But with the cheers of his colleagues still resonating, Beard was doing his best, as his plane set its northward course, to be serious and settle down to read in his magazine a luridly illustrated article about photons and antimatter, and sure enough, within five minutes experienced that cool little leap of the heart when he saw in parenthesis the entire cue – the Beard–Einstein Conflation. Not the Bose–Einstein Condensate, not the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Paradox, not pure Einstein, but the genuine article, and in his simple joy he longed all the harder for the trolley, still two and a half metres distant. He was well aware of the singularity by which the tiny vehicle of his talent, a child’s tricycle say, had hitched a ride behind the juggernaut of a world-historical genius. Einstein had upended mankind’s understanding of light, gravity, space, time, matter and energy, founded modern cosmology, spoken out on democracy, on God or his absence, argued for the Bomb, then against it, played the violin, sailed boats, had children, given his Prize money to his first wife, invented a fridge. Beard had nothing beyond his Conflation, or his half of it. Like a shipwrecked man, he had clung to this single plank, and counted himself privileged. How had it come about? Perhaps it was true that the Committee, angrily divided between three front-runners, had settled for its fourth choice. However Beard’s name had slipped through, it was generally felt that it was the turn of British physics anyway, though, in certain senior common rooms, some muttered that the Committee in its compromise had confused Michael Beard with Sir Michael Bird, the gifted amateur pianist who worked on neutron spectroscopy.
Those ungenerous rumours aside, what a brief state of grace, those blessed months of frenetic calculation and revision in the old rectory on the South Downs, trapped in a soundscape formed by the complaints of his first wife, Maisie, and the incessant wailing of the lodgers’ identical babies. What a feat of concentration! So long ago, so hard to recall the driven kind of person he once was or the actual texture of those days. It sometimes seemed to Beard that he had coasted all his life on an obscure young man’s work, a far cleverer and more devoted theoretical physicist than he could ever hope to be. He had to acknowledge the fact – that twenty-one-year-old physicist was a genius. But where was he now? Was he really the same Michael Beard whose paper caused Richard Feynman to explode with excitement and interrupt the proceedings of the 1972 Solvay Conference? Did anyone still remember or care about that famous Solvay ‘magic moment’? As for those shrieking twins, he had seen for himself last year, at the wedding of one or the other, that they were now overweight coves in their thirties, a dentist and a hedge-fund manager, identically pompous. As old as the Conflation.
After drinks and lunch and more drinks, he allowed the magazine to slide from his lap and, gazing at the button that held in place the headrest cover of the seat in front (he did not have a window seat), fell into familiar reveries and took it as a sign of burgeoning mental health that Patrice was not his sole topic. He had been sent biographical notes and pictures of his fellow guests on the frozen fjord and been struck by the smile of a certain conceptual artist whose name, Stella Polkinghorne, was familiar, even to him. Her most recent media storm involved an accusation of an infringement of copyright that had never come to court. She had constructed for the Tate Modern a scaled-up Monopoly set on a playing field in Catford, each side of the painted board a hundred metres long, a space one could stroll about in, with near-life-sized houses on Park Lane and the Old Kent Road, accommodation one could enter to observe an unequal distribution of wealth. In the empty homes of the Mayfair rich, tapestries, woodcuts by Dürer and discarded champagne bottles, while down the Old Kent Road, among the East End poor, junk-food wrappers, discarded syringes, a TV playing soaps. The dice were two metres high, the Community Chest cards were lowered in place by crane, the dog-eared banknotes made of plywood were in tottering 25-metre piles on the grass. In all, an indictment, it was supposed, of a money-obsessed culture. Do Not Pass Go was celebrated, reviled, photographed from the air by passengers on their descent into Heathrow. Children liked stampeding across the board in herds and crawling inside the top-hat token. The makers of the game began a legal case, which they dropped in the face of public derision and rising sales. A local-business association on the Old Kent Road also brought a case, or said it would, and nothing was heard.
