After a pause while he ordered his thoughts, he said, ‘What is his name?’
She looked away and said, ‘Terry.’
‘Terry?’ He spoke in disbelief. All that was foolish in her was contained in this idiotic name. ‘And what does Terry do?’
She sighed. It had to come out. ‘He’s a conductor.’
‘On the buses?’
‘Orchestras, symphonies. You know, classical stuff.’
But she hated classical music as much as he did, no rhythm, she always said, not hot-blooded enough, not Tobagan and Venezuelan enough for her. She was sitting at the far end of the sofa, looking as if she wished she had lied.
He said, ‘And has Terry met Catriona?’
This made her angry. In a tone of mocking sweetness she said, ‘That’s enough about me. Let’s talk about you. That was her on the phone, I suppose. What’s her name, and what does she do?’
He waved the question away. He was not prepared to set his waitress against her symphonic conductor. ‘Look, Melissa, there’s something you’re not getting. You’re the mother of our child . . .’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Michael. And you’re the father of our et cetera. I can’t believe the crap you talk sometimes. And look . . .’
She seemed on the point of telling him something else, but just then, Catriona wailed from the bedroom and Melissa hurried away to her. When she came back he was standing on the far side of the room, near his luggage.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Go. Fuck off. I’m throwing you out.’
‘No need,’ he said, and picked up his bag and left.
She phoned him in the morning when he was at Heathrow to tell him she loved him. He told her that he was sorry the evening had ended the way it had and blamed himself. They spoke again when he arrived in Dallas and made up a little more. When he thought about it now he was in two minds. He was angry and jealous and wanted to claim Melissa for himself and stuff Terry’s baton down his throat. On the other hand, this Terry was his permission, his passport to more fun with good old Darlene. How much fun of this kind did he have ahead of him? And perhaps this was the point – he had the perfect situation after all. But then he thought of this man in Melissa’s bed, or reading Beatrix Potter to his daughter, and he realised that he must give up Darlene and get back to London as soon as he could. But then, what about Darlene? Hopeless, to think about it now when he was so weary, when being in Lordsburg tomorrow would clarify everything.
He fell asleep fully dressed on the bed, with the palmtop still in his hand.
Interstate 10 was quicker, but they preferred the lonely back road, Route 9, that ran a few miles above the Mexican border, straight as a Euclidean line between low hills and the Chihuahuan desert scrub. It was almost midday, forty-four degrees and rising. Ahead, the two-lane road tapered away and dissolved into a mess of heat warp where buckled light showed smooth mirage puddles that evaporated at their approach. In an hour they had seen only three vehicles, all of them white pick-ups belonging to Border Patrol. When one passed, its driver raised his hand in grim salute. Beard drove, and Hammer sat hunched over his laptop, typing and muttering to himself, ‘Fucking right they don’t . . . that’s better . . . but I haven’t . . . try apologising, asshole . . .’ Occasionally, he offered his companion genuine information. ‘New York Times have cancelled . . . We had two jets for the fly-past, but that war hero with one leg at the Chamber of Commerce, the ex-pilot, knows everyone, so now we have seven.’
