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She'd been replaced by Madame Boyard, who was now standing squarely between me and Jean-Paul Sartre, blocking out the sun. She had her hands on her hips, a lit Camel emerging from her clenched fist like a fuse. She said:

‘What on earth are you doing just
sitting
there?'

‘Let's put it another way,' Julian said. ‘Are you better friends with old man Theo than you are with me?'

‘Julian, I don't know, I don't know what you mean. Theo is
dying:

‘I want you to bring me one of the tobacco plants he was cultivating before he fell ill.'

‘I told you already. He said no.'

‘And in return I'll see what medical help we can get for him. Buchanan's has been working on cancer for years. We've got some excellent people.'

‘I asked him and he said no.'

‘It's only a plant.'

‘Julian, Theo is very ill.'

‘Theo is standing in the way of progress. Help us both. You can if you want to.'

I remembered the angle of Haemoglobin's head as he watched Theo unhooking pictures in the flat above Lilly's Pasties. I remembered Popeye and the lung and Theo's collection of betting slips stacked next to the incriminating X-ray in one of the red nylon shopping bags.

‘I have to have an operation,' Theo was saying. ‘It's common for people my age. Nothing to worry about. It's so routine they haven't even set a date.'

And I believed him because he was already listing all the things he planned to do at my house. He made broad sweeps in the air with his cigarette as he described how he was going to convert the back of the house into a lab. As long as there was enough light, the dampness would create the humidity ideal for growing and experimenting with plants like, say, tobacco. Then, even though he'd never been there, he described my front room in some detail, including the Calor Gas heater and the bean-bag.

‘And I'm not scared of ghosts,' he added, ‘because Jamie told me not to be.'

Jamie had been spying on me all the time, though Theo wouldn't say whether he'd paid him in cigarettes.

‘You're a corrupt man, Theo.'

‘He says you've got a great TV.'

He stopped packing his bags for a moment.

‘Do you really want me to come and live with you?'

‘It'll be good for your work. You said so yourself.'

‘But do you actually
want
me to?'

‘Otherwise you'd be homeless.'

‘You once said you didn't want anything. You didn't want any distractions, remember? You didn't want anything to happen. You didn't even want to talk to anyone very much.'

‘I must have changed.'

'Say it then.'

‘I
want
you to come and live in the house, alright?'

‘Good,' he said, ‘that's very good. Suddenly I feel a bit peckish.'

And there in the middle of the room he dropped everything and hopped from one foot to the other, raising his knees high and turning from the hip. I recognized the Steak and Kidney, and I liked to think he danced it partly from joy. Then I started in on my own version of the dance with a new variation of backward-rotating arms, and that really was a little bit from joy, and we kept it up until Lilly threw open the door.

‘One steak and kidney pie,' she said.

‘Only one?'

‘And one jumbo pasty.'

I come back with Emmy from looking at what's left of Theo's lab, and Walter is sitting at my desk reading this. Or I don't know, maybe he's reading Yesterday.

‘All this mulling,' he says, shaking his head.

‘Who said you could read that?'

‘What is it?' Emmy wants to know. ‘Let's see.'

‘No, please Emmy, put that down. Walter, get away from the desk.'

‘Is it a diary? What is it?'

‘It's a pack of lies,' Walter says. ‘You get to be a hero. I'm just an old fart who wears hats.'

He waves a piece of paper at me. I grab it and eventually manage to clear both him and Emmy away from the desk.

‘Most of it's true,' I say defensively.

‘True?' Walter has now gone several hours without tobacco. ‘I'll tell you a true story.'

‘Calm down, Walter.'

He doesn't. He leans on his stick, punching the air with his finger, saying, ‘There's this woman, see? And her husband commits suicide while her father murders her mother.'

‘Walter, behave yourself,' Emmy says. ‘Nobody committed suicide. My husband left me because he was ill and it was for the best. It was a long time ago.'

‘He just left you. He used to smoke Gitanes. So you got it into your head that he killed himself deliberately. That's what you think isn't it?'

‘Look, Walter,' I say. ‘If you've run out of tobacco don't blame it on Emmy. It's not her fault.'

But he wouldn't let it drop. He described how his wife, Emmy's mother, died of chronic bronchitis and Emmy still held him responsible. That's why she'd made it her mission to save Walter from himself, moving in with him in his house stranded in the Estates.

‘I wanted to help you,' Emmy says.

‘Have a pipe, Walter.'

‘But this is a true story, it doesn't just stop.'

After her husband left, Emmy hadn't found another lover until Theo. Walter said she was too busy, giving anti-smoking talks in boys' private schools with slide-shows of cancerous testicles. It was as though ridding the world of tobacco would make everything alright, including the disaster of her private life.

‘I just don't like people dying, that's all.'

‘Rubbish. You like complaining about one thing instead of everything. You're a frustrated old spinster.'

‘That's because every man I brought to the house was disgusted by your endless smoking, until Theo.'

'So it's my fault?'

‘What's got into you? Why are you saying this?'

‘Because it's a true story,' Walter says. ‘And next time Gregory decides to mull us all over he can put that in his pipe and smoke it.'

