Nancy Temple’s replacement was Susan Appelbaum, a visiting academic from Tel Aviv, who lectured in cognitive psychology and was as light as a bird in her red and blue frock, with a twittering voice to match. She was nervous speaking in public and made an awkward start. In the theatre there was suspicion and some confusion. From the point of view of the audience, which seemed to be of one mind in all things, she had points in her favour and points against. As a woman she was a poor hegemon, and being unconfident, poorer still (Beard thought he was getting the hang of this term). Also, after a few minutes, it was clear she was speaking against Beard. On the other hand, she was a Jew, an Israeli and, by association, an oppressor of Palestinians. Perhaps she was a Zionist, perhaps she had served in the army. And once she got under way, the hostility in the room began to grow. This was a postmodern crowd with well-developed antennae for the unacceptable line. Its heart, when not seized by correct utterance from correct quarters, turned cold. The lady from Tel Aviv was forthright about her reactionary position, which included various underlying assumptions she shared with Beard. She was an objectivist, in that she believed the world existed independently of the language that described it, she spoke in praise of reductionist analysis, she was an empiricist and, by her own proud admission, an ‘Enlightenment rationalist’, which was, Beard sensed from the groaning dissent in the audience, a tad regressive, if not hegemonic after all. There was, she insisted, such a thing as biological sex differences in cognition, but only empirical evidence should shape our view. There was a human nature and it had an evolutionary history. We were not born tabula rasa. By the time her introduction was over, she was having difficulty holding the theatre’s attention.
Not many listened to Appelbaum as she confronted Beard’s arguments. She knew all the same studies, and many more. Some of them she had conducted herself. The literature was clear – there were no significant differences in cognition that gave males an advantage in maths or physics. Divergences between boys and girls, men and women, only emerged in complex tests where subjects were offered more than one route to a solution: men and women chose differently. The people-versus-things distinction was mythology and had distorted some poorly designed but much-cited experiments. On social factors, on the other hand, the studies were eloquent – perceptions and expectations were far stronger signals than objectively measured differences between men and women. This should have pleased her audience, but they didn’t catch it, they weren’t attending as she described experiments in which babies were assigned random gender names and adults were asked to judge their various activities. Or parents were asked to predict their children’s abilities in a given task. Or academics were required to evaluate fictitious male and female candidates with identical qualifications. These, she said, were statistically significant data that showed that perception of gender was a powerful determinant of attitudes. And there were well-studied self-sustaining loops – people applied to departments where there were people ‘like them’, and where they were likely to have success.
By the time Appelbaum started in on her conclusion, Beard thought he was the only one listening. Statistics were clearly not a postmodern concern, and nor were historical anecdotes. She referred to the life of Fanny Mendelssohn, recognised at the time as a prodigous musical talent, the equal of her brother, Felix. Famously, her father explained to her in a letter that while music would be her brother’s profession, for her, music must remain an ornament, for Sundays. A hundred years ago, many ‘scientific’ reasons were advanced why women could not be doctors. Today, there remained unconscious or unintentional, widely diffused differences in the ways boys and girls, men and women, were understood and judged. From cradle to first job application and beyond, in a sustained arc of development, these cultural factors were shown by empirical investigation to be vastly more significant than biology. It was plain why there were so few women in physics.
She sat down to no applause. But there was general relief that she was finally done. Ten minutes later the meeting broke up. Beard headed straight for the exit, feeling reprieved. Some might have said that he had just taken a good kicking, others that he had triumphed. What did he know? He was a physicist after all, not a cognitive psychologist. But pleasingly, here at the ICA, he was hated no more than he had been at the start. These people were not going to take their lead from an Israeli. That was hardly fine, but there was nothing he could do about it. And he was fine, he was still in one piece. As he went along the corridor, the crowd parted for him, no doubt in distaste, and he was at the door onto the Mall in seconds and stepping out into bright sunshine and a reception party, about thirty chanting protestors with placards – No To Eugenics! Nazi Professor Out! – and a dozen press, mostly cameramen, and four members of the Metropolitan Police.