Polkinghorne’s disembodied smile presided over Beard’s melancholic reflections on the end of his marriage. He experienced a genial blend of sadness, anger, nostalgia (those early months were bliss), and a warm, self-forgiving sense of failure. And repetition. Five was enough. He would never go through this again, and with that thought came the familiar recognition of his new freedom. When matters were settled, he would buy a small London flat, he would be responsible only for himself, he would guard ferociously his independence and cure himself of this strange lifelong habit of marriage. It was lovers he needed, not wives.
Passively, he let himself be processed through Oslo, then Trondheim. The flight to Longyearbyen was delayed by two and a half hours, during which he sat in a plastic moulded chair and read the Herald Tribune with total concentration and no recall. It was three in the morning when his taxi stopped by giant mounds of snow outside his hotel. He had not eaten in hours. Dressed in sweater, anorak and long johns, he lay in bed, hemmed in on three sides by chunky wooden beams, and ate all the salted snacks in the minibar, and then all the sugary snacks, and when he was woken by reception at eight the following morning to be told that everyone was waiting for him downstairs, the wrapper of a Mars bar was still folded in his fist.
His immediate need was to satisfy his thirst, but the water from the tap on his basin was so intensely cold, so fiery on the lips and he drank so deeply that he developed shooting pains in his face and temples that had not receded by the time he descended with his luggage, still dazed from lack of sleep, to the lobby to meet his group – already breakfasted, already boisterous, already zipping themselves into their special-issue snowmobile suits. In the lobby’s dim solar-powered light and the press of overdressed bodies he did not catch sight of Stella Polkinghorne. Yes, it came back to him now, the manic larkiness of the English in large groups. From different corners of the crowded space came abrupt shouts of individual laughter and cackles in unison. And it was eight twenty in the morning. Forcing a smile, pretending gamely not to be oppressed, he shook many hands, was told many names and remembered no one because his thoughts were on the coffee he was too late for. How could he start his day? The urn was empty, the breakfast table was being cleared away by a girl who did not speak English, did not even understand the planetary word ‘coffee’, even when pronounced loudly, and now one of the organisers, a great elk of a man called Jan, was telling him it was too late for coffee and was guiding him towards his very own pile of outer clothing and saying he must hurry, a snowstorm was expected within two hours and the group needed to get going.
The place was emptying, and he was not ready. Someone very old with snow in his beard and a damp, unlit cigarette on his lower lip came in muttering ill-temperedly, snatched Beard’s bag, took it out to a sledge hitched to a snowmobile and drove off. Both the waitress and Jan had disappeared, and Beard was the only person in the lobby. This was a long-forgotten experience from his schooldays, not only being late, but feeling ignorant and incompetent and wretched, with everyone else mysteriously in the know, as though in league against him. Fatso Beard, always last, useless at team games. With that memory came added clumsiness and indecision. Although he was dressed in ski clothes of many layers, he was expected to climb inside this extra skin, even to wear his own boots inside another pair. There were inner gloves and giant outer gloves, a heavy balaclava made of carpet underlay to wear over his own, and goggles, and a motorcycle helmet.
