He set the papers down on the seat beside him and attended to his palmtop, scrolling through the fifteen messages it had absorbed since his departure from Berlin Tegel. Fourteen related to his project. His American partner, Toby Hammer, confirmed that the documents were at Grosvenor Square. The ranch owner wanted his option money transferred to an account in El Paso and not the one in Alamogordo. The local Chamber of Commerce politely requested a ‘cleaner’ estimate of the number of jobs the installation would provide for the citizens of Lordsburg. Whenever he saw the name of that small town, his mood improved. He wanted to be there now, on its northern edge, gazing over the dazzling immensity towards the spot, out along the straight road to Silver City, where their work would begin. Lordsburg Holiday Inn wanted him to know that his booking next month was confirmed, in the usual room, and at a lower rate for a faithful customer. For the third time that month, a note from Jock Braby, wanting to meet. He would have heard the rumours of good results at Imperial and now he would be wanting some share of the success. And this, from the man who had arranged Beard’s sacking from the Centre. An afterthought from Toby Hammer. He had found a cheap source of iron filings. Only one personal message: Don’t forget dinner at 8. Main course is you. I love you, Melissa.
I love you. She had written and said this many times, but he had never said it back to her, not even in moments of abandon. And not because he thought he did not love her. He was never quite sure on that count. Long ago he had learned never to declare love to anyone. With Melissa he dreaded the question these three words of supernatural torque must raise. Would he commit to her for the rest of his life and father her child? She longed for the baby that circumstances had denied her. But his entire case history convinced him that if he went along with the plan, he was bound to bring disappointment to this artless, pretty young woman, who was eighteen years younger than him. She was at that age when a childless woman should be in a hurry. If he would not step up to perform his duties, he should bow out. She surely would need a period of adjustment, and then time to find a replacement. But she did not want him to go, and he could not bring himself to leave. And yet – to be an inadequate husband all over again, for the sixth time, to be father of an infant at sixty. Ridiculous regression!
It was agony to discuss the matter with her. The last occasion, in a restaurant in Piccadilly, she was wet-eyed when she said that she would rather not have a child than lose him. Unbearable. The stuff of agony-aunt columns. He could not believe her. If he really loved her, he thought, he should free her and leave her now. But he liked her and was weak. How could he refuse this improbable gift? Who else as young would take on so tenderly a man as faintly absurd, short, tubby, ageing, as scalded by public disgrace, corrupted by a whiff of failure, consumed by his cranky affair with sunbeams?
So he made the poorest choice of all. Barely a choice, more a kind of instinctual funk. Without quite cutting loose, he had kept his distance – he was working abroad anyway. He had seen other women, and all the while half hoped for and wholly dreaded the call she would make to tell him of the eager, talented buck prowling at the peripheries of her existence, about to make, or having just made, an entrance. And then, if he was weak enough, he would hurry back to defend what he would suddenly decide was his, and she would be grateful, the buck would be dispatched (the buck stops here!), the mess would remain, and he would be one step nearer the wrong decision.
He put away the palmtop, leaned back in his seat and half closed his eyes. Right before him on the table, shimmering through his barely parted lashes, were the salt and vinegar crisps, and just beyond the packet was a plastic bottle of mineral water belonging to the young man. Beard wondered whether he should be looking over the notes for his speech, but general travel fatigue as well as the lunchtime drinks had rendered him, for the moment, inert, and he believed he knew the material well enough, and on a card in his top pocket were various useful quotes. As for the snack, he wanted it less than he did, but he still wanted it. Certain of those industrial compounds might stir his metabolism into wakefulness. It was his palate, rather than his stomach, that was looking forward to the acidic tang of the dust coating each brittle slice. He had shown decent restraint – the train had been moving for several minutes now – and there was no good reason to hold back.
He pulled himself up in his seat and leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands propping his chin for several reflective seconds, gaze fixed on the gaudy wrapper, silver, red and blue, with cartoon animals cavorting below a Union Jack. So childish of him, this infatuation, so weak, so harmful, a microcosm of all past errors and folly, of that impatient way he had of having to have what he wanted instantly. He took the bag in both hands and pulled its neck apart, discharging a clammy fragrance of frying fat and vinegar. It was an artful laboratory simulation of the corner fish and chip shop, an enactment of fond memories and desire and nationhood. That flag was a considered choice. He lifted clear a single crisp between forefinger and thumb, replaced the bag on the table, and sat back. He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment’s spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain.
Like a master of wine at a grand tasting, he had closed his eyes. When he opened them he was staring into the level grey-blue gaze of the man opposite. Feeling only slightly ashamed, Beard made a gesture of impatience and looked away. He knew how he must have appeared, a plump fool of a certain age communing intensely with a morsel of junk food. He had been behaving as though alone. So what? As long as he harmed or offended no one, that was his right. He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one. In a simple assertion of selfhood, rather than to satisfy his contemptible needs, he put out a hand to take another crisp, and as he did so, met again the other man’s stare. It was narrow, hard, unblinking, expressive of little beyond a ferocious curiosity. It occurred to Beard that he might be sitting across from a psychopath. So be it. He could be a bit of one himself. The salty residue from the first round gave him the impression that he was bleeding from the gums. He slumped back in his seat, opened his mouth and repeated the experience, although this time he kept his eyes open. Inevitably, the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first, and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once.
