feats ever performed, correctly demanding of nature the existence of antiparticles and placing before the young reader the wide horizons of the ‘Dirac sea’. That was when he was a scientist, and now he was a bureaucrat and never thought about electrons. In the mid nineties he had stood with a small crowd in Westminster Abbey while Stephen Hawking delivered a speech in front of the memorial carved in stone, the exquisitely succinct form of the equation – i?.?? = m? – and Beard had, for the final time, felt a stirring of the old excitement. All gone now.
Closer to the house was a square of hard standing where a rusting clothes tree stood, and bits of a fridge, and stacked white plastic garden furniture, and there it was, right by the stack, a large hardwood box, eight feet by eight, with padlocked lid supporting a coil of black hosepipe. He was relieved that this tub was not the Californian dream he had unconsciously assumed – no sequoias, no cicadas, no Sierra Nevada. But when he walked back towards the side door he remained unhappy, for now it was confirmed – it could only be the sex. What else would bring her to this dingy patch? But then, in his condition, was it not unhappiness that he was looking for?
At that thought he heard a sound above him and, looking up, saw on the first floor a steamed-up steel-framed window swing open, then Rodney Tarpin’s pink, wet face.
‘Oi!’
Abruptly, the face disappeared, and the window remained open, allowing shower steam to billow out, and from inside the house came a muffled sound of bare feet pounding at speed down carpeted stairs. As Beard waited by the side door, arms folded against his chest, he had no plan, he had no idea what he wanted to say. He had spent too much time brooding, waiting, and now he wanted something to happen. It hardly mattered what it was.
Two bolts were drawn back, the aluminium handle shot down, the door flew inwards and his wife’s lover stood before him on the threshold.
Beard thought it important to speak first. ‘Mr Tarpin. Good morning.’
‘What the fuck do you want?’ The stress in his query was on the ‘you’. He wore a not very large red towel tucked around his considerable waist. Water droplets trickled from his head onto his shoulders and meandered down through his chest hair in the zigzag movements of a pinball.
‘I thought I’d come and have a look round.’
‘Oh yeah? So you just walk in here.’
‘My wife does.’
Tarpin seemed put out at the directness of this reference, as though he thought it unfair, or going a little too far. Still faintly steaming, he stepped out onto the path, apparently oblivious to the cold – two degrees centigrade, according to the digital display in the car. Beard was standing seven or eight feet back, arms still crossed, five feet six in his boots, and did not give way when Tarpin planted himself right in front of him. Even barefoot, he was a big fellow, certainly strong above the waist, but thin-shanked below it – a builder’s build – and also flabby across the chest, recent fat smeared over muscle, with a beer and junk-food gut whose lateral extension far exceeded Beard’s own. That towel was hanging by a thread. What was Patrice doing with such a man if not seeking the perfection, the ideal, of her husband’s form? Tarpin’s face was a curiosity. It had a ratty look, not entirely without charm, but it was too small for the head. A small man’s whiskery, inquisitive features had been sunk or projected onto a space they could not fill. Tarpin peeped out from his own skull as though he was wearing an outsized chador. Since Beard had last seen him, the builder had lost a tooth, an upper incisor. Beard was disappointed not to see a tattoo, a snake or motorbike or hymn to his mum. But the physicist, as he fleetingly acknowledged, was an ageing bourgeois in the grip of stereotypical thinking. Tarpin was too old for a body piercing, but sitting right on the skyline of his shoulder, protruding a good half-inch, was a growth of twisted skin, a tag, that resembled a miniature human ear, or a sailor’s minuscule parrot. A few turns of tightly tied dental floss and it would be gone in a week, but perhaps women were touched by such a flaw, by such vulnerability in so large a man with his own business and three employees. Patrice’s tongue would surely have explored its tiny folds.
Tarpin said, ‘What I do with your wife is my business,’ and he laughed at his own joke. ‘And you can fuck off out of it.’
