through a silvery haze over the Weald of Sussex towards the soft line of the South Downs, whose gentle folds once cradled his raucous first marriage, a synaesthesia of misguided love, infant excrement and wailing of their lodgers' twins, and the heady quantum calculations that led, fifteen years and two divorces later, to his prize. His Prize, that had half blessed, half ruined his life. Beyond those hills was the English Channel, trimmed with frills of pinkish cloud that obscured the coast of France.
Now a fresh tilt of the aircraft's wings turned him into the sunlight and a view of west London and, just below the trembling engine slung beneath the wing, his improbable destination, the microscopic airport, and around it, the arterial feeds, and traffic pulsing down them like corpuscles, M4, M25, M40, the charmless designations of a hard-headed age. Benignly, the glare from the west softened a little the industrial squalor. He saw the Thames Valley, a pallid winter green, looping between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern Hills. Beyond, lost to view, was Oxford and the laboratory-toiling of his undergraduate years, and the finely calculated courting of his first wife, Maisie. And now here it came again, for the sixth time, the colossal disc of London itself, turning like an intricately slotted space station in majestic self-sufficiency. As unplanned as a giant termite nest, as a rain forest, and a thing of beauty, gathering itself to great human intensity at the centre, along the rediscovered river between Westminster and Tower Bridge, dense with confident, playful architecture, new toys. Briefly, he thought he saw the plane's shadow flitting like a free spirit across St James's and over the rooftops, but this was impossible at such a height. He knew about light. Among those millions of roofs, four had sheltered his second, third, fourth and fifth marriages. These alliances had defined his life, and they were all, no point denying it, calamities.
These days, whenever he came in over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. The giant concrete wounds dressed with steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon – the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession. The hot breath of civilisation. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from his wondrous, and wondrously dirty, machine, believed in his better moments that he had the answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was running out of time.
Even as his Essex childhood swung back into view – he was so late! – he could trace the route he should have been making among miniaturised streets as neatly etched by winter sun as a printed circuit. He thought he could see the very building in the Strand he was supposed to be in now. Then it was gone. And there were two other roofs, tipping away from him unseen to the north-west. One sheltered his icy, neglected, chaotic Marylebone apartment. His mind's eye permitted him to see in a darkened room the half-eaten meal he had abandoned three months ago with a half-forgotten friend for some night errand. He had not been back and had not seen her since. The place was a midden. In the bedroom next door, in the unheated air, he saw the sensual disorder of the bed, the pillows on the floor, the orange standby lights of the hi-fi still glowing, and scattered about the place, the books and journals he was reading at the time (he struggled to remember them), and that day's newspapers, a champagne bottle and, in two glasses, the evaporated tidemarks of the inch or two they had failed in their hurry to finish. Over these, over the plates in the dining room, the pans in the kitchen, on the garbage in the pail and spread across the chopping board, and even on the coffee grounds in the dried-out filter paper, there would be vigorous, differently hued fungal growths in creamy whites and soft greyish-greens, a blossoming on the abandoned cheese, the carrots, the hardened gravy. Airborne spores, a parallel civilisation, invisible and mute, successful living entities. Yes, they would have long settled to their specialised feasts, and when the fuel ran out, they would dry to a smear of charcoal dust.
The other roof sheltered Melissa Browne, his somewhat neglected love, and it was under this second that he intended to spend the night. She was so kind to him, so soft, so patient, so pretty, the only viable love in his life. Like many women, she thought he was a brilliant scientist, a genius in need of rescuing. But he was such a careless, faithless, disorganised friend, too elusive, too stonily intent on never marrying again. He hadn't phoned. She was cooking dinner. He didn't deserve her. Guilt and a fresh surge of impatience, a vile brew, made him groan. Did he actually make a sound above the engine's note? And here were the South Downs again to remind him he must never yield, he must never change his mind. His frame could not withstand a sixth marriage.
Whichever direction his gaze fell, this was home, his native corner of the planet. The fields and hedgerows, once tended by medieval peasants or eighteenth-century labourers, still visibly patterned the land in irregular quadrilaterals, and every brook, fence and pigsty, virtually every tree, was known and probably named in the Domesday Book after all-conquering William in 1085 conferred with his advisors and sent his men all over England. And ever since, named again with greater refinement, owned, used, costed, traded, mortgaged; mature like a thick-crusted Stilton, as richly stuffed with varied humanity as Babel, as historical as the Nile Delta, teeming like a charnel house with ghosts, in public discourse as dissonant as a rookery in full throat. One day this brash and ancient kingdom might yield to the force of multiple cravings, to the dreamy temptations of a giant metropolis, a Mexico City, SA?o Paulo and Los Angeles combined, to effloresce from London to the Medway to Southampton to Oxford, back to London, a modern form of quadrilateral, burying all previous hedges and trees. Who knew, perhaps it would be a triumph of racial harmony and brilliant buildings, a world city, the most admired world city in the world.
How, wondered Beard as his plane at last quitted the stack on a banking hairpin tangent and lined itself up north of the Thames to begin its descent, how could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a soft fruit – we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!
Half an hour later, the Berlin flight was docked and he was fourth man off, towing his carry- on luggage, walking stiffly at speed, with unmanful little skips and hops (his knees, his body, indeed his mind, were no longer capable of simple running), down the sealed capillaries, the carpeted steel tubes that fed him through the airport's innards towards the immigration hall. Far quicker to pound alongside the hundred-metre moving walkway than squeeze by the dreamy, motionless voyagers and their luggage blocking the runs. At least a dozen young men off his plane, hurrying more effectively, overtook him along this stretch, lean, crop-headed business types, raincoats flapping over their forearms, unhindered by their weighty shoulder bags, talking easily as they flew by. An avenue of ads for banking and office services, weakly humorous, effortfully eye-catching – clearly, advertising was an industry for third-raters – increased his irritation in the unventilated, overlit corridors. He knew it too well, the special kind of mental suffocation that came from contact with aggressive low intelligence. Now, planetary stupidity was his business. And by failing to be punctual, he was being stupid too. At best, he would be seventy-five minutes late. Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics – time reversal. And commanding yourself to be stoical did not get you there any sooner.
For an unnaturally large fee, he was to address an energy conference attended by institutional investors, pension-fund managers, solid types who would not easily be persuaded that the world, their world, was in danger and that they should align their investment patterns accordingly. Through inertia, blind professional custom, they were bound to their old familiars, oil, gas, coal, forestry. He was to persuade them that what they currently made profitable would one day destroy them. On these occasions it was necessary to speak in general terms, of course, but if Beard, already the owner of a dozen patents, could shift them, even by the smallest of fractions, his own company must benefit. They were waiting for him in the Savoy, in two connecting suites facing out over the river, and though they had received advance apologies for his lateness, soon they were bound to melt away to their next meetings, and this frail miracle of appointment-diary co-ordination, four months in the conjuring, would give way to even greater scepticism and fatal withdrawal. Another reason to be in London was to sign the option tomorrow at the US Embassy on a four-hundred-acre site in the south-western scrub desert of New Mexico, a sand-grain speck in the baking vastness. And when the investors were happy, the funds were in, the tax breaks settled, the construction on a scaled-up prototype would begin. Thinking about it made him dizzy with impatience.
Ten minutes of hurry, then Beard, breathless, sweating under his coat, was standing stalled in immigration, buried in a line ten men deep, hundreds long, inching forward among supplicants waiting to be granted entry to their own country. Long minutes passed, and he could feel himself becoming less reasonable. There came to him an image of precious fluid – blood, milk, wine – draining from a tank. He could not restrain a