It was at this moment, as he glanced up, that he witnessed his fellow passenger sitting forward, gaze still eerily fixed, elbows on the table, perhaps in conscious parody. Then, letting one forearm drop, crane-like down onto the bag, the man stole a crisp, probably the largest in the packet, held it in front of his face for a second or two, then ate it, not with Beard’s fastidiousness, but with an insolent chewing motion, with lips parted so that one could glimpse it turning to paste on his tongue. The man did not even blink, his stare was so intense. And the act was so flagrant, so unorthodox, that even Beard, who was quite capable of unconventional thought – how else had he won his Prize? – could only sit in frozen shock and try, for dignity’s sake, by remaining expressionless, to betray no sign of emotion.
The two men were locked into each other’s gaze, and now Beard was determined not to look away. No question, the man’s behaviour was aggressive, the act was naked theft, however trivial the goods. And if it came to physical struggle, Beard did not doubt that he would be on the floor in seconds, with broken arms or head. But there was also a possibility of another element, of something playful behind this steeliness and mockery of an older man’s ridiculous pleasure in junk food. Or a tease, in the old-fashioned situationist mode, of a stuffy bourgeois. Or worse, the fellow believed that Beard was gay, and this was a come-on, a kind of modern
opening known only to certain subgroups for whom his purple silk tie, as a hypothesis, was an accidental signal, an open invitation to seduction. Wasn’t an earring in one ear or the other, he had forgotten which, once a significant marker of sexual orientation? This man had two earrings in each ear. The physicist knew much about light, but about forms of public expression in contemporary culture he was in the dark. Finally, returning to his initial surmise, Beard continued to wonder if his fellow passenger was a psychiatric case on an unlicensed drug holiday from the lithium, in which case it was a bad idea to continue to stare into his eyes. At this, Beard looked away and did the only thing that came to mind. He took another crisp.
What did he expect? As soon as this crisp was on Beard’s tongue, the man’s hand dropped again, and this time he took two, just as Beard himself had intended, and ate them in the same jaunty, vulgar manner. It would surely not be a good move to snatch the bag away from the table – too physical, too abrupt. Dangerous, to be breaking new ground, inviting a scuffle. Would anyone save him if it came to that? Beard glanced around the compartment. Passengers were reading, or staring numb-faced into space, or out the window at the wintry west-London suburbs, oblivious to the drama. What interest was there in two men silently sharing a snack? It was paradoxical, but as Beard saw it, there was more sense in continuing what had already begun. It did not occur to him to avoid confrontation with a stronger man by giving way and letting him have the bag to himself. Beard would not be bullied. He may have been short and overweight, but he had a developed sense of justice and always stood his ground. He was capable of being reckless. There had been some ruinous consequences. He took another slice of fried potato. His opponent, his stare still fixed on Beard, did the same. Then again, and again, for two further rounds, their hands came down on the bag, in steady, deliberate rather than rapid succession, and never quite touched. When there were only two crisps left, the young man retrieved the bag and, in a parody of politeness, offered them to Beard. The only response to this, the final insult, was to turn away.
It was an outrage. The train was beginning to slow, people were reaching for their coats, a computerised voice reminded passengers not to leave the train without their luggage. In a move that secured his triumph, the young man balled up in his fist the plastic bag and stuffed it into the waste bin under the table. Diligently, he used a hand to wipe the table clear of crumbs and grains of salt. Beard’s humiliation was complete. This was how it was to grow older, to be pushed around by the young, the strong, and have no redress. With a warming touch of self-pity, he sensed that every injustice, every historical oppression, unwarranted invasion, chaotic warlordism, every tyrannical break with the rule of law was compacted in this moment, and he was bound by self-respect and his duty to underdogs everywhere to make a show of resistance. Otherwise, he could never live with himself. He lunged forward, seized his opponent’s bottle of water, snapped off its top and drank deeply – he was thirsty anyway – drank it down to the bottom, every last drop of its twenty-five centilitres. He tossed the bottle on the table with a defiant, come-and-get-me look. The blue bottle cap rolled onto the floor.
The young man thought for a moment, then stood and stepped into the aisle, revealing his full height, somewhere around six two. Beard, already beginning to regret his defiance, remained in his seat, determined not to cringe. The man reached up, and with one smooth movement of his overdeveloped arm, he swung Beard’s luggage to the floor, setting it down gently by its owner. If this was an act of contrition, Beard was not moved, and he returned a snarling look of contempt. His adversary hesitated a moment, gazing down at the older man with an expression of sorrow or pity, and then he turned and loped away down the compartment.