Beard was stalled for a moment, for it was not a bad line, and in this hiatus it occurred to him that what he wanted, no, intended to do, any second now, was to kick Tarpin’s bare shin very hard, hard enough to break a bone. The prospect thrilled him and made his heart beat faster. He could not remember if it was these boots or some others thrown out long ago that had the steel tips. It did not matter. How odd, that the man he had once irrationally half-despised as an intruder into his domestic peace, with his drills, tuneless whistling and unbounded dust-creation, and puerile station jabbering on a tinny radio all afternoon, this hireling was now his adversary in equal combat. Only Beard would have considered it equal. Over many years, his colleagues had noted, and sometimes despaired, that in confrontations – theoretical physics naturally had its share – Beard possessed the gift, or curse, of recklessness.
‘You hit my wife,’ he said, his voice constricted by his racing pulse.
He had already glanced down and seen the angled plane of Tarpin’s shin, white, flecked with sparse black hairs like an ill-plucked turkey. And now Beard, something of a sportsman in his day, despite his height, was shifting his weight onto his left foot. He would remember to spread his arms for balance, and if there was time enough he might half turn and crush a toe beneath his heel.
It did not occur to him how obvious it was that he was about to attack. His rounded chest heaved plainly, his thin arms were raised and tensed, and his face was strained, lost in the solipsism of an exciting plan. It was likely that Tarpin had been in many scraps as an adult. Before Beard could duck, Tarpin had drawn back his arm and lashed the older man’s right cheek and ear with an open-handed smack. Beard’s consciousness exploded behind his eyes, and for seconds afterwards the world was a humming white blank. When it seeped back, Tarpin was still there, clutching at his towel, which had loosened with the movement.
‘The next one’ll hurt,’ he said.
This was the kind of treatment old-fashioned movie heroes used on the woman they loved, to calm them. The builder regarded Beard as unworthy of a proper punch. But clearly, more was on the way. Fortunately, at that moment there came from next door the sound of children’s voices approaching up the path, and whispered exclamations and suppressed giggles at the sight of their near-naked tubby neighbour. Then three shy faces at different heights and three pairs of wide brown eyes peered over the fence. Tarpin hurried into the house. He might have gone to fetch a larger towel, or a coat, and it seemed to Beard a good moment to be on his way. But he had his pride and was careful not to appear in a hurry. As he walked down the drive, past the boat slewed in its cradle and the recumbent phone box, he felt his face stinging and burning in the cold – that slap really hurt – and there was a continuous sound in his ear, an electronic whine, and by the time he reached his car he was giddy and half deaf. As he started the engine he looked across at the house and, sure enough, Tarpin in tracksuit and trainers with flailing laces was coming towards him with a firm stride. Beard saw no good reason to linger in Cricklewood.
In the remaining three weeks of that year, everything began to change. There arrived an invitation to the North Pole – at least, that was how he described it to himself and everyone else. In fact, the destination was well below the eightieth parallel, and he would be staying on a ‘well-appointed, toastily-heated vessel of richly-carpeted oak-panelled corridors with tasselled wall lamps’, so a brochure promised, on a ship that would be placidly frozen into a semi-remote fjord, a long snowmobile ride north of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. The three hardships would be the size of his cabin, limited email opportunities, and a wine list confined to a North African vin de pays. The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change, and conveniently, just ten miles away, was a dramatically retreating glacier whose sheer blue cliffs regularly calved mansion-sized blocks of ice onto the shore of the fjord. An Italian chef of ‘international renown’ would be in attendance, and predatory polar bears would be shot if necessary by a guide with a high- calibre rifle. There were no lecturing duties – Beard’s presence would be sufficient – and the foundation would bear all his expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.
Word soon got round the Centre that he was going to the North Pole to ‘see global warming for himself’, and some said he would be towed by dogs and others that he would be pulling his own sledge. Even Beard was embarrassed, and let it be known that it was ‘unlikely’ that he would get all the way to the Pole, and a good part of his time would be ‘in camp’. Jock Braby was amazed by Beard’s commitment to the cause and offered
