Solar by Solar

Author:Solar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407054469
Publisher: Random House Group Limited

Part Three

2009

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.

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