Ian McEwan - Solar

There was, for example, a scheme that fascinated him and he wanted his colleague, Toby Hammer, to take it seriously. Carbon-trading schemes would soon be in place in Europe and one day, perhaps, in the US. The idea was to dump many hundreds of tons of iron filings in the ocean, enriching the waters and encouraging the plankton to bloom. As it grew, it absorbed more carbon dioxide from the air. The precise amount could be calculated in order to claim carbon credits, which could be sold on through the scheme to heavy industry. If a coal-burning company bought enough, it could rightfully claim that its operations were carbon neutral. The idea was to get ahead of the competition before the European markets were fully established. Boats and iron filings needed to be sourced, the proper locations established, and all the legal footwork completed. Toby Hammer needed to get on the job. Some marine biologists, no doubt with secret plans of their own, had heard rumours of his scheme and had been arguing in the press that interfering with the base of the food chain was dangerous. They needed to be blasted out of the water with some sound science. Beard already had two pieces ready for publication, but it was important to hold back until the right moment.

Wrapped in scarlet robes, poised on his throne in the dead of night, he surveyed in princely fashion his recent existence. The iron-filing scheme reminded him of all that was purposeful and decent, and that he must not let himself be dragged down. He would acquire the four hundred acres in New Mexico. They were crossed by ancient power lines on rickety wooden poles, perfectly serviceable, and there was a reliable water source. One day, glass panels angled at the sun, packed with coiled transparent tubes, would cover the grasslands in a shining sea, making hydrogen and oxygen out of light and water for virtually nothing. Compressors would store the hydrogen in massive tanks. Oxygen and hydrogen would recombine to drive the fuel-cell generators. Night and day the plant would supply power to Lordsburg, and illuminate the neon of its tiny strip. Then, as capacity grew, the surrounding settlements would be included – Redrock, Virden, Cotton City and, finally, Silver City. The world would see and come running.

He stirred at last, gathered his dressing gown around him and made his way through the darkened sitting room, stepping over his own mess to get to the kitchen. There he stood in the gloom before the man-sized fridge, hesitating a moment before pulling on its two-foot-long handle. It opened invitingly with a soft sucking sound, like a kiss. The shelves were subtly lit and diverse, like a glass skyscraper at night, and there was much to consider. Between a radicchio lettuce and a jar of Melissa's homemade jam, in a white bowl covered with silver foil, were the remains of the chicken stew. In the freezer compartment was a half-litre of dark chocolate ice cream. It could thaw while he got started. He took a spoon from a drawer (it would do for both courses) and sat down to his meal, feeling, as he peeled the foil away, already restored.

It surprised no one to learn that Michael Beard had been an only child, and he would have been the first to concede that he never quite got the hang of brotherly feeling. His mother, Angela, was an angular beauty who doted on him, and the medium of her love was food. She bottle-fed him with passion, surplus to demand. Some four decades before he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, he came top in the Cold Norton and District Baby Competition, birth-to-six-months class. In those harsh post-war years, ideals of infant beauty resided chiefly in fat, in Churchillian multiple chins, in dreams of an end to rationing and of the reign of plenty to come. Babies were exhibited and judged like prize marrows, and in 1947 four-month-old Michael, bloated and jolly, swept all before him.

However, it was unusual at a village fete for a middle-class woman, a stockbroker's wife, to abandon the cake and chutney stall and enter her child for such a gaudy event. She must have known he was bound to win, just as she later claimed to have always known that he would get a scholarship to Oxford. Once he was on solids, and for the rest of her life, she cooked for him with the same commitment with which she had held the bottle, sending herself in the mid nineteen sixties, despite her illness, on a 'cordon bleu' cookery course so that she might try new meals during his occasional visits home. Her husband, Henry, was a meat-and-two-veg man who despised garlic and the smell of olive oil. Early in the marriage, for reasons that remained private, she withdrew her love from him. She lived for her son and her legacy was clear: a fat man who restlessly craved the attentions of beautiful women who could cook.

Henry Beard was a lean sort, with drooping moustache and slicked-back brown hair, whose dark suits and brown tweeds seemed a cut too large, especially around the neck. He provided for his miniature family well and, in the fashion of the time, loved his son sternly and with little physical contact. Though he never embraced Michael, and rarely laid an affectionate hand on his shoulder, he supplied all the right kinds of present – Meccano and chemistry sets, build-it-yourself wireless, encyclopedias, model airplanes and books about military history, geology and the lives of great men. He had had a long war, serving as a junior officer in the infantry in Dunkirk, North Africa, Sicily and then, as a lieutenant colonel, in the D-Day landings, where he won a medal. He had arrived at the concentration camp of Belsen a week after it was liberated, and was stationed in Berlin for eight months after the war ended. Like many men of his generation, he did not speak about his experiences and relished the ordinariness of post-war life, its tranquil routines, its tidiness and rising material well-being, and above all its lack of danger, everything that was to appear stifling to those born in the first years of the peace.

In 1952, at the age of forty, when Michael was five years old, Henry Beard gave up his job in a merchant bank in the City and returned to his first love, which was the law. He became a partner in an old firm in nearby Chelmsford and stayed there for the rest of his working life. To celebrate a momentous change and his liberation from the daily commute to Liverpool Street, he bought himself a secondhand Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. This pale blue machine lasted him thirty-three years, until his death. From the vantage of adulthood and with some retrospective guilt, his son loved him for this grand gesture. But the life of a small-town solicitor, absorbed by matters of conveyancing and probate, settled on Henry Beard even greater tranquillity. At weekends he mostly cared for his roses, or his car, or golf with fellow Rotarians. He stolidly accepted his loveless marriage as the price he must pay for his gains.

It was about this time that Angela Beard began a series of affairs that stretched over eleven years. Young Michael registered no outward hostilities or silent tensions in the home, but then, he was neither observant nor sensitive, and was often in his room after school, building, reading, glueing, and later took up pornography and masturbation full-time, and then girls. Nor at the age of seventeen did he notice that his mother had retreated, exhausted, to the sanctuary of her marriage. He only heard of her adventures when she was dying of breast cancer in her early fifties. She seemed to want his forgiveness for ruining his childhood. By then he was nearing the end of his second year at Oxford and his head was full of maths and girlfriends, physics and drinking, and at first he could not take in what she was telling him. She lay propped up on pillows in her private room on the nineteenth floor of a tower-block hospital with views towards the industrialised salt marshes by Canvey Island and the south shore of the Thames. He was grown-up enough to know that it would have insulted her to say that he had noticed nothing. Or that she was apologising to the wrong person. Or that he could not imagine anyone over thirty having sex. He held her hand and squeezed it to signal his warm feelings and said there was nothing to forgive.