The other roof sheltered Melissa Browne, his somewhat neglected love, and it was under this second that he intended to spend the night. She was so kind to him, so soft, so patient, so pretty, the only viable love in his life. Like many women, she thought he was a brilliant scientist, a genius in need of rescuing. But he was such a careless, faithless, disorganised friend, too elusive, too stonily intent on never marrying again. He hadn’t phoned. She was cooking dinner. He didn’t deserve her. Guilt and a fresh surge of impatience, a vile brew, made him groan. Did he actually make a sound above the engine’s note? And here were the South Downs again to remind him he must never yield, he must never change his mind. His frame could not withstand a sixth marriage.
Whichever direction his gaze fell, this was home, his native corner of the planet. The fields and hedgerows, once tended by medieval peasants or eighteenth-century labourers, still visibly patterned the land in irregular quadrilaterals, and every brook, fence and pigsty, virtually every tree, was known and probably named in the Domesday Book after all-conquering William in 1085 conferred with his advisors and sent his men all over England. And ever since, named again with greater refinement, owned, used, costed, traded, mortgaged; mature like a thick-crusted Stilton, as richly stuffed with varied humanity as Babel, as historical as the Nile Delta, teeming like a charnel house with ghosts, in public discourse as dissonant as a rookery in full throat. One day this brash and ancient kingdom might yield to the force of multiple cravings, to the dreamy temptations of a giant metropolis, a Mexico City, São Paulo and Los Angeles combined, to effloresce from London to the Medway to Southampton to Oxford, back to London, a modern form of quadrilateral, burying all previous hedges and trees. Who knew, perhaps it would be a triumph of racial harmony and brilliant buildings, a world city, the most admired world city in the world.
How, wondered Beard as his plane at last quitted the stack on a banking hairpin tangent and lined itself up north of the Thames to begin its descent, how could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a soft fruit – we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!
Half an hour later, the Berlin flight was docked and he was fourth man off, towing his carry-on luggage, walking stiffly at speed, with unmanful little skips and hops (his knees, his body, indeed his mind, were no longer capable of simple running), down the sealed capillaries, the carpeted steel tubes that fed him through the airport’s innards towards the immigration hall. Far quicker to pound alongside the hundred-metre moving walkway than squeeze by the dreamy, motionless voyagers and their luggage blocking the runs. At least a dozen young men off his plane, hurrying more effectively, overtook him along this stretch, lean, crop-headed business types, raincoats flapping over their forearms, unhindered by their weighty shoulder bags, talking easily as they flew by. An avenue of ads for banking and office services, weakly humorous, effortfully eye-catching – clearly, advertising was an industry for third-raters – increased his irritation in the unventilated, overlit corridors. He knew it too well, the special kind of mental suffocation that came from contact with aggressive low intelligence. Now, planetary stupidity was his business. And by failing to be punctual, he was being stupid too. At best, he would be seventy-five minutes late. Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics – time reversal. And commanding yourself to be stoical did not get you there any sooner.
For an unnaturally large fee, he was to address an energy conference attended by institutional investors, pension-fund managers, solid types who would not easily be persuaded that the world, their world, was in danger and that they should align their investment patterns accordingly. Through inertia, blind professional custom, they were bound to their old familiars, oil, gas, coal, forestry. He was to persuade them that what they currently made profitable would one day destroy them. On these occasions it was necessary to speak in general terms, of course, but if Beard, already the owner of a dozen patents, could shift them, even by the smallest of fractions, his own company must benefit. They were waiting for him in the Savoy, in two connecting suites facing out over the river, and though they had received advance apologies for his lateness, soon they were bound to melt away to their next meetings, and this frail miracle of appointment-diary co-ordination, four months in the conjuring, would give way to even greater scepticism and fatal withdrawal. Another reason to be in London was to sign the option tomorrow at the US Embassy on a four-hundred-acre site in the south-western scrub desert of New Mexico, a sand-grain speck in the baking vastness. And when the investors were happy, the funds were in, the tax breaks settled, the construction on a scaled-up prototype would begin. Thinking about it made him dizzy with impatience.
