seemed to need a lie to accommodate the guilt he immediately felt at the sound of her. Many conversations with his three-year-old daughter reminded him of dealings over the years with various women in the course of which he had explained himself implausibly, or backtracked or found excuses, and had been seen through.

'You're in bed because your voice is croaky.'

'I'm reading in bed. And what are you doing? What can you see?'

He heard her sharp intake of breath and the sucking sound of clean tongue on milk teeth as she considered which part of her newly acquired net of language to cast about her. She would be by or on the sofa which faced the large bright window and a cherry tree in leaf, she would see the bowl of heavy stones which always interested her, the Moore maquette, the neutral colours of the sunlit walls, the long straight lines of oak boards.

Finally she said, 'Why don't you come in my house?'

'Dearest, I'm thousands of miles away.'

'If you can go you can come.'

The logic of this made him pause, and he was beginning to tell her that he would see her soon when she cut across him with a cheerful thought. 'I'm going in Mummy's bed now. Bye.' The line went dead.

Beard rolled onto his back and closed his eyes and tried to imagine the world from his daughter's point of view. Of time, time zones and physical distance she had as yet no proper conception, and she lived with a machine whose wondrous properties she took for granted. At the press of a button she could speak to her disembodied father, as though at a s̩ance to a spirit of the dead, a ghost on the other side. Sometimes she could summon him in person, mostly she failed. When he did show up, he always brought a gift, clumsily chosen in an airport, often inappropriate Рa pack of twelve rainbow T-shirts that were too small, a soft toy she thought too babyish but was too kind to say, an electronic game she did not understand, a box of chocolate liqueurs he was obliged to eat himself in one go. Melissa tried to talk him out of bringing presents Р'It's you she wants' Рbut Beard's lifelong habit of mollifying girls with surprises buried in wrapping paper was impossible to break. Without a present, he arrived naked, exposed to raw, unpredictable demands, unable to make amends for his absence, required to exert himself in an uncomfortable personal dimension, obliged to engage.

Even at the age of three, Catriona was the kind of person who felt on opening a gift a responsibility towards the feelings of the giver. How could a consciousness so new be so finely attuned? She did not want her father disappointed in her pleasure. The T-shirts, so she reassured him, were not wasted, for one day they would be useful to her baby brother, a tender being whose arrival she anticipated with eerie confidence. She was an intimate, sociable girl of near-unbearable sensitivity. She might hear in a chance remark an inflection, a raised tone, that she took to be a criticism or a reprimand and she would be horrified, and tearful, and then, quite often, she would be sobbing, and not easily reassured. Sometimes, it seemed, she experienced another mind as a tangible force field, whose waves were overwhelming, like Atlantic breakers. This awareness of others was an affliction and a gift. She was bright and confiding, funny and astute, but her emotional delicacy made her vulnerable, and made her father uneasy. Once, some harmless remark of his, some mild expression of impatience, had caused her great unhappiness and brought her mother hurrying into the room to gather the child in her arms. He did not enjoy being made to seem a cad, nor did it suit him, it was constraining, to be sensitive all day long.

Would he have been better off with a bullet-headed, shin-kicking son? Probably not. What bound him to her – at least, as far as he could be bound to anyone – was her insistence, her unconditional, uncritical love. For Catriona, it was simple. He was her father and she claimed him for herself. She understood that his job was to save the world, and since the world was her mother, Primrose Hill, the dance shop and her playgroup, she was fiercely proud. What use Melissa saying that the father did not need to be involved? Catriona would not permit him to defect. She did not care or even notice that he was fat and short and was not very nice and was growing a triple chin, she loved him, and she owned him. She knew her rights. That was another reason why he felt guilt, and brought her presents to distract her from throwing herself at his stomach as he came through the door, and climbing onto his lap and whispering a little girl's secrets in his ear the moment he had sat down after a tiring journey. Like his own father, Beard did not find it easy to be physically affectionate with a child. Like her mother, Catriona was prepared to love unequally, and did not notice his reticence.

In all, he was an irresolute parent and lover, neither committing to nor decently abandoning his family. He clung from habit to a youthful notion of independence that was unusual in a man of almost sixty-two. On arriving back in London he often stayed in the Dorset Square flat, at least for the first two or three nights, until its grime and multiple defects drove him out. Yellowish-grey mushrooms were flourishing along a line where the wall met the ceiling in the kitchen. A gutter outside, which in theory belonged to a neighbour, had cracked and rainwater was penetrating the brickwork. But Beard did not want to confront the belligerent, partially deaf man upstairs, and he did not want to initiate the hacking and plastering, noise and intrusion of a thorough repair. In the hallway the light always failed, however often he changed the bulb. As soon as he turned the switch it popped. In his bathroom upstairs the cold water had long ago run dry. To shave, he ran the hot slowly, and became adept at finishing before the water scalded him. To take a bath it was necessary to fill the tub and let the water cool for an hour or so. These and other small problems required deep attention, and so he preferred to improvise. A large vase collected raindrops in the spare bedroom, an iron foot scraper held the fridge door closed, a frayed and curling length of grubby string substituted for a chain on the ancient lavatory cistern.

But there were no accommodations to be made with the matted, sticky carpets, unvacuumed since his last cleaning lady departed six years back. Nor with the piles of unsorted papers, letters, junk mail and periodicals, the boxes of empty bottles, the odorous sofa, or the grime that seemed to have caked the very air as well as every surface and all the plates and cups and bed linen. He used to tell himself that although the flat was scruffy, it was an office of a sort, it was where he had cracked Tom Aldous's file and reinvigorated his life. At Primrose Hill Melissa and Catriona liked talking to him, whereas here he could sprawl in the lap of squalor and read undisturbed. But that was not always the case now because his ankles itched. The fleas were moving in. There was so much to do to make the place tolerable that no single task seemed worth the trouble. Why refurbish it, why even carry out the dusty scotch and gin bottles and gather up the corpses of flies and spiders when he might, after all, move in with Melissa?

And this hovel, many years back, after he left Patrice, was supposed to be a stopover on his path to the austere and well-lit refuge, as innocently clean as Eden, purged of clutter and distraction, where a free and open mind could range unimpeded. Everywhere he looked in his apartment, made gloomier by unwashed windows, reflected some aspect of himself, his worst, fattest self, incapable of translating a decent plan into a course of action. At any point in the present, there was always something he would far rather do – read, drink, eat, talk on the phone, drift through the internet – than contact an electrician or plumber or a house-cleaning agency, or sort through the three-foot-high paper piles, or answer one of the letters from Tom Aldous's father. It was the same inertia that had forced Beard to stay on an extra year in Dorset Square, the same laziness that had prompted the purchase from the landlord.

When he could stand no more, of himself, of the place, of himself in the place, he retreated north-westwards to the embraces of his lover and their daughter. Cleaned and ironed clothes were waiting for him in Primrose Hill, and a functioning shower and a meal, and two girls who took it in turns to tell him their news and tease him harmlessly about his girth – the Expanding Universe, Melissa named it – and make him relate his adventures in the American desert in his quest to rescue humankind from self-destruction. He would read to Catriona in bed and she would be so awed by the occasion, by the fact it was not her mother but her father intoning, that she lay on her back in a kind of swoon, gripping the duvet beneath her chin, and barely paid attention. Fighting tiredness, she gazed up with contented and possessive love at the bulk of her father sagging over the tiny Beatrix Potter book in his hands. He was all hers. At that time these were the only tales she cared to hear, but Beard was not the man for Potter's dystopia of hedgehogs with ironing boards and rabbits in breeches, and he too struggled to stay awake, and sometimes, mid-sentence, his head would snap forward, and then he would come to and re-engage with affectless voice in the matter, say, of a stolen carrot.

Beard in his Texan hotel room, still on his back with the palmtop in his hand, was thirsty but too weary to raise himself and find a bottle of water. All those miles in the air, all those scotches, and twenty-four hours without sleep were pressing him down into his America-sized bed. He felt waves of virtual movement passing through his back and legs, his body's memory of riding all day the undulations of the stratosphere at three quarters the speed of sound. In this state he was completely without desire but, all the same, he was thinking of Melissa. How did things stand? Generally, after the bedtime story, he would be alone with her at last. At last? These days, he no longer experienced such sharp impatience and urgency, and that was fine, he could concentrate on the food and on hearing about the dance shops. The recession made people feel less like dancing. She was a clever businesswoman, keeping all three shops open by cutting lines, reducing hours but sacking no one. Balletic little girls, in tune with the times, had discovered a taste for black, and middle-aged men no longer tangoed in such numbers, but their wives dropped by for cowboy hats to wear to the line-dancing, which was both unfashionable and popular. Another unexpected boost had been the reality-TV dance contests.

Such talk was soothing, especially in the past frantic weeks, as the on-stream moment for the Lordsburg plant approached. As she chatted he watched her and was certain that in her own, full, rich way, she was as beautiful as ever, and happier than he had ever known her. Motherhood came easily to her. She was warm and relaxed with Catriona, not doting or possessive as she could have been with an only child born three months past her fortieth birthday. Her happiness exceeded anything he had known in his own life, and he thought it had removed her from him partially, placed around her a protective casing that she knew he would never bother to penetrate. She had something magnificent now, a private joy that she thought was not worth the trouble communicating, because he would not understand. She was always pleased to see him, she made love with him as heartily as ever, she encouraged him with Catriona, she even found time to iron his shirts. He gave twenty-five thousand pounds a year to the household, and that was declared more than sufficient. But he suspected that Melissa would have been fine without his money and was just as happy when he was not there.

In effect, she was keeping to the promise she had made many times while they were wrangling over her pregnancy. She would ignore his arguments for an abortion, and in return, she would make no demands. And for his part? He would never have guessed how faithful to himself, how constant he could be. He had made friends with a woman in Lordsburg, a waitress called Darlene, who lived in a trailer on the south side, on the road out to the ghost town of Shakespeare. Darlene was not exactly beautiful, not remotely in Melissa's class, but nor was Beard much to look at now that he waddled a little when he walked and had developed these supplementary chins, the lowest of which hung like turkey wattle and wobbled when he shook his head. When he asked women he did not know out to dinner, they laughed before they said no.

The point about Darlene was that she said yes, and she was good-natured and funny and liked to drink with him. On his last trip to Lordsburg they had got drunk together in the trailer and in a wild moment he had agreed to marry her. But it was while they were making love, it was rhetorical, a mere expression of excitement. The following night, to avoid the scene that would surely accompany his retraction, he got drunk with her all over again, this time in a bar on the north side of town, and he had almost proposed to her a second time. All this meant was that he was fond of her. She was good company, she was a sport, a trouper. But she was currently adding to the general untidiness of his life by wanting to come to England.

The surprise was this: his existence since Catriona's birth was much as before. His friends had told him he would be astonished, he would be transformed, his values would change. But nothing was transformed. Catriona was fine, but it was the same old mess. And now that he had entered upon the final active stages of his life, he was beginning to understand that, barring accidents, life did not change. He had been deluded. He had always assumed that a time would come in adulthood, a kind of plateau, when he would have learned all the tricks of managing, of simply being. All mail and emails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves, clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes and all his stuff where he could find it, with the past, including its letters and photographs, sorted into boxes and files, the private life settled and serene, accommodation and finances likewise. In all these years this settlement, the calm plateau, never appeared, and yet he had continued to assume, without reflecting on the matter, that it was just around the next turn, when he would exert himself and reach it, that moment when his life became clear and his mind free, when his grown-up existence could properly begin. But not long after Catriona's birth, about the time he met Darlene, he thought he saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered emails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply, and lovers he had not owned up to. Oblivion, the last word in organisation, would be his only consolation.

