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.’
Beard had heard rather too much recently of this whole-world talk. He had never been well disposed to biology enlisting quantum mechanics to its cause. And he had an irrational prejudice against physicists who defected to biology, Schroedinger, Crick and the like, who believed that their brilliant reductionism would carry all before them. In fact, greenery in general – gardening, country rambles, protest movements, photosynthesis, salads – was not to his taste.
‘How long have you been fucking my wife?’
Aldous sighed, and seemed about to object. Then his shoulders sagged and he resigned himself. ‘About a month after I first met her.’
‘After I introduced you.’
‘That’s it, Professor. You were away for the night, Birmingham or Manchester. I called in on my way home to see if there was anything Patrice needed…’
‘And there was.’
Again, the wheedling of the rural tenant. ‘Honest, Professor Beard. I had no designs on your wife. She’s way out of my league. I don’t even have a league. She invited me in, then she asked me to stay to dinner – and that was how it began. Later on she told me how it was all over between you, and I sort of persuaded myself that you um…’
‘Wouldn’t mind?’
He knew it already, but it angered Beard, or worse, it pained him, to hear for the second time from Patrice by way of Aldous that she thought the marriage was over. Since the late summer of last year, she had been seeing Aldous, not Tarpin. Or possibly both. The goofy post-doc turned up on her doorstep one August evening and she grabbed another chance to punish her husband.
‘Has anyone ever told you how naive you are, Aldous?’
The young man seized on the word with joy. ‘I am naive, Professor Beard! I do science and nothing else. I’m naive because I don’t meet people, I don’t go out. I go home and work in the studio in my uncle’s garden, often through till dawn. That’s how I’ve always been. But my work is at your disposal. I’ve been making a file for you. For you and no one else. Please say you’ll read it. This is so important.’
Until then the two men had faced each other over a distance of several feet, Aldous standing close to the sofa, with arms clasped in front of him, as if to defend himself against a possible fate or to prevent Beard’s dressing gown from swinging open. Beard began to back away. He was tired of listening to Aldous, he wanted to be alone.
He said, ‘Now you can leave. I’ll be at the Centre tomorrow and I’ll see you in Jock Braby’s office at eleven.’
As Beard crossed the room, Aldous was pleading, almost shouting. ‘No one will ever hire me again. You know that, don’t you? This is too important for private revenge.’
As he reached the sitting-room door, Beard turned and said, ‘Before you go, clear up the mess in the hall.’
‘Professor Beard!’
Aldous was starting to run at him, arms outstretched, his head shaking in denial, his lips stretched across his huge teeth, and it was probably his intention to throw himself at Beard’s knees and beg for mercy. He certainly would have had it, for Beard had no wish to set his domestic humiliation before Braby, and therefore the whole Centre. The Chief betrayed, made an ass of by one of the ponytails. But Aldous never reached Beard, he barely made it two metres into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. As his right foot landed on the bear’s back, it leaped forward, with its open mouth and yellow teeth bucking into the air. Aldous’s legs flew up before him and there was a moment when his considerable length was parallel to the ground, and then his legs rose even further and, though his arms flailed instinctively downwards to break his fall, it was the back of his head that made first contact, not with the floor, not with the edge of the glass table, but with its rounded corner, bluntly penetrating the nape of his neck.
A deep, smothering silence settled on the room, and several seconds passed.
‘No, no, please no,’ Beard muttered as he crossed the room.