Ten minutes of hurry, then Beard, breathless, sweating under his coat, was standing stalled in immigration, buried in a line ten men deep, hundreds long, inching forward among supplicants waiting to be granted entry to their own country. Long minutes passed, and he could feel himself becoming less reasonable. There came to him an image of precious fluid – blood, milk, wine – draining from a tank. He could not restrain a growing sense of thwarted entitlement: someone should have been there to bring him to the front, ahead of the ordinary crowd, to waive the formalities, conduct him to a limo. Did no one here know who he was? Wasn’t he a VIP after all? Yes, he was, just like everyone else. At moments like this, his misanthropy sensitised him to the people packed tight around him, no longer fellow travellers, but adversaries, competitors in a slow race. And he could not help himself, he was on the lookout for one of those cheats who edge up on the periphery of vision, moving while pretending not to, cutting in with a sly shuffle, a subtle turn of the shoulder. Burdening others by stealing time.
He had reached the place where the amorphous overlapping ten queues narrowed down to three in order to line up for the immigration desks. And here he came, a gaunt parchment-faced fellow in a loden coat (Beard had always despised the style), sliding in from the left, trying to use his height to squirm ahead, angling his oversized briefcase at knee height to use as a wedge. Abruptly, driven by shameless rectitude, Beard stepped forward to deny the man space, and felt the briefcase bang against his knee. At that moment Beard turned and sought out his gaze and said politely, though his heart beat a little harder, ‘Terribly sorry.’
A rebuke poorly disguised as an apology, pretending manners to a man he would rather at that moment kill. It was good to be back in England.
But looking into the man’s face revealed just how ancient a cheat this was. Eighty-five at least, with sepia liver spots from papery forehead to puckered throat, and an air of slack-jawed vacancy, and pendulous lower lip faintly trembling and wet. Of course, the old had to get ahead. They had less time. They were almost dead. Their hurry was greater than his, and forgiveness, even an apology, was in order. But the old man had faded away, fallen back somewhere behind, out of sight, in disgrace. Too late to offer him a favourable place in the queue.
And so it was that Beard, heartless scourge of the frail, appeared before an official somewhat chastened, loathing himself a little and therefore not so surprised that his photograph or his height, his date of birth or his next of kin should be the cause of suspicion and a degree of expert frowning. The official snapped the pages of his passport in rapid sequence, glanced at Beard, flipped them back, then, following a moment’s consideration, set the document face down on a scanner. She was in her late twenties, possibly less than half his age. Parents’ country of origin he guessed to be Ethiopia. If she slid off her high stool now, stepped down from her station and kicked off her high heels, she would still stand six inches taller than him.
He was rotund, slow-moving, pinkly hot – and late. She was sleekly attuned to her current task, guarding the portals of her nation against undesirables. He watched her as she stared at his details on he
r screen, as her right hand, faintly purplish about the palm, fluttered insouciantly across her keyboard in pursuit of some other angle on him, a deeper perspective, he suddenly hoped. From the high internal scaffolding of the immigration hall a silence appeared to descend like thickening snow, a delicious chill, and all sense of hurry left him. This fine-textured, light-absorbent, light-loving skin, these high-pitched cheekbones (he saw only one) with a delicate dip and sculpted curve, these brown eyes resting gravely on his case, this happy marriage, as he saw it, of intelligence and grace. Millennia ago, under cool canopies in some secret desert redoubt, the genes of a gazelle had entered the local human pool. Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it. It lingered as he gazed at the black left hand and wrist, long and narrow like a salad tosser, resting inert by the foxed covers of his upturned passport.
