Solar

It was an outrage. The train was begi

The young man thought for a moment, then stood and stepped into the aisle, revealing his full height, somewhere around six two. Beard, already begi

Beard let him get well clear before he stood. He never wanted to see the fellow again. A full minute passed before he stepped out onto the platform. Trembling a little now, with anger or shock, or a little of both, he had some difficulty getting himself into his coat – its belt was tangled around a sleeve. His shoelace was loose. As he kneeled to retie it with fingers not yet fully obedient, he remembered his heap of newspapers and decided to leave them where they were. At last, more or less composed, he made his way along the platform towards the ticket barrier. This was the moment that would remain with him, and come to stand for every recalculation he would ever make about his past, every revised or improved perspective he would ever gain on his own history, his own stupidity and other people's motives. He had stopped twenty feet short of the barrier. He set his wheeled luggage on end and reached under his coat into his jacket pocket for his ticket. There was something else in there, something plastic, bulky, lightweight, crunchy. There came to him a confused childhood memory of a magic trick at a village fete, when some master of the art had pulled from ten-year-old Michael Beard's ear an egg, or rabbit or chicken, something physically impossible, just like this: his crisps, the ones he had already eaten. He pulled the bag clear and, stupefied, stared at it, the Union Jack, the dancing cartoon animals, willing them to melt away. And that other bag? What a cascade of recalibration of every instant, every impulse, of the nature of the man he never wanted to see again, and of how he, Beard, must have seemed – a vicious madman.

He was so entirely in the wrong that for the moment it felt like liberation, strangely like joy. There could be no excuses, he had no defence. He also felt a mirthless impulse to laugh. His error was so unambiguous, so unsullied, he stood so completely revealed to himself, a naked fool, that he felt purified and redeemed, like a penitent, like an elated medieval flagellant with a newly flayed back. That poor fellow whose food and drink you devoured, who offered you his last morsels, fetched down your luggage, was a friend to man. No, no, that was not for now, the agony of retrospection must be postponed.

Despite the need to hurry to his appointment, he remained on the busy platform a good while, below the distant glass roof and its clattering echoes, while passengers stepped around him, and he held the bag of crisps against his chest, feeling himself, quite mistakenly, intensely illuminated.

In the taxi from Paddington to the Savoy he reminded himself to be careful, for he was feeling accident-prone and was about to speak in public, and afterwards, in the conference interval, was contractually bound to mingle, and might well confront journalists, men and women whose outward appearance of humanity and intelligence masked cold-hearted predation. They knew from past successes that he could be coaxed into indiscretion, or an expansive hypothesis – wasn't free-thinking his duty? – which would appear crazed or dimwitted in print, once stripped of all conditionals, all hedging, all playfulness. A speculative remark had already cost him the headline 'Nobel Prof: End Is Nigh'.

His own end – it seemed like that at the time – came only last year, and the curious thing was that people had already started to forget. This amounted to a kind of forgiveness. It was generally known there had been a fuss, a stirring of the news currents around Michael Beard, but the details were blurring. He had been proved wrong about something, or was he in the right all along? Did he assault someone, or was he the victim? Didn't that someone get arrested? Back then, as the storm broke, a colleague, an eminence in computer modelling, told him that the picture of the Nobel prizewi

Even his own recollection of the events, their precise emotional tone, was begi

The press upended Beard's life as one might a wastepaper basket. A couple of shakes, and there tipped into view all kinds of half-forgotten scraps. In other circumstances it might have been a service worth paying for. Independently of each other, his ex-wives, good old Maisie, Ruth, Eleanor, Karen and Patrice, refused to talk to the press. That touched him deeply. Of the past lovers, most were loyal, and only a rump spoke up: one lab assistant, one office administrator. There were also two scientists, failures, nobodies, both of them. Intriguingly, there were also some impostors. The Last Trump sounded, and from their graves and catacombs this pint-sized crowd of ex-lovers and pretenders crawled towards the light, to stand before their Maker, a journalist with a chequebook, and denounce Beard as a woman-hater, an exploiter, a louse.