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‘They should all be forced to take up smoking. Then they might learn to relax a little. I mean really,' he said, holding out his hands for the answer, ‘how can they think we'd want to kill people for profit?'

And there was really no answer to place in his outstretched hands.

‘That girl you liked at college,' he said, changing the subject back again. ‘She was a Lucy, wasn't she? What was her name?'

‘Lucy Hinton,' I said.

‘Yes, I remember now. Blonde.'

'She had black hair.'

‘That's right. Smoked like a chimney, sexy as hell. Do you two still keep in touch?'

‘No,' I said. ‘No we don't.'

13

I learnt about Ginny's life in instalments, in our non-smoking smoke-breaks which always ended with her contemptuous crushing of a cigarette-end. I watched the turning of her foot, ankle, shin, knee, hip. So she had a boyfriend, but Paris was a big city and anything could happen.

She told me her family didn't understand her. She had one sister, older, who became a lawyer like their father, and to show the kind of life she was escaping, Ginny liked to cite the time her sister worked for the Philip Morris tobacco company. Philip Morris had learnt about a television documentary still in production which suggested a connection between smoking-related diseases and men who lived the lifestyle of the Marlboro cowboy. During the opening credits an ex-cowboy and ex-smoker was shown riding his horse across the sunset landscape of the midwest. He was wearing an oxygen mask connected to a tank wallowing in his saddle-bag. The film also featured a rodeo star and former cowboy, Junior Farris, who died of lung cancer in Mustang, Oklahoma before the end of filming. Philip Morris sent Ginny's sister to visit his widow. After a lengthy interview it was eventually established that Junior had spent several winters in the late seventies teaching farm management at a local high-school. It therefore wasn't entirely accurate to portray him as a Marlboro-type cowboy. On the basis of this misrepresentation a legal injunction was issued against the film, which has never subsequently been broadcast.

Ginny described a hopeless arc with her dusty cigarette-end, making it clear that no more words were necessary to explain why she'd run away to Paris in search of love and opera.

I tried to be equally open in return, and there came a time when despite countless delays and hesitations, I decided I ought to tell her the truth about Lucy.

‘What I told you about my girlfriend.'

‘What?'

‘It isn't true,' I said.

‘You don't love her?'

‘No, not that.'

'She isn't in England?'

She looked at me through her eyebrows, and even though I was still trying to work out what I found so exciting about her, it wasn't her eyebrows.

‘Neither of those things.'

‘Well what then?'

'She smokes like a chimney.'

Otherwise, it turned out that Lucy was just about perfect. She could sing and dance and juggle. She modelled for charity magazines and was good with children. But even when I laughed out loud at Lucy's unique sense of humour, Ginny managed to conceal her jealousy. I decided to elaborate: neither of us were possessive types, we held no monopoly over the life of the other.

‘I expect it's the same for you,' I suggested.

‘Actually I'm very possessive,' Ginny said. ‘Why do anything by halves?'

Jean-Paul Sartre listened in closely to everything we had to say, only miming his walk away from us, slippery-shoed and wily like Marcel Marceau. I often suggested we go somewhere else, after work perhaps and out of Sartre's earshot. But Ginny was always too busy with her singing, or she had to phone her boyfriend, or worst of all, she would look at me as though I ought to know better, both me and her being in love with others and all.

‘Are we friends?' Julian asked.

‘Of course we are.'

‘Which is why I want to help,' Julian said. ‘Both you
and
Theo. How is he? Any better?' Theo was dying.

More than a year had passed since Julian called me into this same office to announce the results of his Enquiry, when he'd explained to me at some length that in this day and age a company like Buchanan's had to be fully politicized. Every employee was encouraged to promote certain basic principles, whenever possible, like the fact that there was no demonstrable connection between cigarette-smoking and cancer, and that we lived in a free country where cigarettes were perfectly legal. Individual initiatives such as Theo's, however, were to be discouraged.

‘He means I've been sacked,' Theo said.

Theo had been sitting on Julian's sofa, the black leather contrasting neatly with his white lab-coat. He was smoking a cigarette from the glass box.

‘You're not really sacked,' I said. ‘It's just a ruse.'

Julian had decided that in return for an undertaking to stop delivering cigarettes to the Estates, Theo could take a short holiday at Buchanan's expense. Julian would announce Theo's resignation and the LUNG protesters would go home satisfied. When everything had calmed down, Theo could discreetly return to his full salary and continue his research as if nothing had happened.

'So he's only
saying
you're sacked.'

‘We did this kind of thing all the time in Hamburg.'

'So there isn't a problem,' I said.

‘Yes there is,' Theo said. ‘It's
corrupt
.'

Julian took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘It's public relations. It doesn't mean anything.'

‘And I was
this
close to making a breakthrough with the TMV.'

‘Julian knows that,' I said.

‘Julian
is it?'

‘We were at college.'

'So you know why they kicked him out of Hamburg?'

‘He wasn't kicked out. He didn't like the way they experimented with animals.'

‘Is that what he told you?'

‘It's for the best,' Julian said. ‘Think of the rent for your flat. Think of your dog. I'm being as fair as I can.'

‘I could get another job.'