He remained a bold fool in these matters – habits long fixed, not a crumb wiser than his twenty-five-year-old self, no prospects of improvement, so all his past wives agreed – and in the moments before she spoke he indulged the familiar notion of asking if the immigration officer was free for dinner. He asked many women, total strangers, to dinner, and not everyone said no. His involvement with Patrice had begun over such a feast, and set in train such disgraceful events, that even now, ten years on, he still remembered what he ordered. It predicted all that was to come, it was a curse: a skate with capers and burned butter, an over-salted salad of wild rocket, a yeasty Pinot Grigio, surely corked, and he too fatally entranced to call the sommelier across.
The young woman met his eye and said, ‘You’ve travelled a lot in the Middle East.’
Her ‘lot’ was glottal, the statement intoned as a question. What linguists called uptalk, so he had recently learned. Lately he had become something of a language snob, an inverted language snob, whose age and limited connections prevented him from understanding much about accent and status in England these days. The year before, he had begun an affair with a London waitress whom he took to be the lively feral creature of some forsaken housing estate. But it turned out she had grown up in the Surrey Hills in a Lutyens house hidden among high laurels, and her father was an ennobled mathematician, a fellow member of the Royal Society. Beard had fled. Now here he was again, thrilling to his own idea of something demotic, or racy.
He said neutrally. ‘Yes. that’s right.’
‘Libya. Egypt, Sudan. And the rest. Business is it?’
He nodded.
‘And what is that?’
He had been asked many times at desks like this. He said, ‘Energy consultant.’
‘Is that oil?’
Again, the hint of the elided glottal tugged at something unwholesome in him.
‘No. Solar.’
‘CSP is it?’
Not quite right, but he nodded. She knew. In a dazed moment of virtuous hope and carnal self-interest, his imagination leap-frogged past dinner to the time when she had served out her notice with the immigration service and, smoothly competent, was travelling by his side, working with and for him, living for and with him and his vision of a world cleansed and cooled and energised by photovoltaics, by concentrated solar power, above all by his own artificial photosynthesis, and by systems centralised or distributed and grid-tied. He would teach her all he knew about thin film, heliostats, feed-in tariffs. She would be efficient in hours; out of them, generous, athletic, with low tastes.
He was starting to say conversationally, ‘So you take an interest in …’ as she spoke over him.
‘Thank you, Mr Beard.’ She was offering him his passport with her right hand, reaching over her neglected left where it lay unmoving on the desk. Of course! Unusable, wasted, withered. His ridiculous fantasy surged further, swelling into protective, nurturing affection for her congenitally useless left arm. She would eat dinner with a fork in her right hand; naturally, he would do the same.
His invitation was on his lips as her gaze slipped from his face towards the head of the queue behind, her smile fading as she called, ‘Next.’
This was the weakness he had to live with, his own withered arm, the mental playlets, wholly infantile, that generally led nowhere, occasionally brought him trouble and only very rarely joy. But similar daydreams – manic moments, brief neural bursts, compacted but cloudy episodes that braided the actual with the unreal, and threaded gaudy beads of the impossible, the outrageous and contradictory along thought-lines of indeterminate logic – had long ago brought him to formulate his Conflation. The poetic, the scientific, the erotic – why should the imagination care which master it served?
He hurried across baggage reclaim, past the creaking carousels and bored crowds beneath the information screens, through deserted customs, past the sinister one-way glass and the stainless-steel examination tables like bare mortuary slabs, then out along the lines of dead-eyed drivers and their boards – Kuwait Balloon Adventures, Bishop Dolan, Ted of Mr Kipling – and crossed the departure hall, fully aware that he was not quite making a direct line to the stairs that led down to his train, nor was he quite aiming for the down-at-heel airport shop that sold newspapers, luggage straps and related clutter. Was he going to be weak and go in there as he always did? He thought not. But his route was bending that way. He was a public intellectual of a sort, he needed to be informed, and it was natural that he should buy a newspaper, however pressed for time. At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.
