Solar

  Strictly speaking, he did not lie to her about his life in England, but he did not tell her everything. She knew about the five wives, she had roared over tales of the rancid apartment in Dorset Square, which she promised to restore to order and cleanliness for him, if only he would give her the chance. But he refrained from an account of his partner and child in Primrose Hill. Darlene wanted to accompany him to England, and he did not want to heighten her interest in the plan by saying no, or complicate his life by saying yes, and settled instead for vague promises. As eighteen months passed, matters took the usual turn. The very sharpest edges of pleasure and novelty were dulled, but slowly, and only slightly, with many restorative backward steps. At the same time, her thoughts turned more frequently to the future, their future together, an awkward subject, for the time must come when the plant would be functioning and he would no longer need to come to Lordsburg, and he would be setting up somewhere else in the South-West or scattering iron filings in the ocean to the north of the Galapagos Archipelago, or exploiting his patents around the world. But if this divergence of feeling was a problem, Beard was inclined to do nothing. In their easy intimacy, in the heat and fierce shadows of New Mexico, it was easily shelved. The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.

  So it was a delight to see her now, and go over to the grill and fetch her a jumbo portion of spare ribs, potato salad and ketchup and a bucket of beer to match his own, and sit with her amid the sentimental din and woozy pedal guitars of the country music, and hear her news and tell her his own. They sat close and, keeping well clear of the private realm, he gave her the latest from the diminutive ancient kingdom across the ocean, where, according to the latest scandal, the hard-pressed citizenry had been obliged to empty their pockets in taxes so that the ruling class might clean their moats, build servant quarters, buy trouser presses and hire pornographic movies. Now, down the smog-shrouded cobbled alleyways of filthy cities and in pestilential thatched villages, there were dark mutterings of revolt. For her part, she told him about Nicky’s return to AA, where she had found Jesus for the fourth time and had been off drugs and drink, though not cigarettes, for twenty-two days and still had her job at the pharmacy, though only just.

  When Darlene had finished eating, she laid a heavy arm across his shoulders and kissed his cheek. ‘But honey, the main news is you. Lordsburg was on NBC last night and CNN were filming on Main Street yesterday right by the Exxon station, and everyone’s talking about tomorrow. I’m so proud of you!’

  She was gazing at him with an expression he had not seen before, a look of smug maternal possession that troubled him faintly. But he did not want the moment, and the grander moment that contained it, spoiled in any way. So he kissed her and they drank another beer and shared a chocolate, fudge and peppermint ice cream. Then they stood and kissed again and hugged, and he told her he would see her in an hour. He had a duty to fulfil.

  He made his way across the busy site to the control station, where the whole crew was waiting, crowding in around the consoles to hear him deliver the speech of thanks he had mentally rehearsed on the plane from London. Hammer stood solemnly at his side, arms crossed, like a nightclub bouncer. From somewhere outside came the sound of trumpets and a piccolo, and the thump of a bass drum. The marching band, or some of it, had arrived to rehearse.

  The team had wrought wonders, Beard began by saying in the bland tones of group exhortation, in bringing what had first been just a dream, then a stream of frenzied calculations, then an exploration by way of laboratory tests, then a set of drawings, to this, an engineering reality here in the desert. What they had built existed nowhere else in the world except for some related workbench experiments in a handful of competitor labs. But the process of discovery and development was far greater than this single project, magnificent though it was. Water was first split into hydrogen and oxygen in 1789, the principles of the fuel cell first discussed in 1839. Countless biologists and physicists had devoted themselves to the continuing elucidation of photosynthesis. Einstein’s photovoltaics and also quantum mechanics had played their parts, and chemistry, the science of new materials, protein synthesis, in fact, virtually the whole of the culture of science had contributed in some manner to the triumph that was now almost theirs. And there was a far larger consideration. Everyone here knew that in the greatest scheme of all, spanning billions of years, the capturing and converting of light and the splitting of water by self-organising living forms had generated atmospheric oxygen and had been the engine of evolution. This had been their inspiration, the process they had attempted to reverse engineer.