Beard drove at a steady fifty-five, the elbow of his steering hand cushioned comfortably on his paunch. In the States, it came easier, to drive at a lordly pace, with the big engine barely turning, almost silent. The country had lived en masse with the automobile longer than any other. People had wearied of the car as a racing device, or penis or missile substitute. They stopped at suburban crossroads and politely negotiated with glances who should go first. They even obeyed the fifteen-mile-an-hour limits around schools. At his untaxing speed, with the faded yellow lines rolling under the SUV, his thoughts turned obsessively, uselessly around the project. He held seventeen patents in the panels. If ten thousand were sold . . . and the conversion rate of water to hydrogen in ideal conditions like these … a litre of water held three times the energy of a litre of gasoline. So in a smaller car with the right engine they could have made this journey with two litres of water, three wine bottles full … They should have bought wine in El Paso, because the choice in Lordsburg was narrow …
His thoughts unfurled like the miles, and he was relaxed and happy, despite his session with the doctor. His sense of freedom was at one with the cloudless sky, blueish-black at the zenith, and the empty landscape before him. Here was the culmination of eight years’ work. Travelling to Lordsburg was every Englishman’s ideal of America – the open road narrowing to the horizon, the colossal space, the possibilities. Along the route, especially on the southern side, projecting from the tops of sandy banks and hillocks, were piles of stones, some of them five feet high, one stone balanced on another to give a vaguely humanoid aspect. They had a primitive, ancient look, and when he had first seen them he had assumed they were Aztec relics, the local equivalent of menhirs and dolmens. But they were marks of triumph left by Mexican immigrants who had crossed the border and tramped the miles of scrub to rendezvous with their connections. At intervals by the road were Border Patrol observation stations. Elsewhere they parked their pick-ups on strategic rises and watched through binoculars the grey-green expanse of arid ranchland. Who could blame the immigrants? Who would not want to come to a place where a foreigner could be welcomed to launch a revolutionary energy plant with generous local help and tax breaks, and army marching bands and air-force fly-pasts? It would not have been so smooth in Libya or Egypt.
Hammer interrupted the pleasant inward drift of his thoughts. ‘There’s a message from a lawyer in Albuquerque, been trying to get in touch with you. Says he represents an Englishman called Braby. Wants to talk to you about something in connection with his client.’
‘He wrote to me last week, wanting a meeting,’ Beard said. ‘Ignore it. I don’t owe Braby any favours. He’s the one who got me sacked from the Centre in England. Remember I told you that story.’
Hammer straightened up and slumped back against the headrest. ‘Looking at this screen is making me sick.’ He spoke with eyes closed. ‘The lawyer’s name is Barnard, and he’s flying down here tomorrow. He needs to talk to you. You sure there’s nothing wrong, something I should know about?’
‘Braby’s just the sort to kick you in the face, then ask a favour. Ignore it.’
Hammer kept his eyes shut and said nothing for a minute, and Beard thought he had fallen asleep until he said, ‘When a lawyer comes some distance unasked to meet you, travelling at his client’s expense, you expect trouble.’
Beard let this go. What was there to argue about? He had been ignoring Braby for years. Let him do the brave thing, and pick up the phone himself. It was not difficult to guess his business. An introduction to the NREL in Golden, access to venture capital for the Centre, or maybe the inside line on solar or on tax breaks. Why worry?
They passed through Columbus, and as the Cedar Mountains rose into view they had one more desultory conversation about their iron-filing scheme. Everything was in place, the investors, the captain, the ship, an option to purchase the filings. All that was missing now was a carbon-trading scheme.
‘We’ve got Obama working on it,’ Hammer said. ‘We can think about other things, but when it comes, we’ll be ready.’
The instrument panel was showing an external temperature of one hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than either man had ever known. Beard pulled over so they could experience the full blast. It was a mistake perhaps, to go hatless straight from the refrigerated cabin into such savage heat, or perhaps it was his sudden exertion after ninety minutes behind the wheel. As he stepped onto the edge of the road, just as he was about to exclaim to his friend something banal,
he felt dizzy, his consciousness partially faded and his knees gave way. If he had not kept hold of the car door handle, he would have dropped to the ground. As it was, he swayed and half stumbled, but managed to stay on his feet as his shoulder swung back hard against the car. His pulse was racing as he struggled with the rear door to look for his hat. He leaned into the relative cool of the back seat and fumbled with his panama and, resting there a few seconds, began to feel better. The episode had taken less than fifteen seconds. Hammer, who was on the other side of the car, saw nothing.
The two men stepped away from the road, marvelling. The heat created a form of synaesthesia. It was loud, vulgar, it towered over them, its weight pressed down on their heads, and it leaped up from the ground and struck their faces. Who would believe that a photon had no mass?
‘Here it is,’ Beard cried, miming triumph with a raised clenched fist to disguise his strange turn and reassure himself with the sound of his own voice that he was still the same man. ‘This is the power!’
‘All power to the power!’ Hammer said. ‘But I’ve had enough.’
