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 checked 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. Senor Beard was to excuse an uneducated man’s naivety 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