  Beard filled his lungs, then emptied them with a noisy sigh, and showed his open palms in a gesture of abject modesty.

  ‘This is why I can claim nothing for myself. I stood, like Newton, on the shoulders of giants, hundreds of them, and I borrowed slavishly from nature. By good fortune my Conflation helped me see what others could not, though the door already stood ajar. And what I saw was that the most common element in the universe, hydrogen, could be made cheaply, efficiently and in vast quantities by imitating photosynthesis in a certain way, and that it could power our civilisation, just as this beautiful process has powered life on earth by being its principal biological energy input. So now we will have clean energy, endlessly self-renewing, and we can begin to draw back from the brink of disastrous, self-destructive global warming. Some have claimed that my role was vital, that none of this could have happened without me. Well, who knows? All I say is that I was lucky to have had certain ideas, and I was fortunate to be standing in the right place at the right moment in history, at a time of pressing need. My part was simple inevitability. The point is, we’re a team and everyone’s part was crucial, every last one of you was a vital link. And truly, it has been my great privilege to work with you and come to respect your expertise. And you should know that I owe everything, we all owe everything, to our dear friend here, the human dynamo, Toby Hammer!’

  To applause and cheers, Beard clutched at Toby’s wrist, scratching the American’s skin in the lunge, and wrenched his arm away from his chest and raised it, boxing-ring style.

  Unsmiling, Hammer bowed his head to the redoubled cheers. To cries of ‘speech, speech!’ he declined with pursed lips, and the meeting began to break up.

  When there was just a handful left, men who seemed to want to talk to Beard, Hammer shook his head and silently indicated the door to them and after a moment’s hesitation they filed out, and the two friends were left alone. Beard sat down at one of the consoles and stared at a screen displaying three graphs with falling curves. They were not identified, but he guessed they showed the regulation of the catalysts.

  ‘What’s up, Toby?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘Still worrying about a warming failure? They’re near to breaking the record today down in Orogrande.’

  Hammer did not smile. He was leaning against the wall by the door, hands deep in his pockets, staring over Beard’s head. Finally he said, ‘This guy Barnard called. The lawyer from Albuquerque, acting for Braby and the Centre in England. He’s on his way here now. I said I wouldn’t see him unless he told me what he wanted. And he did.’

  Toby cleared his throat noisily and came away from the door to stand by Beard’s side. He put a hand on the Englishman’s shoulder.

  ‘Michael, is there anything about this project that I should know that I don’t?’

  ‘Of course there isn’t. Why?’

  ‘They’re filing a claim against your patents.’

  ‘Braby?’

  ‘Yup.’

  For several seconds Beard slumped at the console, frowning as he reached back into his grey English past. He brought to mind concrete posts, the smell of the beer factory beside the motorway, the mud between the temporary huts, the makeshift tables piled with foolish dreams. It was as though he were recalling an existence before he was born, before dinosaurs had their dominion, when mists were thick over
primeval swamps. And now, as those mists began to clear, he could see. How had he failed to predict it? This was how Braby was going to angle in on the revitalised American renewables scene, not by begging favours for advice or introductions, but with the muscle of expensive litigation. It was threatening behaviour, it was an attempted mugging. He would expect to settle out of court and take a share in future projects. And on the basis of nothing at all.

  Beard stood suddenly, feeling energised and relieved, and, ignoring an attack of dizziness, tapped Hammer on the chest, as though attempting to correct the faulty machinery of his thoughts.

  ‘Listen, Toby. I’ve seen this kind of manoeuvring before with institutions and patents. Braby thinks, or he’s pretending to think, that I did my photosynthesis work while I was at the Centre and that the rights of exploitation belong there. But I didn’t get started until I set up at Imperial and by then Braby had got me sacked. And anyway, under the terms of my employment I was free to pursue my own work. I mean, I was only in there once a week. I have the old contract at home. I’ll show you.’

