How could it be, Beard wondered with a touch of self-pity as he left one office and went glumly towards the next, that a chance remark of his had sent everyone rushing on this pointless quest? The answer was simple. In response to his proposal, there had been memoranda, detailed proposals one hundred and ninety-seven pages long, budget outlines and spreadsheets, and he had initialled his approval on each without reading them. And why was that? Because Patrice was starting her affair with Tarpin and he was not able to think of anything else.
He was going back along the corridor, passing Braby’s office on his way to talk to a materials specialist, and there was Braby himself, waiting for him just inside his door, and waving him in excitedly. Behind him, taping a drawing to a whiteboard, was one of the two ponytails called Mike.
‘I think we’ve got something,’ Braby said as he closed the door behind Beard. ‘Mike’s just brought it over.’
‘Don’t get the wrong idea, Professor Beard,’ Mike said. ‘I didn’t draw this. I found it.’
Braby took hold of Beard’s sleeve and tugged him to the board.
‘Just look at it. I need your opinion.’
On a large sheet there was one formally executed drawing surrounded by half a dozen sketches – doodles with a solid but wavering line of the kind one might see in Leonardo’s notebooks. Watched intently by the other two, Beard was staring at the centrepiece, a thick column containing a mess of lines and cutaways that resolved at last into a quadruple helix making one complete turn, and at the base, in less detail, a boxy representation of a generator. One of the doodles showed a roofline, with a TV aerial and the helix set on a short vertical pole strapped to the side of a chimney – not a good mounting at all. For two minutes he stared in silence.
‘Well?’ Braby said.
‘Well,’ Beard muttered. ‘It’s something.’
Braby laughed. ‘I thought it was. I don’t know how it works, but I just knew it was.’
‘It’s a variant on the Darrieus machine, the old egg beater.’ In the long-ago days when he was happily, or less obsessively, married, Beard had spent an afternoon reading up on the history of wind turbines. At that stage he had thought the physics was relatively simple. ‘But what’s different here is the blades are canted into a helix with a twist of sixty degrees. And there are four of them to spread the torque and perhaps help it self-start. Probably do well out of an upward-tilting airflow. Might be good on a roof, you never know. So, who came up with this?’
But he already knew the answer and his weariness redoubled. To listen to the Swan of Swaffham celebrate a breakthrough, the dawn of a new era in turbine design, would be more than he could bear today. It would have to be next week, for what he wanted at that moment was to sit somewhere quiet and think about Patrice, excite himself to no purpose. That was how bad it was.
Mike scratched at the base of his ponytail, which showed traces, like blanket stitching, of mutinous grey. ‘It was on Tom’s desk. We guessed he must have left it out for us to see. Then we got excited, couldn’t find him anywhere. We made a copy for the engineers and they already like it.’
Jock Braby did an agitated turn about his office, returned to his desk and snatched his jacket off the back of a chair. The snob in Beard made him want to take the civil servant aside to tell him that it was not done, not since the Bletchley era, or at least, since Beard’s own undergraduate days, to have a row of ballpoints in one’s jacket top pocket. But he only ever thought his advice, he never gave it.
In a state of muted excitement, Braby was dignified, stooping from a height towards his companions and speaking in a measured, husky tone, as though at a sword’s touch he had just straightened the knee from a royal cushion. ‘I’m going to talk to Aldous, then I’m going to take him with me to Design. We need proper drawings. They can sit down with him and get to work, and meanwhile, Mike, you and the other boys can do the maths, you know, Brecht’s Law and so on.’
‘Betz’s Law.’
‘Quite so.’ And he was gone.
When Beard was done with his rounds, he settled alone with a few chocolate biscuits on a plate and a mug of stewed coffee from an urn in the deserted common room, behind the canteen, for a long time the only comfortable place in the Centre, and let his thoughts return to the object of his obsession, fixing, with a near-pleasant heaviness in his limbs, on certain details he had lately neglected. But first he had to heave himself out of his chair and cross the room to turn off the murmuring television, forever tuned to a news channel. Bush v Gore, absorbing the precious attention of the disenfranchised majority of the world’s population. He settled down again and took a grip on his plate.