‘You're getting old, Barclay. Be reasonable.'

‘Your research, Theo,' I said. ‘Where else would you go?'

He then surprised us both by smiling broadly, keeping his mouth closed of course. He stubbed out his cigarette. He stood up. ‘You're both such pessimists,' he said. ‘After all, I can always go and live at Gregory's place.'

Now, a year later, no matter how often I'd tried to explain it, Julian still didn't believe we hadn't plotted against him. This often made me feel as if I owed him something.

‘I'm glad we're still friends,' Julian said. He offered me a light for my cigarette. ‘Because there's something I want you to do for me.'

‘It was a laugh, Walter, wasn't it?'

‘Not all the time, no.'

‘Well a lot of the time it was.'

He is wearing a brown pork-pie hat with a day-glo yellow Think Bike badge. He sits slumped in his chair, looking daggers at Emmy because she's here again, listening to my memories of the Suicide Club. I ask Walter if there's anything wrong.

‘No,' he says.

'Sure?'

‘None of your business.'

Well anyway, it was a laugh most of the time, being in a room full of fearless people every single one of whom knew what was embroidered on the cap-badge of the Player's Navy Cut sailor.

‘HERO!!'

The Suicide Club reintroduced me to exclamation marks, and it was like having a second chance at an education and the happiest days of my life. My curriculum was now an alternative type of history which included any field covered by the stories of Walter and his friends, and Jonesy Paul started me off gently, on Statistics, with the story of a Japanese survey about babies of women married to smokers. One of the women in the survey gave birth to a child well below the average length and weight, but she denied she was married to a smoker. This surprised the statistician, because every afternoon the woman's husband smoked vigorously in the waiting room both before and after his regular visit. Eventually the woman was asked why she kept on denying her husband was a smoker.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘But that man is only my lover.'

Physical Education: while playing in the 1987 Rugby World Cup, in which France reached the final, Serge Blanco the French full-back smoked an average of thirty cigarettes a day, as did a long tradition of great French players before him, including the unforgettable Jean-Pierre Rives.

English Literature: according to Lundy Foot, all the great English novels were written with the aid of tobacco. He could quote Thackeray on the smoke of Cuba, and Kipling on the difference between a woman and a cigar. (This could also be filed under Women's Studies.) In Foot's opinion, the Death of the Novel coincided with the anti-smoking movement, whereas the Death of the Author could all too often be attributed to an opposite and equal reaction against it.

Economics: Karl Marx spent more money on cigars while writing
Das Kapital
than he earned from its publication. This might explain his strange blindness to the obvious truth that in fact tobacco is the opium of the people.

Criminology: the great Sherlock Holmes insisted that all detectives of the superior sort should be able to identify 140 different varieties of tobacco. In
ash
form.

Science and Psychology: Newton was partial to a smoke, as was Freud, who claimed to be sucking a nipple and not a cigar and eventually died of cancer of the mouth, thus demonstrating a fear of women which was entirely justified.

I loved every minute of it.

‘Rubbish,' Walter says. ‘You're idealizing for Emmy's benefit.'

‘I do not
idealized

‘It was never perfect. He's lying.'

‘I never said it was perfect. And anyway, since when have you been such a guardian of the truth?'

Walter lobs his tobacco pouch onto the coffee-table. Haemoglobin pads up and Walter kicks him. Haemoglobin runs away. Then Walter swipes his ashtray off the arm of the chair. It spills, bounces, settles. On the table the tobacco pouch yawns open, like a leather jaw.

It is empty.

Lucy didn't reply so I wrote to her again, gently suggesting that I couldn't wait for ever. But the only letters which came back from England were written by my mother, who'd stopped reading articles about the dangers of smoking and moved on to tragedies of more general interest. In particular, she alerted me to the terrible variety of disaster lying in wait for young Englishmen in big cities in foreign countries. The statistics made appalling reading.

Worried by her subdued punctuation, I wrote back to reassure her. I reminded her that great and wonderful things also happened, even abroad and even in big cities.
Who knows,
I wrote,
I might even be lucky!

And on this understanding, I redoubled my efforts to meet Ginny anywhere but at the library. I asked if I could watch her rehearse for
Cosi Fan Tutti,
but she told me I'd be bored. And anyway, what would Lucy say?

Refusing to give up hope, I tried to tempt Ginny with descriptions of Cosini's Italian restaurant, and not only because it was just round the corner from my place. Cosini, the owner and chef, was famously indecisive and his restaurant kept changing. On cold days I could therefore tell Ginny there was an open fire. On hot days Cosini had installed air-conditioning. Once, after Ginny complained about how poor she was, I told her how
expensive
Cosini's could be.

She looked up, squinting against the bright sunlight in the library courtyard.

‘Does it have a non-smoking section?'

‘A huge one,' I said, ‘always.'

‘Always?'

‘At least half the restaurant.'

'Sorry,' she said, ‘not tonight. I'm expecting a phone-call.'

While she eyed up a good place to crush out her stub of cigarette, I wondered what I was doing wrong. I remembered it being much easier to fall in love with Lucy, so then I tried to twist enough logic to make it Lucy's fault, which was probably when I noticed that Ginny had gone.