His final night in London, a mere thirty hours ago, should have been the ripe time when he was reconciled in joy with his tiny family. Few men could have resisted it, and Vasco da Gama himself could not have been unhappy with such a send-off. And at the beginning Beard was happy. Melissa put on an exceptional show. Even Catriona understood that he was going to America to switch something on, and when he did, the world would be saved. She and her mother, dressed in party frocks, prepared a special early-evening meal, the centrepiece of which was a ball moulded by Catriona's own hands, covered in blue icing with green patches. This was the earth, and on top was a candle, which he blew out in one go, to the little girl's rapture. Melissa and Catriona sang a song about ducklings, Beard sang the first few verses of 'Ten Green Bottles', the only song he knew all the words to. His daughter's arms were round his neck for most of the celebrations. Wasn't this bliss? Almost. He had forgotten to turn his palmtop off, and Darlene rang as Melissa was cutting the cake. Automatically, he took the call and said a little too tersely over her opening remark, 'I'll call you back.' He knew that Melissa had heard a woman's voice and the tension in his own, but nothing in her manner changed, there was no clever presentation of suppressed anger that Catriona would not see and he would. She met his eye, she smiled at him warmly, she poured his wine, she celebrated him.

When Catriona was down for the night and they were alone, he poured himself an extra large scotch and braced himself for a scene. It must come, they should confront it. But she kicked her shoes off and sat close to him and kissed him and told him she would miss him. They talked of other things, of travel arrangements, of his return, and all the while his irritation increased. She was playing with him, she was letting him stew in his guilt. But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why. He was not bound to her exclusively, their arrangement was clear. And she was wrong, he decided, to mask her jealousy with kindness and seduction. She poured him another scotch, she moved closer, nuzzled him, put her tongue in his ear, laid her hand between his legs, caressed him, kissed him again. It was an intolerable deceit. She could feel that he was not aroused. How could she pretend she had not heard Darlene's voice, when she knew that he knew that she had?

And then, while she was telling him an unamusing story about something Catriona had said or done, it came to him, an idea as brilliant and plain as any insight he had ever had. She was not jealous at all, she was untouched, she was indifferent. And for that there could be only one explanation.

He pulled away from her and said as levelly as he could, 'Are you seeing someone?'

It was a move born of his silent anger. But another part of himself, the part that had not touched a drink, did not suspect her at all. His question was more of a punishment, and he reasonably expected her instant denial.

In fact, she was affronted. Her lips formed into the pout he found so likeable, before she said in surprise, 'Aren't you? Michael, of course I am.'

Oh yes, that. The tired old argument from equivalence. The level playing field. Rationality gone nuts, feminism's last stupid gasp.

After a pause while he ordered his thoughts, he said, 'What is his name?'

She looked away and said, 'Terry.'

'Terry?' He spoke in disbelief. All that was foolish in her was contained in this idiotic name. 'And what does Terry do?'

She sighed. It had to come out. 'He's a conductor.'

'On the buses?'

'Orchestras, symphonies. You know, classical stuff.'

But she hated classical music as much as he did, no rhythm, she always said, not hot-blooded enough, not Tobagan and Venezuelan enough for her. She was sitting at the far end of the sofa, looking as if she wished she had lied.

He said, 'And has Terry met Catriona?'

This made her angry. In a tone of mocking sweetness she said, 'That's enough about me. Let's talk about you. That was her on the phone, I suppose. What's her name, and what does she do?'

He waved the question away. He was not prepared to set his waitress against her symphonic conductor. 'Look, Melissa, there's something you're not getting. You're the mother of our child…'

'Oh for God's sake, Michael. And you're the father of our et cetera. I can't believe the crap you talk sometimes. And look…'

She seemed on the point of telling him something else, but just then, Catriona wailed from the bedroom and Melissa hurried away to her. When she came back he was standing on the far side of the room, near his luggage.

'That's right,' she said. 'Go. Fuck off. I'm throwing you out.'

'No need,' he said, and picked up his bag and left.

She phoned him in the morning when he was at Heathrow to tell him she loved him. He told her that he was sorry the evening had ended the way it had and blamed himself. They spoke again when he arrived in Dallas and made up a little more. When he thought about it now he was in two minds. He was angry and jealous and wanted to claim Melissa for himself and stuff Terry's baton down his throat. On the other hand, this Terry was his permission, his passport to more fun with good old Darlene. How much fun of this kind did he have ahead of him? And perhaps this was the point – he had the perfect situation after all. But then he thought of this man in Melissa's bed, or reading Beatrix Potter to his daughter, and he realised that he must give up Darlene and get back to London as soon as he could. But then, what about Darlene? Hopeless, to think about it now when he was so weary, when being in Lordsburg tomorrow would clarify everything.

He fell asleep fully dressed on the bed, with the palmtop still in his hand.

Interstate 10 was quicker, but they preferred the lonely back road, Route 9, that ran a few miles above the Mexican border, straight as a Euclidean line between low hills and the Chihuahuan desert scrub. It was almost midday, forty-four degrees and rising. Ahead, the two-lane road tapered away and dissolved into a mess of heat warp where buckled light showed smooth mirage puddles that evaporated at their approach. In an hour they had seen only three vehicles, all of them white pick-ups belonging to Border Patrol. When one passed, its driver raised his hand in grim salute. Beard drove, and Hammer sat hunched over his laptop, typing and muttering to himself, 'Fucking right they don't…that's better…but I haven't…try apologising, asshole…' Occasionally, he offered his companion genuine information. 'New York Times have cancelled…We had two jets for the fly-past, but that war hero with one leg at the Chamber of Commerce, the ex-pilot, knows everyone, so now we have seven.'

Beard drove at a steady fifty-five, the elbow of his steering hand cushioned comfortably on his paunch. In the States, it came easier, to drive at a lordly pace, with the big engine barely turning, almost silent. The country had lived en masse with the automobile longer than any other. People had wearied of the car as a racing device, or penis or missile substitute. They stopped at suburban crossroads and politely negotiated with glances who should go first. They even obeyed the fifteen-mile-an-hour limits around schools. At his untaxing speed, with the faded yellow lines rolling under the SUV, his thoughts turned obsessively, uselessly around the project. He held seventeen patents in the panels. If ten thousand were sold…and the conversion rate of water to hydrogen in ideal conditions like these €¦ a litre of water held three times the energy of a litre of gasoline. So in a smaller car with the right engine they could have made this journey with two litres of water, three wine bottles full €¦ They should have bought wine in El Paso, because the choice in Lordsburg was narrow €¦

His thoughts unfurled like the miles, and he was relaxed and happy, despite his session with the doctor. His sense of freedom was at one with the cloudless sky, blueish-black at the zenith, and the empty landscape before him. Here was the culmination of eight years' work. Travelling to Lordsburg was every Englishman's ideal of America – the open road narrowing to the horizon, the colossal space, the possibilities. Along the route, especially on the southern side, projecting from the tops of sandy banks and hillocks, were piles of stones, some of them five feet high, one stone balanced on another to give a vaguely humanoid aspect. They had a primitive, ancient look, and when he had first seen them he had assumed they were Aztec relics, the local equivalent of menhirs and dolmens. But they were marks of triumph left by Mexican immigrants who had crossed the border and tramped the miles of scrub to rendezvous with their connections. At intervals by the road were Border Patrol observation stations. Elsewhere they parked their pick-ups on strategic rises and watched through binoculars the grey-green expanse of arid ranchland. Who could blame the immigrants? Who would not want to come to a place where a foreigner could be welcomed to launch a revolutionary energy plant with generous local help and tax breaks, and army marching bands and air-force fly-pasts? It would not have been so smooth in Libya or Egypt.

Hammer interrupted the pleasant inward drift of his thoughts. 'There's a message from a lawyer in Albuquerque, been trying to get in touch with you. Says he represents an Englishman called Braby. Wants to talk to you about something in connection with his client.'

'He wrote to me last week, wanting a meeting,' Beard said. 'Ignore it. I don't owe Braby any favours. He's the one who got me sacked from the Centre in England. Remember I told you that story.'

Hammer straightened up and slumped back against the headrest. 'Looking at this screen is making me sick.' He spoke with eyes closed. 'The lawyer's name is Barnard, and he's flying down here tomorrow. He needs to talk to you. You sure there's nothing wrong, something I should know about?'

'Braby's just the sort to kick you in the face, then ask a favour. Ignore it.'

Hammer kept his eyes shut and said nothing for a minute, and Beard thought he had fallen asleep until he said, 'When a lawyer comes some distance unasked to meet you, travelling at his client's expense, you expect trouble.'

Beard let this go. What was there to argue about? He had been ignoring Braby for years. Let him do the brave thing, and pick up the phone himself. It was not difficult to guess his business. An introduction to the NREL in Golden, access to venture capital for the Centre, or maybe the inside line on solar or on tax breaks. Why worry?

They passed through Columbus, and as the Cedar Mountains rose into view they had one more desultory conversation about their iron-filing scheme. Everything was in place, the investors, the captain, the ship, an option to purchase the filings. All that was missing now was a carbon-trading scheme.

'We've got Obama working on it,' Hammer said. 'We can think about other things, but when it comes, we'll be ready.'

The instrument panel was showing an external temperature of one hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than either man had ever known. Beard pulled over so they could experience the full blast. It was a mistake perhaps, to go hatless straight from the refrigerated cabin into such savage heat, or perhaps it was his sudden exertion after ninety minutes behind the wheel. As he stepped onto the edge of the road, just as he was about to exclaim to his friend something banal, he felt dizzy, his consciousness partially faded and his knees gave way. If he had not kept hold of the car door handle, he would have dropped to the ground. As it was, he swayed and half stumbled, but managed to stay on his feet as his shoulder swung back hard against the car. His pulse was racing as he struggled with the rear door to look for his hat. He leaned into the relative cool of the back seat and fumbled with his panama and, resting there a few seconds, began to feel better. The episode had taken less than fifteen seconds. Hammer, who was on the other side of the car, saw nothing.

The two men stepped away from the road, marvelling. The heat created a form of synaesthesia. It was loud, vulgar, it towered over them, its weight pressed down on their heads, and it leaped up from the ground and struck their faces. Who would believe that a photon had no mass?

'Here it is,' Beard cried, miming triumph with a raised clenched fist to disguise his strange turn and reassure himself with the sound of his own voice that he was still the same man. 'This is the power!'

'All power to the power!' Hammer said. 'But I've had enough.'

Hammer got back in the car, behind the wheel, and that was a relief, Beard thought as he climbed in beside him. He was still too shaky to drive. Now they were travelling close to eighty and in less than half an hour were through Hachita and Playas, then crossing the Continental Divide below the Pyramid Mountains, in Hidalgo County, in the boot heel of the state. Their site was barely an hour away, on the far side of Lordsburg, and as they got nearer they became noisy and jaunty, more like country boys on their way to a hoedown than men in their sixties with awesome responsibilities. They sang 'The Yellow Rose of Texas', the nearest to a cheerful song about New Mexico that they knew. The way had been long and hard, they had travelled together uncomfortably, sometimes miserably in the Middle East, and tiringly through the American South-West. The lab work and the office work had driven them apart at times, and now, finally, they were about to share their secret, the ancient secret of plants, and astound the world with their version of cheap, clean and continuous energy. For old times' sake, and because it was their favourite spot, they turned south at the Animas junction and pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Panther Tracks café and parked right beside the local sheriff's patrol car.

Hammer had mythologised Animas as the friendliest rural community in the States. The day it acquired sidewalks, he said, he would stop coming. The caf̩ Рthe finest west of the Mississippi Рwas a white painted shed with few windows. Stepping out of the heat of the early afternoon, they paused in the doorway to let their eyes adjust. The sheriff and another cop were in quiet conference over mugs of coffee and were the only customers. In the Panther Tracks you did not order what you wanted, but what was available. Today it was pancakes and bacon. The coffee was the specially weak brew favoured across the American South. While they waited, Beard took out his palmtop. It had absorbed new messages that morning in the hotel, but he had not yet opened them. What caught his attention straight off was the name of P. Banner, his fifth ex-wife, Patrice, now married to a cosmetic dentist, Charles, who doted on her almost as much as Beard had nine years ago. She was briefly a headmistress before producing three babies in four years. And all those times she had told Beard that she never wanted children. Not his, anyway. Interesting, that Charles was short, plump and had even less hair than Beard and was two years older. As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.