  ‘This could slow us down,’ Hammer murmured, still gloomily unconvinced.

  Beard said, ‘When they see the dates, my sacking, my contract, they’ll run for cover. We’ll counter-sue for harassment, defamation, whatever. The Centre has even less money than we do. They lost nearly everything on a ridiculous wind turbine they were developing. It was a big public scandal. The place runs on a shoestring.’

  Beard noticed his colleague begin to relax. Poverty in a hostile litigant was refreshing.

  ‘Michael, promise me there are no hidden reefs, no shocks, nothing you’re holding back.’

  ‘I promise. Braby’s a damned opportunist. We’ll kick his backside across the Rio Grande.’

  ‘Barnard will be here in fifteen minutes.’

  Beard made a show of frowning as he looked at his watch. He wanted his spell with Darlene. Only then could he face the lawyer.

  ‘I have a meeting in town. But he can come and find me at the Holiday Inn this evening. Or in that restaurant across the road.’

  As Beard went towards the door, Hammer was already bent over his laptop writing emails and hardly seemed to notice his friend leaving. Normality restored.

  It was invigorating, to come out of the frozen air of the control room into the dry heat of the late afternoon, from fluorescent to golden light, from the murmurings of the servers into the din of preparation and the cacophony of two separate sound systems playing country music in different parts of the site competing with the rehearsals of the army band and the whine of a power drill. It was not only the prospect of heading into town with Darlene that stirred Beard. He was enlivened, uplifted by outrage at Braby’s clumsy, unjust claims. They added even greater value to the project. The false friend who had turned on him at the lowest point in his career now wanted some small part of the glory. He could not have it, and it was a joy to contemplate the fact. Beard’s step was unusually light and quick as he went through the bustle. He slowed as he passed a stall setting up to sell patriotic souvenirs. He could imagine buying a little Stars and Stripes on a stick and waving it with childish malice under Braby’s nose. But no. Let him rot with his tinpot helical turbine in the damp grey confines of southern England.

  He was twenty minutes early for Darlene, so he headed towards the parade ground and the silvery trills and foghorn blare of the marching band. There were twenty or so men in fatigues, not many of them young, standing with their bandmaster in the shade of an awning at one end of the raw, flattened square. On the south side, workmen had finished erecting a set of steeply raked bleachers for dignitaries and press. Again, he marvelled at all that Toby Hammer had achieved with his emails. As Beard made his way around the ground, the musicians were rehearsing, with just a few cranky, misplaced notes, a Beatles medley, and he assumed that this was not a proper army band but some kind of reservist group of local enthusiasts. The bandmaster’s white baton conjured an unpleasant association of Melissa’s lover. It was already getting late in London and he owed her a call. But this was not the time.

  To the strutting tones of ‘Yellow Submarine’, he walked towards the stand of bleachers, which rose right up from among the brush and palmillas. There was a figure sitting alone, dead centre, and Beard immediately recognised a fellow Englishman. Was it the cigarette, the stoop of narrow shoulders, or the grey socks and black leather shoes and absence of hat and sunglasses? There was a small carry-all at the man’s feet and he was hunched forward, chin resting in one hand, staring not at the band, but past it, in the direction of the Gila hills. Rodney Tarpin, of course. His old friend, come all this way to render his account. After the initial shock of recognition, and some minutes of hesitation, Beard decided to go over to him, certain that it would be better to have a confrontation now on his own terms, and in public, than be taken by surprise. Darlene’s hands over his eyes had been a warning.

  The stand was unreasonably steep and he paused to rest at the centre row before going sideways along it towards his man. In a display of cool, pretending not to notice or care about Beard’s approach, Tarpin continued to stare straight ahead as he smoked, even as Beard sat down next to him. He did not trust himself to speak until he had caught his breath, and still Tarpin did not turn to acknowledge him. This was how momentous encounters were presented in certain movies, and Tarpin would have had time to watch a few. He had not wasted much of his eight years in the prison gym. Confinement had shrunk him. His arms and legs were thin, and the builder’s proud gut that once held sway above his belt was now a little pot. Even his head looked smaller, the face more mouse than rat, and the impression of taut nostrils, of eager inquisitiveness, had been stamped out. In its place, a passive watchfulness that might have passed, at dusk perhaps, for calm. But in the golden New Mexico afternoon he looked a harmless wreck, a bum sucking too needily on his cigarette, hardly the man to deliver a slap to the face. Beard felt his spirits glow and swell with relief. This poor lag could do him no harm.

