Solar

He did not stand a chance, and he seemed to know it. In a tone of near regret, the prosecution laid the matter out: Tarpin’s obvious motive, the phoned and written threats, the proven violence, his hair on the murder weapon tossed in the laurels and his hair in the dead man’s grip, the tissue containing his dried nasal mucus and Aldous’s blood, the lack of an alibi. When Beard’s turn came, he spoke to the point. Was he not a citizen who respected the law? He gave a thorough account of his movements on the morning in question, then of his wife’s black eye, of his visit to the accused’s house and the blow to the face he had received. The case against Tarpin was bad enough, but it was Patrice, also appearing for the prosecution, who sank him. At the witness stand she was described by the press as beautiful and deadly, rigid with contempt for the man who had killed her lover. As a witness, Beard was not permitted to be in court to hear his wife’s testimony, and could only read the press reports. He had never known her talk so well, so clearly and to such effect. She mesmerised court and country with her account of Tarpin’s possessiveness and brutality, his jealous rages. He was an obsessive, she said, a deranged fantasist who had urged her to kill Aldous in his sleep if she ever saw the chance. He refused to let her go, and what she had thought would be a brief and casual affair became a nightmare lasting months. She was terrified of his violence but did not dare refuse him sex. He slapped her when they made love.

‘Do you not enjoy that, Mrs Beard?’ she was asked by Tarpin’s dapper counsel during cross-examination.

‘No,’ she said crisply. ‘Do you?’ There was laughter in the public gallery.

Her most quoted, celebrated remark must have been practised in front of the mirror. ‘When he killed my Tommy, the nation lost a genius,’ she said. ‘And I lost the only man I ever loved.’

The jury was out for only three hours and no one, not even Tarpin, could have been surprised by the verdict.

It was during the six days that separated the jury foreman’s a

On the steps outside the court, she told the press and TV cameras that the sentence was not long enough, given the damage he had done. During the following week, some commentators agreed with her, while others thought it too severe for what the French might have called a crime of passion. However, watching the news that night in his socks, lying on the stinking sofa, amid the novel squalor of his bachelor apartment, with Aldous’s pages spread across his lap, Beard considered sixteen years was just about right.

Part Two

He was ru

Here was a commonplace sight that would have astounded Newton or Dickens. He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime – it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging, widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks towards the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood, and the outsized hospital where his mother died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary, and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine. Then his gaze was rotated southwards through a silvery haze over the Weald of Sussex towards the soft line of the South Downs, whose gentle folds once cradled his raucous first marriage, a synaesthesia of misguided love, infant excrement and wailing of their lodgers' twins, and the heady quantum calculations that led, fifteen years and two divorces later, to his prize. His Prize, that had half blessed, half ruined his life. Beyond those hills was the English Cha

Now a fresh tilt of the aircraft's wings turned him into the sunlight and a view of west London and, just below the trembling engine slung beneath the wing, his improbable destination, the microscopic airport, and around it, the arterial feeds, and traffic pulsing down them like corpuscles, M4, M25, M40, the charmless designations of a hard-headed age. Benignly, the glare from the west softened a little the industrial squalor. He saw the Thames Valley, a pallid winter green, looping between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern Hills. Beyond, lost to view, was Oxford and the laboratory-toiling of his undergraduate years, and the finely calculated courting of his first wife, Maisie. And now here it came again, for the sixth time, the colossal disc of London itself, turning like an intricately slotted space station in majestic self-sufficiency. As unpla

These days, whenever he came in over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. The giant concrete wounds dressed with steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon – the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession. The hot breath of civilisation. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from his wondrous, and wondrously dirty, machine, believed in his better moments that he had the answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was ru