Ian McEwan - Solar

‘Wouldn’t mind?’

He knew it already, but it angered Beard, or worse, it pained him, to hear for the second time from Patrice by way of Aldous that she thought the marriage was over. Since the late summer of last year, she had been seeing Aldous, not Tarpin. Or possibly both. The goofy post-doc turned up on her doorstep one August evening and she grabbed another chance to punish her husband.

‘Has anyone ever told you how naïve you are, Aldous?’

The young man seized on the word with joy. ‘I am naïve, Professor Beard! I do science and nothing else. I’m naïve because I don’t meet people, I don’t go out. I go home and work in the studio in my uncle’s garden, often through till dawn. That’s how I’ve always been. But my work is at your disposal. I’ve been making a file for you. For you and no one else. Please say you’ll read it. This is so important.’

Until then the two men had faced each other over a distance of several feet, Aldous standing close to the sofa, with arms clasped in front of him, as if to defend himself against a possible fate or to prevent Beard’s dressing gown from swinging open. Beard began to back away. He was tired of listening to Aldous, he wanted to be alone.

He said, ‘Now you can leave. I’ll be at the Centre tomorrow and I’ll see you in Jock Braby’s office at eleven.’

As Beard crossed the room, Aldous was pleading, almost shouting. ‘No one will ever hire me again. You know that, don’t you? This is too important for private revenge.’

As he reached the sitting-room door, Beard turned and said, ‘Before you go, clear up the mess in the hall.’

‘Professor Beard!’

Aldous was starting to run at him, arms outstretched, his head shaking in denial, his lips stretched across his huge teeth, and it was probably his intention to throw himself at Beard’s knees and beg for mercy. He certainly would have had it, for Beard had no wish to set his domestic humiliation before Braby, and therefore the whole Centre. The Chief betrayed, made an ass of by one of the ponytails. But Aldous never reached Beard, he barely made it two metres into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. As his right foot landed on the bear’s back, it leaped forward, with its open mouth and yellow teeth bucking into the air. Aldous’s legs flew up before him and there was a moment when his considerable length was parallel to the ground, and then his legs rose even further and, though his arms flailed instinctively downwards to break his fall, it was the back of his head that made first contact, not with the floor, not with the edge of the glass table, but with its rounded corner, bluntly penetrating the nape of his neck.

A deep, smothering silence settled on the room, and several seconds passed.

‘No, no, please no,’ Beard muttered as he crossed the room.

Aldous lay at full stretch on the floorboards, as though laid out by an undertaker, with only minimal space between arms and torso, eyes wide open, lips parted, the dressing gown covering him decently. Beard kneeled down by the young man’s shoulder. No breathing, no pulse. There was a halo of blood under his head about nine inches across, and for some reason it did not grow larger. Then Beard saw that blood was seeping away, no, cascading down the gaps between the boards. Blood loss alone would have finished Aldous.

‘Oh fuck… oh fuck…’ Beard whispered to himself over and over. Something impossible had happened and he was willing it away, undoing it, reversing it, simply because it could not be. It was too improbable. But with each second the new reality advanced on him, pushed his efforts aside and settled into place. It was true. He also thought of what he should have been doing, of heart massage, of mouth-to-mouth. Like all laboratory workers, he was required to learn these techniques. But something quite still, possessing authority, not so much a voice as a presence lying safely beyond his distress, suggested that he should not touch the body.

He got up and went to the telephone. He was shivering. The stillness of Belsize Park intensified as his hand hesitated above the receiver. The same reasonable presence proposed that he think carefully before dialling. He was not a naturally indecisive man. What was wrong with him? His hand felt dead. It took him some moments to catch up with his own good sense and read the situation as others might. Here was how it looked: a man returns from abroad to find his wife’s lover in the house. A confrontation follows. Twenty minutes later the lover is dead from a blow to the back of the head. He slipped, I tell you, he slipped on the rug as he ran across the room towards me. Oh yes? And why was he running, Mr Beard? To throw his arms around my knees and plead with me not to have him sacked, to beg me to join with him to save the world from climate change. There would be sceptics. For the last time, Mr Beard, did you not smear blood on the corner of the table? And what have you done with the murder weapon, Mr Beard? Innocence would come at a high cost. It would have to be earned, fought for. Media interest would be lacerating. Sex, betrayal, violence, a beautiful woman, an eminent scientist, a dead lover – perfect. Patrice, sincerely or maliciously, would be his chief accuser. Two years thinking of nothing else. Nobel laureate, balding boffin, government appointee, in the dock, fighting to stay out of jail.

At the thought he felt weak in his legs, in the tendons behind his knees, but he did not sit down. It was clear. Only those who loved him would believe him. And no one loved him. He should have had children, grown-up daughters, indignant on his behalf, busy in his defence. He walked across the room towards the hall and then came back. He did not know what to do. Then he did. He went out of the sitting room into the hall, stepped carefully over the trail of puddles and walked into the kitchen, to the drawer where tinfoil and clingfilm and greaseproof rolls were kept. Also in that drawer was a carton of transparent disposable gloves.

He drew on a pair. Nothing criminal in that, but once his hands were encased, he felt invisibility, invincibility steal over him, over his entire body. A mental state, to be sure, but what other states did he have? He did not have a plan, he simply enacted one. His body had a plan. And he walked it through, as though experimentally, believing at every stage he could undo it, go back to the beginning, with nothing lost or compromised. Everything he was doing now merely served a precautionary principle. He might return to the phone, he might summon the emergency services. But just in case he did not, he needed to be prepared. In his light-headed way, he was thinking clearly. He went through the kitchen towards the back door, and walked into the windowless vault where the light bulbs and household junk were kept. It was in exactly the same place, against the wall, the dirty canvas tool bag. He turned over the contents and found a hammer, one of several, with a narrow head that seemed about right. While rummaging, he saw other items he thought he might use. The comb, the used tissue, the withered apple core. He arranged the bag to make it look undisturbed, took the four items into the kitchen and put them in a plastic carrier bag. He took a few sheets of kitchen towel and soaked some of them in water, and was about to return to the sitting room when he changed his mind. He went back into the vault and fetched the tool bag and carried it into the hall and set it down by the front door.

Tom Aldous did not look different, but the rug’s frozen laugh appeared sinister to Beard as he kneeled down beside the body. The bear’s hard, glassy eyes each captured a warped parallelogram of the sitting-room windows and looked murderous. It was the dead polar bears you had to watch. He set out the four items from the carrier bag in a neat row, staring at the fragment of dried-out apple core, wondering how it might help him. But he could think of no possible use for it and returned it to the bag. As he took the hammer in his hands he understood that his calculations about the precautionary principle, about returning to the beginning, to the phone, were all wrong. What he was about to do could not be undone. He would be putting his innocence behind him. He dipped the head of the hammer in the puddle of blood, smeared the handle, and set it aside to dry. Next, he took the used paper tissue and bloodied that too, and pushed it under the sofa, well out of sight. The comb was trickier, just as he had anticipated. He pulled away some hair from between the teeth and managed to place some between Aldous’s fingers. Hairs attached themselves to the gloves, but Beard was not concerned. The hammer head was now half-dry and easily took a hair, as did the handle. He put another single hair on the arm of a chair. Then he used the kitchen towel to wipe down and dry thoroughly the edge and corner of the glass coffee table, though there was no blood there visible to the naked eye.