Such was the music and magic of ship-bound climate-change talk. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall he had learned to call a bulkhead, the boot room continued to deteriorate. By midweek four helmets were missing along with three of the heavy snowmobile suits and many smaller items. It was no longer possible for more than two thirds of the company to be outside at the same time. To go out was to steal. The state of the boot room, the gathering entropy, became a subject of Barry Pickett’s evening announcements. And Beard, oblivious to his own vital role, his generous assistance in setting the initial conditions, could not help reflecting expansively on this post-lapsarian state. Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs. Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. Even harder to impose order once the room was strewn with backpacks and stuff-bags and supermarket plastic bags half filled with extra gloves and scarves and chocolate bars. No one, he thought, admiring his own generosity, had behaved badly, everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in ‘discovering’ their missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the boot room?
On the last morning they ate their breakfast to the din of the entire snowmobile fleet warming up outside. They went out onto the ice, many of them missing pieces of their equipment. Beard was without a helmet. While he waited for the signal to leave, he warmed his goggles on the engine, and wound a scarf round his head. The low orange sun was unhindered, there would be a useful tailwind, and it looked like the journey back to Longyearbyen might even be pleasant, if one were fully clothed. There was a shout from the deck. Between them, Barry Pickett and one of the crew were manhandling down the gangplank a huge plastic and fibre sack of the sort that builders use to store sand in. Lost property. They gathered around the treasure and poked about in it. Beard found a helmet that fitted and knew it must be his. No one was ashamed, or even faintly embarrassed. Here was their stuff. Where had it been hiding all this time?
They said their goodbyes to the crew, and set off in loud and poisonous single file across the fjord towards Longyearbyen, keeping to a stately twenty-five kilometres per hour to avoid the cutting headwind. Hunched low over his machine, trying to draw a little of its heat onto his face, Beard found himself in a mellow state – an unfamiliar cast of mind for the morning. He was not even hung-over. On the frozen shores of the fjord they slowed to walking pace to navigate deep ruts, trenches, in the ice. He could not remember them from the outward journey. But of course, he had been asleep behind Jan’s back. Then they were on a long straight snowy track, passing a hut where, the guides had told them, a great eccentric once lived a lonely life.
If, Beard thought, he ever travelled by spaceship to another galaxy, he would soon be fatally homesick for these, his brothers and sisters up ahead of him, for everyone, ex-wives included. He was suffused with the pleasant illusion of liking people. Entirely forgivable, all of them. And somewhat cooperative, somewhat selfish, sometimes cruel, above all, funny. The snowmobiles were passing through the narrow, high-sided gully, scene of his shame, a moment best buried. He preferred to recall his cool escape from a murderous bear. But yes, he felt unusually warm towards humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion, as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was. But what about the general disgrace that was the boot room? Evidently, a matter of human nature. And how were we ever going to learn about that? Science of course was fine, and who knew, art was too, but perhaps self-knowledge was beside the point. Boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly. Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science or art, or idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law.
These fondly forgiving and self-forgiving thoughts sustained him until they reached the hotel for lunch. How long ago, it seemed, since they had been there. They handed over their snowmobile suits and the rest, said their goodbyes to Jan, and within the hour they were on their plane to Trondheim. Beard was booked with a different airline for the onward flight to Oslo. The others had four hours to wait. In the confines of the small airport, they seemed reluctant to leave each other’s company. They took over the bar and soon started up their music again, the songs, the laments of global calamity, over lunchtime beers and hotdogs. This was where Beard went to find them to say goodbye. He passed twenty minutes in email swaps and embraces. Stella Polkinghorne kissed him on the lips, Jesus gave him his business card. There was a loud hurrah as Beard was leaving the bar. In all, he was reminded that by way of running undemanding errands on the ice and pretending to care about wind turbines, he had attained a degree of unfamiliar popularity. Even the spindly novelist had clasped him to his narrow chest. Beard was still smiling to himself thirty minutes later as his twin-propeller plane bounced down the freezing runway and banked southwards to return him to the mess he had almost managed to forget.
