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‘This is Mary and she wants 20 Player's Navy Cut for her mum.' He looked at us hopefully. ‘Her mum's in the Navy.'

‘Don't be stupid,' the girl said, ‘and I don't want any cigarettes.'

'Shut up you.'

‘Well I don't. It's a disgusting smelly habit and it kills people.'

She pushed past him and left. He looked unhappy and dissatisfied for at least ten seconds, and then he was thinking about something else.

‘Can I look at the bubble-gum picture again?'

Theo told the boy he could have a poster of Popeye, if he kept a lookout for an old woman with grey eyes.

‘My real name's Jamie,' the boy said.

By nature, I worry. Today I worry that Walter has been blown into traffic. I worry he has been battered to death by a rogue squall of hail-stones. That the wind has tumbled him along the street like paper, breaking every brittle bone in his body. I just worry, because without cigarettes I am more natural.

It was here in this room that we celebrated Walter's one hundredth birthday with an EGM of the Suicide Club. Actually it was one day after his birthday because his family had claimed the day itself. Walter's daughter Emmy baked three cakes in the shape of one zero zero, and to prove the continued strength of his lungs Walter insisted on blowing out all the candles by himself. Later, as they were leaving the party, three of his great-nephews and a cousin complained that the icing tasted of St Bruno.

On behalf of the club, Theo had wanted to blend a hundred strains of tobacco into a special anniversary smoking mixture. However, there weren't a hundred different strains of tobacco, so instead he compiled and bound in calf's leather a collection of 100 interesting facts about smoking. He pinned a dark-brown tobacco-leaf, like the dry-veined wing of a giant moth, into the inside-back cover.

Walter didn't dare take the book home and I have it here on the desk. Inside, used as a bookmark, is Walter's telegram of congratulations from the Queen. It smells of King Edward cigars.

The last time I saw Uncle Gregory, in 1971, he was as brown as a varnished boomerang. He was so brown that his tan almost masked the dark moles on his shoulders and back. He'd spent the Australian summer travelling from city to city following the Ashes Test series and the Benson and Hedges one-day internationals. Whenever England were batting he made a point of taking off his shirt, closing his eyes and tipping his face up to the sun. In the second Test England occupied the crease for almost two days and Uncle Gregory didn't see a single ball.

That was the last time England won the Ashes in Australia, but back in our summer, watching the rain scar the windows, Uncle Gregory shocked me when he said he'd been supporting the Australians. He didn't even have a good word for John Edrich.

He stayed with us for nearly a month, sitting shirtless in the back garden under the whirligig washing line, blinking furiously, mending the motor-mower and the washing machine and anything else that Dad was too busy at work to mend. He clamped his cigarettes between his teeth and stubbed out the ends in an old puncture repair tin from the shed.

‘You're just feeling sorry for yourself.'

‘Can I have more coffee?'

'Stop moping, Gregory. She's not coming round.'

‘I never said she was.'

‘You've been moping for weeks. Go and see her.'

‘I'm not moping.'

‘Don't be frightened, Gregory. She's only a girl.'

If I'd been a character in one of Lucy's old films I could have laid siege to her, eventually climbing up the drainpipe to her window on the third floor, thereby saving her forever from the terrible mistake of ignoring me. As it was, I had no history of visiting Lucy's room. I'd never been comfortable there, either because there was no Julian Carr next door, or because her walls were covered with postcards of male torsos which only roughly approximated to mine. I don't know.

‘Go on, Gregory, grab destiny by the throat and shake it.'

So I went to see her, and for once I found myself standing in an open doorway trying to get in instead of keeping someone out. Lucy's friend Kim was there, and neither of them made me feel very welcome. Lucy looked beautiful. Her black hair was tied back and it looked very clean. I asked if I could talk to her on her own and they both said no.

‘I really am sorry, Lucy.'

‘Oh for Christ's sake,' Kim said. ‘You still don't get it do you? It was only a bet. And now it's finished. Over.'

'Sorry?'

‘It was a bet. Now why don't you just fuck off?'

