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Ginny leant forward, put her hands on her bare knees, and looked closely at the sandy gravel. Then she reached down and picked up a cigarette-end. She gave it to me.

‘Really,' I said, ‘I don't smoke.'

She ignored me and leant forward again until she found a second cigarette-end for herself. She held it between the very tips of her long fingers and grimaced slightly.

I offered her one of my Gauloises, which I carried about with me at all times, for luck.

‘I thought you didn't smoke,' she said.

‘I don't'

‘You're weird.'

‘Have one.'

‘No,' she said. ‘I don't smoke either. What have you done with your butt?'

‘I dropped it.'

‘Don't you know
anything?
Just hold on to it, in case Boyard comes out. And keep an eye on the door.'

After about exactly the time I imagined it took to smoke a cigarette, Madame Boyard did come out into the sunlight of the courtyard. Ginny immediately stood up, dropped her filter, and stood on it. She then lifted her heel slightly and turned her naked ankle in both directions, crushing the filter under the sole of her loafer.

We passed Madame Boyard on our way back to the basement. She already had a Camel lit and was heading for one of the benches by the fountain, a great collar of smoke planing out behind her.

Just after six o'clock I turned on the television. A Durham man who once played inside-right for Stoke City was suing British American Tobacco because there was no health warning on his cigarette brand when he first started smoking in the early sixties. The man was fifty-seven years old and suffering from chronic lung cancer. He'd smoked fifteen cigarettes a day for thirty years and was expecting a third, possibly fatal heart attack. He was one of life's seriously low-rollers.

And then on the local news the lead story was the Research Unit and Theo. He was filmed through the wire fence walking from the Unit down towards the pond. He didn't seem to know about the cameras, because all he did was smoke and look at his feet. Then the film cut to a reporter who was interviewing Emmy Gaston outside the main gates. Demonstrators could be heard chanting Barclay Barclay Barclay, Out Out Out, and several lab-coated scientists stood at a corner of the Research Unit peeking round each other at the protesters. I recognized Theo's hair. He had a cigarette in his mouth. They cut back to Emmy, who explained very clearly that Buchanan's were paying certain employees to distribute free cigarettes in order to addict new customers. It was a disgrace and something should be done.

Finally there was a studio interview with a representative of the Buchanan's company. He was young and smartly turned out in a double-breasted blue suit. He wore sincere wire-framed glasses. He said he'd been specifically sent to Long Ashton by Buchanan's senior management as a sign of how seriously the company was treating the allegations being made. He said that an internal enquiry had already begun and any necessary disciplinary action would be taken swiftly and without delay. No, it wasn't company policy to give away cigarettes to addict new users. The Buchanan's company would never, under any circumstances, approve such an initiative.

Looking admirably composed, entirely trustworthy, and all grown up, Dr Julian Carr thanked the interviewer warmly for her time.

12

Ginny Mitchell was training to be a singer in the National Academy of Music, which was based at the opera house. She worked in the library to help pay the fees.

‘Know anything about opera?'

‘Not really.'

‘It's simple. Everyone sings and then someone dies.'

Every hour, on the hour, Ginny told Madame Boyard we were going outside for our smoke break. As she often pointed out, it could only happen in France, and once in the courtyard we used to talk and wave around our unlit fag-ends, one eye on the door leading to the basement. Ginny told me that her first impression of Europe had been small people with bad teeth which she attributed respectively to an ignorance of dental floss and the under-development of basketball.

‘I think you'll find that's a joke,' she said.

She came from Maryland and apart from buying contact lenses her most immediate ambition was to be chosen as an understudy for a forthcoming production of
Cosi Fan Tutti.
She had beautiful and slender hands, and held cigarette-ends right at the tips of her fingers, between her polished fingernails. When she talked she moved her hands expertly, flowingly, like a Mediterranean.

‘I try to keep my throat and my vocal cords and my lungs in optimum condition at all times.'

Her hands lingered in front of each essential part of her singer's anatomy. ‘It's like a sport. I have to train. I have to work out. I have to jog. Do you like jogging?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I have to keep the tiniest bronchioli as clear as glass. You know about bronchioli?'

‘Little bits of lung.'

‘Then I can hold the high notes. They must never be allowed to fade, not in the Paris method. I don't suppose you have any idea how large a lung is?'

‘No, no I don't.'

‘I mean to look after. It's quite a job.'

‘Honestly, I have no idea.'

‘Flattened out, a single adult lung covers about forty square metres. Imagine that.'

There was something disquieting about her. I thought it might have been her mouth, but then I really liked her mouth. It might have been the way she looked at me over the top of her glasses, or the crispness of her voice. Whatever it was, I was fairly sure she wasn't a transvestite.

‘Did you always want to be an opera-singer?'

‘Only when I found out I was good at it,' she said. ‘It agrees with me. Here she comes.'

Ginny stood up and dropped her cigarette-end and trapped it beneath her shoe. Intent on crushing it beyond redemption she turned her heel and then her shapely leg and then her slim hips first one way and then the other. She kept on killing the cigarette long after it was dead.

Watching her ankle catch the light, I wondered if it would be a betrayal of Lucy if I fell in love with another.