A year ago he had bumped into her in Regent's Park with her son, a delicate five-year-old with girlish curls. She was friendly, and he thought she was still beautiful. They sat on a bench and chatted for fifteen minutes. By devious means, Beard managed to pose the one question on his mind. Was she still an unfaithful wife? Yes, she might be, was her equally devious implication, but he did not stand a chance, if that was what he meant.

Dear Michael, This might not be news to you, but in case it is you should know that five weeks ago, Rodney came out of prison. He tried to get in touch with me. He has all sorts of mad ideas I won't begin to describe. Charles's lawyer went to court and got a prohibitive-steps order that means he'll be arrested if he phones or writes or comes within 500 yards of our house. Now I've just heard from friends of friends that he's gone to the States to look for you. Perhaps he wants to thank you personally for giving evidence against him at his trial! Anyway, I think you should be warned. It's half-term tomorrow and we are all off to the Shetlands in the pouring rain. All best, Patrice.

Yes, that Turnip at the Camino Real hotel. It was one of the quaint decencies of English law that well-behaved murderers served only half their terms. An internet search on Beard's name would lead to Lordsburg easily enough, and to the site. So what? Despite the air conditioning, he felt the pricking sensation of sweat forming above his upper lip, and a tightness across his chest that caused a pain at the base of his throat. The pancakes came, twenty in each stack, the friendly lady said, and a pitcher of maple syrup to douse them with, a pile of streaky bacon six inches high, and a top-up of coffee of palest brown.

'Nirvana!' Hammer said, banging his hands together, still in the mood that had just deserted Beard.

He had always known this moment must come, but he had grown used to knowing it, and he had thought there was a good chance that Tarpin would serve his full term, and that time would dilute everything, and prison weaken him, and that, after all, it was Patrice who obsessed him, that she was the one who did for him at the trial. In fact, Beard's true accomplishment, a masterstroke of self-persuasion, was to half believe that Tarpin, because he was violent, because he had been tried and found guilty and was in prison with other guilty men, was tainted by association, and was indeed guilty, and not only that, but he knew it and was resigned to his fate. Beard, after all, had killed no one, and his story in court was unarguable, his witness from the Institute of Physics impeccable. As the years had passed, those events, on the morning he had returned from the Arctic, had begun to appear dreamlike, unprovable, without consequences. But lying below these appearances, like a stratum of impervious rock, were other assumptions, no, certainties, that in his busy life he had managed not to dwell on. Just as Beard had dreaded that the police and Patrice would assume that he, the jealous husband, had murdered Aldous, so Tarpin was bound to think so too. Who else would want to frame him with the tools from his bag? So what did an unjustly imprisoned violent man, working out his bitter rage in the prison gym every day for eight years, do on his release? No shortage of cheap flights to Dallas.

As long as the sheriff and his friend were there, on the next table, Beard felt safe. All the same, when the café door swung open with a bang against its frame, he started, and the tightness round his chest intensified. It was a boisterous group of four local teenagers, three boys and a girl, wanting Cokes. The presence of two cops did not subdue them. They greeted each other like family members. Perhaps two armed policemen could do nothing against Tarpin. He might be ready to kill Beard in full view, and spend the rest of his life in the cells, morbidly content with a settled score. No shortage of handguns in this part of the world, and as easily purchased as fishing tackle.

'Off your food, Chief?' Hammer had finished his stack. 'Bad news from home?'

'No, no,' Beard said automatically, though even as he said it, he saw below Patrice's name a message marked urgent from Melissa. 'Just something I need to sort out. But I'm not hungry. It's too hot. Have mine.'

He pushed his plate across and Toby started in on his twenty-first pancake as Beard, after a half-minute's hesitation, opened Melissa's message. He supposed he should read it before he was killed.

'Michael, phone me, please. I need to talk to you about the other night.'

The other night? He struggled with this. Then he remembered Terry, the symphonic lover. She had dumped Terry, or she was marrying him. Beard could not decide at that moment which he would have preferred. If the latter, he would hide in Darlene's trailer. Tarpin would be no match for her. Or he would kill them both. He was not thinking straight, and he was in no condition for a matters-of-the-heart exchange with Melissa. He never would be. He scrolled through the names on the other twenty-seven messages – all but one was work-related, most in the pure, exalted domain of artificial photosynthesis. He opened the one from Darlene.

'Come quick! Something to tell ya!!!'

He did not deserve these distractions. They were encircling him, women, an Albuquerque lawyer, a north-London criminal, the unquiet cells of his own body, in a conspiracy to prevent him making his gift to the world. None of this was his fault. People had said of him that he was brilliant, and that was right, he was a brilliant man trying to do good. Self-pity steadied him a little. He and Toby were due to meet the engineers for a final inspection of the site that afternoon. Then Beard would give a speech to the assembled team. They should get on. But to drive towards Lordsburg was to drive towards Tarpin. The sight of Hammer's pancakes, or rather, the vision of him eating so many, doused in syrup, topped with the partially burned strips of the flesh and fat of pigs, sickened him. Muttering an excuse, he went through the caf̩ to the men's room, believing that he might be able to think more clearly if he could be sick. He stood waiting, slightly stooped, like a diligent waiter, over the porcelain bowl. How sparkling clean it was, just when a little disgust, the chocolate arabesque of another man's excrement, might have helped him empty his stomach. But nothing came. He straightened and dabbed at his forehead with a tissue. So what should he do? Either his life was at risk, or he was a hysterical coward. He considered the elemental fact РTarpin was coming to see him. What good could come of that? Even now he might be sitting on the edge of a bed in a motel room on the Lordsburg strip, oiling his gun. Clearly, he was well motivated. For psychologically, logistically, even financially, it was not easy for an ex-con to fly about the world. He would need to lie about his criminal past on the US visa-waiver form. But no one would know. So it was foolish not to panic. The sensible thing might be to slip away, plead modesty and let Toby handle the opening ceremony, go down to Ṣo Paulo, for example, where a woman he knew, Sylvia, a fine physicist herself, would be more than happy to let him stay. He flushed the lavatory, washed his hands slowly, trying to make a decision before going back to the table. Yes, fine, Ṣo Paulo, but he could not speak Portuguese. He could not stay down there for ever. He would miss Darlene. So then what?

Hammer was standing to settle the bill. On a smeared plate, four pancakes and one bacon rasher, snapped in two unequal parts, and a toothpick remained. The glass syrup jeroboam was empty. It was a miracle the man was thin. He said, 'We're due in forty minutes and it's forty-five miles. Let's go!'

Beard could think of nothing to say and so, morosely, he followed his friend out into the blinding light of the parking lot towards the car.

They headed north across the grasslands towards the interstate, both men silent, though Hammer at the wheel whistled random notes, as though performing some earnest avant-garde piece. Beard was generally adept at avoiding inconvenient or troubling thoughts, but now that his spirits were low he was brooding about his health, and staring at the reddish-brown blotch, a map of unknown territory, on his wrist. The biopsy was in. Doctor Eugene Parks had confirmed in the morning that it was a melanoma and that it had grown just a half-millimetre deeper into the surrounding tissue than he would have preferred. He named a specialist in Dallas who could remove it tomorrow and start the radiation therapy. But Beard wanted to be in Lordsburg for the opening and told Parks he would come back within the month, as soon as he was free. Parks, in his engaging, neutral manner, told him he was being irrational. No time to lose, on the edge of no return, metastasis a possibility.

'Don't be a denier,' Doctor Parks had said, appearing to refer back to their climate-change chats. 'This won't go away just because you don't want it or are not thinking about it.'

And that was not all the bad news, though the rest was familiar enough. Beard had stripped to the waist and was now, resentfully, buttoning his shirt. The consulting rooms were on the nineteenth floor of a block in downtown El Paso, same floor, Beard remembered, that his mother had died on. Parks, whose people originally came from St Kitts, had minty breath and a wise old leathery face of silvery black. His head projected forward from his shoulders turtle fashion and bobbed kindly whenever Beard spoke. He was the same age as Beard, though some inches taller, and kept in shape by swimming, he said, every morning of the working week, between six and seven, before he saw his first patient. Beard could not imagine being wet, or even awake, at that time of day and knew he could never compete with this boast, could never pay the price of such inconvenience and discomfort to lower his body-mass index.

It was true, the doctor did not lecture or moralise, but he compensated with a disengaged, insulting frankness. With each instance, each looming physical catastrophe, the wise turtle head protruded a little further and he gently tapped his own palm with a pencil. No one, he said, not even Beard, would choose to walk around with a body like Beard's. He was carrying an extra sixty-five pounds, the equivalent of a combat infantryman's full pack. His knees and ankles were swollen from the weight, osteoarthritis was a growing possibility, his liver was enlarged, blood pressure was up again and there was a growing risk of congestive heart failure. His bad cholesterol was high, even by English standards. He was clearly experiencing breathing difficulties, he stood a decent chance of diabetes mellitus as well as advancing the likelihood of prostate and kidney cancer and thrombosis. His one piece of luck – luck, Beard noted, not virtue – was that he was not addicted to cigarettes, otherwise he might already be dead.

The doctor's head and shoulders were framed by a south-facing plate-glass window, a glaring rectangle of hazy white sky suggestive of the oppressive morning heat. Occasionally, an airplane drifted across, taking a turn around the city before landing on the east side. Over the river was Juarez, currently a world capital for murder as drug gangs fought their turf wars and slaughtered along the way soldiers, judges, policemen and city officials. Now the Mexican cartels were hiring unemployed Texan teenagers to do their killing. Clearly, life would push on without Michael Beard. As he listened to Parks enumerate his possible futures, he decided not to mention his recent acquisition of a classic symptom, the occasional sensation of tightness around his chest. It would only make him appear even more foolish and doomed. Nor could he admit that he did not have it in him to eat and drink less, that exercise was a fantasy. He could not command his body to do it, he had no will for it. He would rather die than take up jogging or prance to funky music in a church hall with other tracksuited deadbeats.

When Beard made his vague promise to return within the month, Doctor Parks was for tying him down to dates. Tuesday the twenty-third or Thursday the twenty-fifth, he must take his pick. Beard hesitated, Parks insisted, as though it were his own bloodstream through which liberated cancer cells were about to drift, looking for a new place, a nearby lymph node, to set up home. Beard chose the remoter date, knowing that he could phone Parks's secretary and blamelessly cancel.

Now, as Hammer ceased his terrible whistling and slowed to pass through the minute township of Cotton City, the sanctuary of an obscure clinic in Dallas looked more attractive. But Beard knew that he did not have the strength to run away. The arrangements for tomorrow had a momentum he could not interrupt, not when he was so hungry for public triumph, for that time in the early evening when little Lordsburg with its neon and burger joints and abundant air conditioning became nominally carbon neutral, and American civilisation, which stood for the aspirations of all the world, could continue on its way without the inconvenience of overheating. The eight-year journey from the slow deciphering of the Aldous file to lab work, refinements, breakthroughs, drawings, field tests must be completed. General acclaim was the final stage. Tarpin could do his worst.

Beard fiddled with the radio to catch the on-the-hour news, and there it was, a snappy interview with one of Hammer's PR team explaining that sunlight and water would first power Lordsburg and, one day, the entire planet.

Hammer whooped. 'Beautiful! I trained that girl up well.'

He and Beard never acknowledged, not even to each other in private, that they would not really be supplying electricity to Lordsburg at all. They would be selling kilowatt hours to a local utility company that were the rough equivalent of the town's average consumption over a year. The electrons from their revolutionary plant would swarm anonymously among the rest.

'We'll all be down there,' the announcer said. 'Out on Highway 90, three miles east of 70. Join us at 6 p.m. tomorrow, countdown to switch-on, when Lordsburg leads the world!'