Patrice was by far the most beautiful of all his wives, or rather, she was in her angular fair-haired way, so it seemed to him now, the only beautiful wife he had ever had. The other four had missed beauty by millimetres – a nose too thin, a mouth too wide, a minimally defective or recessive chin or forehead – and they had appealed, these lesser wives, only from a particular perspective, or by an effort of will or imagination, or through self-deceiving desire. Certain details then, concerning Patrice. For example, the narrowness of her buttocks. A single large hand could span them. The creamy tautness of her skin between protruding points of pelvic bone. The startling polymorphism that had formed her fine, straw-blonde pubic hair. Would he ever see any of these treasures again? And now, unsensual as it was, he had to consider the bruise beneath her eye. She would not talk to him, and he might never know the truth. He could deal only in probabilities. Suppose his plan had worked, that the woman in his room, whose footfalls he had drummed with his palms on the stairs, had not enraged but endeared and bound Patrice to him, made her anxious at what she thought she was about to lose, prompted her to tell Tarpin that the affair was over, that she was returning to her husband – and provoked his fury. In that case, her blackened cheekbone signalled that she was almost his, Beard’s, again. Too much wish-fulfilment in that. What then?
Mechanically, he conveyed biscuits from plate to mouth. Perhaps the entire entanglement was going to take an improbable course. Most things were improbable. There were bruised and broken women who could not stay away from their violent men. Organisers of women’s refuges often lamented this quirk of human nature. If she was addicted to her fate there would be more blows to the face. His beautiful Patrice. Unbearable. Unthinkable. What then? She could be sickened as much by Michael’s sympathy as by Rodney’s violence, and want to be shot of them both. Or, he could go into his bedroom one night and discover her already there, waiting for him, naked on the marital bed, on her back as of old, legs parted, and he was going towards her, murmuring her name, and now he too was naked. It was going to be easy, and when he reached her side he cupped her left … But he was no longer alone, and he did not have to look up to know whose shape was in the doorway.
Without pouring himself a coffee – he allowed himself no stimulants and thought Beard should do the same – Aldous sat down beside the Chief and, skipping preliminaries, said, ‘I seriously urge you to read the piece on thin-film solar in next week’s Nature.’
Some of the blood supply that should have been in Beard’s brain was still in his penis, though draining quickly, otherwise he might have had the presence of mind to tell Aldous to go away.
Instead, he said, ‘Braby’s looking for you.’
‘That’s what I heard. You’ve all seen my turbine drawing.’
‘He’s probably in his office now.’
In a show of professional exhaustion, Aldous removed his baseball cap, leaned back in the armchair and closed his eyes. ‘I should have destroyed it.’
‘It has some promise,’ Beard said, much against his will. He distrusted anyone off a baseball field in a baseball cap, whichever way round it was worn.
‘That’s the point. Actually, it’s revolutionary. Talk about smooth torque! Optimal angle of attack for any direction of wind flow. Turbulence problem solved! Don’t get me wrong, Professor Beard, it’s brilliant. B
ut d’you know, if the Centre takes it up, that’ll be three wasted years of development, doing work that a commercial firm could be doing with a view to making money. And it’s not important enough, micro wind is not going to solve the problem, Professor. The wind doesn’t blow hard enough in most towns. We need a new energy source for the whole of civilisation. There really isn’t much time. We should be doing the basics on solar, before the Germans and Japanese run away with it, before the Americans wake up. I’ve got some ideas. Even with our crappy climate, there’s infrared. But why am I telling this to you, of all people? We need to take another look at photosynthesis, see what we can learn. I’ve got some great ideas there too. I’m putting together a file for you. And now I’ve just seen Mr Braby heading towards Design with my stupid drawing in his hand. Oh Christ!’
He clamped a hand over his closed eyes in another show – this time, of undeserved suffering stoically endured.
‘I’m a simple man, Professor Beard. I just want to do what’s right by the planet.’
