His own end – it seemed like that at the time – came only last year, and the curious thing was that people had already started to forget. This amounted to a kind of forgiveness. It was generally known there had been a fuss, a stirring of the news currents around Michael Beard, but the details were blurring. He had been proved wrong about something, or was he in the right all along? Did he assault someone, or was he the victim? Didn't that someone get arrested? Back then, as the storm broke, a colleague, an eminence in computer modelling, told him that the picture of the Nobel prizewinner being led handcuffed through a jeering crowd was carried in four hundred and eighty-three newspapers. This fact remained with Beard, his humiliation had been planetary, but it seemed to have remained with no one else. New material had befuddled the public memory, fresh scandals, sporting events, confessions, war, celebrity gossip and the tsunami had wiped clean his slate. A twelve-month torrent, swelling steadily, had carried him to safer ground.
Even his own recollection of the events, their precise emotional tone, was beginning to fragment. To be the focus of press attention was to experience a form of vertigo and bewilderment. Mercifully, his own particular memory stain was fading to an indistinct watermark. But certain details remained sharp, kept alive by the retelling. He believed that anecdotes were a blight on conversation, and yet still he went on telling them. He often related how it was not the case that the feel of handcuffs on the skin was of cold steel, as one reads in detective novels. Those placed on him had been warmed by a long morning inside the armless gabardine jacket of the arresting policewoman. It was the intimate snugness of the fit around his wrists, the feel of transferred body warmth, that was sinister. Likewise, the clichA© was that whenever you read a press story on any subject of which you had personal knowledge, there was at least one salient fact wrong. But that was not his experience. He marvelled at the unearthing of a quantity of accurate facts about himself. The distortion was in the way in which they were juxtaposed, wrought into fresh implication, millimetres beyond the reach of a libel lawyer. And he was impressed too by the research, by how these restless newspaper types had, in a matter of a day or two, penetrated deep into the obscure quarters, into the slums of an overcrowded personal life, drawing in one instance a bounty of malice from his third wife's older brother, a near-mute recluse who had always loathed Beard and who lived without a telephone by a dirt track along a deserted north-westerly peninsula on Bruny Island off the coast of Tasmania.
The press upended Beard's life as one might a wastepaper basket. A couple of shakes, and there tipped into view all kinds of half-forgotten scraps. In other circumstances it might have been a service worth paying for. Independently of each other, his ex-wives, good old Maisie, Ruth, Eleanor, Karen and Patrice, refused to talk to the press. That touched him deeply. Of the past lovers, most were loyal, and only a rump spoke up: one lab assistant, one office administrator. There were also two scientists, failures, nobodies, both of them. Intriguingly, there were also some impostors. The Last Trump sounded, and from their graves and catacombs this pint-sized crowd of ex-lovers and pretenders crawled towards the light, to stand before their Maker, a journalist with a chequebook, and denounce Beard as a woman-hater, an exploiter, a louse.
But being silent or loyal got no one off the hook. The coverage was total. Until the attention of the press was distracted by a football scandal, he was its plaything. One front page rendered him in cartoon form as a leering goat, beckoning with limp hoof as it lounged against the caption: 'See Inside: Beard's Women'. Even as he opened the paper with sickening heart and scanned a gallery of faces, which included colleagues, old friends, the wives, Melissa, something in him stirred and an inner voice, steely, beyond humiliation, murmured that he had not done so badly in three or four decades, that all these women had the gleam of quality, of high self- possession. As for the impostors, the chancers, there were actually three, all not quite beautiful. But how could he not be interested in the fictitious nights they spent with him? He was flattered.
