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.
&nb
sp; 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 enacti
ng 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.’