Hammer got back in the car, behind the wheel, and that was a relief, Beard thought as he climbed in beside him. He was still too shaky to drive. Now they were travelling close to eighty and in less than half an hour were through Hachita and Playas, then crossing the Continental Divide below the Pyramid Mountains, in Hidalgo County, in the boot heel of the state. Their site was barely an hour away, on the far side of Lordsburg, and as they got nearer they became noisy and jaunty, more like country boys on their way to a hoedown than men in their sixties with awesome responsibilities. They sang ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, the nearest to a cheerful song about New Mexico that they knew. The way had been long and hard, they had travelled together uncomfortably, sometimes miserably in the Middle East, and tiringly through the American South-West. The lab work and the office work had driven them apart at times, and now, finally, they were about to share their secret, the ancient secret of plants, and astound the world with their version of cheap, clean and continuous energy. For old times’ sake, and because it was their favourite spot, they turned south at the Animas junction and pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Panther Tracks café and parked right beside the local sheriff’s patrol car.
Hammer had mythologised Animas as the friendliest rural community in the States. The day it acquired sidewalks, he said, he would stop coming. The café – the finest west of the Mississippi – was a white painted shed with few windows. Stepping out of the heat of the early afternoon, they paused in the doorway to let their eyes adjust. The sheriff and another cop were in quiet conference over mugs of coffee and were the only customers. In the Panther Tracks you did not order what you wanted, but what was available. Today it was pancakes and bacon. The coffee was the specially weak brew favoured across the American South. While they waited, Beard took out his palmtop. It had absorbed new messages that morning in the hotel, but he had not yet opened them. What caught his attention straight off was the name of P. Banner, his fifth ex-wife, Patrice, now married to a cosmetic dentist, Charles, who doted on her almost as much as Beard had nine years ago. She was briefly a headmistress before producing three babies in four years. And all those times she had told Beard that she never wanted children. Not his, anyway. Interesting, that Charles was short, plump and had even less hair than Beard and was two years older. As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.
A year ago he had bumped into her in Regent’s Park with her son, a delicate five-year-old with girlish curls. She was friendly, and he thought she was still beautiful. They sat on a bench and chatted for fifteen minutes. By devious means, Beard managed to pose the one question on his mind. Was she still an unfaithful wife? Yes, she might be, was her equally devious implication, but he did not stand a chance, if that was what he meant.
Dear Michael, This might not be news to you, but in case it is you should know that five weeks ago, Rodney came out of prison. He tried to get in touch with me. He has all sorts of mad ideas I won’t begin to describe. Charles’s lawyer went to court and got a prohibitive-steps order that means he’ll be arrested if he phones or writes or comes within 500 yards of our house. Now I’ve just heard from friends of friends that he’s gone to the States to look for you. Perhaps he wants to thank you personally for giving evidence against him at his trial! Anyway, I think you should be warned. It’s half-term tomorrow and we are all off to the Shetlands in the pouring rain. All best, Patrice.
Yes, that Turnip at the Camino Real hotel. It was one of the quaint decencies of English law that well-behaved murderers served only half their terms. An internet search on Beard’s name would lead to Lordsburg easily enough, and to the site. So what? Despite the air conditioning, he felt the pricking sensation of sweat forming above his upper lip, and a tightness across his chest that caused a pain at the base of his throat. The pancakes came, twenty in each stack, the friendly lady said, and a pitcher of maple syrup to douse them with, a pile of streaky bacon six inches high, and a top-up of coffee of palest brown.
‘Nirvana!’ Hammer said, banging his hands together, still in the mood that had just deserted Beard.
He had always known this moment must come, but he had grown used to knowing it, and he had thought there was a good chance that Tarpin would serve his full term, and that time would dilute everything, and prison weaken him, and that, after all, it was Patrice who obsessed him, that she was the one who did for him at the trial. In fact, Beard’s true accomplishment, a masterstroke of self-persuasion, was to half believe that Tarpin, because he was violent, because he had been tried and found guilty and was in prison with other guilty men, was tainted by association, and was indeed guilty, and not only that, but he knew it and was resigned to his fate. Beard, after all, had killed no one, and his story in court was unarguable, his witness from the Institute of Physics impeccable. As the years had passed, those events, on the morning he had returned from the Arctic, had begun to appear dreamlike, unprovable, without consequences. But lying below these appearances, like a stratum of impervious rock, were other assumptions, no, certainties, that in his busy life he had managed not to dwell on. Just as Beard had dreaded that the police and Patrice would assume that he, the jealous husband, had murdered Aldous, so Tarpin was bound to think so too. Who else would want to frame him with the tools from his bag? So what did an unjustly imprisoned violent man, working out his bitter rage in the prison gym every day for eight years, do on his release? No shortage of cheap flights to Dallas.