Perhaps matters would have turned out better if Beard had not brought out from the event indoors a mood of jaunty defiance. There were half a dozen older women among the demonstrators. One of them nipped out from behind a policeman, took a tomato from a brown paper bag and threw it at Beard. She was ten feet away and there was no time to dodge. A rotten tomato is an item of urban legend. This one, though soft, looked perfectly edible. It flopped against his lapel and clung there a moment. When it fell he caught it in his open palm, and with a quick, impulsive movement chucked it back, an entirely playful gesture, he tried to explain afterwards, without anger or malice. Why else throw it underarm? The tomato, its skin now ruptured, hit the woman full in the face, just to the right of her nose. With a strange sound, a plaintive musical hoot, the woman, who was about Beard’s age and almost as plump, brought her hands up to her face, somehow trapping and smearing the tomato against her features, and at the same time sank to her knees.
In colour, it made a dramatic photograph. Taken from behind Beard, it showed him looming over a woman cowering on the ground, the victim of a gory assault. In Germany it was on the cover of a magazine with the headline ‘Protester Felled By “Neo-Nazi” Professor’. In the background, not quite out of focus, was the relevant placard. Another picture, also widely used, taken over the head of the kneeling woman, revealed Beard’s heartless smile. He could not help himself, he was genuinely amused. The tomato was so soft, his toss so gentle, the woman’s reaction so comically overplayed, a policeman so solicitous in bending over her, another so self-important as he urgently radioed for an ambulance. This was street theatre. A policewoman touched Beard’s arm and said tonelessly that she was arresting him for assault. A second policewoman stood close, pressing her shoulder against his to let him know that struggle was useless. The handcuffs, alive with the young woman’s body warmth, clicked over his wrists to a good-natured cheer from the demonstrators. A half-dozen photographers walked backwards in front of him as he was led towards a patrol car parked on the Mall. As it pulled away they ran alongside, with a great clatter of shoes, snapping Beard in the criminal gloom of the back seat.
The police car drove past the National Portrait Gallery, up the Charing Cross Road and stopped outside Foyles. The arresting officer, who was sitting with Beard, unlocked the handcuffs as her colleague turned round in the front seat and said, ‘You can go now, sir.’
‘I thought you were charging me with assault.’
‘Just removing you from a scene where there was likely to be a breach of the peace. For your own safety.’
‘How considerate of you to think of handcuffing me in front of the press.’
‘Kind of you to say so, sir. Only doing our job. But thank you, sir.’
The car door was held open for him, and then he was alone on the pavement, wondering if there was a book he needed to buy. There was not. He went home to his flat and lay brooding in the scum-rimmed bath, gazing through steam clouds at the archipelago of his disrupted selfhood – mountainous paunch, penis tip, unruly toes – scattered in a line across a soapy grey sea. He told himself that things are often not as bad as you think. That was true. But sometimes they are worse: a dying story had been revived.
Over the following week images of the shackled Nobel professor, of the humbled victim kneeling before her persecutor, of his unwholesome grin, digitally multiplied themselves around the world like retroviruses. Out at the Centre, Jock Braby seized his chance and forced Beard’s resignation. A lecture series was cancelled in outrage, and at various venues his presence was thought likely to harm the good name of an institution or a fellow visiting dignitary or, at the very least, cause trouble from the students and younger faculty. A kindly civil servant phoned to ask whether he cared to choose between resigning from Physics UK and being sacked. A research centre took the trouble to let him know that the name of Beard, now mud, would cease to appear on its letterhead. In the senior common room of an Oxford college, where he went for solace and coffee, three English-literature dons walked out at the sight of him, heads held high, while their own coffees cooled conspicuously by their abandoned chairs. His phone did not ring much – his friends were silent, or, like his ex-wives, reticent, or baffled. However, Imperial College, delighted with the lab he had set up and the funding he had attracted, stood by him. And he received an affable, comradely letter, bearing the stamp of an Austrian prison, from a neo-Nazi serving time for the murder of a Jewish journalist.