Soon they were heading east on the interstate, and then swinging north round the town and after a couple of miles turning right for Silver City. Minutes later they came over a slight rise that gave them a view of the site. Beard had seen it many times in the past months, with everything in place and dry runs going smoothly after some initial setbacks. But still, this afternoon he felt a little swoon of pride. Sensing the mood, Hammer slowed.

'Well, matey,' he said, concealing his own strong emotions behind a hideous attempt at cockney. 'Don't it just warm the cockles of your 'eart?'

The twenty-three big tilted panels had a dull gleam under the ferocious sun. They were fed by a mess of pipework and valves. Behind them were the storage tanks for the compressed hydrogen and oxygen, and alongside were the breezeblock sheds housing the fuel-cell generator and the catalysts. Power lines on new poles led to the nearest of the ancient wooden pylons that tottered in succession across the immensity of semi-desert. On the other side of the tanks was a pumping station built over the deep water source, and beyond was a neat brick building that housed the computers.

What was new were the hundreds of people, construction workers, vendors and sound technicians, moving importantly between tasks, and the many hundreds or thousands of Stars and Stripes planted on poles around the panels where the security fence should have been, and in triangular bunting along the top of the giant pale blue marquee and down its guy ropes, around the sound stage, and lining the recently bulldozed half-acre square where the army band would march, and suspended in artfully drooping streamers over the bleachers where the local VIPs would sit, and along the avenue formed by fast-food and cold-drink concessions and, at right angles to it, down an even grander avenue of portable lavatories, and around the perimeter of the parking lot, where there were at least a hundred vehicles instead of the usual dozen, with room for a couple of thousand more. Not a single Union Jack, Beard noted moodily, to honour himself, the inventor and first mover of the project. But he said nothing, and banished the thought.

To one side, on another space cleared of vegetation, and unadorned by flags, were media trucks and satellite dishes. A few hundred yards out into the scrub, on a low rise parallel to the highway, was the unlit neon 'Lordsburg!' sign, in homage to the lettering of the famous Hollywood landmark, all characters erected except the exclamation mark, and even now this thirty-foot-high punctuation was being hauled upright with ropes by men in hardhats.

As they turned off the road onto a dirt track and passed under a proscenium of yet more Stars and Stripes, an aroma of frying fat, chilled by the car's air conditioning, filled the cabin and tickled their noses.

Beard said, 'Toby, you're a genius!'

Hammer nodded in grave acknowledgement. 'I like to bring things and people together. But, Michael. This is your invention. The genius is you.'

Feeling serene now, Beard nodded in return. This was how friendship should be.

Even as they parked, men in T-shirts and baseball caps, some holding clipboards, were hurrying towards them through a dust cloud. This was Hammer's team, or a part of it, and among the group were engineers, hydraulic and computer specialists and other technicians. Beard had done the theoretical work, designed and supervised the experiments in the lab, but the rest, the scaling up, the drawings, the mass-production design, the actual plant layout and construction, the pipes and valves and how they were represented in the software, was not his concern. He knew the principles, he owned the patents, but he could not have given a detailed account of the site. Here on the open plain, he was an eminence, almost a legend, and everybody treated him with appropriate respect, with the intimate politeness at which Americans excel, but no one needed him to come and peer into a trench or adjudicate on spheres of responsibility. The NREL in Golden, Colorado, had examined the prototype and confirmed that the process he had devised worked to a high level of efficiency. The rest was for this friendly bunch of practical men waiting for Toby Hammer, who himself knew nothing about the technicalities or underlying principles, but had a gift for detail and co-ordination and man-management.

So now, as the two men stepped out of their car and engaged in a round of handshakes and backslaps, Beard prepared to slip away. The roasting air was amplifying the appeal of cooking smells, of meat grilling on wood fires, drifting across the parking lot from the concessions. The news about Tarpin had ruined his brunch, but his concentration would remain unsettled until he had strolled down this instant desert boulevard and made a considered choice. Toby, who kept a pick-up on site, handed the car keys over and he and his group headed across the parking lot towards the array.

After barely five minutes' reflection, Beard was sitting alone in deep shade at a trestle table with a paper plate of barbecued brisket, Texan style, with three giant gherkins and a mound of potato salad and a small waxed-paper bucket of draught beer. By the common standards of energy production, the Lordsburg Artificial Photosynthesis Plant, known as LAPP to the engineers, was negligible, a mere toy, barely a prototype. But sitting here, with the blue smoke of grilled chicken rolling past him from the joint next door, and country rock on speakers mounted on poles, and the chefs shouting cheerily to each other of the news that twenty-four hungry men from the 'Lordsburg!' sign-erection team were heading this way for rump steaks, Beard felt himself to be at the centre of the world. How delicious it was, not only the food, but to be here, cosily ignored, in an obscure corner of the American heartland, and to know that the din, the construction, the digital media and soon, jet fighters and marching bands, this imminent industrial revolution, owed their existence at this spot among the palmillas and dried grasses to what he had once conceived eight years ago, lying on a dirty sofa in a basement flat five thousand miles away.

He had his teeth clamped about the fourth piece of succulent brisket when something happened that he had not experienced since his schooldays and even then considered intensely annoying. He felt a presence at his back and before he could turn, warm hands clamped over his eyes, gripping his head tightly so he could not move, and a voice said in a whisper into his ear, 'Guess who?'

A finger of the left hand was pressing uncomfortably on the northern hemisphere of his eyeball and he dared not struggle. His tongue was laden with meat, and in the shock of the moment he was unable to swallow. But still, he managed to say indistinctly, 'Tarpin?'

'She your Chinese girl?' There was merry laughter as he was released.

Darlene, of course, and his irritation vanished as he struggled to his feet, chewing rapidly to empty his mouth, and embraced her. Who could not love Darlene? She was a good-hearted, overweight woman from Nebraska who had waited tables all her life, had married three times, had four grown-up children who appeared to adore or need her, for they phoned constantly, had discovered New Mexico twelve years back and changed her name from Janet. She now spoke fluent Spanish, after living for six years with a Hispanic truck driver in a trailer on the southern edge of town before she threw him out.

And now she had set her heart on Michael Beard. At their first sexual encounter she had told him he was her very first older man. And then, correcting herself, her first much older man. He did not like to think that her own choices, like his, might be narrowing. He was, after all, something of a local hero, honoured by the Chamber of Commerce on East 2nd Street for bringing jobs to the town. He was not such a bad proposition. And she, of course, fulfilled Beard's old fantasy of the grand lowlife. In that way of Americans good-naturedly declaring a class affiliation, she chewed gum, open-mouthed, remorselessly, all day, even while she talked, stopping only in order to kiss him. She never read books or newspapers or even magazines, had never been to church, and disliked wholesome food as much as Beard, and when she doused her plate was fond of evoking Ronald Reagan's celebrated insight that ketchup was a vegetable. Beard was disappointed by her lack of religion. It did not conform to type. But she was staunch. She was not even an atheist, she said, she could not care enough even to deny God's existence. He simply did not 'come up'.

They had met when Beard, with many hours to kill before a meeting, drove out of Lordsburg one afternoon and turned along a track that led to the ghost town of Shakespeare and, faintly bored, afflicted in the spring warmth by formless sexual expectation, wandered down the old main street, from the old saloon to the old general merchandise to the old Stratford Hotel, where Billy the Kid once washed dishes. As Beard was leaving he came across Darlene in the parking lot. She had come out to lend support to her friend Nicky, who was after a job as a tour guide and had just been told she was too unconfident and ignorant to qualify. She was crying on Darlene's arm as Beard, in predatory mode, strolled across and kindly asked if he could be of help. Darlene explained the outrageous rejection while Nicky tried to join in. She was a scrawny, freckly, crop-haired chain-smoker with a stutter, trying to inhale even as she wept, and Beard thought that he himself would not have hired her in any capacity. But this was her third failed attempt in as many days to get a job and so they went back to Darlene's trailer and drank consolatory beers and scotch all afternoon, with Nicky producing cocaine and pot, which he and Darlene refused. To endear himself to Darlene he promised to find Nicky something out at the site (which he did, and Hammer sacked her two days later), and after she had left to see to her children, Beard and Darlene made love in the oak-veneered bedroom next door.

He saw her whenever he came to Lordsburg. There was a bar on 4th Street they liked, and sometimes they partied in his room at the Holiday Inn, but mostly they enjoyed themselves in the trailer, which she kept neatly. There was a small yard at the rear with two lemon trees she cared for like children, trees just big enough to cast some shade in the late afternoon on a couple settling down to drink. After a couple of scotches – she shared that taste with Beard – she laughed a lot, very loudly, and after three or four drinks she loved to go indoors, into the cool throb and rattle of the air conditioning, to make love. For Beard the affair was an unexpected sexual renaissance, with piercing sensory pleasure, much like that near-inversion of agony he remembered from his twenties. A lifetime had swept by since he last shouted out involuntarily like a madman at the moment of orgasm. He never would have believed he would be experiencing such extremities of sensation with a woman of fifty-one, whose body was as slack and tired and inflated, as scribbled on by varicose veins, as his own. He assumed that this might well be his last throw at such ecstasy, and so he cherished her. Just as he took presents from El Paso or Dallas airports to Melissa and Catriona, so he lugged in reverse items for Darlene from Heathrow. In another town, another country, she might have been considered a noisy drunk. In Lordsburg she was popular and useful, and through her he came to respect the town. Apart from her evening waitressing job at the Lulu Diner, she worked as a volunteer in a grade school, tidying classrooms and cleaning up grazed knees. For two weeks a year she did unpaid menial jobs at a summer camp for autistic kids in the Gila hills. Only rarely, two or three times in a year at most, was she gathered insensate off the sidewalk at night by a neighbour or a patrolman and brought home to the trailer.

Strictly speaking, he did not lie to her about his life in England, but he did not tell her everything. She knew about the five wives, she had roared over tales of the rancid apartment in Dorset Square, which she promised to restore to order and cleanliness for him, if only he would give her the chance. But he refrained from an account of his partner and child in Primrose Hill. Darlene wanted to accompany him to England, and he did not want to heighten her interest in the plan by saying no, or complicate his life by saying yes, and settled instead for vague promises. As eighteen months passed, matters took the usual turn. The very sharpest edges of pleasure and novelty were dulled, but slowly, and only slightly, with many restorative backward steps. At the same time, her thoughts turned more frequently to the future, their future together, an awkward subject, for the time must come when the plant would be functioning and he would no longer need to come to Lordsburg, and he would be setting up somewhere else in the South-West or scattering iron filings in the ocean to the north of the Galapagos Archipelago, or exploiting his patents around the world. But if this divergence of feeling was a problem, Beard was inclined to do nothing. In their easy intimacy, in the heat and fierce shadows of New Mexico, it was easily shelved. The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.

So it was a delight to see her now, and go over to the grill and fetch her a jumbo portion of spare ribs, potato salad and ketchup and a bucket of beer to match his own, and sit with her amid the sentimental din and woozy pedal guitars of the country music, and hear her news and tell her his own. They sat close and, keeping well clear of the private realm, he gave her the latest from the diminutive ancient kingdom across the ocean, where, according to the latest scandal, the hard-pressed citizenry had been obliged to empty their pockets in taxes so that the ruling class might clean their moats, build servant quarters, buy trouser presses and hire pornographic movies. Now, down the smog-shrouded cobbled alleyways of filthy cities and in pestilential thatched villages, there were dark mutterings of revolt. For her part, she told him about Nicky's return to AA, where she had found Jesus for the fourth time and had been off drugs and drink, though not cigarettes, for twenty-two days and still had her job at the pharmacy, though only just.

When Darlene had finished eating, she laid a heavy arm across his shoulders and kissed his cheek. 'But honey, the main news is you. Lordsburg was on NBC last night and CNN were filming on Main Street yesterday right by the Exxon station, and everyone's talking about tomorrow. I'm so proud of you!'