He stayed overnight in Oslo, changed his reservation to a 6 a.m. flight and was three hours early into Heathrow. As his plane made its approach over Windsor Park it was raining heavily, the dawn sky was greenish-black, all headlights were on along the feed-in roads. Outside the terminal building, in the airport taxi queue, he learned there was a traffic pile-up and ten-mile tailback on the M4, so he went back inside, descended the levels and took the train to Paddington and a cab from there. By the time he arrived outside his house the rain had stopped and was dripping heavily from the blackened branches of the pavement rowan trees. As his taxi pulled away, he stood by his garden gate with his luggage and looked about him, marvelling that among such densely crowded buildings at ten on a weekday morning, there was no one to be seen, not even the sound of a voice or a radio. Belsize Park appeared as empty of life as the Arctic. And there was his home, his very own box of miseries, neat, early Victorian, of grey London brick, with stone mullions on the downstairs windows, and standing on its own patch of wintry garden with its one bare birch and, to the side, an ancient apple tree. Not many London houses had a hundred feet of front garden, and a path of flaking brick in herringbone pattern making a shallow curve to the front door, and mossy brick walls marking the boundaries. Architecturally, it was superior to all his other marital homes, and now it would have to be sold, the contents dispersed, its two owners likewise, not because they habitually disliked each other, though she might loathe him now, but because he had had eleven affairs in five years and she had only one. An uneven score, and they must live and suffer by unspoken rules.
The front gate made its usual squeak, more of a valedictory quacking sound, as he pushed it open. He was sad, but he was no longer in anguish. That pleasant woman on the train whose name he could no longer recall, the visit to Tarpin’s, his chaste interlude on the eightieth parallel (he was almost completely healed) were new layers of a protective coating. However minimally, he was a different man. He was full of regrets, he was sorry that he did not know the trick of making Patrice love him, but he was resigned. He was going indoors to make a start on dismantling the stage set of his marriage. His intention was to begin packing that day. During the dark afternoons on the frozen-in ship, he had had time to reflect, and planned to take only personal belongings. She could have the rest, the sofas, rugs, paintings, knives and forks, and if she could persuade her father, a merchant banker, to buy out his half-share, she could have the house as well. Beard would make the disengagement as painless and efficient as he could. For all he cared, she could set up with Tarpin. No shortage of space on the tussocky front lawn for a boat, lamp post and phone box.
The wheels of his luggage made a plaintive ticking against the
path. His last homecoming. He was relieved that he was early, that Patrice would not be at home to fail to greet him, to ignore his return, for this was Friday, a full teaching day, when scores of cross-legged children sang in dissonant unison to her piano in the afternoon. Such details of her existence he would soon forget, or be denied.
Arriving at the front door, and bending with effort against the newly thickened cordon of fat around his waist to rummage in his briefcase for his key, he noticed a change. The cream-painted wire basket that held milk bottles and had a dial and red arrow for indicating to the milkman the day’s requirement was not in its usual place. It had been moved, or kicked, more than a foot to the right, leaving exposed a blurred rectangular mark framed in grit on the stone doorstep. Now the basket stood askew at a diagonal, showing its communicative face to the wall. He did not rearrange it. What was the point? Soon he would move into a new place – he had in mind a small, white-walled flat stripped bare of clutter, his domestic Spitsbergen, from where he would devise a new future for himself, lose weight, become agile, and steely with fresh purpose, whose nature was still unclear.
He found his key, opened the front door and, as he pulled his luggage into the hall, was aware of another difference, a slight rearrangement of the air. It was damp, or warm, or both, and scented in an unfamiliar way. More obviously, there was water on the parquet floor, a trail of outrageous wet footprints, or foot-sized puddles, leading from the bottom of the stairs towards the sitting room. Someone – Tarpin, surely, that constant creature of the bathroom – had stepped carelessly from the shower, and was treating the place like his own.