Emmy is close to tears. Haemoglobin is whining. My sheets of paper seem to be shuffling about the desk of their own accord. Emmy looks across to me for help and I can see we're both thinking the same thing. Theo would have known what to say and what to do.

‘I'm sorry, Gregory,' Emmy says. ‘My father is increasingly frail'

If only Theo had spent less time and energy on building the lab, on courting Emmy. If only he'd gone for his operation as soon as he knew he needed it.

Still no letters.

I missed my underground train to the library because I was watching two drunks on the opposite platform. One of them was wearing a white fur coat and the other balanced a silver rucksack on his knees. On the rucksack it said Apollo Space Mission. They were sitting on a bench separated into individual plastic seats, a design intended to stop people like them from sleeping in any comfort when they were tired. The two men shared a single pistachio nut.

I have no idea what this can possibly mean.

Then they lit a cigarette. I watched them smoke, lean back, close their eyes, smile. They were utterly happy and I didn't understand why. I thought of books which might explain it to me:
A Social History of Paris Destitutes,
or
The Pistachio Nut: A History.
Then I decided they were probably just mad, a pair of old crackpots. Yes, that was it. That was all.

Because of the crackpots I was late for work, and as I jumped down the stairs, Ginny ran up in the other direction, pushing straight past me, her feet fast and urgent on the concrete steps. I had the impression she was crying.

Madame Boyard was waiting by the computers.

‘Ginny Mitchell is unwell,' she said, sighing deeply.

Distracted, she pressed down the O on the broken keyboard. She watched the single letter accumulate before neatly tapping the key again to release it.

‘It's broken,' she said. ‘She loved him. But secretly he loved a radiographer.'

Madame Boyard had told Ginny to go outside and smoke as much as she liked until she stopped crying. I wanted to help, but Madame Boyard said she doubted very much whether I could. I was a man, and the understanding of love and heartbreak was almost certainly beyond me. She turned and walked back to her desk, and I watched her calf-muscles and thought she was quite attractive, in her own way. And poor old Ginny, I thought that too.

Some time later, while I was typing in the details of
Don Juan
at the Met in 1943, Ginny came back. She rubbed each dry eye with a knuckle, then with the back of her wrist, then almost with her elbow and finally on her shoulder. She sniffed. She sat down and scratched her knee and I forgot all about Madame Boyard. At last I realized what was disconcerting about Ginny Mitchell. It was the same thing which was familiar and exciting about her, all at the same time.

It was her bones. She had Lucy Hinton's sexy bones.

‘Just one tobacco plant,' Julian said. ‘It's not much to ask for.'

‘I'll think about it.'

He looked at me as if I was making some basic and astonishing error, like encouraging children to smoke.

‘I just don't understand what you've got against me sometimes,' he said.

The first time Theo went into hospital, the entire Suicide Club sat in vigil. No-one smoked and no-one talked about smoking, as if this in itself would guarantee the success of Theo's operation. It wasn't at all what Theo would have wanted, but then Theo was in hospital, his history of cigarettes opened up to strangers. We sat in silence mostly.

Old Ben Bradley raised his eyebrows, leant forward in his chair, opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He leant back in his chair, shaking his head. Then Jonesy Paul, checking each word to avoid all reference to tobacco, worked hard at a description of his baby nephews at a marionette theatre in a creche at Great Ormond Street Hospital. There wasn't much else to say. In real life, he'd left them watching Punch and Judy while he slipped outside for a Piccadilly in Pall Mall.

Walter accepted the challenge like a man and remembered his trip to North Africa. He'd been abandoned in a desert. No food, no water. Only the sun at noon and the rare view of a horizoned Bedouin heat-hazed in the distance, slumped against the single hump of his unstoppable ... blast. Giving up is never as easy as it looks.

Finally Humphrey King, in a stroke of inspiration, declaimed at some length on the Roman Empire, including its taste for gladiatorial combat, elaborate mosaic and dormice (all of which seemed like obvious displacement activities, though no-one was going to say so). King moved on to the relationship between Romans and suicide, claiming with some delicacy that their society lacked any serene and widely accessible source of satisfaction. Walter wanted to know the exact percentage of Romans who committed suicide, and then in contrast to Humphrey King he said with no delicacy at all that if he'd been a Roman he'd have felt like committing suicide about twenty times a day.

We lapsed into silence, each one of us secretly blaming the others for agreeing to the tobacco amnesty, and then a missed cigarette later, blaming the others for Theo's illness. But still nobody smoked and nobody mentioned smoking, because Theo's life depended on it.

Haemoglobin started growling for no obvious reason. Bananas scuttled round the back of the sofa and raced himself in circles before crouching, absolutely still, facing the door at which someone was imperiously knocking.

‘It's bloody open,' Walter shouted, or it could have been everyone, but nobody was quite ready for the sight of Julian, sweeping into the room with a broad smile on his face, his charcoal overcoat flapping out behind him. He looked around and clapped his hands, then looked around some more, smiling all the time.

'So this is the famous smoking club,' he said.

He pulled a carton of Buchanan's Century from the inside pocket of his overcoat. He held it up like a wand.

‘Not
now
,' Walter hissed.

Julian ignored him and tried again. ‘Tobacco,' he said. ‘Cigarettes. And there's plenty more where this came from.'

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