An old white man in a woolly Rastafari hat. It wasn't always the same.

‘Have you seen an old woman?' he said.

‘What does she look like?'

‘Brownish hair. Energetic'

‘Your wife?'

‘My daughter. On the warpath.'

'Sorry. We haven't seen her.'

‘Well never mind. How about some fags instead then?'

I think Theo refused because Walter was altogether too cheerful. He wasn't even disappointed when Theo said no. Instead, he asked if he could stay and smoke a pipe. Then he sat there and told us all about the Estates, which used to be full of proper houses like his, sensible and two-storeyed so that you could throw the cat out of any window in the house without killing it.

‘In the old days it was all equally crap of course,' he said. ‘But we were promised something better than this. That's what hurts.'

In those days, Walter wasn't even a hundred years old.

‘Your daughter,' Theo reminded him quietly. ‘Is she about my age? Very striking eyes? Very grey, very handsome eyes?'

Sometimes, she would spend the last of her monthly salary on cigarettes when Theo needed new shoes. This never occurred to either of them as a genuine option. When they went shopping, unable to afford cakes and tea-shops, they would rest and warm themselves in the public library, and while his mother argued with the tired librarian about whether cigarette smoke damaged the pages of books, Theo read his way through the science shelves. After insisting on her right to smoke in a public place, Theo's mother would flip through the index cards in the catalogue, looking for the pseudonym of her runaway husband. First she tried variant spellings of the name Barclay, and then anagrams of the variant spellings. Then she would just flick through at random, sometimes stopping at a name or title which interested her, working on the principle that if her husband had published a book she was sure to recognize his pseudonym as soon as she saw it.

This was all part of her exhaustive effort to trace him, which was motivated by the desire to tell him that he had not been, and therefore by definition never would be, chosen by God. She wanted him to know that God had annulled their marriage for precisely this reason. As for his new life, with a croupier or without, God wasn't sufficiently interested to have an opinion. This was all she wanted to say, so as to save him from labouring under any false hope of salvation.

These afternoons in the library were largely responsible for Theo's extraordinary progress at school. Three months after his sixteenth birthday he was accepted as an undergraduate in the Faculty of Natural Science at the University of Glasgow, where he decided to specialize in botany. He and his mother therefore moved to Glasgow, where his mother found an early-morning job on the Underground trains, sweeping flattened cigarette filters out of the carriages and onto the platform, where it was somebody else's job to scoop them into dustbins.

There is a thought trying to surface which I am trying equally hard to subdue. It is not a nice thought.

As it was close to Christmas we had crackers at Walter's hundredth birthday party and he wore a silver and green paper crown all day long. He and his best friend Humphrey King stayed so late that in the end there were just the four of us, finishing off a birthday bottle of Captain Morgan's. I smoked an illicit extra Carmen because it was a special occasion and Theo was smoking Carrier's. In his pipe Walter had the special blend of four tobaccos that had been an unexpected gift from Julian Carr.

Humphrey King was the only one not smoking. He hadn't smoked for fifteen years, ever since he realized that he only smoked when he was depressed, and in forty years it had never once cheered him up. Now, whenever he smelled cigarette smoke, it automatically depressed him. He was sitting by the fire reading Theo's compilation of smoking facts. He looked at each of us in turn.

‘One of us four is going to die of cancer,' he said.

‘Cheer up, Humphrey, it might be me,' Theo said.

‘It says here that twenty-five per cent of smokers die of cancer. That means one of us four.'

‘Let's hope it isn't the one in four who's Chinese,' Walter said. When he chortled he had to take his pipe out of his mouth.

‘John Wayne died of lung cancer,' Humphrey said. ‘I used to really like John Wayne.'

I remember looking at Humphrey and hoping it would be him. Or if not, then Walter. It ought to be Walter, at his age, or Humphrey, for the simple but convincing reason that I knew him the least well. But I didn't really mean that about Walter. I didn't mean I wanted him to die. I just meant that he was old and I was young, and I have more of a right to see the other side of the year 2000. I intend to astonish children with stories about the twentieth century, stories which Walter will be far too senile by then to remember.