Beard let him get well clear before he stood. He never wanted to see the fellow again. A full minute passed before he stepped out onto the platform. Trembling a little now, with anger or shock, or a little of both, he had some difficulty getting himself into his coat – its belt was tangled around a sleeve. His shoelace was loose. As he kneeled to retie it with fingers not yet fully obedient, he remembered his heap of newspapers and decided to leave them where they were. At last, more or less composed, he made his way along the platform towards the ticket barrier. This was the moment that would remain with him, and come to stand for every recalculation he would ever make about his past, every revised or improved perspective he would ever gain on his own history, his own stupidity and other people’s motives. He had stopped twenty feet short of the barrier. He set his wheeled luggage on end and reached under his coat into his jacket pocket for his ticket. There was something else in there, something plastic, bulky, lightweight, crunchy. There came to him a confused childhood memory of a magic trick at a village fete, when some master of the art had pulled from ten-year-old Michael Beard’s ear an egg, or rabbit or chicken, something physically impossible, just like this: his crisps, the ones he had already eaten. He pulled the bag clear and, stupefied, stared at it, the Union Jack, the dancing cartoon animals, willing them to melt away. And that other bag? What a cascade of recalibration of every instant, every impulse, of the nature of the man he never wanted to see again, and of how he, Beard, must have seemed – a vicious madman.
He was so entirely in the wrong that for the moment it felt like liberation, strangely like joy. There could be no excuses, he had no defence. He also felt a mirthless impulse to laugh. His error was so unambiguous, so unsullied, he stood so completely revealed to himself, a naked fool, that he felt purified and redeemed, like a penitent, like an elated medieval flagellant with a newly flayed back. That poor fellow whose food and drink you devoured, who offered you his last morsels, fetched down your luggage, was a friend to man. No, no, that was not for now, the agony of retrospection must be postponed.
Despite the need to hurry to his appointment, he remained on the busy platform a good while, below the distant glass roof and its clattering echoes, while passengers stepped around him, and he held the bag of crisps against his chest, feeling himself, quite mistakenly, intensely illuminated.
In the taxi from Paddington to the Savoy he reminded himself to be careful, for he was feeling accident-prone and was about to speak in public, and afterwards, in the conference interval, was contractually bound to mingle, and might well confront journalists, men and women whose outward appearance of humanity and intelligence masked cold-hearted predation. They knew from past successes that he could be coaxed into indiscretion, or an expansive hypothesis – wasn’t free-thinking his duty? – which would appear crazed or dimwitted in print, once stripped of all conditionals, all hedging, all playfulness. A speculative remark had already cost him the headline ‘Nobel Prof: End Is Nigh’.
His own end – it seemed like that at the time – came only last year, and the curious thing was that people had already started to forget. This amounted to a kind of forgiveness. It was generally known there had been a fuss, a stirring of the news currents around Michael Beard, but the details were blurring. He had been proved wrong about something, or was he in the right all along? Did he assault someone, or was he the victim? Didn’t that someone get arrested? Back then, as the storm broke, a colleague, an eminence in computer modelling, told him that the picture of the Nobel prizewinner being led handcuffed through a jeering crowd was carried in four hundred and eighty-three newspapers. This fact remained with Beard, his humiliation had been planetary, but it seemed to have remained with no one else. New material had befuddled the public memory, fresh scandals, sporting events, confessions, war, celebrity gossip and the tsunami had wiped clean his slate. A twelve-month torrent, swelling steadily, had carried him to safer ground.
Even his own recollection of the events, their precise emotional tone, was beginning to fragment. To be the focus of press attention was to experience a form of vertigo and bewilderment. Mercifully, his own particular memory stain was fading to an indistinct watermark. But certain details remained sharp, kept alive by the retelling. He believed that anecdotes were a blight on conversati
on, and yet still he went on telling them. He often related how it was not the case that the feel of handcuffs on the skin was of cold steel, as one reads in detective novels. Those placed on him had been warmed by a long morning inside the armless gabardine jacket of the arresting policewoman. It was the intimate snugness of the fit around his wrists, the feel of transferred body warmth, that was sinister. Likewise, the cliché was that whenever you read a press story on any subject of which you had personal knowledge, there was at least one salient fact wrong. But that was not his experience. He marvelled at the unearthing of a quantity of accurate facts about himself. The distortion was in the way in which they were juxtaposed, wrought into fresh implication, millimetres beyond the reach of a libel lawyer. And he was impressed too by the research, by how these restless newspaper types had, in a matter of a day or two, penetrated deep into the obscure quarters, into the slums of an overcrowded personal life, drawing in one instance a bounty of malice from his third wife’s older brother, a near-mute recluse who had always loathed Beard and who lived without a telephone by a dirt track along a deserted north-westerly peninsula on Bruny Island off the coast of Tasmania.