course of action. At any point in the present, there was always something he would far rather do – read, drink, eat, talk on the phone, drift through the internet – than contact an electrician or plumber or a house-cleaning agency, or sort through the three-foot-high paper piles, or answer one of the letters from Tom Aldous's father. It was the same inertia that had forced Beard to stay on an extra year in Dorset Square, the same laziness that had prompted the purchase from the landlord.
When he could stand no more, of himself, of the place, of himself in the place, he retreated north-westwards to the embraces of his lover and their daughter. Cleaned and ironed clothes were waiting for him in Primrose Hill, and a functioning shower and a meal, and two girls who took it in turns to tell him their news and tease him harmlessly about his girth – the Expanding Universe, Melissa named it – and make him relate his adventures in the American desert in his quest to rescue humankind from self-destruction. He would read to Catriona in bed and she would be so awed by the occasion, by the fact it was not her mother but her father intoning, that she lay on her back in a kind of swoon, gripping the duvet beneath her chin, and barely paid attention. Fighting tiredness, she gazed up with contented and possessive love at the bulk of her father sagging over the tiny Beatrix Potter book in his hands. He was all hers. At that time these were the only tales she cared to hear, but Beard was not the man for Potter's dystopia of hedgehogs with ironing boards and rabbits in breeches, and he too struggled to stay awake, and sometimes, mid-sentence, his head would snap forward, and then he would come to and re-engage with affectless voice in the matter, say, of a stolen carrot.
Beard in his Texan hotel room, still on his back with the palmtop in his hand, was thirsty but too weary to raise himself and find a bottle of water. All those miles in the air, all those scotches, and twenty-four hours without sleep were pressing him down into his America-sized bed. He felt waves of virtual movement passing through his back and legs, his body's memory of riding all day the undulations of the stratosphere at three quarters the speed of sound. In this state he was completely without desire but, all the same, he was thinking of Melissa. How did things stand? Generally, after the bedtime story, he would be alone with her at last. At last? These days, he no longer experienced such sharp impatience and urgency, and that was fine, he could concentrate on the food and on hearing about the dance shops. The recession made people feel less like dancing. She was a clever businesswoman, keeping all three shops open by cutting lines, reducing hours but sacking no one. Balletic little girls, in tune with the times, had discovered a taste for black, and middle-aged men no longer tangoed in such numbers, but their wives dropped by for cowboy hats to wear to the line-dancing, which was both unfashionable and popular. Another unexpected boost had been the reality-TV dance contests.
Such talk was soothing, especially in the past frantic weeks, as the on-stream moment for the Lordsburg plant approached. As she chatted he watched her and was certain that in her own, full, rich way, she was as beautiful as ever, and happier than he had ever known her. Motherhood came easily to her. She was warm and relaxed with Catriona, not doting or possessive as she could have been with an only child born three months past her fortieth birthday. Her happiness exceeded anything he had known in his own life, and he thought it had removed her from him partially, placed around her a protective casing that she knew he would never bother to penetrate. She had something magnificent now, a private joy that she thought was not worth the trouble communicating, because he would not understand. She was always pleased to see him, she made love with him as heartily as ever, she encouraged him with Catriona, she even found time to iron his shirts. He gave twenty-five thousand pounds a year to the household, and that was declared more than sufficient. But he suspected that Melissa would have been fine without his money and was just as happy when he was not there.
In effect, she was keeping to the promise she had made many times while they were wrangling over her pregnancy. She would ignore his arguments for an abortion, and in return, she would make no demands. And for his part? He would never have guessed how faithful to himself, how constant he could be. He had made friends with a woman in Lordsburg, a waitress called Darlene, who lived in a trailer on the south side, on the road out to the ghost town of Shakespeare. Darlene was not exactly beautiful, not remotely in Melissa's class, but nor was Beard much to look at now that he waddled a little when he walked and had developed these supplementary chins, the lowest of which hung like turkey wattle and wobbled when he shook his head. When he asked women he did not know out to dinner, they laughed before they said no.
