X20

by Richard Beard

  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.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My parachute instructor. Stella Granger. She’s very nice.’

  Then Emmy turns away, as if she’s disappointed with me. She stares hard at the poster of Popeye, pipe in mouth, and says she often used to wonder what we did all day. ‘Apart from smoking, obviously.’

  ‘It was a club,’ I say, wondering how I’ve upset her. ‘It was just a place where people could be together.’

  ‘How exactly?’ Emmy asks, settling into one of the chairs. ‘Tell me how, exactly.’

  I didn’t go home to England for Christmas.

  Instead, I wandered the city like a superhero, on the alert for burning buildings and wailing women. Failing that, I looked out for second-hand bookshops with box-fulls of English books somewhere out of sight near the back. I browsed for anything with the word History in the title, and before long my reading became entirely determined by this arbitrary decision. I ended up with translations of Michelet’s History of France and Fliche and Martin’s History of the Church (Vol. VII). I read the Unfinished History of the World by Hugh Thomas and a History of the New World by Girolamo Benzini. I came across a Know the Game History of Rugby Union Football and Tobacco: A History by VG Kiernan. I became the owner of an Everyman History of Rasselas, by Dr Samuel Johnson. Once, when I was desperate for something to read but couldn’t find any book with History in the title, I bought Raymond Aaron’s Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, because it was about history. It served me right because it turned out to be a rejected printer’s edition with page one hundred and twelve repeated one hundred and twelve times.

  By coincidence, I began to find that many of the best bookshops were near the opera house, and it was always possible that I might just meet Ginny either coming or going from one of her classes. I never did. Instead, I used to see Lucy Hinton on the pillion seat of a lime-green Lambretta, in helmet and goggles, an unlit cigarette between her pouting lips and a
split skirt slip-streaming past her stocking-tops. In sunglasses and a business-suit, her black hair streaming clean in the wind, striding towards the Bourse. Outside the Louvre guiding groups of Japanese photographers. In any number of cafes, partly obscured and from the side, something about the way she inhaled, and then held the smoke in her lungs for a moment before letting it slip through her lips. And I was always sure it was her, and just as surely it always turned out to be someone too old or too young, too tall or too short, with the wrong ears or nose or throat, a Canadian who spoke no English or a married Spanish au pair or a back-packing Croat looking for lifts towards Holland.

  Prepared to give Lucy one last chance, I wrote her a letter and addressed it to her Hall of Residence, where I didn’t even know if she lived anymore. If she really loved me then she’d write back. If she didn’t write back then it must have been a bet and I had nothing to lose by asking Ginny out. I mean I could just ask her. It would just be asking.

  Opera as an art-form can be traced back to Italy and the intermissions (intermezzi) between acts of sixteenth-century court entertainments. During the intermezzo an allegorical or philosophical theme would be enacted to the accompaniment of music in the emerging solo virtuoso style.

  The intermezzi were famous for their elegance and refinement, and as they evolved into opera their appeal was thought to lie in an aesthetic remoteness which combined with increasingly wanton displays of splendour. Eventually, opera came to depict the world as a series of possible sensual gratifications. It could fulfil the audience’s desire to believe in an existence grander and more intense than their own, and the heroic gestures of the protagonists offered a clarity of emotion absent from the confused impulses and ambiguous feelings of everyday life.

  The action of opera is usually dominated by a beautiful woman (the soprano). The hero (tenor) is drawn to the beautiful woman by destiny, and this combination invariably leads to disaster. Both Rossini and Verdi, for example, identify the operatic potential in the story of Othello. Wagner has his Tristan expiring in Isolde’s arms, and Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande die from frustration at the impossibility of sustaining love in a cruel and cynical world. This sense of impending disaster is pervasive. In Eugene Onegin both the star-crossed lovers survive, but Tchaikovsky made up for this by himself attempting suicide during rehearsals.

  Ginny liked the kind of opera in which all emotion was pure, though obstructed. And in such circumstances, suicide was often viewed as the only noble response. In Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Edgardo the British lover is banished to France and stabs himself when he learns of Lucia’s supposed infidelity. Janacek’s Katya Kabanova, weary of the intensity of passion, wades into the Volga. In Verdi’s Aida the lovers chose to be entombed together, to die sated in each other’s arms, and all these opera suicides sing sublimely at the moment of death, so much so that to an impressionable mind it might seem that death itself is the key to beauty.

  Of course, this glorification of death only applies to one type of opera, usually called opera seria. There is also opera comique and opera buffa, both of which are often no more than vulgar farces set to music. In these types of opera a brief period of discord is followed by a general resolution of conflict. Suicide is no more than a temporary threat made by conventionally disaffected lovers, and it is rare for even minor characters to die.

  ‘My brain needed all the oxygen it could get. You know, Gregory, you’ve hardly changed at all. Got a girlfriend?’

  ‘Not just at the moment, no.’

  ‘You should get married. It’s a greatly undervalued level of consciousness.’

  ’So my mother keeps telling me. Look, Julian, if you’ve given up then how come you still carry cigarettes?’

  He casually flicked his packet of Centuries across the table. ‘Good for morale,’ he said. ‘There’s a chap in marketing who smokes. Embassy. Every morning he puts them into a Buchanan’s packet before coming to work.’