‘He's a great man and a great scientist. His work on the Tobacco Mosaic Virus is truly revolutionary, and we're in no hurry to lose a man of his calibre.'

Julian's arms were stretched out along the back of a black leather sofa. His office was on the second floor of the Research Unit and it had a view over the cinder running track and the asphalt tennis court, and then down towards the pond where we'd found Bananas. His hair was darker and cut very much shorter than when I'd last seen him, in Hamburg.

I offered him a Carmen.

‘You know that's not allowed,' he said, waving them away. The band of his wedding ring glinted in the sunlight. ‘But have one yourself. Sure.'

In his own office, in his chalk-stripe suit, with his lightweight glasses on, it was hard to believe he was still the same age as me. I was wearing my track-suit.

‘You're a difficult man to track down, Gregory.'

‘You knew where I was.'

‘You never answered my letters.'

‘I never received any letters.'

‘Must have been lost in the post then. Like the ones I sent you in Paris.'

‘That's probably it,' I said.

My Carmen was turning out to be one of those which didn't taste so good. I leant forward in my chair, also black leather, to reach the onyx ashtray on the oblong coffee-table. Next to the ashtray was a glass box full of cigarettes.

‘You look great,' Julian said. ‘I've heard they're very pleased with your work.'

‘I've been well looked after.'

He wanted to make sure I had enough money, and that I'd been offered tickets to the rugby and the Formula 3 at Brand's Hatch. Perhaps I'd be interested in Glyndebourne, where the company always liked to sponsor a marquee? I told him Buchanan's had always been most generous.

‘You're worth a lot to us, Gregory,' he said, pausing accurately before adding: ‘That's why I don't think motorcycling is a very good idea.'

I asked him how long he was planning to stay.

‘Too dangerous,' he said, ‘too much of a risk. Tell me some more about Barclay, as a person I mean.'

Ah, back to Theo then. That was easy enough. Theo had lost his mind, deserting his loyal friends for an infatuation with an anti-smoking fanatic who hated the sight of him. But I wasn't going to say this to Julian, because Theo's desertion wasn't as bad as breaking someone's heart, just for a bet. I said,

‘What are you going to do to him?'

‘It's not an execution, Gregory. We're all on the same side, remember? We're doing our best to protect him from these LUNG people, and we'll look after him just like we've looked after you.'

He leant over and lit my second Carmen, but despite the glass box on the table he didn't take a cigarette for himself. He said we really ought to go out sometime. I should meet his wife.

A black cotton baseball cap, fronted by JPS in gold. Walter holds the door open for Emmy, who I haven't seen since Theo's funeral. She hasn't changed. She looks fit, relaxed, as though she was still in love, and far younger than she actually is. It must be all those years without smoking.

‘Walter tells me you're giving up,' she says, and I mumble a little and say hum ha I'm not out of the woods yet.

‘That's why I brought you this.'

She hands me a square of green card printed with the words: Bluebell Drama Club, The Mikado, Admits Two. As I wonder what this can mean, Walter pads out to make the tea, shuffling to the door like a man wearing slippers. I hear him put a match to his pipe, and Haemoglobin trots out to join him.

‘Thanks,' I say, ‘but it's not really my type of thing.'

‘You don't know.'

‘Call it instinct.'

‘One show and you'll be hooked. Trust me.'

Emmy goes up close to Bette Davis in
Now Voyager
and examines her from close range. Then she moves on to the framed print of Magritte's pipe. She smiles.

‘I got that in Paris,' I say. ‘How's the Outward Bound?'

‘Great,' she says. ‘A big of jogging, a little cycling, the basics of Alpine parascending. Interesting people.'

She looks briefly at the acupuncture diagram of an ear and then more closely at the cross-section of lung. She sighs quietly, mostly to herself.

‘Look at all this stuff,' she says. ‘He always knew it was killing him.'

‘He didn't want to forget the risk, the gamble of it all. The posters and everything were there to remind us. They kept us honest.'

‘It's such a waste.'

‘It's always a waste,' Walter says, coming back in with the tea. ‘Think of your mother.'

‘That's not the same. She never smoked a cigarette in her life.'

Emmy glances up at the inscription from Paracelsus above the door. ‘And poor old Bananas,' she says, taking a mug from Walter and holding it in both hands, blowing steam off the top. She looks across at me with her convincing grey eyes.

‘Theo asked me to look out for you,' she says.

‘I can look out for myself.'

‘Good. I want you to take my parachute instructor to see the
Mikado.
She's very keen.'

‘Emmy.'

‘I'll be away and Walter's too old.'

‘And it's no-smoking,' Walter chips in.

‘Really,' I say, more forcefully this time, ‘I don't think it s me.'

Emmy puts down her mug and tells me quite calmly that I'm in danger of becoming pathetic.

‘You can't give up smoking for ever, Gregory. At some stage you have to give up giving up and go on. Take a look at what's happening outside the window. Meet some new people. Make some friends.'

‘I will,' I say. ‘Very soon.'

‘Don't be frightened, Gregory.'

‘I'm not frightened.'

‘Her name is Stella.'