Solar

  His mistake was to wait a few seconds at the end, as men of his age tended to do, mindful that there might be more. He should have turned his head to hear what Jan had shouted. Or perhaps he could only have avoided the inevitable if he had accepted one of the other invitations, to the Seychelles or Johannesburg or San Diego, or if, as he thought later with some bitterness, climate change, radical warming above the Arctic Circle, was actually taking place and was not a figment of the activist imagination. For when his business was done he discovered that his penis had attached itself to the zip of his snowmobile suit, had frozen in hard along its length, the way only living flesh can do on sub-zero metal. He wasted precious seconds, gazing at his situation in shock. When at last he pulled tentatively, he experienced intense pain. And he was already in pain from the cold.

  He remained standing with his legs apart, facing the rock wall. He did not dare do as one might with a sticking plaster, and rip himself away in one stroke. He had read of an American hiking alone in the wilderness who got his arm trapped behind a rock and sawed through his own elbow with a penknife. Beard was not that kind of dedicated person, and after all, an elbow, a forearm, a hand were one of a pair and, to an extent, disposable. As the polar wind raged against the cliff-face and rebounded against his shivering form, he watched in horror as his penis shrank even smaller, and curled tighter against the zip. And not only was it shrinking before his eyes, but it was turning white. Not the white of a blank page, but the sparkling silver of a Christmas bauble.

  He was close to panicking, but could not bring himself to call for help. It was additionally difficult not to panic with his head smothered by carpet underlay and a thick helmet and goggles with diminishing visibility. For want of anything else to do, he covered himself with a cupped hand, a hand like a block of ice. He was beginning to feel sluggish, even sleepy, the way people are supposed to be in extreme cold, and his thoughts lurched in slow motion. He saw Jock Braby on TV proclaim an obituary through a forgiving smile. He went to see global warming for himself. Nonsense, of course he would survive. But this was it, a life without a penis. How his ex-wives, especially Patrice, would enjoy themselves. But he would tell no one. He would live quietly with his secret. He would live in a monastery, do good works, visit the poor. As he stood dithering, he wondered for the first time in his adult life whether there might be purposeful design in human lives, and entities like Greek gods, imposing ironies, extracting revenge, imposing their rough justice.

  But the rationalist in Michael Beard died hard. There was a problem, and he should attempt to solve it. He was reaching lugubriously into the inside pocket of his jacket. In his post-doc years he had worked for a while in low-temperature physics, but even as a schoolboy, as Fatso Beard, bad at games, a swot at science, he knew the basics. Pure ethanol froze at minus one hundred and fourteen degrees, everyone knew that. Brandy at eighty per cent proof would be forty per cent ethanol by volume, giving a freezing point of … minus forty-five point six. At last, the hip flask was in his hand, the top came off after only a brief struggle, and generously he poured his libation and within seconds he was free.

  When he put it away, his unfortunate cock was as hard as ice, but no longer white. It was also stinging, an excruciating hot-needle pain that slowed his efforts to get dressed. After ten minutes, in one piece at last, he turned and stumbled back onto the track and found his guide waiting.

  ‘Sorry about that. Call of nature.’

  Jan caught hold of his elbow. ‘You in bad shape, man. Look, you dropped your boots off your neck. We go both on my bike. We gonna pick up your machine later.’

  He let himself be guided to Jan’s snowmobile and it was there that the calamity finally happened. As he raised a leg to hoist himself onto his place behind the guide, he felt, and even thought he heard, a terrible rending pain in his groin, a cracking and a parting, like a birth, like a glacier calving. He gave a shout, and Jan turned to steady him and settle him in place.

  ‘It’s one hour, is all. You’ll be OK.’