She was gazing at him with an expression he had not seen before, a look of smug maternal possession that troubled him faintly. But he did not want the moment, and the grander moment that contained it, spoiled in any way. So he kissed her and they drank another beer and shared a chocolate, fudge and peppermint ice cream. Then they stood and kissed again and hugged, and he told her he would see her in an hour. He had a duty to fulfil.

He made his way across the busy site to the control station, where the whole crew was waiting, crowding in around the consoles to hear him deliver the speech of thanks he had mentally rehearsed on the plane from London. Hammer stood solemnly at his side, arms crossed, like a nightclub bouncer. From somewhere outside came the sound of trumpets and a piccolo, and the thump of a bass drum. The marching band, or some of it, had arrived to rehearse.

The team had wrought wonders, Beard began by saying in the bland tones of group exhortation, in bringing what had first been just a dream, then a stream of frenzied calculations, then an exploration by way of laboratory tests, then a set of drawings, to this, an engineering reality here in the desert. What they had built existed nowhere else in the world except for some related workbench experiments in a handful of competitor labs. But the process of discovery and development was far greater than this single project, magnificent though it was. Water was first split into hydrogen and oxygen in 1789, the principles of the fuel cell first discussed in 1839. Countless biologists and physicists had devoted themselves to the continuing elucidation of photosynthesis. Einstein's photovoltaics and also quantum mechanics had played their parts, and chemistry, the science of new materials, protein synthesis, in fact, virtually the whole of the culture of science had contributed in some manner to the triumph that was now almost theirs. And there was a far larger consideration. Everyone here knew that in the greatest scheme of all, spanning billions of years, the capturing and converting of light and the splitting of water by self-organising living forms had generated atmospheric oxygen and had been the engine of evolution. This had been their inspiration, the process they had attempted to reverse engineer.

Beard filled his lungs, then emptied them with a noisy sigh, and showed his open palms in a gesture of abject modesty.

'This is why I can claim nothing for myself. I stood, like Newton, on the shoulders of giants, hundreds of them, and I borrowed slavishly from nature. By good fortune my Conflation helped me see what others could not, though the door already stood ajar. And what I saw was that the most common element in the universe, hydrogen, could be made cheaply, efficiently and in vast quantities by imitating photosynthesis in a certain way, and that it could power our civilisation, just as this beautiful process has powered life on earth by being its principal biological energy input. So now we will have clean energy, endlessly self-renewing, and we can begin to draw back from the brink of disastrous, self-destructive global warming. Some have claimed that my role was vital, that none of this could have happened without me. Well, who knows? All I say is that I was lucky to have had certain ideas, and I was fortunate to be standing in the right place at the right moment in history, at a time of pressing need. My part was simple inevitability. The point is, we're a team and everyone's part was crucial, every last one of you was a vital link. And truly, it has been my great privilege to work with you and come to respect your expertise. And you should know that I owe everything, we all owe everything, to our dear friend here, the human dynamo, Toby Hammer!'

To applause and cheers, Beard clutched at Toby's wrist, scratching the American's skin in the lunge, and wrenched his arm away from his chest and raised it, boxing-ring style.

Unsmiling, Hammer bowed his head to the redoubled cheers. To cries of 'speech, speech!' he declined with pursed lips, and the meeting began to break up.

When there was just a handful left, men who seemed to want to talk to Beard, Hammer shook his head and silently indicated the door to them and after a moment's hesitation they filed out, and the two friends were left alone. Beard sat down at one of the consoles and stared at a screen displaying three graphs with falling curves. They were not identified, but he guessed they showed the regulation of the catalysts.

'What's up, Toby?'

'I'm not sure yet.'

'Still worrying about a warming failure? They're near to breaking the record today down in Orogrande.'

Hammer did not smile. He was leaning against the wall by the door, hands deep in his pockets, staring over Beard's head. Finally he said, 'This guy Barnard called. The lawyer from Albuquerque, acting for Braby and the Centre in England. He's on his way here now. I said I wouldn't see him unless he told me what he wanted. And he did.'

Toby cleared his throat noisily and came away from the door to stand by Beard's side. He put a hand on the Englishman's shoulder.

'Michael, is there anything about this project that I should know that I don't?'

'Of course there isn't. Why?'

'They're filing a claim against your patents.'

'Braby?'

'Yup.'

For several seconds Beard slumped at the console, frowning as he reached back into his grey English past. He brought to mind concrete posts, the smell of the beer factory beside the motorway, the mud between the temporary huts, the makeshift tables piled with foolish dreams. It was as though he were recalling an existence before he was born, before dinosaurs had their dominion, when mists were thick over primeval swamps. And now, as those mists began to clear, he could see. How had he failed to predict it? This was how Braby was going to angle in on the revitalised American renewables scene, not by begging favours for advice or introductions, but with the muscle of expensive litigation. It was threatening behaviour, it was an attempted mugging. He would expect to settle out of court and take a share in future projects. And on the basis of nothing at all.

Beard stood suddenly, feeling energised and relieved, and, ignoring an attack of dizziness, tapped Hammer on the chest, as though attempting to correct the faulty machinery of his thoughts.

'Listen, Toby. I've seen this kind of manoeuvring before with institutions and patents. Braby thinks, or he's pretending to think, that I did my photosynthesis work while I was at the Centre and that the rights of exploitation belong there. But I didn't get started until I set up at Imperial and by then Braby had got me sacked. And anyway, under the terms of my employment I was free to pursue my own work. I mean, I was only in there once a week. I have the old contract at home. I'll show you.'

'This could slow us down,' Hammer murmured, still gloomily unconvinced.

Beard said, 'When they see the dates, my sacking, my contract, they'll run for cover. We'll counter-sue for harassment, defamation, whatever. The Centre has even less money than we do. They lost nearly everything on a ridiculous wind turbine they were developing. It was a big public scandal. The place runs on a shoestring.'

Beard noticed his colleague begin to relax. Poverty in a hostile litigant was refreshing.

'Michael, promise me there are no hidden reefs, no shocks, nothing you're holding back.'

'I promise. Braby's a damned opportunist. We'll kick his backside across the Rio Grande.'

'Barnard will be here in fifteen minutes.'

Beard made a show of frowning as he looked at his watch. He wanted his spell with Darlene. Only then could he face the lawyer.

'I have a meeting in town. But he can come and find me at the Holiday Inn this evening. Or in that restaurant across the road.'

As Beard went towards the door, Hammer was already bent over his laptop writing emails and hardly seemed to notice his friend leaving. Normality restored.

It was invigorating, to come out of the frozen air of the control room into the dry heat of the late afternoon, from fluorescent to golden light, from the murmurings of the servers into the din of preparation and the cacophony of two separate sound systems playing country music in different parts of the site competing with the rehearsals of the army band and the whine of a power drill. It was not only the prospect of heading into town with Darlene that stirred Beard. He was enlivened, uplifted by outrage at Braby's clumsy, unjust claims. They added even greater value to the project. The false friend who had turned on him at the lowest point in his career now wanted some small part of the glory. He could not have it, and it was a joy to contemplate the fact. Beard's step was unusually light and quick as he went through the bustle. He slowed as he passed a stall setting up to sell patriotic souvenirs. He could imagine buying a little Stars and Stripes on a stick and waving it with childish malice under Braby's nose. But no. Let him rot with his tinpot helical turbine in the damp grey confines of southern England.

He was twenty minutes early for Darlene, so he headed towards the parade ground and the silvery trills and foghorn blare of the marching band. There were twenty or so men in fatigues, not many of them young, standing with their bandmaster in the shade of an awning at one end of the raw, flattened square. On the south side, workmen had finished erecting a set of steeply raked bleachers for dignitaries and press. Again, he marvelled at all that Toby Hammer had achieved with his emails. As Beard made his way around the ground, the musicians were rehearsing, with just a few cranky, misplaced notes, a Beatles medley, and he assumed that this was not a proper army band but some kind of reservist group of local enthusiasts. The bandmaster's white baton conjured an unpleasant association of Melissa's lover. It was already getting late in London and he owed her a call. But this was not the time.

To the strutting tones of 'Yellow Submarine', he walked towards the stand of bleachers, which rose right up from among the brush and palmillas. There was a figure sitting alone, dead centre, and Beard immediately recognised a fellow Englishman. Was it the cigarette, the stoop of narrow shoulders, or the grey socks and black leather shoes and absence of hat and sunglasses? There was a small carry-all at the man's feet and he was hunched forward, chin resting in one hand, staring not at the band, but past it, in the direction of the Gila hills. Rodney Tarpin, of course. His old friend, come all this way to render his account. After the initial shock of recognition, and some minutes of hesitation, Beard decided to go over to him, certain that it would be better to have a confrontation now on his own terms, and in public, than be taken by surprise. Darlene's hands over his eyes had been a warning.

The stand was unreasonably steep and he paused to rest at the centre row before going sideways along it towards his man. In a display of cool, pretending not to notice or care about Beard's approach, Tarpin continued to stare straight ahead as he smoked, even as Beard sat down next to him. He did not trust himself to speak until he had caught his breath, and still Tarpin did not turn to acknowledge him. This was how momentous encounters were presented in certain movies, and Tarpin would have had time to watch a few. He had not wasted much of his eight years in the prison gym. Confinement had shrunk him. His arms and legs were thin, and the builder's proud gut that once held sway above his belt was now a little pot. Even his head looked smaller, the face more mouse than rat, and the impression of taut nostrils, of eager inquisitiveness, had been stamped out. In its place, a passive watchfulness that might have passed, at dusk perhaps, for calm. But in the golden New Mexico afternoon he looked a harmless wreck, a bum sucking too needily on his cigarette, hardly the man to deliver a slap to the face. Beard felt his spirits glow and swell with relief. This poor lag could do him no harm.

The silence was becoming absurd. Beard spoke up briskly, as though to a dim and wayward employee. 'So, Mr Tarpin. They've let you out. What brings you all this way?'

He turned at last, pinching out his cigarette between forefinger and thumb. In the corners of the whites of his eyes were unhealthy egg-yolk smears. There were broken capillaries too running from the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks. When he spoke he exposed the missing tooth, an upper incisor, that prison dentistry had omitted to fix.

'I thought if I was sat up here you'd be bound to see me.'

'Well?'

'Mr Beard, I need to talk to you, tell you something, ask you something.'

Faintly, Beard's fear revived. He was keeping a watch on Tarpin's hand, and on the bag at his feet. 'All right. But I haven't got long.'

Below them the band ground on through its medley. The final chords of 'Yesterday' dissolved into a chirpy rendition, in strict marching tempo, of 'All You Need is Love'. Hard to credit that millions once screamed and tore at their hair for such staid little ditties.

'I'll come straight to it then. First thing is this. I never killed Thomas Aldous.'

'I remember you saying in court.'

'It doesn't matter you don't believe me. No one believes me. I don't care, because the truth is, I would have killed him if I'd had half the chance. And this is the thing. I told Patrice to do it if she ever saw a way without getting harmed. And I swore to her, if she did it, I'd go down for it, if it came to that. She didn't say nothing, but she must have taken one of my hammers when she was round my place and got him when he was asleep on her sofa.'

'Hang on,' Beard said. 'Why on earth would Patrice want to kill Tom Aldous?'

'I understand you're upset, Mr Beard. I know you got a divorce and all, but this was the woman you loved once and it's not nice, is it, to hear that she's a killer. But she hated him. She couldn't get rid of him. She asked him to leave her alone, but he wouldn't go away. I did what I could, but he was a big bastard…'

Beard had half forgotten that he knew the truth and that he had devised Tarpin's misery for him. He hardly knew which objection to raise first. He said, 'Did she tell you she hated him? That she wanted to get rid of him?'

'Many many times.'

'But she told the whole world she loved him.'

Tarpin straightened and spoke with some pride. 'That was later, that was for my motive, you see. Jealous! I was ready to do anything for her.'