He knew this shop too well, and it seemed he was walking directly towards it now. He was simply going in to take a look, test his will, buy a newspaper and nothing besides. If only it were pornography that he was trying to resist, then failure could do him no harm. But pictures of girls or parts of girls no longer stirred him much. His problem was even more banal than top-rack glossies. Now he was at the counter, sorting the pound coins from euros in his hand, with four newspapers under his arm, not one, as if excess in one endeavour might immunise him in another, and as he handed them across for their bar codes to be scanned, he saw at the edge of vision, in the array beneath the till, the gleam of the thing he wanted, the thing he did not want to want, a dozen of them in a line, and without deciding to he was taking one – so light! – and adding it to his pile, partly obliterating a picture of the prime minister waving from the doorway of a church.
It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in salt, industrialised powdered foodstuffs, preservatives, enhancers, hydrolysing and raising agents, acidity regulators and colouring. Salt and vinegar flavoured crisps. He was still stuffed from his lunch, but this particular chemical feast could not be found in Paris, Berlin or Tokyo and he longed for it now, the actinic sting of these thirty grams – a drug dealer’s measure. One last jolt to the system, then he would never touch the junk again. He thought there was every chance of resisting it until he was on the Paddington train. He stuffed the bag in the pocket of his jacket, took up his burden of papers and his wheeled luggage and continued across the concourse. He was thirty-five pounds overweight. About his future lightness he had made many general resolutions and virtuous promises, often after dinner with a glass in his hand, and all parliamentary heads nodding in assent. What defeated him was always the present, the moment of vivid confrontation with the affirming tidbit, the extra course, the meal he did not really need, when the short-term faction carried the day.
The flight from Berlin was a typical failure. At the start, as he lowered his broad rear into his seat, barely two hours after a meaty Germanic breakfast, he was forming his resolutions: no drinks but water, no snacks, a green-leaf salad, a portion of fish, no pudding, and at the same time, at the approach of a silver tray and the murmured invi
tation of a female voice, his hand was closing round the stem of his runway champagne. A half-hour later he was ripping open the sachet of a salt-studded, beef-glazed, toasted corn-type sticklet snack that came with his jumbo gin and tonic. Then there was spread before him a white tablecloth, the sight of which fired some neuronal starter gun for his stomach juices. The gin melted his remaining resolve. He chose the starter he had decided against: quails’ legs wrapped in bacon on a bed of creamed garlic. Then, cubes of pork belly mounted on a hill-fort of buttered rice. The word ‘pavé’ was another of those starter guns: a paving slab of chocolate sponge encased in chocolate under a chocolate sauce; goat’s cheese, cow’s cheese in a nest of white grapes, three rolls, a chocolate mint, three glasses of Burgundy, and finally, as though it would absolve him of all else, he forced himself back through the menu to confront the oil-sodden salad that came with the quail. When his tray was removed, only the grapes remained.
He bought his ticket and settled himself at a table on the half-empty train. Sitting opposite was one of those young men in their thirties with shaved head, chubby face and gymnasium-thickened neck who were, to Beard’s undiscerning eye, impossible to tell apart. This man, however, was distinguished by piercings in his ears. For some unacknowledged seconds there was an under-the-table negotiation, a polite ballet, for leg space. Then the younger man proceeded with the message he was tapping into his phone, and Beard, scanning the front pages, experienced the familiar mental narrowing of home-coming. These were surely the very papers he had read before he left, weeks before. Here were the same headlines, over the same photograph, asking the same question. When would Blair go? Tomorrow? Straight after the next election, assuming he won? A year in, or two, or after a whole fourth term? Was this not exactly the same number of Shia citizens in Baghdad, slaughtered by al-Qaeda as they queued to buy bread? That story apart (Beard was riffling through his pile), the tsunami had taken over a quarter of a million lives, which had raised for some, just as it had last month, the question of God’s existence. Elsewhere, the country was, as ever, pronounced to be in ruins, its governance, finances, health service, justice and education systems, military, transport infrastructure and public morals in a state of terminal inanition. From habit, he looked out for climate-change articles. Nothing today. Solar? Nothing – but there would be soon.