  Something cold and hard had dropped from Beard’s groin and fallen down inside the leg of his longjohns and was now lodged just above his kneecap. He put his hand between his legs and there was nothing. He put his hand on his knee and the hideous object, less than two inches long, was stiff like a bone. It did not feel, or it no longer felt, like a part of himself. Jan kick-started the engine and they set off at a crazy speed, careening over ice ridges as hard as concrete, swerving round near-vertical banks like reckless adepts in a velodrome. Why was he not at home in bed? Beard cowered out of the wind behind Jan’s broad back. The burning sensation in his groin was spreading, his cock had slipped round and was nestling under the crook of his knee, and they were speeding in the wrong direction, hurtling northwards towards the Pole, deeper into the wilderness, into the frozen dark, when they should have been rushing towards a well-lit emergency room in Longyearbyen. Surely, the intense cold would work to his advantage, keeping the organ alive. But microsurgery? In Longyearbyen, population fifteen hundred? Beard thought he was about to be sick, but instead he slipped his hands through the belt at the back of Jan’s jacket and let his head drop onto his protector’s spine and fell into a doze, and it was only the sudden silencing of the snowmobile’s motor that woke him, and he saw looming above him out of the ice the dark hull of the ship where he would spend the week.

  It turned out that Beard was the only scientist among a committed band of artists. The entire world and all its follies, one of which was to warm up the planet, was to their south, which seemed to be in every direction. Before dinner that night in the mess room, the convenor, Barry Pickett, a benign and wizened fellow, who had rowed across the Atlantic single-handed before he devoted his life to recording the music of nature (the rustling of leaves, the crashing of waves), addressed the gathering of the Eighty Degrees North Seminar.

  ‘We are a social species,’ he began, with the kind of biological flourish that Beard generally distrusted, ‘and we cannot survive without some basic rules. Up here, in these conditions, they are even more important. The first concerns the boot room.’

  It was simple enough. Below the wheelhouse was a cramped, underlit changing room. All coming on board must stop there and remove and hang up their outer layers. On no account was wet, snowy or iced-up clothing to be brought into the living quarters. Prohibited items included helmets, goggles, balaclavas, gloves, boots, wet socks and snowmobile suits. Wet, snowy, icy or dry, they were to remain in the boot room. Penalty for infringement was certain death. There was forgiving laughter from the good-natured artists, pink-faced, sensible folk in chunky sweaters and work shirts. Beard, squashed in a corner with his fifth glass of Libyan vin de pays, dosed up on painkillers and in pain, constitutionally hostile to groups, feigned a smile. He did not like to be part of a group, but he did not want the group to know. There were other rules and housekeeping items, and his attention was drifting. From behind Pickett, from the galley on the other side of an oak-veneered wall, came the smell of frying meat and garlic, and the sounds of spoons against saucepans and the hectoring growl of the international chef chivvying an underling. Hard to ignore the kitchen when it was already eight twenty and there had been nothing to eat for hours. Not being able to eat when he chose was one of the freedoms Beard had left behind in the foolish south.

  All day the sun had stood barely five degrees above the horizon, and at two thirty, as though giving up on a bad job, it had sunk. Beard witnessed the moment through a porthole by his bunk, where he lay in agony. He saw the flat snowy vastness of the fjord turn blue, then black. How could he have imagined that being indoors eighteen hours a day with twenty others in a cramped space was a portal to liberty? On arrival, as he passed through the mess room on his way to find his quarters, the first thing he had seen, propped in a corner, was an acoustic guitar, surely awaiting its strummer and a tyrannous sing-along. A large section of bookcase was taken up with board games, and ancient packs of cards. He might as well have check
ed into an old people’s home. Monopoly was surely among the games, and here was reason for further regret. Jan had helped him off the snowmobile, half carried him up the gangplank, and shown him into the boot room. Moving slowly, with grunts and moans, Beard had set about removing his outer layers, unzipping his snowmobile suit, terrified of what he was about to discover. In the deep gloom of the place it took a while to find an unoccupied station to hang his stuff on, and as he did, on hook number twenty-eight, he heard a pleasant, deep female voice behind him saying kindly,

  ‘This just dropped out the bottom of your trousers.’