He got into the suit – it must have weighed twenty pounds – put on the dusty balaclava, squeezed his head into the helmet, put on the inner and outer gloves, then realised that he would not be able to put on the goggles while wearing the gloves, took off the gloves,
clamped on the goggles, put on the inner and outer gloves, then remembered that his own ski goggles and gloves, hip flask and stick of lipsalve on the seat next to him would need to be stowed. He took off the inner and outer gloves, put his stuff in a pocket inside his jacket after much struggling with the zip of the outer suit, put on the inner and outer gloves again and found that in the damp warm air of the lobby, and with his own impatient perspiring, his goggles were fogging up. Hot and tired, an unpleasant combination, he stood suddenly in exasperation, turned and collided with a beam or a column, he couldn’t see which, with a massive cracking sound. How fortunate it was that the Nobel laureate was wearing a helmet. No damage to his skull, but there was now a diagonal crack across the left eyepiece of his goggles, an almost straight line that refracted and diffused the low yellow light in the lobby. To remove the helmet, balaclava and goggles and wipe the condensation from them he had to remove all four gloves, and now that his hands were sweating these items were not so easy to dislodge. Once the goggles were off, it was straightforward enough to bring them to the almost-cleared breakfast table and take a crumpled paper napkin, used, but not much used, to polish the lens. Perhaps it was butter, perhaps it was porridge or marmalade that smeared the already scratched plastic, but at least the condensation was off, and it was relatively simple, after replacing the balaclava, to secure the goggles around the helmet and lower it over his head and put on all four gloves and stand, ready at last to face the elements.
His vision was much restricted by the new breakfast coating, otherwise he would have seen the boots earlier lying on their sides under his chair. Off with the gloves then – he was not going to lose his temper – and then, after some fiddling with the laces, he decided he would see better without the goggles. Clear sight confirmed that the boots were far too small, by at least three sizes, and there was some relief in knowing that not all the incompetence was his own. But he was game, and thought he would give it one last try, and that was how Jan, entering the lobby with a blast of icy air, found him, trying to push his foot in its hiking boot into a fur-lined snow shoe.
‘My God, you thick or which?’
The giant elk man kneeled before him and with impatient tugs removed his hiking boots, tied the laces together and slung the pair around Beard’s neck.
‘Now try.’
His feet slid in, Jan secured the laces at speed and stood.
‘Come on, man. Let’s go!’
Possibly it was his embarrassment that helped fog up the goggles again, but he had a pretty good idea of the direction of the door, and he had the rough outline of Jan’s shoulder to guide him.
‘You drive a snowmobile before?’
‘Of course,’ he lied.
‘Good good. I want to catch the others.’
‘How far is it to the ship?’
‘One hundred fifteen kilometres.’
When they stepped out, the wind slapped his face, no less hard than Tarpin had, and with the same stinging aftermath. The condensation inside his goggles froze instantly but for a small patch, through the marmalade veneer of which he could just make out Jan’s form retreating along a path cut through the deep snow that wound between the shapes of buildings. After ten minutes they arrived at the edge of the settlement before a vast white plain that stretched away into a mist. It may have been an airfield, for there was an orange windsock nearby straining in the horizontal position. Parked by a ditch were two snowmobiles, noisily pumping out a blue-black mist of their own.
‘I follow you,’ Jan said. ‘Minimum fifty kilometres an hour if we want to arrive before the storm. OK?’
‘OK.’
But it was not OK. The wind was strong and they would be driving straight into it. Deep inside his helmet, the tips of his ears were already numb, and so were the tip of his nose and his toes. To see he was obliged to tilt his head and angle his sightline through a diminishing area of semi-clarity, avoiding at the same time the illuminated crack over his left eye. But all this was incidental, blindness and pain he could live with. A more urgent problem was oppressing him as he turned towards his snowmobile. In his hurry and thick-headedness that morning, he had omitted all the usual routines. He had not shaved or washed and, except to drink a pint of freezing water, had not set foot inside the bathroom. Then he had hurried out of the room with his bag. Now it was minus twenty-six, wind force five, they were pressed for time, a storm was looming, Jan was already astride his machine and gunning the engine, and Beard, trapped inside many layers of intractable clothing, needed to urinate.
As best he could, he looked about him. The nearest houses were four hundred metres away, and showed great blank walls with one or two miniature windows – bathroom windows surely. Oh to be there, in a heated tiled room, barefoot in his pyjamas, taking a leisurely piss before crawling back under the duvet for one extra hour. But he could go right here, in the ditch, turn his back to the wind, remove his gloves, grapple bare-fingered with the frozen chunky zip of his one-piece snowmobile suit, grope under his jacket to reach the shoulder buckles of his salopettes and somehow push them down, burrow past sweater, shirt, long silk under-shirt, long johns, underpants, to gain at last the moment of the release he dared not think about. No, it was too difficult, it would have to wait, and besides, he felt better as soon as he was sitting down in the saddle of his snowmobile.