The point about Darlene was that she said yes, and she was good-natured and funny and liked to drink with him. On his last trip to Lordsburg they had got drunk together in the trailer and in a wild moment he had agreed to marry her. But it was while they were making love, it was rhetorical, a mere expression of excitement. The following night, to avoid the scene that would surely accompany his retraction, he got drunk with her all over again, this time in a bar on the north side of town, and he had almost proposed to her a second time. All this meant was that he was fond of her. She was good company, she was a sport, a trouper. But she was currently adding to the general untidiness of his life by wanting to come to England.
The surprise was this: his existence since Catriona's birth was much as before. His friends had told him he would be astonished, he would be transformed, his values would change. But nothing was transformed. Catriona was fine, but it was the same old mess. And now that he had entered upon the final active stages of his life, he was beginning to understand that, barring accidents, life did not change. He had been deluded. He had always assumed that a time would come in adulthood, a kind of plateau, when he would have learned all the tricks of managing, of simply being. All mail and emails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves, clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes and all his stuff where he could find it, with the past, including its letters and photographs, sorted into boxes and files, the private life settled and serene, accommodation and finances likewise. In all these years this settlement, the calm plateau, never appeared, and yet he had continued to assume, without reflecting on the matter, that it was just around the next turn, when he would exert himself and reach it, that moment when his life became clear and his mind free, when his grown-up existence could properly begin. But not long after Catriona's birth, about the time he met Darlene, he thought he saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered emails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply, and lovers he had not owned up to. Oblivion, the last word in organisation, would be his only consolation.
His final night in London, a mere thirty hours ago, should have been the ripe time when he was reconciled in joy with his tiny family. Few men could have resisted it, and Vasco da Gama himself could not have been unhappy with such a send-off. And at the beginning Beard was happy. Melissa put on an exceptional show. Even Catriona understood that he was going to America to switch something on, and when he did, the world would be saved. She and her mother, dressed in party frocks, prepared a special early-evening meal, the centrepiece of which was a ball moulded by Catriona's own hands, covered in blue icing with green patches. This was the earth, and on top was a candle, which he blew out in one go, to the little girl's rapture. Melissa and Catriona sang a song about ducklings, Beard sang the first few verses of 'Ten Green Bottles', the only song he knew all the words to. His daughter's arms were round his neck for most of the celebrations. Wasn't this bliss? Almost. He had forgotten to turn his palmtop off, and Darlene rang as Melissa was cutting the cake. Automatically, he took the call and said a little too tersely over her opening remark, 'I'll call you back.' He knew that Melissa had heard a woman's voice and the tension in his own, but nothing in her manner changed, there was no clever presentation of suppressed anger that Catriona would not see and he would. She met his eye, she smiled at him warmly, she poured his wine, she celebrated him.
When Catriona was down for the night and they were alone, he poured himself an extra large scotch and braced himself for a scene. It must come, they should confront it. But she kicked her shoes off and sat close to him and kissed him and told him she would miss him. They talked of other things, of travel arrangements, of his return, and all the while his irritation increased. She was playing with him, she was letting him stew in his guilt. But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why. He was not bound to her exclusively, their arrangement was clear. And she was wrong, he decided, to mask her jealousy with kindness and seduction. She poured him another scotch, she moved closer, nuzzled him, put her tongue in his ear, laid her hand between his legs, caressed him, kissed him again. It was an intolerable deceit. She could feel that he was not aroused. How could she pretend she had not heard Darlene's voice, when she knew that he knew that she had?
And then, while she was telling him an unamusing story about something Catriona had said or done, it came to him, an idea as brilliant and plain as any insight he had ever had. She was not jealous at all, she was untouched, she was indifferent. And for that there could be only one explanation.
He pulled away from her and said as levelly as he could, 'Are you seeing someone?'
It was a move born of his silent anger. But another part of himself, the part that had not