'For God's sake, man, then why didn't you plead guilty and get a shorter term?'

'Some cocky little lawyer said he could get me off, and I believed him.'

'So you planned all this out together?'

'I couldn't get to her once Aldous was dead. And then I was arrested. So we had to sort of work it out as we went along without actually speaking. But we knew what we were doing.'

The band had given all it could to the Beatles and was taking a rest. Brass players were decanting condensate onto the desert sand from their instruments. The bandmaster was striding away with a cigar in his mouth.

Beard said, 'But surely, if you had gone to see Aldous yourself, you could have frightened him off.'

Tarpin laughed bitterly. 'Tried that, didn't I? Right at the start. Went round to his place in Hampstead, took a tyre iron just for effect. He had it off me first stroke, threw me all over his garden, put my back out, fractured my kneecap, held my head under his pond, dislocated my arm. And did this. Look.'

He pointed to the gap in his teeth.

Beard could not help a fierce proprietorial pride in Tom Aldous. What a physicist! He said, 'Paying you back, I suppose, for blacking Patrice's eye.'

'I apologised for that, Mr Beard,' Tarpin said huffily. 'More than once, if you want to know. And in the end Patrice accepted my apology.'

'So you went to prison for my wife. And she came to see you, wrote you beautiful grateful letters?'

'It wouldn't look right, would it, visiting her lover's murderer. After a year I started writing to her. Every single day. But I heard nothing. Nothing in eight years. I didn't even know she was married again till I came out.'

The poor deluded sap stared away towards the mountains beyond Lordsburg. Looking at him, Beard was pleased that he himself had never fallen properly in love. Not if this was what happened to a man's reason. He had come closest with Patrice, and what an idiot that had made of him. In the circumstances it was not possible, but he would have liked to press Tarpin about the murder weapon, the hammer with the narrow head. Had he really forgotten that he had left a bag of tools in Belsize Park? What an ass, and how convenient.

Tarpin said, 'I can't stop thinking about her, and you're the only one I can talk to. We've both loved the same woman, Mr Beard. You could say our fates are entwined. She won't let me come near her, won't even talk to me for five minutes on the phone. But I still love her.'

He repeated himself, with greater force, so that two workmen walking past the stand glanced up in their direction.

'I ought to be bitter, I ought to be furious at the way she let me down. I ought to break her neck, but I love her, and it makes me feel good just to say it out loud to someone who knows her. I love her and if it was ever going to stop, it would have happened a long time ago, when I realised I wasn't going to hear from her. I love her, I love €¦'

'Let me get this right,' Beard said. 'You came all this way, you concealed your criminal record from Homeland Security, just to tell me that you still love my ex-wife?'

'You were the only other player, if you see what I mean. You're the only one I can say it to and it means something, that Patrice killed Aldous, and I paid for it with eight years of my life. And I owe you an apology, treating you the way I did when you came round to my house. But I was under a lot of stress, you see, with Patrice going to see Aldous in the evenings because she didn't dare upset him. But I am truly sorry about hitting you like that.'

Beard said, 'I think we can let that one go.'

But there was a purpose to Tarpin's apology. 'There was another reason I came. I've thought about this really hard. I've got to do something with myself. I can't spend the next ten years just thinking about Patrice. Mr Beard, I want a fresh start, somewhere far away from where she is. I saw about your thing here on the TV. You're the only one who knows this situation and I know you'll understand. I'm asking you to give me a job. I've still got the skills, plumbing, wiring, bricklaying, labouring. I'll pick up litter, if that's what's on offer. I know how to work hard.'

Beard's thoughts were running ahead. He had found something for Darlene's Nicky, even though she lasted only two days. There were ways round Tarpin's illegal status. And the man was a fantasising fool who possibly deserved a break. It was unfortunate for Tarpin, however, that minutes before, Beard's mood had dipped at the memory of those dark days, when he watched from a first-floor window as his wife, in new frock and shoes, went down the garden path to her Peugeot and her evening assignation. Wasn't eight years enough? Wasn't his punishment complete? It probably never would be, Beard thought as he stood and extended his hand and resumed his official tone.

'Thank you for coming to see me, Mr Tarpin. I don't know whether I believe your story, but I've enjoyed it. As for a job, well, you had an affair with my wife and you encouraged her to murder my close colleague, or, who knows, you killed him yourself. All in all, I don't exactly feel I owe you any favours…'

Tarpin stood too, but he refused the handshake. He sounded astonished. 'You're saying no?'

'Yes.'

He moved at speed from whining petitioner to aggressor. 'Because I went with your wife?'

'Mostly that, yes.'

'But you didn't love her. You fucked everything in sight. You didn't look after her. You could have had her all to yourself, but you drove her away.'

Now that he was angry, he looked more like his former self, with the colour back in his cheeks and that old ratty look. He was gaunt, but in possession perhaps of some wiry strength. And though he had shrunk and aged, he remained taller and younger than Beard.

'I didn't go looking for an affair,' he said loudly. 'Patrice came on to me as a way of getting at you. I had my own problems. My wife ran off with my kids. You wrecked your own fucking marriage. That beautiful woman. You broke her poor heart!'

Mindful of the possibility of violence, Beard was edging away along the line of bleachers. He was no Tom Aldous, adept at cracking kneecaps. He said from a judicious distance, 'There are some patrolmen down by the highway. Clear off now or I'll invite them to come and discuss your tourist visa with you. They're not so gentle with illegals in these parts, you know.'

'You bastard! You cowardly bastard!'

Beard descended the stand as fast as he was able, then strode away. Even when he had reached the far side of the parade ground and was heading back towards the Texan-style barbecue, he could hear the diminishing cries, 'Cunt! Coward! Cheat! I'll get you!' Heads of upright citizens turned to look, and there were disapproving glances in Beard's direction too. Some minutes later, after a wrong turn, he found himself in the grand colonnade of green portable lavatories and slipped inside to make lingering use of one. When he came out and looked around, he saw Tarpin in the distance, right down on the highway, waving his thumb at the passing traffic.

Beard was late for his rendezvous with Darlene, but he was tired and hot, and there was much to think about, so he dawdled. Tarpin, not Aldous, was the lover whom Patrice could not shake off, and she made up a story to escape another black eye. But what had stopped the bullying was the thrashing Aldous delivered. Even if Beard had strangled Aldous with his bare hands, Tarpin would have stepped up to take the blame, such was the reach of his obsessive delusional state. Beard's past was often a mess, resembling a ripe, odorous cheese oozing into or over his present, but this particular confection had congealed into the appearance of something manageably firm, more Parmesan than Epoisses. He was reflecting cheerfully on this formulation – it reminded him that he was still peckish – and was in sight of the Texan barbecue when he felt his palmtop trembling in his pocket. Melissa, the screen told him. Calling before she turned in for the night. But when he put the phone to his ear he heard the sound of a car's engine and, faintly in the background, Catriona singing.

'Darling,' he said quickly, before she could speak. 'I've been trying to reach you.'

'We were on the plane.'

Running off with the conductor, taking his child, was his immediate thought. 'Where are you?' he said peevishly, expecting her to lie.

'We're just leaving El Paso.'

He paused to take this in. 'How can you be? I don't understand.'

'We're on our way. It's half-term, Lenochka is taking care of the shops and, as you know, Catriona and I have got something to discuss with you.'

'Like what?' Beard said, feeling nameless guilt. What had he done now?

She said, 'Someone called Darlene phoned to tell me you two are getting married. Before you do, your daughter and I would like a word.'

That. In memory the occasion was as vague as a half-forgotten dream, but he knew the moment, some weeks ago in the trailer bedroom. Darlene had not mentioned it since.

He said, 'Melissa, believe me, there's no truth in it.' As if by saying so he could make her turn back to London and leave his evening free.

She said, 'Hold on, I've got to take this exit…One other thing I want you to know before we meet. Terry.'

'Yes.'

'He doesn't exist. I made him up. It was a way of saving face, and it was stupid. It made things worse.'

'I see,' Beard said.

And he did. She had uninvented Terry, and now he would be expected to do the same for Darlene. He heard Catriona singing or shouting in the background.

Melissa said, 'We'll see you soon. And you belong to us.' She rang off.

He remained where he was, leaning against a pole that supported a loudspeaker. Thank God it was silent. Around him the site was emptying as the sun lowered and men came to the end of their shifts and headed for the parking lot. As he recalled it, he and Darlene had been making love after drinking one hot afternoon, and the air conditioning was at its highest setting, rattling like a madman at the bars of his cell. Seconds before he came, she cupped her hand around his balls and asked him to marry her and he had said, or shouted, yes. Perhaps the notion of such wild folly and abandon was what brought him on. How could he have meant it when he was already not married to Melissa? No one would believe a man at such a moment? The point was that Darlene had discovered his other life, and like the bold player she was, she was forcing his hand. Someone, or everyone, would be disappointed. Nothing new there.

Beard reached for his infrared car key, whose reassuring solidity seemed to contain all the miles he wanted to put between himself and Lordsburg. It would be sensible to slip away now, find lodgings along the interstate in Deming, avoid Darlene and Melissa all day tomorrow in order to concentrate on his world-historical event, then face them afterwards, together or separately. Anything but face them this evening. But as he turned to walk towards his car, he felt great sadness at losing the promised hour with Darlene. The old parliament of his selfhood was in uproarious division. An eloquent voice of experience rose above the din to suggest that denying himself a long-awaited release could be even more damaging to his concentration. He ignored this voice and continued walking. Sometimes a man had to make sacrifices, for science, for the well-being of future generations.

But then came deliverance. He had taken barely thirty steps when he heard his name called behind him. She had come out from under the Texan-barbecue awning into the thoroughfare just a hundred yards away, and was running towards him in a jiggling, splayed-arm manner, and he felt relieved. They would go straight to his motel room. The decision was out of his hands.

For reasons of her own, she did not ask him why he was heading in the wrong direction. They strolled companionably arm in arm down the boulevard of green latrines towards the parking lot. When they were there she thought it would be better if she left her car and came in his. He could think of no good reason why not, except that he would be bound to her company, tomorrow morning as well as tonight. That was surely what she had in mind. As he drove towards Lordsburg she slid her left hand across his lap, and she caressed him the whole way while she told him what she would do when they were indoors. He was in a trance, no other thought in his head, as he turned into the motel drive and pulled up outside his usual room. He went robotically to the office to check in. Soon they were reclining their excited naked bulks on cool sheets behind a double-locked door. Only ten years ago, when he still thought he could rescue himself with exercise, he would have been shocked by his own pneumatic form, by his concertina of chins, and by the ribbed contours of the woman he was stroking, and by the sweaty scent of newly cut grass that arose from armpits, groins and crooks of knees, heavily enfolded regions that rarely saw air or light. Yet everything was as thrilling as it had ever been. She was a kind and ingenious lover, who sucked and licked and teased and drew him wetly in, but when his moment came, he remembered to refrain from giving himself away in marriage.

Afterwards, they lay closely side by side. She lifted her weight onto one elbow and, gazing down on him fondly, played with the few tufts of hair that survived behind his ears. His eyes were closed.

'Michael?' she whispered. 'Honey?'

'Mm.'

'Did I ever tell you that I love you?'

'Yes…' He had been thinking, with strange lucidity of his old friend, the photon, and a detail in Tom Aldous's notes about the displacement of an electron. There might be an inexpensive way of improving a second generation of panels. When he was back in London he would blow the dust off that file. He said again, contentedly, 'Yes.'

'Michael?'

'Mm.'

'I love you. And d'you know something?'

'Mm.'

'You belong entirely to me and I'm never letting you go.'

He opened his eyes. Post-coitally, it troubled him, that women could not instantly discard their intimate pre-coital personalities, but lingered instead in an oppressive continuity of feeling. He, on the other hand, was luxuriating in the rediscovery of his unshareable core, in nurturing that private little part that was a man's closest approximation – was this ridiculous? – of a foetus. Ten minutes before he had felt he belonged to her. Now, the idea of belonging to anyone, of anyone belonging to anyone, was stifling.