  He turned. It was Stella Polkinghorne holding out something thin and grey. It was actually in her hand, between her forefinger and thumb.

  ‘I think it’s your lipsalve.’

  She said her name, he said his, they shook hands. She said she was deeply honoured to meet a great scientist, and he said that he was a long-time admirer of her work. It was only at this point that they released their hands. It was not exactly a beautiful face, but broad and friendly, with blonde hair straggling out from under a woollen cap. He liked the way her curious gaze met his. A broken front tooth gave her a reckless, humorous look. She said she was looking forward to getting to know him, and he said he felt the same about her, and then she hesitated, apparently not wanting to leave and unable to think of something else to say, and nor could he, distracted as he was by pain.

  Then she said, ‘I’ll see you then,’ and she went through into the ship.

  All afternoon he lay on his bunk in a haze of foolish schemes and regrets, examining and re-examining the damage to his skin, making plans for his immediate departure, and replaying his encounter. He could send an email urgently recalling himself to England. But he could not face the snowmobile journey back to the airport. A helicopter would have to come from Longyearbyen. How much did they cost? A thousand pounds an hour perhaps. Three hours then, worth every penny, to avoid singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’. Looking forward to getting to know him. That could mean anything. No, it meant only one thing. And what luck – he had seen from a schedule on a noticeboard that he was the only guest not sharing a cabin. But he was out of commission, possibly for weeks. He took another look. His injury resembled a scalding, he was swollen and pink, he needed to be alone, he wanted to go home, he should try and sit next to her at dinner tonight. But he would not be here. The helicopter was coming. But it would not fly at night. There were other kinds of sex they could have, or that she could have. What would be the point of that? Perhaps he was getting better. He took another peek.

  Finally it had been hunger and the need for a drink that drove him from his cabin. After Pickett’s speech, Beard was not able to move out of his corner in time to sit next to Stella Polkinghorne and instead found himself wedged between the bulkhead and a famous ice sculptor from Mallorca called Jesus, an elderly man with a mournful face and curved yellowish-white moustache who smelled richly of cigars, and had a wheezing, honking sound in his voice like a teddy bear’s growl. After they had introduced themselves, Beard suggested that such a profession might be difficult to pursue in the Balearics. Jesus explained that back in the old days, the ice houses in the mountains kept the fishmongers of Palma supplied with giant blocks of ice in summer, and this was how his grandfather learned the skills he passed on to his son, who passed them on to his. Jesus had won many ice-carving competitions in cities around the world – a recent triumph was in Riyadh – and his speciality was penguins. He imported whisky when he was not carving, had four sons and five daughters, and had founded twenty years ago a school for blind children outside the port of Andratx. His wife and two of the sons ran his olive and vineyard estate in the Tramuntana, high on the sea cliffs fifteen kilometres south of Pollensa, not so far from the famous Cova de ses Bruixes, the Witches Cave. Beard’s pain was lifting, the painkillers had a strong euphoric effect. He had never enjoyed anything quite so good as the steak, French fries, green salad and red wine before him. And Jesus – he had never met anyone with this name, even though he knew it was common in Spain – seemed to him the most interesting man he had met in years.

