Turkish slippers, coming down to meet them with pleasant smiles and the offer of coffee as soon as her husband had made the introductions.
For twenty minutes they sat at the kitchen table, and she was kind, she cocked her head sweetly as she listened to the story of Tom Aldous’s mother and asked sympathetic questions, and told the story of her own mother, who also died young. Then the conversation lightened, and her eyes met Beard’s whenever she laughed, she included him, she listened with a half-smile when he spoke, appeared amused when he made a joke, and at one point touched his hand to interrupt him. Tom Aldous was suddenly blessed with expressiveness and humour, and made them laugh with an account of his father, a formidable history teacher, now a cantankerous invalid, who fed his hospital lunch to a ravenous red kite. Aldous kept turning away and grinning, and self- consciously running his hand up his neck to touch his ponytail. At no point did he remember that the planet was in peril.
And so the married couple harmoniously entertained the merry young man, and by the time he stood to leave it was clear that something wondrous had happened, there had been a fundamental shift in Patrice’s attitude towards her husband. After seeing Aldous to his car, Beard, not daring to believe that his plan, summoning a woman on the stairs with his bare hands, had actually worked, hurried back into the house to learn more. But the kitchen was deserted, the cups with their dregs were still in place on the table, the house was quiet again. Patrice had retreated to her room, and when he went up and tapped on her door she told him plainly to go away. She had only wished to torment him with a glimpse of the life they once had. It was her absence she wanted him to savour.
He did not catch sight of her until the following evening, as she left the house, leaving behind a trail of unfamiliar scent.
The weeks passed and little changed. The autumn term began at Patrice’s primary school. In the early evenings she marked work and prepared classes, and three or four times a week left the house around seven or eight to be at Tarpin’s. When the clocks went back in late October and she went up the garden path in darkness, her absence was all the more complete. Nothing came of her intention to have her lover round to dinner, at least, not while Beard was in the house. Occasional meetings took him out of town for the night, and when he returned he saw no sign of Tarpin’s presence, unless it was in the deeper sheen of the oak dining-room table or the neatness of the kitchen, with every pot and pan unusually stowed.
But in early November he went into the walk-in larder at the rear of the house, near the back door, in search of a light bulb. It was a cold and windowless room with brick-and-stone shelves where various household hardware and junk and unwanted presents had spilled into the space intended for provisions. On the far wall was a single ventilation slot which showed pinpricks of daylight, and directly underneath, on the floor, was a dirty canvas bag. He stood over it, letting his outrage grow, and then, noticing that the top was undone, parted it with his foot. He saw tools – different-sized hammers, bolsters and heavy-duty screwdrivers and, lying right on top, a chocolate-bar wrapper, a brown apple core, a comb and, to his disgust, a crumpled used paper tissue. The bag could not have been left behind when Tarpin was working on the bathroom, for that was many months back and Beard knew he would have seen it. It was clear enough. While he was in Paris or Edinburgh, the builder had come straight from work to see Patrice, had forgotten his tools the next morning, or did not need them, and she had stowed them in here. He wanted to throw them out immediately, but the handles of the bag were black and greasy, and Beard felt revulsion at touching anything of Tarpin’s. He found the bulb and went into the kitchen to pour himself a scotch. It was three in the afternoon.
Early the next day, a cold Sunday, he found Rodney Tarpin’s address on an invoice and, after deciding not to shave and drinking three cups of strong coffee, and pulling on a pair of old leather boots that added an inch to his height and a thick woollen shirt that put muscle on his upper arms, he drove towards Cricklewood. On the radio, exclusively American affairs. Commentators were still picking over last month’s bombing of the warship USS Cole by a group called al-Qaeda, but the main item was the same old thing, it had run all summer and autumn and was wearing on his patience. Bush versus Gore. Beard was not an American citizen, he had no vote in this fight, and still was obliged by the news service, for which he was compelled to pay a fee, to attend to every bland development. He was aggressively apolitical – to the fingertips, he liked to say. He disliked the overheated non-arguments, the efforts each side made to misunderstand and misrepresent the other, the amnesia that spooled behind each ‘issue’ as it arose. To Beard, the United States was the fascinating entity that owned three quarters of the world’s science. The rest was froth and, in this case, a struggle within an elite – the privileged son of a former president jostling with the high-born son of a senator. With the polls long closed, it seemed, Gore had phoned Bush to retract his concession of defeat, Florida was too close to call, there would be an automatic recount – ‘Circumstances have changed since I first called you’ was the understatement Al Gore had used.
