In office, both men would be bound by the same constraints, both pinned down by the same facts, by advisors from the same graduate colleges, schooled in like-minded orthodoxies – Beard had little interest in the detail. It could make no significant difference to the world at large, was his considered opinion as he rolled through Swiss Cottage, if Bush rather than Gore, Tweedledum rather than Tweedledee, was president for the first four or eight years of the twenty-first century.
The previous afternoon and evening with the scotch had bequeathed a reckless clarity, as well as a pleasant sensation of invincibility. Now he saw that he had been taking matters too seriously. Unfaithful wife? Then get another! Cricklewood had a hung-over, pacified look with few pedestrians about, and the Sunday-morning tranquillity reminded him that his mission was simply to appease his curiosity. He had a right to know where Patrice spent half her week and how his adversary lived. A mile further on, through a sequence of side turns, Tarpin’s road turned out to be a four-lane urban motorway a mile long, connecting two arterial routes, a provisional, accidental place where the houses, pre-war semis, had an embattled, windswept look. He parked in a lay-by right outside the drive and stared at the place he had seen in the photograph, at the slats of dark-stained pine bolted to the front elevations to create a sixteenth-century look, at the motor boat slumped uncomfortably on its trailer – it could have been a rowing boat hiding under the wind-shredded plastic cover – at the coach lamp on a black post by the front door, which was in the Georgian style, and, a bold recent addition, lying on its side on the concrete, surrounded by neatly weeded beds, a red phone box. Between the near-black timbers, the house was painted brilliant white, the floral curtains behind the leaded panes were trimly ruched and drawn open.
Beard had no strong views on interior or exterior design, no prejudices against garden coach lamps and the like, and the attempt to give a nineteen-thirties suburban house an Elizabethan appearance seemed to him innocently patriotic. If he had not loathed Rodney Tarpin, he would have thought that the place suggested decency, hard work, simple-minded optimism. He knew from conversations way back that Mrs Tarpin had left last year with the three children and was living with a Welsh quantity surveyor on the Costa Brava, so there was some pathos too in the way Rodney was keeping the place up. But this was where Patrice came regularly to be fucked, and every detail, even the little wishing well and the posse of dwarfs clustered by its handle, seemed hostile. He hated them in return. Was Tarpin going to erect the phone box in Patrice’s honour? He could hear her pretending to like it. Darling, that’s so original, so creative . . . Enough! He got out of the car.
Because his wife had been up this way so many times before him, and because he had once been Tarpin’s employer, Beard felt entitled and at ease as he went up the drive. From one of the black gloss-painted down-pipes came the tinkle of falling water, and from the drain at its base steam rose into the November air. The master of the house was at his ablutions, rinsing from his body the DNA of Mrs Beard. The front door with its Palladian portico had an unused look, so Beard followed a narrow concrete path squeezed between the house and a wooden boundary fence that led to a side door and continued through an open gate into the back garden. He remembered Tarpin boasting of a hot tub and he wanted to see. She may or may not have been in it, but he was in the mood to be thorough, he needed to know everything.
A treeless patch of unmown lawn was separated on three sides from the neighbours by a chain-link fence just beyond which a pylon stood astride the cluttered land that lay between the houses, and he could hear the homely crackle of the power lines. Electrons – so durable, so fundamental. He had spent much of his youth thinking about them. At the age of twenty-one he had read in wonder the Dirac Equation of 1928 in its full form, predicting the spin of an electron. A thing of pure beauty, that equation, one of the greatest intellectual feats ever performed, correctly demanding of nature the existence of antiparticles and placing before the young reader the wide horizons of the ‘Dirac sea’. That was when he was a scientist, and now he was a bureaucrat and never thought about electrons. In the mid nineties he had stood with a small crowd in Westminster Abbey while Stephen Hawking delivered a speech in front of the memorial carved in stone, the exquisitely succinct form of the equation – iγ.δψ = mψ – and Beard had, for the final time, felt a stirring of the old excitement. All gone now.
