It took more than one drink to arouse guilt in Michael Beard. This was his third, or fourth. He had been waiting more than an hour. Outside in the streets it was forty-three degrees, in here it felt like minus ten. Only the drink kept him warm. He had made the journey and been in this bar many times in recent years. London to Dallas to El Paso, picking up at the airport the outsized SUV, the only kind of vehicle that could comfortably accommodate his bulk. Then recuperating here or meeting up with his associates before the three-hour drive west along the Mexican border to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Today, Hammer was coming in from San Francisco. Freak summer storms were delaying flights over the Rockies. Beard could have gone on without him, but he preferred to wait. He thought he might even stay the night and see Doctor Eugene Parks in the morning and hear the result of his tests. It was a superstition he could not banish, that a wise old American doctor like Parks could be counted on to deliver a clinical judgement with the proper neutrality of a disinterested foreigner, without the moral undertones, the hint of blame or poorly suppressed outrage Beard had come to expect from his medical countrymen. You may get dressed now, Professor Beard. I'm afraid we really must address your lifestyle. His lifestyle, he wanted to say as, humiliated, he struggled back into his underwear, was to bring to the world artificial photosynthesis on an industrial scale. If the world with its sclerotic credit markets would only let him.

His drink arrived, piled above the brim with ice cubes, squandered energy in convenient, transparent form, and a half-kilo of nuts on a trencher under a blanket of salt. It was not Doctor Parks's style, to reprimand his clients for the way they lived. And he was sympathetic to Beard's project, being an ardent believer in climate change, and having bought a piece of real estate in Newfoundland which, he was certain, would be capable of sustaining a vineyard within ten years. When the Texan summer temperatures regularly hit fifty centigrade, that would be the time to pack up and head north. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans, he told Beard, now buying up land in Canada.

As he transferred all but one of the ice cubes from his drink to his old glass, Beard saw the blemish on the back of his hand and stared at it, willing it to disappear. Three years ago there had been something there, and it had taken him a good while to go and have it diagnosed. It turned out to be a benign skin cancer, easily frozen off with liquid nitrogen. Nine months ago, it had come back and looked different, and he suspected he would not be so lucky this time. So he did nothing while it grew and darkened to a livid blotch with black edges. Generally, he remembered it when his spirits were low. Such cowardice and irrationality he would once have thought beyond him. Somewhere in Doctor Parks's office, in a file, was the truth in the form of a biopsy report. It could be collected tomorrow, or it could wait until he came back through this way. What would suit Beard best would be to go tomorrow for his general check-up and not be told, unless the result was good. In America, such things could be arranged.

He had promised to phone Darlene in Lordsburg but he did not feel like it now. On a raised platform in a corner of the bar, two men were settling themselves on chairs by a microphone. One began to tune an electric guitar whose jarring sound of bending microtones stirred a memory. Yes, the name of the married theology students he and Maisie had shared with was Gibson, Charlie and Amanda, and they were devout and intellectual, against the fashion of the time, and studied at an institute in Lewes. Their god, by way of mysterious love, or an urge to punish, had conferred on them two babies of a giant size and type who would easily have snatched the prize from Beard in '47, twins who never slept and rarely ceased their identical piercing wails, who set each other off if they ever failed to start up in step, and who jointly propelled a miasma through the elegant house, as penetrative as a curry on the stove, a prawn vindaloo, but rank like sea swamp, as though they were confined for reasons of religion to a diet of guano and mussels.

Young Beard, working in the bedroom on the early calculations that would lead him to his life's work, his life's free ride, stuffed wads of blotting paper in his ears and kept the windows open, even in midwinter. When he went down to make himself coffee, he would encounter the couple in the kitchen in some aspect of their private hell, dark-eyed and irritable from lack of sleep and mutual loathing as they divvied up their awful tasks, which included prayer and meditation. The generous hallway and living spaces of the Georgian rectory were rendered charmless by the hundred protruding metal-and-plastic tools and devices of modern childcare. Neither adult nor infant Gibsons expressed any pleasure in their own or each other's existence. Why would they? Beard privately swore to himself that he would never become a father.

And Maisie? She changed her mind about a PhD on Aphra Behn, she turned down a job in the university library and signed on instead for social-security benefit. In another century she would have been considered a woman of leisure, but in the twentieth she was 'active'. She read up on social theory, attended a group run by a collective of Californian women, and started up a 'workshop' herself, a new concept at the time, and though, in conventional terms, she no longer soared, her consciousness was raised and within a short time she confronted the blatant fact of patriarchy and her husband's role in a network of oppression that extended from the institutions that sustained him as a man, even though he could not acknowledge the fact, to the nuances of his small talk.

It was, as she said at the time, like stepping through a mirror. Everything looked different, and it was no longer possible to be innocently content, for her and, therefore, for him. Certain matters were settled after serious discussion. He was too much of a rationalist to think of many good reasons why he should not help out around the house. He believed that it bored him more than it did her, but he did not say so. And washing a few dishes was the least of it. There were profoundly entrenched attitudes that he needed to examine and change, there were unconscious assumptions of his own 'centrality', his alienation from his own feelings, his failure to listen, to hear, really hear, what she was saying, and to understand how the system that worked in his favour in both trivial and important ways always worked against her. One example was this: he could go to the village pub for a pleasant pint on his own, while she could not do so without being stared at by the locals and made to feel like a whore. There was his unexamined belief in the importance of his work, in his objectivity, and in rationality itself. He failed to grasp that knowing himself was a vital undertaking. There were other ways of knowing the world, women's ways, which he treated dismissively. Though he pretended not to be, he was squeamish about her menstrual blood, which was an insult to the core of her womanhood. Their lovemaking, blindly enacting postures of dominance and submission, was an imitation of rape and was fundamentally corrupt.

Months passed, and many evening sessions, during which Beard mostly listened, and in the pauses thought about work. At that time he was thinking about photons from a radically different angle. Then one night, he and Maisie were woken by the twins as usual, and lay side by side on their backs in the dark while she broke the news that she was leaving him. She had thought this through, and did not want an argument. There was a commune forming in the sodden hills of mid Wales and she intended to join it and did not think she would ever return. She knew, in ways he could never understand, that this must be her course now. There were issues of her self-realisation, her past and her identity as a woman that she felt bound to examine. It was her duty. At this point, Beard felt himself overtaken by a powerful and unfamiliar emotion that tightened his throat and forced from his chest a sob he was powerless to contain. It was a sound that surely all the Gibsons heard through the wall. It could easily have been confused for a shout. What he experienced was a compound of joy and relief, followed by a floating, expansive sensation of lightness, as if he was about to drift free of the sheets and bump against the ceiling. Suddenly, it was all before him, the prospect of freedom, of working whenever he wanted, of inviting home some of the women he had seen on the Falmer campus, lolling on the steps outside the library, of returning to his unexamined self and being guiltlessly shot of Maisie. All this caused a tear of gratitude to roll down his cheek. He also felt fierce impatience for her to be gone. It crossed his mind to offer to drive her to the station now, but there were no trains from Lewes at 3 a.m., and she had not packed. Hearing his sob, she had reached for the bedside light and, leaning over to look into his face, she saw the dampness around his eyes. Firmly and deliberately she whispered, 'I will not be blackmailed, Michael. I will not, repeat not, be emotionally manipulated by you into staying.'