Recklessly, with no other thought than to throw the intruder out, Beard strode along the water trail and entered the room. It could not have been clearer, for there he was on the sofa, with dripping hair, wearing a dressing gown, Beard’s dressing gown in black silk with a paisley pattern, a Valentine’s gift from Patrice, and he was sitting upright, startled, the newspaper unfolded in his lap. But he was not Tarpin – this was the difficult adjustment, and it took Beard seconds to realign. The man on the sofa was Aldous, Tom Aldous, the post-doc, the Swan of Swaffham, the tip of whose ponytail released a droplet, which fell onto a cushion as the two men stared at each other in silence.
Beard’s processes of accommodation were hindered by irrelevant questions and answers. Would he ever want to wear that dressing gown again? He thought not. What were the odds against his meeting both of Patrice’s lovers in a sodden state? Extremely long. Naturally, the silence appeared to last many more seconds than it did, and it was broken at last by Aldous with a titter, a nervous whinnying sound he tried to hide behind his hand. His worst fear had been realised. There may have been a very brief moment when he thought that Beard’s form in the doorway was an apparition, the paranoid consequence of an overproductive mind. Now he knew it was not. He may, in this short interlude, before either man spoke, have seen before him another more persuasive apparition – his career prospects in shreds. Theoretical physics was a village, and on its green, by the village pump, Beard still had influence. Did Aldous, the Centre’s home-grown genius, think he could talk his way out of this? The hand he had used to smother his giggle reached out towards the low glass table that stood in front of the sofa. By a pile of magazines was a coffee cup – tall, in thin white porcelain, one in a set of six bought by Patrice at Henri Bendel’s in New York. Aldous raised it to his lips. If the purpose was to demonstrate that he was untroubled or guiltless, the gesture was undermined by the newspaper sliding from his lap onto the floor into a face-down heap. With his eyes still on the master of the house, he took an insolent sip. Beard took a step closer.
‘Put that down, man. And stand up.’
It was as well that Aldous obeyed, for Beard, seven or eight inches shorter, thirty years older and weak about the arms had no physical means of imposing his will. He had only the rectitude, outrage and whatever authority a cuckold could command. Hands on hips, back straight to attain his entire five feet five, he watched as Aldous struggled to his feet and hastily retied the cord of the dressing gown under which, it was briefly clear, he was naked.
‘So, Mr Aldous.’
‘Look,’ Aldous said with a placating, downward movement of his palms, ‘we can talk about this. Professor Beard, can I call you Michael?’
‘No.’
‘You see, we shouldn’t let ourselves be forced into roles that others have written for us when . . .’
Beard took another step forward. He did not believe for a moment that there would be violence, but he did not mind giving the impression that he thought there would be. ‘What are you doing in my house?’
The rural Norfolk accent, it seemed then, was well adapted to a special kind of pleading. In such tones the tenantry might once have begged their manorial lord for lower rents in hard times. ‘I was going to finish this coffee, see, get dressed, tidy up and leave. I was going to double-lock the door from the outside like I was told and put the key through the letterbox. If you hadn’t come back early there wouldn’t have …’
‘I said, what are you doing in my house?’
Using his palms again in a gesture of empty-handed frankness, Aldous said, ‘I had dinner with Patrice and I stayed the night. Look, Professor Beard, may I be frank?’
He paused, as if he really did expect an answer. When he did not get one, he continued, ‘We both value rationality. We’ve made careers out of it. So let’s not be swept up into responses that are no longer appropriate to the situation. We both know that your marriage is over. Technically, you and Patrice are man and wife, but you’re not even on speaking terms and haven’t been for ages, and here you are, getting ready to play the injured party, the furious husband catching his wife’s lover red-handed, when in fact you’re probably thinking of moving out anyway. That’s Patrice’s impression, and it’s certainly her wish.’