As long as the sheriff and his friend were there, on the next table, Beard felt safe. All the same, when the café door swung open with a bang against its frame, he started, and the tightness round his chest intensified. It was a boisterous group of four local teenagers, three boys and a girl, wanting Cokes. The presence of two cops did not subdue them. They greeted each other like family members. Perhaps two armed policemen could do nothing against Tarpin. He might be ready to kill Beard in full view, and spend the rest of his life in the cells, morbidly content with a settled score. No shortage of handguns in this part of the world, and as easily purchased as fishing tackle.
‘Off your food, Chief?’ Hammer had finished his stack. ‘Bad news from home?’
‘No, no,’ Beard said automatically, though even as he said it, he saw below Patrice’s name a message marked urgent from Melissa. ‘Just something I need to sort out. But I’m not hungry. It’s too hot. Have mine.’
He pushed his plate across and Toby started in on his twenty-first pancake as Beard, after a half-minute’s hesitation, opened Melissa’s message. He supposed he should read it before he was killed.
‘Michael, phone me, please. I need to talk to you about the other night.’
The other night? He struggled with this. Then he remembered Terry, the symphonic lover. She had dumped Terry, or she was marrying him. Beard could not decide at that moment which he would have preferred. If the latter, he would hide in Darlene’s trailer. Tarpin would be no match
for her. Or he would kill them both. He was not thinking straight, and he was in no condition for a matters-of-the-heart exchange with Melissa. He never would be. He scrolled through the names on the other twenty-seven messages – all but one was work-related, most in the pure, exalted domain of artificial photosynthesis. He opened the one from Darlene.
‘Come quick! Something to tell ya!!!’
He did not deserve these distractions. They were encircling him, women, an Albuquerque lawyer, a north-London criminal, the unquiet cells of his own body, in a conspiracy to prevent him making his gift to the world. None of this was his fault. People had said of him that he was brilliant, and that was right, he was a brilliant man trying to do good. Self-pity steadied him a little. He and Toby were due to meet the engineers for a final inspection of the site that afternoon. Then Beard would give a speech to the assembled team. They should get on. But to drive towards Lordsburg was to drive towards Tarpin. The sight of Hammer’s pancakes, or rather, the vision of him eating so many, doused in syrup, topped with the partially burned strips of the flesh and fat of pigs, sickened him. Muttering an excuse, he went through the café to the men’s room, believing that he might be able to think more clearly if he could be sick. He stood waiting, slightly stooped, like a diligent waiter, over the porcelain bowl. How sparkling clean it was, just when a little disgust, the chocolate arabesque of another man’s excrement, might have helped him empty his stomach. But nothing came. He straightened and dabbed at his forehead with a tissue. So what should he do? Either his life was at risk, or he was a hysterical coward. He considered the elemental fact – Tarpin was coming to see him. What good could come of that? Even now he might be sitting on the edge of a bed in a motel room on the Lordsburg strip, oiling his gun. Clearly, he was well motivated. For psychologically, logistically, even financially, it was not easy for an ex-con to fly about the world. He would need to lie about his criminal past on the US visa-waiver form. But no one would know. So it was foolish not to panic. The sensible thing might be to slip away, plead modesty and let Toby handle the opening ceremony, go down to São Paulo, for example, where a woman he knew, Sylvia, a fine physicist herself, would be more than happy to let him stay. He flushed the lavatory, washed his hands slowly, trying to make a decision before going back to the table. Yes, fine, São Paulo, but he could not speak Portuguese. He could not stay down there for ever. He would miss Darlene. So then what?