Closer to the house was a square of hard standing where a rusting clothes tree stood, and bits of a fridge, and stacked white plastic garden furniture, and there it was, right by the stack, a large hardwood box, eight feet by eight, with padlocked lid supporting a coil of black hosepipe. He was relieved that this tub was not the Californian dream he had unconsciously assumed – no sequoias, no cicadas, no Sierra Nevada. But when he walked back towards the side door he remained unhappy, for now it was confirmed – it could only be the sex. What else would bring her to this dingy patch? But then, in his condition, was it not unhappiness that he was looking for?
At that thought he heard a sound above him and, looking up, saw on the first floor a steamed-up steel-framed window swing open, then Rodney Tarpin’s pink, wet face.
‘Oi!’
Abruptly, the face disappeared, and the window remained open, allowing shower steam to billow out, and from inside the house came a muffled sound of bare feet pounding at speed down carpeted stairs. As Beard waited by the side door, arms folded against his chest, he had no plan, he had no idea what he wanted to say. He had spent too much time brooding, waiting, and now he wanted something to happen. It hardly mattered what it was.
Two bolts were drawn back, the aluminium handle shot down, the door flew inwards and his wife’s lover stood before him on the threshold.
Beard thought it important to speak first. ‘Mr Tarpin. Good morning.’
‘What the fuck do you want?’ The stress in his query was on the ‘you’. He wore a not very large red towel tucked around his considerable waist. Water droplets trickled from his head onto his shoulders and meandered down through his chest hair in the zigzag movements of a pinball.
‘I thought I’d come and have a look round.’
‘Oh yeah? So you just walk in here.’
‘My wife does.’
Tarpin seemed put out at the directness of this reference, as though he thought it unfair, or going a little too far. Still faintly steaming, he stepped out onto the path, apparently oblivious to the cold – two degrees centigrade, according to the digital display in the car. Beard was standing seven or eight feet back, arms still crossed, five feet six in his boots, and did not give way when Tarpin planted himself right in front of him. Even barefoot, he was a big fellow, certainly strong above the waist, but thin-shanked below it – a builder’s build – and also flabby across the chest, recent fat smeared over muscle, with a beer and junk-food gut whose lateral extension far exceeded Beard’s own. That towel was hanging by a thread. What was Patrice doing with such a man if not seeking the perfection, the ideal, of her husband’s form? Tarpin’s face was a curiosity. It had a ratty look, not entirely without charm, but it was too small for the head. A small man’s whiskery, inquisitive features had been sunk or projected onto a space they could not fill. Tarpin peeped out from his own skull as though he was wearing an outsized chador. Since Beard had last seen him, the builder had lost a tooth, an upper incisor. Beard was disappointed not to see a tattoo, a snake or motorbike or hymn to his mum. But the physicist, as he fleetingly acknowledged, was an ageing bourgeois in the grip of stereotypical thinking. Tarpin was too old for a body piercing, but sitting right on the skyline of his shoulder, protruding a good half-inch, was a growth of twisted skin, a tag, that resembled a miniature human ear, or a sailor’s minuscule parrot. A few turns of tightly tied dental floss and it would be gone in a week, but perhaps women were touched by such a flaw, by such vulnerability in so large a man with his own business and three employees. Patrice’s tongue would surely have explored its tiny folds.
Tarpin said, ‘Wha
t I do with your wife is my business,’ and he laughed at his own joke. ‘And you can fuck off out of it.’
Beard was stalled for a moment, for it was not a bad line, and in this hiatus it occurred to him that what he wanted, no, intended to do, any second now, was to kick Tarpin’s bare shin very hard, hard enough to break a bone. The prospect thrilled him and made his heart beat faster. He could not remember if it was these boots or some others thrown out long ago that had the steel tips. It did not matter. How odd, that the man he had once irrationally half-despised as an intruder into his domestic peace, with his drills, tuneless whistling and unbounded dust-creation, and puerile station jabbering on a tinny radio all afternoon, this hireling was now his adversary in equal combat. Only Beard would have considered it equal. Over many years, his colleagues had noted, and sometimes despaired, that in confrontations – theoretical physics naturally had its share – Beard possessed the gift, or curse, of recklessness.