Beard waited for more.
‘What I mean to say, Professor Beard – I wish you’d let me call you Michael – is that we could skip all the anger and heartache, we could be efficient about this, and we could even be friends.’
‘I see.’ The question he then put to Aldous came without forethought, and as he asked it, he thought it might perform useful mischief, or at the very least give him a moment to think. ‘And what about Rodney Tarpin? What’s happened to him?’
Aldous gave a good impression of a man pretending to be unfazed. Slowly, he retied once more the belt of Beard’s dressing gown. ‘I’m not afraid of Tarpin. And I’ve recorded two of his phone calls, and a postcard he wrote is now with the police. The man’s a maniac, but at least he doesn’t hide it.’
Beard said, ‘He hit Patrice.’
‘That was grotesque,’ the young man cried out, seeing a common cause to bind the professor to him. ‘How could this guy do a thing like that to such a beautiful woman?’
‘And he attacked me. Hit me in the face.’
‘He should be in prison.’
‘At least now he’ll be on your case, not mine. Are the police offering you protection?’
‘Well, you know, they said they’re rather busy at the moment.’
The urge to punish gave Beard a warm glow that was not unlike love. He said, ‘I suppose he intends to kill you. I’d carry a knife if I were you, not that I care either way what happens to you.’
Despite Beard’s efforts, Aldous did not appear intimidated by Tarpin. He said simply, ‘He doesn’t frighten me, Professor Beard.’
‘And I suppose Patrice would have told him where you work – I mean, where you used to work.’
Instantly, the young man’s cool drained away. He was the supplicant once more, a man with his job on the line.
‘Oh now look, Professor Beard. You’re taking this too far. Let’s go back to the central point. Rationality . . .’
‘Deeply irrational,’ Beard said, ‘to make love to the boss’s wife.’
‘Honestly, it goes deeper than that. I’ve been stupid, I know I’ve got a lot
to learn. But I’m talking about, about a substratum of powerful logic . . .’
Beard laughed out loud. Substratum! This was like watching a chess player fight his way out of an approaching checkmate. He could remember no particular occasion, but he knew he had been in such situations himself, probably in front of an outraged wife, just when she had blown his last excuse and then, brilliantly, on a surge, he had produced a sleight of mind, a knight’s move in the eleventh dimension, a dazzling projection upwards from the flat-world of the conventional game. Yes, he liked a substratum of powerful logic. He listened.
Aldous spoke breathlessly. ‘Three weeks ago I overheard you saying to one of our group that you believed that apart from general relativity, the Dirac Equation was the most beautiful artefact our civilisation had ever produced. I disagree. You do yourself a disservice. There’s nothing like the Conflation, nothing like this elaboration of the photovoltaics – nothing more elegant, nothing truer, Professor Beard. Everyone everywhere reveres it. But no one has thought it through from the angle of applied science, and the crisis in climate change. And I have, I’ve seen the potential of your work in relation to photosynthesis. The fact is, no one understands in detail how plants work, though they pretend they do. No one really understands how photons are converted to chemical energy so efficiently. Classical physics can’t explain it. This talk of electron transfer is nonsense, it doesn’t add up. How your average leaf transfers energy from one molecular system to another is nothing short of a miracle. But this is the point – the Conflation opens it right up. Quantum coherence is key to the efficiency, you see, with the system sampling all the energy pathways all at once. And the way nanotechnology is heading, we could copy this with the right materials, and then crack water cheaply, and store hydrogen on a domestic or industrial scale. Beautiful! But I’m nothing, I’m no one. I want to show you my ideas, and when you’ve looked at them, I know you’ll go for it. People will listen to you. Quantum coherence in photosynthesis is nothing new, but now we know where to look and what to look at. You could steer this research, you could get a prototype funded. It’s too important to let go, it’s our future, the whole world’s future that’s at stake, and that’s why we can’t afford to be enemies.’