(2010) Solar by Ian McEwan

Author:Ian McEwan [McEwan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, contemporary
ISBN: 9780307399243
Publisher: Windsor
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

By the time his taxi had swung round Trafalgar Square and paused to join in a traffic jam along the Strand, he was over an hour and a half late. Five minutes later, he had made no progress. For the past four hours, it suddenly seemed, his thoughts had been cramped by delay and exasperation, until now, sitting in the motionless cab, the confinement became intolerable. He pushed a twenty-pound note through the slot in the driver’s screen and climbed out with his luggage and began to tow it towards the Savoy. Walking might make him later still, but acting like a man in a hurry rather than thinking like one was a relief. And barrelling along with his wheeled burden, overtaking and weaving between pedestrians, was the workout he had been promising himself for years. Richly dishevelled, the knot of his purple tie askew, the expensive wool suit in need of a press, the overcoat too warm for the modern English winter, hurrying lopsidedly along, one leg making a decent show of stepping forward, the other stiffly scooting, he bobbed up the Strand like a fat boy on a pogo stick. Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed. No meeting was worth dying for. The traffic began to move again, and his own cab, now for hire, shot past him as he shuffled towards the hotel.

In the lobby, two conference organisers were waiting. The younger one took his bag, the other, a very old man in a blazer leaning heavily on a walking stick, with a liver-spotted death mask for a face, pointed at his watch and walked with him up the stairs.

‘All is fine,’ the fellow croaked through the effort of raising his body weight through the luxurious gravitational field. ‘We’ve rejigged the running order. You’re on in five minutes.’

Beard heard this in good heart, for he felt by comparison youthful and unassailable, the motion of his feet across the thick carpet was pleasing and the pain had vanished from his chest.

Another official, younger but more senior, of Indian origin, received him by a set of lofty double doors thrown open to the din of teatime chatter. After the preliminaries – a great honour, a thousand thank yous, much anticipated, about lateness please not to worry – the young man, whose name, Saleel, Beard remembered from email exchanges, ran through the composition of the audience: institutional men and women, a few civil servants, a few academics, no journalists.

But Beard was not fully attentive, for his gaze had shifted from Saleel’s face to a view over the young man’s dark-suited shoulder of the room and its voluble crowd. Arranged on tables covered in white cloths, framed by high windows and a view of the darkening Thames, were square porcelain dishes densely heaped with plump pillows of crustless sandwiches. Even from where he stood he could make out the fat pink stripes of a smoked-salmon filling.

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