‘You hit my wife,’ he said, his voice constricted by his racing pulse.
He had already glanced down and seen the angled plane of Tarpin’s shin, white, flecked with sparse black hairs like an ill-plucked turkey. And now Beard, something of a sportsman in his day, despite his height, was shifting his weight onto his left foot. He would remember to spread his arms for balance, and if there was time enough he might half turn and crush a toe beneath his heel.
It did not occur to him how obvious it was that he was about to attack. His rounded chest heaved plainly, his thin arms were raised and tensed, and his face was strained, lost in the solipsism of an exciting plan. It was likely that Tarpin had been in many scraps as an adult. Before Beard could duck, Tarpin had drawn back his arm and lashed the older man’s right cheek and ear with an open-handed smack. Beard’s consciousness exploded behind his eyes, and for seconds afterwards the world was a humming white blank. When it seeped back, Tarpin was still there, clutching at his towel, which had loosened with the movement.
‘The next one’ll hurt,’ he said.
This was the kind of treatment old-fashioned movie heroes used on the woman they loved, to calm them. The builder regarded Beard as unworthy of a proper punch. But clearly, more was on the way. Fortunately, at that moment there came from next door the sound of children’s voices approaching up the path, and whispered exclamations and suppressed giggles at the sight of their near-naked tubby neighbour. Then three shy faces at different heights and three pairs of wide brown eyes peered over the fence. Tarpin hurried into the house. He might have gone to fetch a larger towel, or a coat, and it seemed to Beard a good moment to be on his way. But he had his pride and was careful not to appear in a hurry. As he walked down the drive, past the boat slewed in its cradle and the recumbent phone box, he felt his face stinging and burning in the cold – that slap really hurt – and there was a continuous sound in his ear, an electronic whine, and by the time he reached his car he was giddy and half deaf. As he started the engine he looked across at the house and, sure enough, Tarpin in tracksuit and trainers with flailing laces was coming towards him with a firm stride. Beard saw no good reason to linger in Cricklewood.
In the remaining three weeks of that year, everything began to change. There arrived an invitation to the North Pole – at least, that was how he described it to himself and everyone else. In fact, the destination was well below the eightieth parallel, and he would be staying on a ‘well-appointed, toastily-heated vessel of richly-carpeted oak-panelled corridors with tasselled wall lamps’, so a brochure promised, on a ship that would be placidly frozen into a semi-remote fjord, a long snowmobile ride north of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. The three hardships would be the size of his cabin, limited email opportunities, and a wine list confined to a North African vin de pays. The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change, and conveniently, just ten miles away, was a dramatically retreating glacier whose sheer blue cliffs regularly calved mansion-sized blocks of ice onto the shore of the fjord. An Italian chef of ‘international renown’ would be in attendance, and predatory polar bears would be shot if necessary by a guide with a high-calibre rifle. There were no lecturing duties – Beard’s presence would be sufficient – and the foundation would bear all his expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.
Word soon got round the Centre that he was going to the North Pole to ‘see global warming for himself’, and some said he would be towed by dogs and others that he would be pulling his own sledge. Even Beard was embarrassed, and let it be known that it was ‘unlikely’ that he would get all the way to the Pole, and a good part of his time would be ‘in camp’. Jock Braby was amazed by Beard’s commitment to the cause and offered to arrange a send-off party in the common room.
In the same week as the North Pole summons he began an affair with a not-so-young accountant he had met on a train and asked out to dinner. She was pleasantly dull, worked for a fertiliser corporation, and it was all over in three weeks. Crucially, however, the edge of his obsession with his wife was blunted – minimally, and not all the time, but he knew he had crossed a line. It saddened him, to know that he would soon stop desiring her altogether, for it gave him a view of the obvious truth, that it was already over and that the comfortable house and their possessions would have to be divvied up, and after a year or two he might never see her again. Visiting Tarpin had also helped initiate his disaffection. How could he continue to love a woman who wanted a man like that? Why punish herself so thoroughly just to insult her husband?