In all, however, it was a miserable time. It had started out innocently enough, with a mouse- click of assent to an invitation to be the titular head of a government scheme to promote physics in schools and universities, to entice more graduates, more teachers, into the profession, to glory in past achievements and make intellectual heroes out of physicists. When the invitation came, he was busier than he had ever been in his life and he could so easily have refused. He had an artificial-photosynthesis project at Imperial College, with fifteen people working for him. He was still at the Centre, though mostly for the purpose of drawing his fee. And it was important, he felt, to keep his new work out of Jock Braby's reach. Beard had started his company, he was acquiring patents on catalysts and other processes, and he had found Toby Hammer, a wiry ex-drunk, a fixer and go-between, who knew his way round campus bureaucracies and state legislatures and the homes of venture capitalists. Beard and Hammer had been looking for a solar-rich site, first in the Libyan Sahara, then in Egypt, then Arizona and Nevada, and finally, as a decent compromise, in New Mexico. Now Beard was alive with purpose and was shedding many of his old sinecures. But this request came through the Institute of Physics and was difficult to refuse.
And so he sat for the first time with his committee in a seminar room in Imperial College. His colleagues were three professors of physics from Newcastle, Manchester and Cambridge, two secondary-school teachers from Edinburgh and London, two headmasters from Belfast and Cardiff, and a professor of science studies from Oxford. Beard asked the members to introduce themselves in turn and explain a little about their background and their work. This was a mistake. The physics professors went on too long. They were impressed by their own work and they were instinctively competitive. If the first was going to speak in great detail, then so were the second and the third.
It was not old habits alone that made Beard impatient to hear from the professor of science studies, for the subject itself was a novelty to him. She was the last to speak, and introduced herself as Nancy Temple. Her face was round, not exactly pretty, but pleasant and open, and its pink blush had a childlike, well- defined edge curving down from cheekbone to jawline. He thought it could do no harm to ask her out to dinner. She began by noting that she was the only woman in the room, and that the committee reflected one of the very problems it might want to address. Round the table, everyone, including Beard, who had invited all of those present except Nancy Temple, murmured his emphatic assent. Her voice had the hypnotic sing-song inflections of Ulster. She confirmed that she had grown up in a middle-class suburb of Belfast and attended Queen's University, where she studied social anthropology.
She said she could best explain her field by outlining a recent project, a four-month in-depth study of a genetics lab in Glasgow as it set out to isolate and describe a lion's gene, Trim-5, and its function. Her purpose was to demonstrate that this gene, or any gene, was, in the strongest sense, socially constructed. Without the various 'entexting' tools the scientists used – the single-photon luminometer, the flow cytometer, immunofluorescence, and so on – the gene could not be said to exist. These tools were expensive to own, expensive to learn to use, and were therefore replete with social meaning. The gene was not an objective entity, merely waiting to be revealed by scientists. It was entirely manufactured by their hypotheses, their creativity, and by their instrumentation, without which it could not be detected. And when it was finally expressed in terms of its so-called base pairs and its probable role, that description, that text, only had meaning, and only derived its reality, from within the limited network of geneticists who might read about it. Outside those networks, Trim-5 did not exist.
During this presentation, Beard and the physicists from universities and schools listened in some embarrassment. Politely, they avoided exchanging glances. They tended to take the conventional view, that the world existed independently, in all its mystery, awaiting description and explanation, though that did not prevent the observer leaving thumbprints all over the field of observation. Beard had heard rumours that strange ideas were commonplace among the liberal-arts departments. It was said that humanities students were routinely taught that science was just one more belief system, no more or less truthful than religion or astrology. He had always thought that this must be a slur against his colleagues on the arts side. The results surely spoke for themselves. Who was going to submit to a vaccine designed by a priest?
When Nancy Temple came to the end of her speech, Newcastle and Cambridge spoke up simultaneously, more in wonder than in anger. 'Where does that leave Huntington's, for example?' one said as the other was asking, 'Do you honestly believe that what you don't know about doesn't exist?'
Beard, chivalrous to the hilt, thought it his duty to protect her and was about to step in, but Professor Temple was replying in a tolerant manner.
'Huntington's is also culturally inscribed. It was once a narrative about divine punishment or demonic possession. Now it's the story of a faulty gene, and one day it will likely transmute into something else. As for the genes we know nothing about, well, obviously, I have nothing to say. Of the genes that have been described, clearly they can only come to us mediated by culture.'