‘I see,’ Beard said, suddenly unable to face the final biscuit as it appeared in his grasp. He put it back on the plate and with some effort pushed himself out of his chair. ‘I need to be getting back now. You’ll need to drive me to the station.’
‘No point,’ Aldous said, and was out of his chair and crossing the room in three strides to the TV set, where he changed stations and paused, waiting for one item to give way to another, then turned up the volume. It was as if he had conjured the story for his own purposes, driven an elderly couple to destitution and despair and persuaded them to throw themselves hand in hand in front of the London to Oxford train. The local news report showed nothing more gory than the lines of frustrated passengers at Reading station being turned away and others waiting for special coaches that had failed to turn up.
The young man was guiding Beard towards the door, as one might a mental patient in need of a bath. ‘I live not far from Belsize Park and I’m going home now. It’s not a Prius, but it’ll get you to your door.’
He did not know how Aldous knew where he lived, but there was no point asking. And because Beard now intended to go home, back to the headquarters of his misery, he had no interest in sending Aldous to see Jock Braby.
Within minutes the Chief was sitting in the front of a rusty Ford Escort, pretending to listen to an insider’s account of what he might expect to find in next year’s International Panel on Climate Change report. Now the driver’s line of gaze had to deviate a whole ninety degrees from the road to engage with his passenger, sometimes for seconds on end, during which time, by Beard’s calculation, they had travelled several hundred metres. You don’t have to look at me to talk to me, he wanted to say, as he watched the traffic ahead, trying to predict the moment when he might seize the wheel. But even Beard found it difficult to criticise a man who was giving him a lift, his host in effect. Rather die or spend a life as a morose quadriplegic than be impolite.
After outlining what he expected to read next year in the third IPCC report, Aldous told Beard – and was the fiftieth person to do so in the past twelve months – that the last ten years of the twentieth century had been the warmest ten, or was it nine, on record. Then he was musing on climate sensitivity, the temperature rise associated with a doubling of CO2 above pre-industrial levels. As they entered London proper, it was radiative forcing, and after that the familiar litany of shrinking glaciers, encroaching deserts, dissolving coral reefs, disrupted ocean currents, rising sea levels, disappearing this and that, on and on, while Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril – that moronic word again – but because someone was telling him it was with such enthusiasm. This was what he disliked about political people – injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.
So climate change was consuming Tom Aldous. Did he have other subjects? Yes, he did. He was concerned about the emissions from his car and had found an engineer in Dagenham who was going to help him convert it to run on electricity. The drive train was good, the problem was the battery – he would need to recharge it every thirty miles. He would just about make it into work if he travelled no faster than eighteen mph. Finally, Beard forced Aldous into the human arena by asking him where he lived. In a studio flat at the bottom of his uncle’s garden in Hampstead. Each weekend he drove to Swaffham to visit his father, who was ill with a lung infection. The mother was long dead.
The story of the mother was about to begin as they pulled up outside the house. Beard was interrupting to speak his thanks, keen to bring the encounter to an end, but Aldous was out of the car and hurrying round to open the passenger’s door and help him out.
‘I can manage, I can manage,’ Beard said testily, but with the recent weight-gain, he almost could not, the wretched car was so low-slung. Aldous accompanied him up the path, again in psychiatric-nurse style, and when they were at the front door and Beard was reaching for his key, asked if he might use the lavatory. How to refuse? Just as they stepped into the house he remembered that it was Patrice’s afternoon off, and there she was, at the head of the stairs, in rakish blue eyepatch, tight jeans, pale green cashmere sweater, Turkish slippers, coming down to meet them with pleasant smiles and the offer of coffee as soon as her husband had made the introductions.
For twenty minutes they sat at the kitchen table, and she was kind, she cocked her head sweetly as she listened to the story of Tom Aldous’s mother and asked sympathetic questions, and told the story of her own mother, who also died young. Then the conversation lightened, and her eyes met Beard’s whenever she laughed, she included him, she listened with a half-smile when he spoke, appeared amused when he made a joke, and at one point touched his hand to interrupt him. Tom Aldous was suddenly blessed with expressiveness and humour, and made them laugh with an account of his father, a formidable history teacher, now a cantankerous invalid, who fed his hospital lunch to a ravenous red kite. Aldous kept turning away and grinning, and self-consciously running his hand up his neck to touch his ponytail. At no point did he remember that the planet was in peril.