In office, both men would be bound by the same constraints, both pinned down by the same facts, by advisors from the same graduate colleges, schooled in like-minded orthodoxies – Beard had little interest in the detail. It could make no significant difference to the world at large, was his considered opinion as he rolled through Swiss Cottage, if Bush rather than Gore, Tweedledum rather than Tweedledee, was president for the first four or eight years of the twenty-first century.
The previous afternoon and evening with the scotch had bequeathed a reckless clarity, as well as a pleasant sensation of invincibility. Now he saw that he had been taking matters too seriously. Unfaithful wife? Then get another! Cricklewood had a hung-over, pacified look with few pedestrians about, and the Sunday-morning tranquillity reminded him that his mission was simply to appease his curiosity. He had a right to know where Patrice spent half her week and how his adversary lived. A mile further on, through a sequence of side turns, Tarpin’s road turned out to be a four-lane urban motorway a mile long, connecting two arterial routes, a provisional, accidental place where the houses, pre-war semis, had an embattled, windswept look. He parked in a lay-by right outside the drive and stared at the place he had seen in the photograph, at the slats of dark-stained pine bolted to the front elevations to create a sixteenth-century look, at the motor boat slumped uncomfortably on its trailer – it could have been a rowing boat hiding under the wind-shredded plastic cover – at the coach lamp on a black post by the front door, which was in the Georgian style, and, a bold recent addition, lying on its side on the concrete, surrounded by neatly weeded beds, a red phone box. Between the near-black timbers, the house was painted brilliant white, the floral curtains behind the leaded panes were trimly ruched and drawn open.
Beard had no strong views on interior or exterior design, no prejudices against garden coach lamps and the like, and the attempt to give a nineteen-thirties suburban house an Elizabethan appearance seemed to him innocently patriotic. If he had not loathed Rodney Tarpin, he would have thought that the place suggested decency, hard work, simple-minded optimism. He knew from conversations way back that Mrs Tarpin had left last year with the three children and was living with a Welsh quantity surveyor on the Costa Brava, so there was some pathos too in the way Rodney was keeping the place up. But this was where Patrice came regularly to be fucked, and every detail, even the little wishing well and the posse of dwarfs clustered by its handle, seemed hostile. He hated them in return. Was Tarpin going to erect the phone box in Patrice’s honour? He could hear her pretending to like it. Darling, that’s so original, so creative… Enough! He got out of the car.
Because his wife had been up this way so many times before him, and because he had once been Tarpin’s employer, Beard felt entitled and at ease as he went up the drive. From one of the black gloss- painted down-pipes came the tinkle of falling water, and from the drain at its base steam rose into the November air. The master of the house was at his ablutions, rinsing from his body the DNA of Mrs Beard. The front door with its Palladian portico had an unused look, so Beard followed a narrow concrete path squeezed between the house and a wooden boundary fence that led to a side door and continued through an open gate into the back garden. He remembered Tarpin boasting of a hot tub and he wanted to see. She may or may not have been in it, but he was in the mood to be thorough, he needed to know everything.
A treeless patch of unmown lawn was separated on three sides from the neighbours by a chain-link fence just beyond which a pylon stood astride the cluttered land that lay between the houses, and he could hear the homely crackle of the power lines. Electrons – so durable, so fundamental. He had spent much of his youth thinking about them. At the age of twenty-one he had read in wonder the Dirac Equation of 1928 in its full form, predicting the spin of an electron. A thing of pure beauty, that equation, one of the greatest intellectual