  Julian had invited me to a pub. The contents of his pockets were on the table, and along with the scarlet and black box of Buchanan Centuries there was a Carmen castanet key-ring, a disposable lighter marked Buchanans and several coins, some of them foreign. He undid the top button of his button-down Oxford shirt and loosened his tie. I lit a Carmen.

  ‘To be honest,’ he said, leaning over the table, ‘I mean out of the office and everything, I think you and Barclay are bloody heroes.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, Julian, why aren’t you a doctor anymore?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘I am a doctor.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you working as a doctor?’

  ‘Jesus, Gregory, try and relax a little.’

  ‘Or at least a medical researcher. Like in Hamburg.’

  He gave me a man-to-man look. ‘They were not very nice to animals in Hamburg.’

  And anyway, his present position was a promotion. He told me so twice. Public Relations was the front line these days, and the money was amazing. He said that to a married man little things like cash and the year after next became important, especially now they were thinking of children. I nodded and smoked and then, instead of reminding him of the great ambitions he’d squandered since his youth, asked after his wife. Her name seemed a good place to start.

  ‘Lucy,’ Julian said.

  ’Sorry?’

  ‘Lucy. My wife. Her name’s Lucy.’

  ‘Lucy what?’

  ‘Lucy Carr,’ he said, smiling broadly. He leant over the table again. ‘But sometimes, just between ourselves, I call her Lulu the lover who came from the moon:

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘How about Tuesday?’

  ‘Not Tuesday either.’

  I explained to her that it wasn’t anything grand. I’d buy a few things from the market and we could have them in my room. Some smoked chicken perhaps. She could bring the wine. White would be best.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  Or there was this Italian restaurant just round the corner from me, Cosini’s. It was great.

  ‘Really, I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can. It’s easy. You just say yes.’

  ‘Gregory, I’ve got a boyfriend.’

  I looked closely at the green statue. It was the statue of a coat, mostly, and a way of walking into the wind, but according to a plate near its base it was also Jean-Paul Sartre. His mouth was slightly open, his lips parted, perhaps a little breathless from his vigorous striding and all the cigarettes he was famous for smoking with Albert Camus.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’

  ‘He’s in England,’ she said. ‘He’s English.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything like that.’

  ’Sure. You probably already have a girlfriend.’

  I stared Jean-Paul Sartre directly in his green lapel. I stood up and brushed a leaf from his collar.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do. Obviously. She’s in England too.’

  Ginny’s boyfriend was a medical student in London who was training to be an Ear Nose and Throat specialist. She’d met him in the Tuileries, jogging. They both jogged at the same time every morning, even though he was supposed to be on holiday, and before long they were jogging side by side. It was as if they were meant for each other.

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I said.

  My girlfriend was called Lucy. She had long black hair. She was very slim. She didn’t smoke.

  It wasn’t really a club.

  Although Theo would have let anyone join, nobody knew about it and there were no application forms. In fact, it was Emmy who’d given Theo the idea for the name, in the Estates, when he came out of No. 47 and locked the door for the last time. A huge cheer went up from the crowd of demonstrators, and under cover of We Shall Not Be Moved Theo stood next to Emmy and said,

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘I told you I would.’

  ‘And you did. I don’t suppose you ever feel sorry for smokers at
all? I don’t mean me. I mean these smokers?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘All you created here was a kind of suicide club.’

  ‘You exaggerate,’ Theo said. ‘It’s not as important as that.’

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ she said.

  So then when Theo moved in with me he had the idea to buy the brass plaque and the big overstuffed armchairs and the pictures to hang on the walls. It was a kind of joke, but maybe it was also to remind him of Emmy. Then Walter brought along his cigarette-card collection and then his friends and it seemed funny enough to pretend it really was a club.

  Theo then decided that everyone ought to pass an entrance test to be admitted as a member. This was part of his constant effort to remind us all of the dangers of smoking, usually while dragging deeply on whatever brand of cigarette he favoured at any particular time. French were always his favourites, probably because they were the strongest and in this period he was always cutting down. His test questions weren’t difficult. They required a basic familiarity with smoking, so as to eliminate impostors:

  Which tobacco brand is associated with the final of the Rugby League Challenge Cup, which takes place annually at Wembley Stadium?

  Name three often fatal diseases closely associated with the smoking of cigarettes.

  What word is embroidered on the hat of the sailor pictured on packets of Player’s Navy Cut?

  Name any three public figures who smoked and who also died of lung cancer.

  With what catchphrase did Superman defy Nick O’Teen in the 1981 television campaign against smoking?

  Nearly all of Walter’s friends had smoked for long enough to know these answers and many more, so nearly everyone who joined turned out to be Walter’s friend. There were also rumours that Walter would happily sell the questions in advance, in exchange for tobacco. The only person ever to fail the entrance test more than three times was Jamie, even though he once got all the questions right. That was Walter again.

  The women from the Estates never once came to visit, or to smoke, or to ask Theo for cigarettes. I have no idea of what happened in their homes after Theo was forced to desert them, but I believe they made no protest because they were used to having things taken away from them. It was one of the reasons they liked to smoke in the first place.