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 b
rands 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.’
‘Gregory’
‘What should I do, Julian? Just tell me.’
‘Go and see her. Be nice to her.’
‘I was nice to her.’
‘Hell, Gregory, if you really like her buy a pack of fags, break down her door and smoke every single one of them in front of her face.’
‘I mean apart from that. You’re sure there wasn’t a bet?’
‘Do you really think she’d sleep with you just for a bet?’
‘I never told you she slept with me. Who told you we slept together?’
‘Go and see her, Gregory.’
‘There must be something I can do.’
’Sure. You could give up everything and go to Paris or New York, packing only your self-pity. When you arrive unwrap it carefully from your cardboard suitcase and mould it into art objects in the tradition of suffering lovers since the eve of time.’
‘Come on, Julian, be serious.’
‘Imagine it. Gregory Simpson in New York, the man who even gets worried about leaving his room in the morning.’
‘It was a bet, wasn’t it?’
‘For God’s sake, Gregory.’
‘Well fuck you. Fuck everything.’
‘Gregory, come back. Where are you going?’
‘New York. Where d’you think?’
He was always cracking jokes and larking about. When we were playing in the garden he’d pull me aside and ask me what did the big chimney say to the little chimney and I’d say, I don’t know, what did the big chimney say? And then I’d run off on a circuit of the lawn, turning my arms into wings and banking heavily into corners while dropping atomic bombs on Australian opening bowlers. By the time I landed I’d forgotten what the joke was.
Uncle Gregory and my father spent a lot of time that summer talking in private. They once called me into the dining-room and Uncle Gregory solemnly gave me an envelope with my name written on the outside in capital letters. My father then took it away from me before I could open it. He said there was money inside so it was better if he looked after it for me. It was a very thin envelope, so I didn’t think it could be very much money.
Uncle Gregory spent the next summer in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and I used to send him a different Get Well card every month, because Mum told me to. They never worked. At Christmas, to hide the fact that there was no present from Australia, I had an extra present from Mum and Dad. It was an Airfix 1/20 model of a Canberra bomber with a detachable observation turret.
Uncle Gregory died in hospital before I finished making it.
DAY
8
She knocked on the door for the third time and I told her to go away.
‘Are you alright? Come downstairs.’
‘Later.’
I hadn’t unpacked either of my cases. I’d thrown the bean-bag into the corner, but only to clear a space and not to position it. I stayed absolutely still, lying on my bed and hardly breathing until she went away. Of course I wasn’t alright.
Then I jammed all the questions she’d asked me into a single senseless lump, like plasticine: What about your exams? Are you hungry? Don’t you want to talk about it? Is it a girl? Would you like some tea? Have you heard about your father? Were you being bullied? You’re not taking drugs are you? Is history too hard a subject? Coffee instead then?
And when they were all mashed together I tossed them onto the bean-bag and out of sight.
This room was much bigger than the one in William Cabot, with a window over-looking the front garden and the road. It was big enough for a double-bed which didn’t touch the wall on either side, and I lay there listening for the neighbours, Seventh Day Adventists who were usually out, standing on other people’s doorsteps. I felt so lethargic I could hardly move my head, and the silence wasn’t helping. My eyes locked onto a faded Nick O’Teen sticker on the side of the book-case which held my science-fiction novels.
Every day, before Superman found and destroyed him, Nick O’Teen would tempt little children with cigarettes. He used to say: ‘If you want to grow up fast, take one of these.’
I can’t remember what Superman said.
Theo lived with his mother in two rooms at the station end of Buchanan Street. They often had disagreements, either about botany, which Theo’s mother dismissed as a vain attempt to label God, or about cigarettes. She would ask him if he didn’t trust God to take good care of her, while all Theo really wanted was some clean air for the aspidistras he was cross-pollinating on the window-sill.
Often, at the weekends, his mother would take bus-trips. Acting on information received from a widespread network of friends and acquaint
ances, most of them Calvinists, she travelled all over Scotland to check on the latest sighting of her husband. The information was consistently incorrect, but she did think she’d once recognized the slope of his back in the wheel-house of a lobster boat receding from Craobh Haven.
At the age of nineteen Theo was awarded a first-class degree. His mother accused him of getting ahead of himself, but for the graduation ceremony she bought them both a new pair of shoes and stood proudly at the very front of the Assembly Rooms as her son was officially made a Bachelor of Science. Theo then submitted a proposal for a PhD, provisionally entitled Patterns of Deception in Plant Virus Infections, and became the youngest research student ever to be accepted by the University, a record he held until the mid-seventies when the Maths department began admitting students from China.
Maybe Walter really is dead.
He isn’t here again and maybe in fact in reality he really has been run over by a bus.
This feeling now is completely different from the feeling I had yesterday. That was just a bad and ugly thought, and dark, and sharp-shaped. But today, on the second day running, I’m thinking that perhaps he really is dead, and what should I do now? Smoke? Pathetic. There is this huge difference between how I think things will be and how they actually are. I have to phone up Emmy. I have to know what’s happened to Walter.
Okay, right. So that’s settled.
I just phoned up Emmy and after asking me how the plant was getting on and whether Walter had told me about Stella, she eventually understood why I was sounding so worried. Fairly convincingly, she told me that Walter wasn’t dead. He was at Humphrey King’s house, comforting Mrs King.
’So he’s alright?’ I said.
‘He’s fine. It was good of you to ring.’
X20 Page 8