Solar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Part Three

  2009

  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.