That nasty thought just won't go away.

On television, on every channel, Superman was regularly crushing the evil Nick O'Teen. People started jogging. The Clean Air Society experienced a revival. Cigarette taxes were increased and medical research confirmed that filtered cigarettes led to no significant decrease in the incidence of heart disease. The first papers were published on passive smoking, and more than 600,000 British children were awarded Superman certificates attesting their personal commitment to the fight against tobacco products.

Everywhere, tobacco was in retreat. In the portrait gallery at St John's College Cambridge a pipe was painted out of the hand of Dr Samuel Parr, a hot-tempered, cricket-loving cleric whose proudest memory was of the tobacco he once shared with the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Smoking was banned from cinema auditoriums, and a year later every window of every carriage on the London Underground had its very own No-Smoking sticker.

All the same, if you smoked a cigarette the nicotine still reached your brain in seven seconds and made you feel good. This was one of the reasons a hundred and forty different cigarette brands remained on sale in tobacconists throughout the country. It also explained why none of the adverse publicity made any difference to the Long Ashton Tobacco Research Unit. Theo still had his job. I still jogged up there twice a week and was regularly given clean bills of health. I watched my money pile up in the bank.

The Buchanan's people were most reassuring. They emphasized that statistics only indicated correlation and not causation, which meant, just as an example, that incipient cancer might be causing people to smoke. Equally encouraging were the discoveries being made at Buchanan's own labs in Hamburg, where Syrian Hamsters proved as likely to contract cancers from exposure to distilled nicotine as they did from a leading brand of hair-gel.

Walter is dead.

The weather knows this, and hacks frenzies of anguished rain against the windows. Walter has been run over by a bus, like in one of his stories. He would have called it The Centenarian Smoker Run Over by a Bus story. Probably while on his way to buy tobacco. Yes, just like one of Walter's stories.

He could have been run over by a bus, all the same.

He has been run over by a bus.

He has toppled into the radiator grille of a Leyland Cityhopper travelling at thirty miles an hour which has scorched his coat and then bundled him under its front axle.

Or. The wind has pressed him, ever so gently but irresistibly (a man of his age) over the railings of the bridge and down into the gorge. He is so old and frail that instead of falling straight down he is blown some distance up-river before making contact with the water.

Or struggling against the wind his heart has failed. Or he died of an undiagnosed cancer of the brain, lung, larynx, pancreas, oesophagus while unlatching his front-door. Or he choked to death on a strand of half-inhaled pipe tobacco. I don't know. I don't care. I just want him dead.

Walter is dead. I weigh up this fact carefully. Without doubt it is a major disaster. It is worthy of wailing. It almost certainly constitutes a shock of sufficient magnitude to justify, in order to cope, the lighting and smoking of a cigarette. Even the severest non-smoker would understand. Nobody would blame me, surely, not after such an unexpected tragedy, not after the unbearably sudden death of a close close friend like Walter.

What I'm trying to say is that in my mind I am killing Walter for a cigarette. It simply isn't true that giving up smoking is good for your health.

He was bigger than me and stronger than me. He'd been captain of his school rugby team and his torso wasn't unlike those on the postcards in Lucy's room. He was less frightened than me and more clear-headed, so that when I tried to punch him he grabbed my head and put it under his arm. Then he squeezed my neck until I begged him to stop.

He was now walking me calmly round the small garden in front of William Cabot Hall, as if I'd asked him for advice. He was
counselling
me. In the middle of the garden there was an over-sized statue of William Cabot sitting on a chair looking out to sea. There was a seagull, a real one, sitting on his head.

‘Now listen to me,' Julian said. ‘Just listen. There was never a bet.'

‘Kim said it was after the time with the socks. That you had a bet with Lucy to see how gullible I really was.'

'She's just trying to get her own back.'

‘Kim said you bet Lucy a pack of cigarettes that she couldn't get me to smoke.'