What else did he not know about her? One answer came just before Christmas, in a long-delayed conversation that became an understated row of cold finality. She had known for half a year that his mathematician from Humboldt, Suzanne Reuben, was barely a tenth of the story. Patrice had most of the rest of the truth and, pacing and despoiling the sitting-room floorboards in her stilettos, enumerated tersely the names, places and approximate dates, a dossier memorised with an obsessiveness that matched his own. The cheerfulness she had shown around the house, she said, was to conceal her wretchedness, the affair with Tarpin was supposed to save her from humiliation. She demanded to know how Beard was going to explain away eleven affairs in five years. He was about to remind her of his mother, who ran up a higher score, when Patrice left the room. She had come to talk, not to listen. Here it was at last, the confrontation he had been wanting all these months. Now he could not think why. He lay on the sofa, legs propped on the glass coffee table, closed his eyes and felt the first longings for the cold pure air of the treeless Arctic.
In late February he arranged to leave from the Centre for Heathrow, and so the farewell party in the communal room took place while his taxi stood outside, and his bag stuffed with his old skiing clothes waited by the door. Sixty-one people were now employed full-time, and most of them crowded in to hear Jock Braby’s speech, for this was more than a send-off, it was a celebration of the shining steel object mounted on two crates in the middle of the room, a prototype designed and constructed in record time, ready to be tested in the Farnborough wind tunnels, Tom Aldous’s quadruple-helix wind turbine. Many noted how it resembled in more intricate form Crick and Watson’s model without the base pairs, and some tried to remember and adapt Rosalind Franklin’s famous remark that it was too beautiful not to be true, or, in this case, not to work. In his speech, Braby reminded the team that it was too early for congratulations, there was far more work to be done, but he wanted everyone to see just how far the project had progressed, and how revolutionary it would be. With uncustomary lyricism, he summoned an image of a townscape, as seen from a nearby hill, and five thousand roofs glittering in the setting sun with the gyrations of their silver turbines, far more beautiful, he thought, than the TV aerials that had transformed the urban prospect in the nineteen
fifties.
Throughout, Tom Aldous kept himself well to the back of the crowd and appeared to be avoiding Beard, which was fine since both men knew the project was doomed and collusion in the fact would have been in poor taste when everyone was so happy. Braby now turned to Beard and wished him well on an eight-week journey he knew would have its hazards and hardships. He reminded the team that the climate models had predicted that the earliest and most radical signs of planetary warming would be observed in the Arctic, and said how proud he was that it was the Centre’s own Chief – many fond chuckles at that word – who was going to brave the harshest conditions in order to see for himself.
Then Beard stepped forward to say a few words. He had no idea how Braby had got hold of the idea that he was going away for eight weeks. His trip was for six nights, but it was hardly appropriate to contradict a colleague in public. Nor did he mention the toasty ship and the tasselled lamps, but instead confessed to being proud and excited to be associated with an institution that was bound for ‘great things’ – he would not allow himself to be more specific – and predicted that one day their Centre would outstrip its American rival in Golden, Colorado. A toast, a round of applause, a quick succession of handshakes and backslaps, and Beard was moving towards his taxi, with Jock Braby himself carrying his suitcase, and as the car pulled away the ponytails whooped and pounded on the roof, but Aldous was not among them.
For all the hours he spent on journeys, he was not a well-adapted traveller, not because he was chaotic or fearful, but because long journeys always brought him up against a certain mental deficiency, an emptiness, a restless boredom that was, he thought, as he buckled himself into his seat, the expression of his true state, habitually obscured by the daily round or by sleep. He was not able to read seriously on an airplane. Even on firm ground he never read full-length books all the way through. He was one of those travellers who stare out the window, regardless of the view, or at the seat in front of him, or flip backwards through an in-flight magazine. At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up to date, in layman’s terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime’s habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page-turn. Another distraction was an overdeveloped awareness of the precise location in the aisle of the drinks trolley, of that muffled clinking sound and its asymptotic approach. And with or without a drink, he was prone at altitude to meandering sexual fantasies or memories, or a mix of both.