He was roused to accusation. He said, 'You phoned Melissa.'

'I sure did! More than once.'

'And you told her we were getting married?'

'You bet.'

She was still completely naked, but from somewhere she had produced a stick of gum – she never chewed while they made love – and set her jaws in their easy circular motion, and at the same time grinned good-naturedly down at him, waiting for his outburst, and enjoying herself.

'How did you get the number?' An irrelevant question, but her jauntiness had thrown him.

'Michael! You called her from my place while I was at work. You think it doesn't show up on the phone bill?'

He was about to speak but she laughed and clutched his elbow.

'Do you know what happened when I called that number first time? A little child answered and so just to make sure I said, "Sweetheart, can I speak to your daddy?" and do you know what she said?'

'No.'

'Real serious. "My daddy's saving the world in Lordsburg." Isn't that cute?'

It was no longer possible to have such a conversation naked. He went to the bathroom and fetched a dressing gown, and when he came back he was surprised to find her getting dressed. She still looked cheerful. He sat on a chair by the bed, watching her as she stepped into her skirt and bent with a grunt to fix her shoes.

Finally he said, 'Darlene, let's be clear. We're not getting married.'

She spoke as she pinned her hair in a mirror by the TV set. 'I have to get home to shower and change. I'm helping out at the school tonight for an hour. But don't worry. Nicky gets off work at the pharmacy in ten minutes and she'll give me a ride.'

She was ready to leave and came and sat by him on the edge of the bed. She smiled ruefully and patted his knee. He was already feeling some rising regret that she was going. Was it self-love, this appetite for such a voluminous woman? His life had been a steadily mounting curve, Maisie to Darlene.

She said, 'Listen to me. A list of things you ought to know. One is, you're not an entirely good person, nor am I. Two, I love you. Three, I always assumed you were married. You didn't talk about it, I didn't ask. We're consenting adults. Four, when I spoke to Melissa I found out there was no Mrs Beard. Five, there have been times when you made love to me you said you wanted to marry me. Six, so I've decided. We're getting married. You'll kick and scream, but my mind's made up. I'll wear you down. No escape, Mister Nobel Lauree-ate. The stagecoach is pulling out and I do believe you're on it!'

She was so merry, so hopelessly optimistic and well disposed. So American. He started to laugh, and then so did she. They kissed, then kissed deeply.

He said, 'You're magnificent, and I'm not marrying you. Or anyone.'

She stood and took her bag. 'Well, I'm marrying you.'

'Stay a little longer. I'll drive you home.'

'Uhuh. I just got dressed. You'll make me late. I know you.'

She blew him a kiss from the door and was gone.

He remained in the chair wondering whether to phone Hammer and find out how the meeting with the lawyer went. The conversation would be easier from his own point of view, he decided, if he took a shower first. He thought he might watch the local TV news to see if the project was getting full coverage, but the remote was under a pillow, under one of many, on the far side of the bed, and he did not feel like stirring, not just yet. He was so lethargic that it crossed his mind that it would be a fine thing to move, or be gently moved on a hospital gurney to another room where the bed was made and his clothes were not sliding off the chair and the contents of his suitcase were not advancing across the floor. Not possible. He belonged here, in this world. So he would take a shower, now. But he did not get up. He thought about Melissa and Catriona approaching him along the Interstate, driving into the sunset, and how wise he had been, not telling Darlene of their arrival. She would want them all to have dinner together and discuss the future. He wondered where Tarpin was staying, and then he reminded himself he should be feeling excited about tomorrow, which made him think again about Hammer. And so his mind turned soporifically through the complications of the evening, so that when it came, the explosive knock or kick against his door, his startled surprise took the form of an involuntary leap from the chair and a jolt of pain through his chest. Then it came again, two powerful blows resounding against the hollow plywood.

'All right,' he shouted. 'I'm coming.'

Pulling open the door sucked the dry asphalt warmth of the evening into the motel room and revealed Hammer against an orange sky, and behind him a large figure in a suit.

'I'm not even asking,' Hammer said flatly. 'We're coming in.'

Beard shrugged as he stood back. Why then should he apologise for the state of the place?

Hammer looked pale, his face was rigid. He said in the same unmodulated voice, 'Mr Barnard, Mr Beard.' It was usually 'Professor'.

Beard shook the man's hand and gestured towards the chaotic bed, the only place to sit, and he returned to his chair. Barnard, who carried a document case, brushed the sheet with a fastidious flick of his hand, reasonably concerned about bodily fluids getting on his grey silk suit. Hammer sat beside him, and the three were hunched close together, like children plotting in a bedroom on a rainy afternoon.

Barnard, big, square-jawed, thin-lipped, with heavy-framed glasses, six three at least, and bursting out of his shirt, gave an initial impression, by the way he perched his case on his knees and kept his ankles together, of a meek-mannered fellow in a tough guy's body, more of a Clark Kent type, and apologetic about it. Toby at his side looked to be in a state of shock. There was a novel tremor in his right hand, and he kept swallowing hard, sending his Adam's apple up with an audible click. This should have been the kind of occasion when he sought out Beard's gaze for a conspiratorial or satirical exchange. Lawyers! But he would not meet his colleague's eye. Instead, he stared at his clasped hands as he said, 'Michael, this is bad.'

In the silence Barnard nodded sympathetically and waited, and then said in a voice pitched a little too high for his form, 'Shall I begin? Mr Beard, as you know, my firm is instructed from England in the matter of various patents granted to you. I'm going to spare you the legal language. Our intention is to settle this reasonably and swiftly. Our immediate wish is for you to cancel tomorrow's public event because it is prejudicial to our client's case.'

Beard's mind's eye, like a studio camera on a wire, was moving smoothly through the Dorset Square flat looking for the pile in which his old employment contracts were concealed. He said through a pleasant smile, 'And what case is that?'

'Sweet Jesus,' Hammer said softly.

'In the year 2000 my client personally made a copy of a three hundred and twenty-seven page document which we know to be in your possession. These were notes written by Mr Thomas Aldous before his death and while he was employed at the Centre for Renewable Energy, near Reading, England. This copy has been examined by reputable experts, top physicists in their field, including Professor Pollard of Newcastle University, and they have also examined your various patent applications. From their conclusions, parts of which have been seen by Mr Hammer here, we have every reason to believe that those applications were based not on original work by you, but on the work of Mr Aldous. Theft of intellectual property on such a scale is a serious matter, Mr Beard. The rightful owner of Mr Aldous's work is the Centre. These were the clear terms of his employment, which you can read for yourself.'

Beard maintained his engaged, kindly grin, but privately he registered this threat or setback in the form of an uncomfortable rippling of his pulse, like a syncopated drum roll, that did not simply distort his consciousness, but interrupted it, and for a second or two he might have passed out.

Then his heartbeat steadied, and he seemed to return to the room and adopted from nowhere a no-nonsense tone. 'Disrupting tomorrow's event would be highly prejudicial to our own interests and those of the locality and is clearly out of the question. It's virtually impossible anyway.' He leaned forward confidentially. 'Have you ever tried cancelling a US Air Force fly-past, Mr Barnard?'

No one smiled.

Beard continued. 'The second point is this. As I remember, the cover sheet of Tom Aldous's notes is marked confidential. For the exclusive attention of Professor Beard. I believe this confidentiality has been breached. Thirdly, before his death, Mr Aldous and I worked intensively on artificial photosynthesis. He used to come to my house, so often in fact that, as everybody knows, he ran off with my wife. When we were working together, I did the thinking and talking, Tom did the writing. In our democratic times, Mr Barnard, science remains a hierarchical affair, unamenable to levelling. Too much expertise, too much knowledge has to be acquired. Before they become old fools, senior scientists tend to know more, by objectively measured standards. Aldous was a lowly post-doc. You could say he was my amanuensis. And that was why the file was marked for me, and no one else. I have scores, if not hundreds, of pages of my own notes covering the same material, all properly annotated and dated, and certainly pre-dating the Aldous file. If you insist on wasting the Centre's resources coming to court, I'll make them available. But you will be paying my costs, and I shall take advice on whether to sue Mr Braby personally for defamation.'

Toby Hammer's slumped back had begun to straighten a little and there was hope, or the beginning of hope, in his eyes as he watched his friend.

The lawyer continued much as before. 'We have letters Aldous wrote to his father describing his ideas and his intention of putting them before you in this file. He wanted you to use your influence to get funding. We know from many sources that your interest at the time was confined to a new kind of wind turbine.'

'Mr Barnard,' Beard spoke in the falling tones of gentle, steely admonition. 'My life's work has been in light. Since the age of twenty, when I learned by heart the poem of that name by John Milton. Some twenty-five years ago, I received the Nobel Prize for modifying Einstein's photovoltaics. Do not try to tell me my interests are or were confined to wind turbines. As for Tom's letters, he would not be the first ambitious young man who made grand claims about his achievements to a father who was still supporting him.'

Beard drew his dressing gown around him, and nodded reassuringly at Hammer.

Barnard conceded nothing. He simply moved to his next point. 'This is not central to our case, it merely corroborates it. We have transcripts of a recording of a speech you gave in the Savoy Hotel, London, in February 2005. We find that it was mostly derived from various paragraphs in Mr Aldous's file.'

Beard shrugged. 'And those paragraphs were derived from me.'

'We also have,' Barnard said, 'notes made by Mr Aldous in the year before he met you, and these demonstrate a deep interest in global warming, ecology, sustainable development, and various calculations, the sort of things that were developed in this file. And before you tell me, Mr Beard, that he must have got these from you somehow, even though he didn't know you, you should be aware that our office has researched thoroughly every public lecture, radio talk, media interview, newspaper opinion piece, every course you gave at university, and there is nothing of yours that touches on artificial photosynthesis, nor is there a single mention by you of climate change or renewable energy in the months and years before Mr Aldous died and his file came into your possession. Hardly what one would expect, is it, Mr Beard, from a public figure like yourself making breakthrough discoveries in the field?'

Hammer had slumped again, and at last Beard was angry. What was this ludicrous man doing in his room, sitting so primly on the bed which minutes before had supported the glorious form of Darlene? Beard was on his feet, one hand holding his dressing gown in place over his private parts, the other jabbing a finger towards Barnard's face. 'Climate change? You're conveniently forgetting that I was head of the Centre before I ever knew Tom Aldous. No win, no fee, is it, Mr Barnard? Looking to get rich? Well, take this back to your Mr Braby. Tell him I know a shabby opportunist when I see one. We've made something beautiful here and he thinks he can hitch a ride. He's also stupid enough to think that a court will believe that this is the kind of work a graduate student can dream up alone. Tomorrow our site will be delivering clean low-cost electricity to Lordsburg. Tell Mr Braby to watch it all on TV, and we'll see him in court!'

Barnard had also stood and held his briefcase against his chest. He was shaking his head, and when he spoke his voice was tight with a new emotion, indignation or pride or some blend of the two. 'There is one further development you should be aware of. Mr Braby is no more. Last month was the Queen's birthday and to mark the occasion as special she invited him to become her knight of the realm. He is now Sir Jock Braby.'

Beard moaned in exasperation and made a show of clapping his hand to his forehead. But there was a look of panic in Hammer's eyes. If Braby had the Queen of England on his side, what possible chance did they have in an English court of law?

Beard said, 'It's all crap, Toby. Don't listen. This is the Queen's Birthday Honours List. She doesn't choose it, she knows fuck all about it, and they all scramble to be on it, every booby and arriviste from science and the arts and the civil service who wants to strut about the place hoping to be taken for a member of the minor aristocracy.'

There was a silence after this outburst, and then Barnard sighed and took a step around the bed towards the door. 'Shall we assume then, Mr Beard, that Her Majesty hasn't gotten round to choosing you?'

Beard said crisply, 'I'm not at liberty to say.'

