Ian McEwan - Solar

That was one haven. The other was Melissa's apartment, a two-minute stroll from the Primrose Hill branch, almost opposite the building where Sylvia Plath once put her head in the oven after setting out bread and milk for her sleeping children. The poet, a daughter of the fifties, was a diligent housewife who kept about her an unpoetically tidy domain, like Melissa's. Beard, on the other hand, was a domestic slob, clean about his person, vain about his clothes, but a dedicated sower of unconscious disorder, for whom the retrieval of his own dropped towel or the closing of a drawer or cupboard door or disposal of a wrapper or apple core would have seemed as purposeful an act as spring cleaning. The lady who once tended his Marylebone flat had walked out without explanation, but he knew why and had not found a replacement. His third wife, Eleanor, once discovered in the pages of a valuable first edition an ancient rasher of his breakfast bacon doubling as a bookmark.

Like many slobs, Beard was appreciative of the order that others created without effort, or any that he noticed. In Melissa's flat, which was spread over two floors, he was particularly happy. She lived such an uncluttered life at home. There were open perspectives untroubled by furniture. The foot-wide beeswaxed floorboards recovered from a Gascony chateau shone with dull perfection. There were no loose objects, all the books were on the shelves in the right order, at least until he visited, and the art on the walls was sparse lithographs, mostly of dancers. There was a single statue, a Henry Moore maquette. Other surfaces justified themselves by their own particular empty dustless gleam. In the bedroom, no clothes were on view, and the bed, unruffled as a millpond, was as big as any he had seen in an American hotel. Melissa's was the sort of place whose ambience Beard could wreck in two minutes by sitting down in it, shrugging off his coat, opening his briefcase and removing his shoes. He never felt at home until he was shoeless. But he was impressed by her apartment, it seemed like the embodiment of mental freedom, and he did his best not to litter it, and was partially successful.

A burglar entering the property, silencing the alarm and taking the trouble to glance about before settling down to work, would never have guessed the nature or even the gender of its owner. The apartment was subdued, cool, masculine in its light browns and battleship greys. Whereas in her shops, as in bed, Melissa was loud, cheerful, generous. She stood only an inch higher than her Michael, was rounded and soft and wide-hipped like a Renoir bather, though not remotely in Beard's plump league. She had black hair that was curly or curled (he would never ask), dark eyes and rich skin colour – nut brown, with a bloom of red across the cheekbones that deepened when she was furious or suddenly happy. She claimed a dash of Tobagan and Venezuelan blood, like Angostura bitters she said, through her great-grandmother. Whatever the truth, she thrived in a heatwave, loathed the cold, defined as under fifteen degrees, and believed she belonged in some other country further south, but it was too late to shift now.

Perhaps she chose the decor in the Fitzroy Street flat to highlight her wardrobe. She wore bold prints (the Tobago inheritance) or deep-hued silks, and had an array of stilettos in reds and greens as well as black, and pastel dancing shoes that never fitted. At home, arranged on a sombre sofa against a neutral wall, she shimmered in her colours, in Beard's eyes, like a new-minted Gauguin in his Marquesas phase.

When he visited, she cooked up a tropical storm. Her well-balanced meals were spicy and much to his taste. Any advantage to his health was easily offset by outsized second helpings. She never served herself much of her own cooking, but she watched him eat from across the table with smouldering satisfaction, telling him that hot spices would burn off his fat and make him an ardent lover, or that she was fattening him up so he could never run away. The latter was closer to the truth. After one of her spreads, feeling neither thinner nor even faintly aroused, he would sit in near silence, sweating in an armchair for half an hour to recover.

How did he ever deserve her? She ran him baths on winter nights and lit candles around the bathroom and squeezed into the oversized roll-top tub with him. She bought him shirts, silk ties, cologne, wine, scotch (she did not drink), underwear and socks. When it was time for him to leave, she booked his flights. In a poor return, he brought back expensive presents from airport duty-free, a modern form of parsimony by way of flagrant convenience and notional tax avoidance, but she did not seem to mind. She loved his physics, the indecipherable sheets of photovoltaic calculation, his 'Arabic', that often spilled across the oak boards, and she made him explain – again – the symbols, the Dirac bras and kets, the tensor products, the Young diagrams. But she too could have been a mathematician. He had seen her complete the morning newspaper sudoku at a speed with which others might fill out a form, hurrying to be done before she rushed to work. She approved of his mission and loyally read climate-change stories in the press. But she told him once that to take the matter seriously would be to think about it all the time. Everything else shrank before it. And so, like everyone she knew, she could not take it seriously, not entirely. Daily life would not permit it. He sometimes quoted this observation in talks.

She talked about her previous lovers with a freedom he could not match. She had never troubled to get seriously involved with a contemporary. Of the various men she described, all were fifteen or twenty years older. The one exception was early on, and he was even more ancient. At the age of twenty she had a year-long affair with a married man, a professional golfer of fifty-six. Now he was seventy-seven, and they still kept in touch. Her preference in partners had a history. She grew up by Clapham Common, in south London, an only child, whose parents divorced when she was eleven. She loved her father and lived with her mother, with whom she often fought. When her mother married the last in a series of 'obnoxious' boyfriends, Melissa went to live with her father across the Common, just as he suffered a stroke. From the age of fourteen she nursed him (intimately, for he was almost completely paralysed) until his death four years later. She told Beard what a therapist friend had told her years ago. Caring for the father she loved at a formative period in her sexual development, then failing to keep him alive, she was guiltily bound in subsequent relationships to the task of finding a replacement, retrieving him from the grave, rescuing him from his misfortune and redeeming her failure.

Beard was equally bound to believe that this was the kind of nonsense that science was invented to protect him from. But he said nothing. So many unexamined assumptions, so many unproven elements! An unconscious that wrote its own craftily concealed stories peppered with inept symbolism? Not a shred of neurological evidence. Repression? Empirically, no such mechanism had been shown to exist. On the contrary, unwanted memories were hard to forget. Sublimation? Likewise, a fairy tale that no serious investigation could sustain. Attending to the toilet needs of her father could just as likely have put her off older men for life, and then there would have been an equally confident Freudian confabulation. Many women who had never nursed a dying father, or had any analogous experience, preferred older men. Why were Melissa's lovers (with one exception) only fifteen or twenty years older, when her father was thirty-seven the day she was born? Could her unconscious, so literal in other regards, not do the simple adding-up?

The truth was simpler. Women knew it in their hearts. Since he was too tactful to say it to her, he was obliged to set it out impartially for himself. Repetition was helpful. Older men were better companions, they were seasoned lovers, they knew the world, they knew themselves. Unlike younger men, they held their emotions in balance. They had read more, seen more, they were warmer, kinder, less boastful, more tolerant, less violent. They were more interesting, they could choose the wine. They had more money. Besides, it irked him to believe that it might not be him she was drawn to, but some symbol of seniority of which he was an acceptable approximation. He was further irked to hear that when she met her first serious love, the errant golfer, he was the same age as her father when he died.