It was an underpowered motorbike on skids and easy enough to drive. One twist of the throttle on the right handlebar and the thing slid forward with the shriek of an overworked engine and a puff of stinking black exhaust. Within seconds he was bouncing across the plain, following through the sight holes of his goggles the tracks left by the rest of the group, which were mercifully side-lit by the rising sun. The wind, suddenly a sixty-mile-an-hour gale, cut through his layers, his nostril hairs stiffened into steel pins, his teeth, all his teeth, ached, his face felt peeled raw. By a miracle of osmosis, every breath he exhaled found its way inside his goggles and froze, and within ten minutes he could see nothing at all but blurry crystals and had to stop. Jan pulled alongside. Surprisingly, he was sympathetic.
‘This you do.’
He raised a flap of flimsy tin casing and wedged the goggles over the engine. They were on a tongue of land, some three hundred metres wide, that ran between two lakes, or perhaps it was a bay, perhaps the sea was close by. Beard was too cold to ask. The endless snow was orange in the morning sunlight, their track ahead led straight towards a low mountain range many miles off, and hovering over it, or behind it, was a long tube of black cloud. He would have stepped away to relieve himself while they waited, but now the wind was even harsher, and perhaps his need was not really so pressing. It was incredible, he thought, no, it was criminal, that the citizens of Spitsbergen should think it reasonable to go about in this climate on a kind of motorbike, when some kind of humanely enclosed vehicle with a heater, a proper windscreen, a seat with a backrest – a car! – might save a life or two. His moment of indignation briefly diverted him and it was only when he was back in the saddle, wearing his deiced goggles, and driving once more into a roar of fiery air, that he realised he had arrived at a point when he must make an immediate choice: stop and piss now, or allow his bladder to rupture, which would cause him to die of an internal infection, or drench himself and freeze to death. But he kept going. He guessed there remained a hundred kilometres to cover, he was doing forty kilometres an hour. Two and a half hours. Clearly impossible.
But still he did not stop. He distracted himself by attempting to recall the last occasion he had urinated. Surely it was at Longyearbyen airport, while he waited for his luggage, late at night, the day before yesterday. Thirty-five hours without a piss. Had he simply forgotten? Was he really that busy?
The moment he understood that it was the cold that had confused him and made him add the extra day, he stopped, and in his eagerness half fell off the snowmobile onto the track. He heard Jan’s machine bump into the rear of his, but he did not look back as he hurried away. It was a differen
t kind of terrain they were on now. Their route made a shallow S through a gully enclosed on each side by thirty-foot walls of rock and ice. A vestigial sense of propriety drew him to the base of one wall, as though to a urinal, where he stood doubled up, with his back to the wind, and used his teeth to pull off the outer glove on his right hand. He heard Jan call out to him, but could not bear to be spoken to now. Biting at the end of each finger in turn, he worked the glove lining off. Immediately, his hand became numb and slow. It took him more than two minutes to unfasten the zip of his snowmobile suit, and then he found that he needed two hands to get through his jacket to the shoulder releases of his salopettes, so he pulled off the gloves on his left hand with his slow-moving right. Once more, his goggles were misting up and freezing over. But he had to admire his own calm, as he delved and tugged through the layers, as his precious body warmth bled out into the vicious cold and the wind whipped round his back, into the cliff and onto his face. Only in the final seconds, when his clumsy pink hand, as cold as a stranger’s, reached into his underpants, did he think he might lose control. But at last, with a joyous shout that was lost to the gale, he directed his stream against the ice wall.