The car door was held open for him, and then he was alone on the pavement, wondering if there was a book he needed to buy. There was not. He went home to his flat and lay brooding in the scum- rimmed bath, gazing through steam clouds at the archipelago of his disrupted selfhood – mountainous paunch, penis tip, unruly toes – scattered in a line across a soapy grey sea. He told himself that things are often not as bad as you think. That was true. But sometimes they are worse: a dying story had been revived.
Over the following week images of the shackled Nobel professor, of the humbled victim kneeling before her persecutor, of his unwholesome grin, digitally multiplied themselves around the world like retroviruses. Out at the Centre, Jock Braby seized his chance and forced Beard's resignation. A lecture series was cancelled in outrage, and at various venues his presence was thought likely to harm the good name of an institution or a fellow visiting dignitary or, at the very least, cause trouble from the students and younger faculty. A kindly civil servant phoned to ask whether he cared to choose between resigning from Physics UK and being sacked. A research centre took the trouble to let him know that the name of Beard, now mud, would cease to appear on its letterhead. In the senior common room of an Oxford college, where he went for solace and coffee, three English-literature dons walked out at the sight of him, heads held high, while their own coffees cooled conspicuously by their abandoned chairs. His phone did not ring much – his friends were silent, or, like his ex- wives, reticent, or baffled. However, Imperial College, delighted with the lab he had set up and the funding he had attracted, stood by him. And he received an affable, comradely letter, bearing the stamp of an Austrian prison, from a neo-Nazi serving time for the murder of a Jewish journalist.
For two weeks he thought of nothing else. To stay away from reading newspapers, as Melissa sweetly proposed, was beyond him. When there was nothing new in the two-kilo wedge of the morning's press, he felt a curious, twisted disappointment at an immediate prospect of emptiness, at having nothing to consume him all day. He had discovered a compulsion to read of this alien, the avatar bearing his name, the goat-monster-seducer, denier of a woman's right to a career in science, eugenicist. He was baffled by how he had ended up stuck with this last label. But after a few blustery walks up and over Primrose Hill among the pushchairs and kite-fliers, he came to a tentative conclusion. The Third Reich had projected a prohibitive shadow more than half a century long over genetics where it touched on human affairs – at least, in the minds of those outside the subject. To suggest the possibility of genetic influence, genetic difference, of an evolutionary past bearing down in some degree on cognition, on men and women, on culture, was to some minds like entering a camp and volunteering to work with Doctor Mengele.
When he tried out this notion on biologist friends they were amused. That was old hat, that was seventies stuff, there was a new consensus now, not only in genetics, but in academic life in general. He was too bitter. Have another drink! But what did they know about journalists or postmodernists? As Beard saw it, the solution was simple. Stick to photons – no resting mass, no charge, no controversy on the human scale. His work in artificial photosynthesis was proceeding well, with a laboratory prototype already using light to split water efficiently into hydrogen and oxygen. Civilisation needed a safe new energy source, and he could be of use. He would be redeemed. Let there be light!
For all that resolve, he thought his disgrace would mark him for years. And then what happened? Nothing. His avatar vanished. Overnight, he was airbrushed from the public prints, a soccer match- fixing story took his place, and the slow-healing amnesia began. For a while he was underemployed, then four months later, he gave six short talks about Einstein for the BBC World Service. A research group in Germany seduced him onto its letterhead. Cambridge saw its chance to steal him from Imperial, then Imperial trumped Cambridge and gave him two more researchers and even more money. UCL wanted a slice of him too, offering as a softener an honorary degree, then Caltech pitched in, and some old friends at MIT wanted to bring him across.
How magnanimous was public life, and how well did the lustre of a Nobel laureate reflect upon an academy and oil the wheels of grant acquisition!
By the time his taxi had swung round Trafalgar Square and paused to join in a traffic jam along the Strand, he was over an hour and a half late. Five minutes later, he had made no progress. For the past four hours, it suddenly seemed, his thoughts had been cramped by delay and exasperation, until now, sitting in the motionless cab, the confinement became intolerable. He pushed a twenty-pound note through the slot in the driver's screen and climbed out with his luggage and began to tow it towards the Savoy. Walking might make him later still, but acting like a man in a hurry rather than thinking like one was a relief. And barrelling along with his wheeled burden, overtaking and weaving between pedestrians, was the workout he had been promising himself for years. Richly dishevelled, the knot of his purple tie askew, the expensive wool suit in need of a press, the overcoat too warm for the modern English winter, hurrying lopsidedly along, one leg making a decent show of stepping forward, the other stiffly scooting, he bobbed up the Strand like a fat boy on a pogo stick. Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed. No meeting was worth dying for. The traffic began to move again, and his own cab, now for hire, shot past him as he shuffled towards the hotel.
In the lobby, two conference organisers were waiting. The younger one took his bag, the other, a very old man in a blazer leaning heavily on a walking stick, with a liver-spotted death mask for a face, pointed at his watch and walked with him up the stairs.
'All is fine,' the fellow croaked through the effort of raising his body weight through the luxurious gravitational field. 'We've rejigged the running order. You're on in five minutes.'
Beard heard this in good heart, for he felt by comparison youthful and unassailable, the motion of his feet across the thick carpet was pleasing and the pain had vanished from his chest.
Another official, younger but more senior, of Indian origin, received him by a set of lofty double doors thrown open to the din of teatime chatter. After the preliminaries – a great honour, a thousand thank yous, much anticipated, about lateness please not to worry – the young man, whose name, Saleel, Beard remembered from email exchanges, ran through the composition of the audience: institutional men and women, a few civil servants, a few academics, no journalists.
But Beard was not fully attentive, for his gaze had shifted from Saleel's face to a view over the young man's dark-suited shoulder of the room and its voluble crowd. Arranged on tables covered in white cloths, framed by high windows and a view of the darkening Thames, were square porcelain dishes densely heaped with plump pillows of crustless sandwiches. Even from where he stood he could make out the fat pink stripes of a smoked-salmon filling. Artfully scattered across the tables were slices of lemons, detached yellow smiles of enticement to which no one in the room was paying much attention. He was not at that moment truly hungry, but he was, in his own term, pre-hungry. That is, he could appreciate how pleasurable it might be, in less than an hour, to lift a few of those items onto a plate and contemplate the river while he ate. And just as easily, he could anticipate the regret he would feel if the dishes were removed too soon, when the afternoon tea break came to an end, which it must do when his talk began. Safer to eat a few now.
Saleel was saying, 'A conservative lot, institutional investors, not scientific, of course, so not too technical would be most heartily appreciated.'
By turning his shoulder into the room, Beard was able to prompt his host, clearly a sensitive and intelligent man, to exclaim as he handed over a white envelope, 'But of course, you need refreshment! And please, your emolument.'
A minute later Beard had the plate and, on it, thick-cut smoked wild salmon speckled with dill and ground black pepper between thin white bread slices, nine heavy quarter segments – a precautionary number, since he did not have to eat them all. But he did, and very quickly, without much satisfaction or even a thought for the river, because a soft-spoken man with a stutter wanted to tell him about his son's physics exam, and then a tall man with a stoop and a jutting ginger beard and large accusing eyes set eerily far apart introduced himself. He was Jeremy Mellon, lecturer in urban studies and folklore. Beard, who was on his sixth piece, felt obliged to ask why Mellon was here.
'Well, I'm interested in the forms of narrative that climate science has generated. It's an epic story, of course, with a million authors.'
Beard was suspicious. This was the Nancy Temple tendency. People who kept on about