For two weeks he thought of nothing else. To stay away from reading newspapers, as Melissa sweetly proposed, was beyond him. When there was nothing new in the two-kilo wedge of the morning’s press, he felt a curious, twisted disappointment at an immediate prospect of emptiness, at having nothing to consume him all day. He had discovered a compulsion to read of this alien, the avatar bearing his name, the goat-monster-seducer, denier of a woman’s right to a career in science, eugenicist. He was baffled by how he had ended up stuck with this last label. But after a few blustery walks up and over Primrose Hill among the pushchairs and kite-fliers, he came to a tentative conclusion. The Third Reich had projected a prohibitive shadow more than half a century long over genetics where it touched on human affairs – at least, in the minds of those outside the subject. To suggest the possibility of genetic influence, genetic difference, of an evolutionary past bearing down in some degree on cognition, on men and women, on culture, was to some minds like entering a camp and volunteering to work with Doctor Mengele.
When he tried out this notion on biologist friends they were amused. That was old hat, that was seventies stuff, there was a new consensus now, not only in genetics, but in academic life in general. He was too bitter. Have another drink! But what did they know about journalists or postmodernists? As Beard saw it, the solution was simple. Stick to photons – no resting mass, no charge, no controversy on the human scale. His work in artificial photosynthesis was proceeding well, with a laboratory prototype already using light to split water efficiently into hydrogen and oxygen. Civilisation needed a safe new energy source, and he could be of use. He would be redeemed. Let there be light!
For all that resolve, he thought his disgrace would mark him for years. And then what happened? Nothing. His avatar vanished. Overnight, he was airbrushed from the public prints, a soccer match-fixing story took his place, and the slow-healing amnesia began. For a while he was underemployed, then four months later, he gave six short talks about Einstein for the BBC World Service. A research group in Germany seduced him onto its letterhead. Cambridge saw its chance to steal him from Imperial, then Imperial trumped Cambridge and gave him two more researchers and even more money. UCL wanted a slice of him too, offering as a softener an honorary degree, then Caltech pitched in, and some old friends at MIT wanted to bring him across.
How magnanimous was public life, and how well did the lustre of a Nobel laureate reflect upon an academy and oil the wheels of grant acquisition!
* * *
By the time his taxi had swung round Trafalgar Square and paused to join in a traffic jam along the Strand, he was over an hour and a half late. Five minutes later, he had made no progress. For the past four hours, it suddenly seemed, his thoughts had been cramped by delay and exasperation, until now, sitting in the motionless cab, the confinement became intolerable. He pushed a twenty-pound note through the slot in the driver’s screen and climbed out with his luggage and began to tow it towards the Savoy. Walking might make him later still, but acting like a man in a hurry rather than thinking like one was a relief. And barrelling along with his wheeled burden, overtaking and weaving between pedestrians, was the workout he had been promising himself for years. Richly dishevelled, the knot of his purple tie askew, the expensive wool suit in need of a press, the overcoat too warm for the modern English winter, hurrying lopsidedly along, one leg making a decent show of stepping forward, the other stiffly scooting, he bobbed up the Strand like a fat boy on a pogo stick. Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed. No meeting was worth dying for. The traffic began to move again, and his own cab, now for hire, shot past him as he shuffled towards the hotel.
In the lobby, two conference organisers were waiting. The younger one took his bag, the other, a very old man in a blazer leaning heavily on a walking stick, with a liver-spotted death mask for a face, pointed at his watch and walked with him up the stairs.
‘All is fine,’ the fellow croaked through the effort of raising his body weight through the luxurious gravitational field. ‘We’ve rejigged the running order. You’re on in five minutes.’