  In reply to the reciprocal question, Beard said he was a theoretical physicist. It always sounded like a lie. The sculptor paused, perhaps to rehearse mentally his English, then asked a surprising question. Señor Beard was to excuse an uneducated man’s naïvety and ignorance, but was the strange reality described by quantum mechanics a description of the actual world, or was it simply a system that happened to work? Infected by the Mallorcan’s courtly style, Beard complimented him on the question. He could not have phrased it better himself, for there was no better interrogation of quantum theory than this. It was a matter that had dominated years of Einstein’s life and led him to insist that the theory was correct but incomplete. Intuitively, he just could not accept that there was no reality without an observer, or that this reality was defined by the observer, as Bohr and the rest seemed to be saying. In Einstein’s memorable phrase, there was out there a ‘real factual situation’. ‘When a mouse observes,’ he had once asked, ‘does that change the state of the universe?’ Quantum mechanics seemed to imply that a measurement of the state of one particle could instantaneously determine the state of another, even if it was far away. But this was ‘spiritualistic’ in Einstein’s view, it was ‘spooky action at a distance’, for nothing could move faster than the speed of light. Beard the realist was sympathetic to Einstein’s extended, failing battle with the brilliant coterie of quantum pioneers, but it had to be faced: the experimental proof suggested that there really could be long-range spooky correlations, and that the texture of reality at the small and large scale really did defy common sense. Einstein was also convinced that the mathematics needed to describe the universe would ultimately be shown to be elegant and relatively simple. But even in his lifetime, two new fundamental forces had been found, and ever since, the view had been complicated by a messy array of new particles and antiparticles, as well as various imaginary dimensions and all kinds of untidy accommodations. But Beard still clung to the hope that as yet more was revealed, a genius would arise to propose an overarching theory binding all in a formulation of astounding beauty. After many years (this was his little joke as he placed a confiding hand on Jesus’s frail arm), he had finally given up hopes of being the mortal chosen to find this grail.

  He said all this over the rising din of twenty climate-change artists settling down to the wine as the plates were cleared away. Jesus failed or refused to detect the self-irony and pronounced solemnly, turning his sad, drooping face to gaze about the crowded quarters, that it was a mistake to abandon hope at any stage of life. All his best penguins, the ones truest to life and most expressive of pure form, had been carved in the last two years, and recently he had started on polar bears, creatures much threatened by rising temperatures and, at one time, well beyond the reach of his artistic powers. In his humble view, it was important never to lose faith in the possibility of profound inner change. Clearly, a scientist like Señor Beard should strive for this theory, for this beauty, for what was life without the highest ambitions?

  How could Beard confide to Jesus that he had done no serious science in years, and that he did not believe in profound inner change? Only slow inner and outer decay. He was returning the conversation to the safer ground of penguin as compared to polar-bear ice carving, but as he did so he felt his spirits sinking back. The painkillers were wearing off, the wine, this same wine, now tasted thin and sharp, the cheerfulness around him was reminding him that his marriage was over. He felt weary, and too cynical for the company. His liveliness in conversation was revealed as a fake, a product of shock, drugs and drink.

  He brought the conversation to an end and said goodnight to Jesus and, muttering apologies, squeezed along the packed rows to the aisle. All the conversations he passed through were of art and climate change. At the next table a choreographer, a woman he had not seen before, sleek and beautiful and brimming with goodwill, was descri
bing through a French accent a geometric dance she had planned to take place on the ice. He could not stand it, the optimism was crushing him. Everyone but Beard was worried about global warming and was merry, and he was uniquely morose. He cared only for darkness and silence.

  He lay a long while on his bunk in the airless cabin, kept awake by the throbbing in his groin – his heartbeat seemed to have migrated down there – and listening to voices and laughter, and wondering if his misanthropy would last all week. The helicopter idea he now saw was absurd. Coming away from his life in remote Belsize Park to this lifeless wilderness had confronted him with the idiocy of his existence. Patrice, Tarpin, the Centre and all the other pseudo-work he did to mask his irrelevance. What was life without the highest ambitions? The answer was exactly this, another night of unmemorable insomnia.

  Two hours later he was on the edge of sleep when there came the sound of the guitar being tuned and he groaned and turned angrily on his side. But it was not strumming and singing he heard through the woodwork, but a tenderly played melody that sounded Spanish, reflective, with a touch of lightness and precision, like something of Mozart’s. In the morning he would learn that it was a study by Fernando Sor. Lying in total darkness on his narrow bed he did not doubt that it was Jesus who played, as if to him, and it was to this melancholy air that at last he fell asleep.

  * * *