Barnard let his briefcase swing down and dangle at his side. Toby was now on his feet. Barnard said, 'Well, on behalf of Sir Jock Braby and the National Centre for Renewable Energy, I want to put it to you one last time. If you agree to call off tomorrow's media event and agree to revisit the patents situation, you'll find us sympathetic collaborators who will certainly find a role for you in the development of a technology which rightly belongs to the Centre. If not, then our first move will be to go to court to freeze all exploitation until this matter is resolved.'

Hammer, turning to Beard, looked like he was about to go down on one knee. 'Michael, that could take five years.'

Beard was shaking his head. 'No, Toby. I say no.'

Barnard said, 'The British government has deep pockets, at least in this affair. They're keen to see the Centre own the patents and show the taxpayer a decent return.'

Hammer clutched at the lapels of Beard's dressing gown. 'Listen, we owe a lot of money. No one's going to sign with us until this is straightened out. We can't afford lawyers.'

'We've put in all the work,' Beard said as he pushed Hammer's hand away. 'If we roll over now, we'll be lucky if they take us on as lavatory attendants.'

'Gentlemen,' Barnard said. 'I'm pretty sure we can offer you something better than that. And Mr Hammer's right. When news of our legal contest becomes public, people will not want to do business with you. Surely it's in your interests too, not to make a splash tomorrow.'

'I'm putting this as politely as I can,' Beard said. 'Please leave.'

With the faintest pursing of his thin lips, Barnard turned and opened the door. Over his shoulder the orange desert sky was fading through yellow to luminous green.

Hammer, usually a cool type, wailed on a rising note, 'Michael, we've got to keep talking! Mr Barnard, wait, I'll come out with you.'

The lawyer inclined his head regretfully. 'Sure, but it's Mr Beard's signature that we want,' and he stepped out into the dusk, and Hammer hurried after him. The door swung shut, and Beard heard the voices of the two men retreating across the parking lot, with Toby's suddenly growing louder, beseeching, begging for time, then giving way to Barnard's insistent murmur.

He was slumped in the chair just as before, still wondering about a shower. The episode appeared like a playlet staged for his benefit. For the moment he was numb to its implications. He was aware that a great wall obstructed the progress of his life and he could not see past it. His thoughts were stilled. His only concern was that Melissa and Catriona would arrive in less than an hour and he should be dressed to greet them. After many empty minutes he went to the bathroom and got under the shower and stood there blankly, barely conscious, with hot water drumming on his skull. At a sound, he put his head out of the cubicle and listened. There was a loud knock on his door, then another. There was silence, then his palmtop began to ring from the bedside table as the knocks resumed and grew louder. Hammer called out his name many times. No doubt desperate to come in and persuade him to be Braby's minion.

Beard retreated under the shower, and when he was sure that his friend had gone away he stepped out and began to dry himself. Hot water on his skin had done the trick. He was refreshed and knew what must happen. It was all down to attitude. Tomorrow's opening must go ahead. The rewards might be snatched away, but the world would see what he had accomplished. He would go out in a blaze. Or better, persuade someone with money to back him through the courts in return for a part share. Their most important visitors were already in their hotels in El Paso, and some were coming through Silver City. The sun would rise, the panels would makes gases out of water, the gases would run the turbines, electricity would flow, the world would surely stand amazed. Nothing must interrupt the Beatles medley and the screaming low-level jets.

With a towel stretched round his waist, whistling 'Yellow Submarine', he came back into the bedroom, rummaged in his case and pulled out a shirt, which he shook free of the laundry-service cellophane and cardboard. The sound of plastic wrapping was a reminder of one more animating factor, his hunger. Having refused his brunch, and replaced it with his lunch, he was running a meal deficit which he was about to address. He found clean underwear and socks – strange to think back to the days when he could put his socks on while standing up – and unfolded his best non-crease suit. Of course, he was dressing for Melissa. At the thought of her, while dousing himself with cologne at the bathroom mirror, he went back into the bedroom to spend some minutes straightening out the bed. And at the thought of Darlene, and how and where everyone would sleep and what would get said, his mind reared up like a skittish horse and went off in another direction. Which was alcohol. The restaurant across the road did not serve it. From a compartment inside his suitcase he brought out a silver and calfskin hip flask filled with Dutch gin, Genever, easily good enough to be drunk at room temperature, and indistinguishable from water. He took a shot now and put the flask in his pocket. Then he paused before the door and drank a longer shot, and stepped outside.

Always a delicious moment to be savoured, and never to be had in the British Isles, when, showered and perfumed and wearing fresh clothes, one steps out from the air conditioning into the smooth, invincible warmth of a Southern evening. Even in the denatured neon glow of the Lordsburg mini-strip, the crickets or cicadas – he did not know the difference – went on singing. There was no money in stopping them. And no means of preventing or franchising the neatly etched half-moon that hung above the gas station.

Tonight, however, his pleasure was marred. Parked thirty feet away from his motel-room door was a black Lexus, and climbing into the driver's seat was Barnard. Standing on the passenger side, waiting to get in, with that same bag at his feet, was Tarpin. As he opened his door he noticed Beard and half smiled and made a knife of his forefinger and drew it across his throat. The engine started, the headlights came on, Tarpin got in with his luggage and the car reversed from its space and pulled out of the parking lot. Baffled, Beard watched them go, and remained on the spot after they had disappeared. Then he shrugged and went over to the office to tell the receptionist to let Melissa know where he could be found, then walked across the road to the Blooberry and arrived with his good mood partially restored. He was not going under.

He could make a case that there was no better or happier place to eat in the United States than the Blooberry Family Restaurant – speciality, a steak skillet breakfast. The unreflecting atheist was bound to find interest and instruction in the Mennonite tracts on a table by the entrance. 'A Happy Home', 'A Loving Marriage', and nearer his own field, 'Caring for the Earth'. By the checkout was a gift shop where in the course of eighteen months he had bought more than two dozen T-shirts for Catriona. The restaurant floor was large, the waitresses all seemed close versions, merry cousins, of Darlene. Off-duty cops ate here, and Border Patrolmen, truckers, hollow-eyed interstate travellers sitting alone, and families, of course, Hispanic, Asian, white, often in large spreads across three or four tables pushed together. But even when it was crowded, the Blooberry was dignified and subdued, as though it quietly craved a drink. The place was soothingly anonymous. Not once had he been recognised as a regular by the jolly staff. Interstate 10 was close by and turnover was high.

The food happened to suit him. As he waited to be seated he had no need to reflect on choices – he always ate the same meal here. There was no point in straying. He was led to a booth in the farthest corner. To help settle his impatience for the starter to arrive, he poured a stiff measure of gin into his empty water glass and drank it down like water, and poured another. Everything was terrible, but he was not feeling so bad. At least this Terry no longer existed. Or was that such a good thing? Melissa and Darlene, a serious mess. He could not face it, he could not bear to think about it. But it would be faced. And poor Toby. He knew he should phone him to explain why the demonstration must go ahead, but for the moment he could not be doing with another argument.

To keep his mind off his order – fifteen minutes had passed, and it usually took less than five – he looked through his emails, and here were a couple of items that made him exclaim with pleasure. The first was an informal approach from an old friend, an ex-physicist now working as a consultant in Paris. A consortium of power companies wanted Beard to bring his 'wide experience of green technologies to the task of steering public policy in the direction of carbon-free nuclear energy'. On offer was a salary well into six figures, along with an office in central London, a researcher and a car. Well, of course. The argument could be made. The CO2 levels went on rising and time was running out. There was really only one well-tested means of producing electricity on a scale to meet the needs of a growing world population, and do it soon, without adding to the problem. Many respected environmentalists had come round to this view, that nuclear was the only way out, the lesser of two evils. James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, Tim Flannery, Jared Diamond, Paul Ehrlich. Scientists and good men all. In the new scale of things, was the occasional accident, the local radiation leak, the worst outcome possible? Even without an accident, coal was daily creating a disaster, and the effects were global. Was not the 28-kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl now the biologically richest and most diverse region of Central Europe, with mutation rates in all species of flora and fauna barely above the norm, if at all? Besides, wasn't radiation just another name for sunlight?

The second email was an invitation to address a meeting of foreign ministers at COP 15, the grand climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December. He would be at one with its spirit and he was, he supposed, the perfect choice. He would be there. His starter arrived, orange-coloured cheese, dipped in batter, rolled in breadcrumbs and salt and deep-fried, with a creamy dip of pale green. Perfection, and in such quantity. As soon as the area around his booth was clear of waiting staff, he poured the remains of the Genever. He ate rapidly and was down to his last three lozenges, and beginning to wonder if some of them were filled with mushroom, not cheese, when the palmtop vibrated by his plate.

'Toby.'

'Listen. I've got all kinds of bad news for you, but the worst has just happened, minutes ago.'

Beard noted the strained tone of controlled hostility in his friend's voice.

'Go on.'

'Someone's taken a sledgehammer to the panels. They've gone down the rows and taken them all out. Shattered. We've lost all the catalysts. Electronics. Everything.'

There was no taking this in properly. Beard pushed his plate away. Builder's work. What would Barnard have needed to pay him? Two hundred dollars? Less?

'What else?'

'We won't be meeting again. I don't think I could bear the sight of you, Michael. But you might as well know. I'm talking to a lawyer in Oregon. I'll be taking action to protect myself against what are rightfully your debts. We, you, already owe three and a half million. Tomorrow's going to cost another half million. You can go down there yourself and explain to all the good people. Also, Braby is going to take you for everything you have and will ever have. And in the UK that dead boy's father has persuaded the authorities to move against you on criminal charges, basically theft and fraud. I hate you, Michael. You lied to me and you're a thief. But I don't want to see you in prison. So stay out of England. Go somewhere that doesn't have an extradition treaty.'

'Anything else?'

'Only this. You deserve almost everything that's coming to you. So go fuck yourself.' The line went dead.

This time he did not conceal the flask as he shook it over his glass. Two drops fell out. His waitress was standing by his elbow with a heaped plate. She was a solemn teenager with hair in a prim ponytail and on her teeth were braces studded with colourful glass beads. It cost her a lot to say what she had to.

'Sir? We have a no-alcohol poss…policy on these premises?'

'I didn't know. I'm terribly sorry.'

She took away the bowl with the three cold lozenges and set the main course down before him. Four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted jacket potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.

He stared at it a good while. The destination of choice, as the cliche ran, to avoid extradition was Brazil. Was he to buy a ticket to SÃo Paulo and stay with Sylvia? She was a lovely woman, and interesting too. It might not be so bad. But impossible. To soothe himself he took up his knife and fork and was immediately distracted by the sight of the lesion, the melanoma on the back of his hand. It was larger, he thought, since he last looked, and was an angry purplish-brown under the Blooberry's fluorescent lights. Was he really going to deal with this now, along with everything else? He thought it unlikely. It would take care of itself. Nor would he go to the site tomorrow to speak to the angry crowds. Nor would he be saving the world.

He set the cutlery down unused. What he wanted most was to go alone to a bar and sit at the counter with a scotch. It was a short walk down to 4th Street. But he would take the car. He was about to call his waitress over for the check when he heard a commotion on the far side of the restaurant. He turned and saw Melissa with high colour in her cheeks and wearing one of her vibrant Caribbean dresses of big green flowers against a red and black ground. She was striding past the 'Please Wait To Be Seated' sign, and right behind her, surprisingly, was Darlene, and both women looked stormy, furious and rumpled, as if they had just had a fight outside. Now they were looking for him. Ahead of them by several feet was Catriona, carrying a little girl's backpack designed to give the impression that a koala bear was clinging to her shoulders for a free ride. She saw her father before the women did and was running towards him, coming to claim him, calling out something indistinct, skipping between the crowded tables. As Beard rose to greet her, he felt in his heart an unfamiliar, swelling sensation, but he doubted as he opened his arms to her that anyone would ever believe him now if he tried to pass it off as love.