Beard heard this in good heart, for he felt by comparison youthful and unassailable, the motion of his feet across the thick carpet was pleasing and the pain had vanished from his chest.
Another official, younger but more senior, of Indian origin, received him by a set of lofty double doors thrown open to the din of teatime chatter. After the preliminaries – a great honour, a thousand thank yous, much anticipated, about lateness please not to worry – the young man, whose name, Saleel, Beard remembered from email exchanges, ran through the composition of the audience: institutional men and women, a few civil servants, a few academics, no journalists.
But Beard was not fully attentive, for his gaze had shifted from Saleel’s face to a view over the young man’s dark-suited shoulder of the room and its voluble crowd. Arranged on tables covered in white cloths, framed by high windows and a view of the darkening Thames, were square porcelain dishes densely heaped with plump pillows of crustless sandwiches. Even from where he stood he could make out the fat pink stripes of a smoked-salmon filling. Artfully scattered across the tables were slices of lemons, detached yellow smiles of enticement to which no one in the room was paying much attention. He was not at that moment truly hungry, but he was, in his own term, pre-hungry. That is, he could appreciate how pleasurable it might be, in less than an hour, to lift a few of those items onto a plate and contemplate the river while he ate. And just as easily, he could anticipate the regret he would feel if the dishes were removed too soon, when the afternoon tea break came to an end, which it must do when his talk began. Safer to eat a few now.
Saleel was saying, ‘A conservative lot, institutional investors, not scientific, of course, so not too technical would be most heartily appreciated.’
By turning his shoulder into the room, Beard was able to prompt his host, clearly a sensitive and intelligent man, to exclaim as he handed over a white envelope, ‘But of course, you need refreshment! And please, your emolument.’
A minute later Beard had the plate and, on it, thick-cut smoked wild salmon speckled with dill and ground black pepper between thin white bread slices, nine heavy quarter segments – a precautionary number, since he did not have to eat them all. But he did, and very quickly, without much satisfaction or even a thought for the river, because a soft-spoken man with a stutter wanted to tell him about his son’s physics exam, and then a tall man with a stoop and a jutting ginger beard and large accusing eyes set eerily far apart introduced himself. He was Jeremy Mellon, lecturer in urban studies and folklore. Beard, who was on his sixth piece, felt obliged to a
sk why Mellon was here.
‘Well, I’m interested in the forms of narrative that climate science has generated. It’s an epic story, of course, with a million authors.’
Beard was suspicious. This was the Nancy Temple tendency. People who kept on about narrative tended to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to be of equal value. But he did not even have to say, ‘How interesting,’ for people were setting down their cups and saucers and hurrying to find their seats, and the old fellow with a stick was grimacing at him and once more tapping his watch, and there was only just enough time to bolt down the last three wedges of smoked salmon.
Beard was guided to a purpose-built stage and shown to a moulded orange plastic seat behind a vat of bilious red and yellow tulips. He tried not to look at them. He thought there was a general air of unreality about the gathering. A couple of hundred people sat in ranks, in a shallow arc before him. The pinkness of so many faces looked absurd. Their chatter seemed to resound in an echo chamber. The Savoy was swaying, or undulating gently beneath his feet, as though it had slid into the river and was rocking on the turning tide. He succumbed to a fit of yawning, which he suppressed through tensed nostril wings. He had to face it, he was a little queasy, and it did not help that a heavy-breathing technician with mottled skin and odorous tooth decay or pyorrhoea bent close over his face to attach a radio mic.
While Beard sat cross-kneed, with customary, frozen half-smile, pretending to listen to Saleel’s long and toofulsome introduction, and even more so when at last he stood to bored applause and took his place behind the lectern, gripping tight its edges in both hands, he felt an oily nausea at something monstrous and rotten from the sea, stranded on the tidal mud flats of a stagnant estuary, decaying gaseously in his gut and welling up, contaminating his breath, his words and, suddenly, his thoughts.