  The silence was becoming absurd. Beard spoke up briskly, as though to a dim and wayward employee. ‘So, Mr Tarpin. They’ve let you out. What brings you all this way?’

  He turned at last, pinching out his cigarette between forefinger and thumb. In the corners of the whites of his eyes were unhealthy egg-yolk smears. There were broken capillaries too running from the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks. When he spoke he exposed the missing tooth, an upper incisor, that prison dentistry had omitted to fix.

  ‘I thought if I was sat up here you’d be bound to see me.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Mr Beard, I need to talk to you, tell you something, ask you something.’

  Faintly, Beard’s fear revived. He was keeping a watch on Tarpin’s hand, and on the bag at his feet. ‘All right. But I haven’t got long.’

  Below them the band ground on through its medley. The final chords of ‘Yesterday’ dissolved into a chirpy rendition, in strict marching tempo, of ‘All You Need is Love’. Hard to credit that millions once screamed and tore at their hair for such staid little ditties.

  ‘I’ll come straight to it then. First thing is this. I never killed Thomas Aldous.’

  ‘I remember you saying in court.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter you don’t believe me. No one believes me. I don’t care, because the truth is, I would have killed him if I’d had half the chance. And this is the thing. I told Patrice to do it if she ever saw a way without getting harmed. And I swore to her, if she did it, I’d go down for it, if it came to that. She didn’t say nothing, but she must have taken one of my hammers when she was round my place and got him when he was asleep on her sofa.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Beard said. ‘Why on earth would Patrice want to kill Tom Aldous?’

  ‘I understand you’re upset, Mr Beard. I know you got a divorce and all, but this was the woman you loved once and it’s not nice, is it, to hear that she’s a killer. But she hated him. She couldn’t get rid of him. She asked
him to leave her alone, but he wouldn’t go away. I did what I could, but he was a big bastard . . .’

  Beard had half forgotten that he knew the truth and that he had devised Tarpin’s misery for him. He hardly knew which objection to raise first. He said, ‘Did she tell you she hated him? That she wanted to get rid of him?’

  ‘Many many times.’

  ‘But she told the whole world she loved him.’

  Tarpin straightened and spoke with some pride. ‘That was later, that was for my motive, you see. Jealous! I was ready to do anything for her.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man, then why didn’t you plead guilty and get a shorter term?’

  ‘Some cocky little lawyer said he could get me off, and I believed him.’

  ‘So you planned all this out together?’

  ‘I couldn’t get to her once Aldous was dead. And then I was arrested. So we had to sort of work it out as we went along without actually speaking. But we knew what we were doing.’

  The band had given all it could to the Beatles and was taking a rest. Brass players were decanting condensate onto the desert sand from their instruments. The bandmaster was striding away with a cigar in his mouth.

  Beard said, ‘But surely, if you had gone to see Aldous yourself, you could have frightened him off.’

  Tarpin laughed bitterly. ‘Tried that, didn’t I? Right at the start. Went round to his place in Hampstead, took a tyre iron just for effect. He had it off me first stroke, threw me all over his garden, put my back out, fractured my kneecap, held my head under his pond, dislocated my arm. And did this. Look.’

  He pointed to the gap in his teeth.

  Beard could not help a fierce proprietorial pride in Tom Aldous. What a physicist! He said, ‘Paying you back, I suppose, for blacking Patrice’s eye.’

  ‘I apologised for that, Mr Beard,’ Tarpin said huffily. ‘More than once, if you want to know. And in the end Patrice accepted my apology.’