And so the married couple harmoniously entertained the merry young man, and by the time he stood to leave it was clear that something wondrous had happened, there had been a fundamental shift in Patrice’s attitude towards her husband. After seeing Aldous to his car, Beard, not daring to believe that his plan, summoning a woman on the stairs with his bare hands, had actually worked, hurried back into the house to learn more. But the kitchen was deserted, the cups with their dregs were still in place on the table, the house was quiet again. Patrice had retreated to her room, and when he went up and tapped on her door she told him plainly to go away. She had only wished to torment him with a glimpse of the life they once had. It was her absence she wanted him to savour.
He did not catch sight of her until the following evening, as she left the house, leaving behind a trail of unfamiliar scent.
* * *
The weeks passed and little changed. The autumn term began at Patrice’s primary school. In the early evenings she marked work and prepared classes, and three or four times a week left the house around seven or eight to be at Tarpin’s. When the clocks went back in late October and she went up the garden path in darkness, her absence was all the more complete. Nothing came of her intention to have her lover round to dinner, at least, not while Beard was in the house. Occasional meetings took him out of town for the night, and when he returned he saw no sign of Tarpin’s presence, unless it was in the deeper sheen of the oak dining-room table or the neatness of the kitchen, with every pot and pan unusually stowed.
But in early November he went into the walk-in larder at the rear of the house, near the back door, in search of a light bulb. It was a cold and windowless room with brick-and-stone shelves where various household hardware and junk and unwanted presents had spilled into the space intended for provisions. On the far wall was a single ventilation slot which showed pinpricks of daylight, and
directly underneath, on the floor, was a dirty canvas bag. He stood over it, letting his outrage grow, and then, noticing that the top was undone, parted it with his foot. He saw tools – different-sized hammers, bolsters and heavy-duty screwdrivers and, lying right on top, a chocolate-bar wrapper, a brown apple core, a comb and, to his disgust, a crumpled used paper tissue. The bag could not have been left behind when Tarpin was working on the bathroom, for that was many months back and Beard knew he would have seen it. It was clear enough. While he was in Paris or Edinburgh, the builder had come straight from work to see Patrice, had forgotten his tools the next morning, or did not need them, and she had stowed them in here. He wanted to throw them out immediately, but the handles of the bag were black and greasy, and Beard felt revulsion at touching anything of Tarpin’s. He found the bulb and went into the kitchen to pour himself a scotch. It was three in the afternoon.
Early the next day, a cold Sunday, he found Rodney Tarpin’s address on an invoice and, after deciding not to shave and drinking three cups of strong coffee, and pulling on a pair of old leather boots that added an inch to his height and a thick woollen shirt that put muscle on his upper arms, he drove towards Cricklewood. On the radio, exclusively American affairs. Commentators were still picking over last month’s bombing of the warship USS Cole by a group called al-Qaeda, but the main item was the same old thing, it had run all summer and autumn and was wearing on his patience. Bush versus Gore. Beard was not an American citizen, he had no vote in this fight, and still was obliged by the news service, for which he was compelled to pay a fee, to attend to every bland development. He was aggressively apolitical – to the fingertips, he liked to say. He disliked the overheated non-arguments, the efforts each side made to misunderstand and misrepresent the other, the amnesia that spooled behind each ‘issue’ as it arose. To Beard, the United States was the fascinating entity that owned three quarters of the world’s science. The rest was froth and, in this case, a struggle within an elite – the privileged son of a former president jostling with the high-born son of a senator. With the polls long closed, it seemed, Gore had phoned Bush to retract his concession of defeat, Florida was too close to call, there would be an automatic recount – ‘Circumstances have changed since I first called you’ was the understatement Al Gore had used.