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
