deep floorboard stain in the sitting room, Michael and Patrice returned from their respective lodgings to the marital home in order to empty it of their belongings and put it up for sale and go their separate ways. These were gusty, sunlit days in March, with winds so strong that the unmown grass was flattened silver sides up, and last year’s unswept leaves were piled in drifts against the mossy garden walls. It was weather of a bracing, purifying sort, for Beard at least.
True to his plan, and to Patrice’s satisfaction, he renounced any claim to the contents of the house – the list was oppressively long – and took only his books, clothes and a few personal belongings. Not only was he going to shed weight, and become trim and fit, he was intent on a slimmed-down life in the plain apartment he had yet to find. A simplifying factor was, of course, the fading of his love for, or obsession with, his wife. In one of their rare exchanges, he told her that her love life had brought nothing but destruction, and grief to an ailing father in Swaffham, and deprived the country of one of its most promising scientists. It amazed Beard how convinced he himself now was by the narrative everyone believed, and how easily he could summon the appropriate memories and emotions. Was it not true that if Patrice had not had an affair with Tom Aldous, he would still be alive today? And was it not also true that Tarpin would probably have wanted Aldous dead? There was no pretence on Beard’s part, he was genuinely aggrieved by what Tarpin had done, and it was right to hold Patrice to account. She owed her husband an apology.
Typically, she did not see it that way. She was in deep mourning for what she now believed was the love of her life. Her apologies were due only to the man who could not hear them. She was miserable with guilt at bringing Tarpin into Aldous’s life, for failing to protect the younger man, for not taking the threats more seriously. In addition, the burdens of packing and storage were all hers, since she wanted the stuff, which happened to include the rug and coffee table that had murdered her lover. She moved about the house in silent sorrow, working through her lists with numb efficiency. Her husband was at best an irrelevance, though he suspected that she hated him now for indefinable reasons, or for no good reason at all. Her silence, he decided, was preferable to the lethal cheerfulness with which she had wanted to annihilate him during her Tarpin days.
He was not inclined to help her sort through the goods that were now hers, but he made himself useful in other ways. Since there was nothing legally at issue between them, he suggested they share a lawyer. He knew a good one. Beard also knew the right agent to sell their house. He was well practised in these kinds of arrangements. He moved out first, to a rented basement flat in Dorset Square, on the north side of the Marylebone Road, and it was there, three months later, sprawled on a stained floral sofa that smelled like a dog, that he began to read the folder marked ‘Strictly for the eyes of Professor M. Beard’. It was turgid stuff, organic as well as inorganic chemistry, interwoven with some quantum informational concepts and certain more obscure subsections of the Conflation. These elements edged towards a theoretical description of the energy exchange in photosynthesis. Presumably, the intention, at some point further into the file, was to suggest how the process might be imitated and adapted somehow, but Beard’s attention began to flag, first because the material was impenetrable, second because he needed to buy a flat, and then, five months to the day after Tom Aldous’s death, the trial of Rodney Tarpin began.
He did not stand a chance, and he seemed to know it. In a tone of near regret, the prosecution laid the matter out: Tarpin’s obvious motive, the phoned and written threats, the proven violence, his hair on the murder weapon tossed in the laurels and his hair in the dead man’s grip, the tissue containing his dried nasal mucus and Aldous’s blood, the lack of an alibi. When Beard’s turn came, he spoke to the point. Was he not a citizen who respected the law? He gave a thorough account of his movements on the morning in question, then of his wife’s black eye, of his visit to the accused’s house and the blow to the face he had received. The case against Tarpin was bad enough, but it was Patrice, also appearing for the prosecution, who sank him. At the witness stand she was described by the press as beautiful and deadly, rigid with contempt for the man who had killed her lover. As a witness, Beard was not permitted to be in court to hear his wife’s testimony, and could only read the press reports. He had never known her talk so well, so clearly and to such effect. She mesmerised court and country with her account of Tarpin’s possessiveness and brutality, his jealous rages. He was an obsessive, she said, a deranged fantasist who had urged her to kill Aldous in his sleep if she ever saw the chance. He refused to let her go, and what she had thought would be a brief and casual affair became a nightmare lasting months. She was terrified of his violence but did not dare refuse him sex. He slapped her when they made love.
‘Do you not enjoy that, Mrs Beard?’ she was asked by Tarpin’s dapper counsel during cross- examination.
‘No,’ she said crisply. ‘Do you?’ There was laughter in the public gallery.
Her most quoted, celebrated remark must have been practised in front of the mirror. ‘When he killed my Tommy, the nation lost a genius,’ she said. ‘And I lost the only man I ever loved.’
The jury was out for only three hours and no one, not even Tarpin, could have been surprised by the verdict.
It was during the six days that separated the jury foreman’s announcement and the judge’s sentencing that Beard took up Aldous’s file again. It was the least he could do, to honour the dead, and he was agitated, he needed distraction. Second time around, he understood more, and began to be interested, even a little excited. The task Aldous had set himself was to discover then copy the ways of plants, perfected by evolution during three billion years of trial and error. Deploying techniques and materials still only talked of in nanotechnology, the idea was to exploit direct energy from sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using special light-sensitive dyes in place of chlorophyll and catalysts containing manganese and calcium. The stored gases would be taken up by a fuel cell to generate electricity. Another idea, also taken from the lives of plants, was to combine carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with sunlight and water to make an all-purpose liquid fuel. It was brilliant or insane – he was not sure. Marking each of his pages with last year’s date, he began some notes of his own, and then stopped because the next day, a Tuesday, the court sat, and the accused stood to hear his fate. Tarpin listened to the judge with the same intent and dreamy detachment with which he had followed all the proceedings and had protested, all too feebly, his innocence. According to the press reports, he kept looking in Patrice’s direction (Beard could imagine that inquisitive, rodent look), but she kept her face turned from him.
On the steps outside the court, she told the press and TV cameras that the sentence was not long enough, given the damage he had done. During the following week, some commentators agreed with her, while others thought it too severe for what the French might have called a crime of passion. However, watching the news that night in his socks, lying on the stinking sofa, amid the novel squalor of his bachelor apartment, with Aldous’s pages spread across his lap, Beard considered sixteen years was just about right.
Part Two
He was running out of time. Everyone was, it was the general condition, but Michael Beard, bloated by an unwanted lunch, shifting under his seat belt, could think only of the diminishing hours of his day, and of what he stood to lose. It was two thirty and his plane, already one hour late, still lumbered oafishly clockwise in a stack above south London. Too troubled to continue reading, gnawing ineffectually from time to time and from an awkward angle on a tender spike of cuticle in the corner of his thumbnail, a whitlow in the making, he watched his familiar corner of England rotate below him. What else could he do? This was not the time for lofty retrospection or overviews, just when he should have been rushing down streets, along corridors, but much of his past and many of his preoccupations were down there, three thousand metres below the expensive seat that others, as usual, had paid for.
Here was a commonplace sight that would have astounded Newton or Dickens. He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime – it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging, widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks towards the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood, and the outsized hospital where his mother died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary, and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine. Then his gaze was rotated southwards
