X20

by Richard Beard

  ‘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.’

  DAY

  14

  They’re absolutely brilliant.’

  ’So I look
ed ugly in my glasses?’

  ‘No, but now. You look completely different.’

  In her new contact lenses, even in the subdued light of Cosini’s, Ginny looked a credit to her bones. Actually, without her glasses she looked slightly startled, but her bones were just the same. She took off her denim jacket. Underneath she was wearing a short summer dress the colour of vanilla icecream. Small strawberries wandered across it.

  ‘Being a singer,’ she said, ‘in Italian restaurants I usually have the alveoli.’

  She was wearing red lipstick. ‘Let’s order some wine.’

  The contact lenses were stage one of Ginny’s plan for life without the consolation of an English boyfriend. The dinner in Cosini’s was stage two, although she’d made it quite clear in accepting the invitation that it was only because I’d been a good friend to her. Not content with this formula, she wanted me to know that she wasn’t attracted to me at all, or in fact to any man just at the moment. I shouldn’t worry, therefore, that she would try to seduce me. My relationship with Lucy was quite safe.

  This was unfortunate because I know knew for certain that Lucy didn’t plan a love-lorn move to Paris. It was Julian Carr who’d told me so, in a throwaway line between his exam results and the fact that Lucy had passed on my address. His letter had briefly revived the part of my mind reserved for miracles, and I waited for him to end the letter with a plea for forgiveness and a passionate appeal on Lucy’s behalf. No doubt she’d been too emotional to write to me herself. In fact, Julian was only interested in telling me about his career, and how it was all progressing according to plan. Apparently Buchanan’s wanted to give him a taste of commercial research, so they’d offered him a sandwich year in Hamburg. But no monkeys! he wrote. I didn’t reply.

  ‘Because what does it all mean without love? What is there to defend?’

  ’Sorry?’

  ‘You ought to listen, Gregory. I don’t like repeating things. It puts unnecessary strain on my voice. On my throat,’ she said, ‘and my vocal cords.’ She did that thing where she tracked her body with her hands, ‘and my lungs.’ It wasn’t just her bones. Under her dress she had beautiful lungs, rising and falling.

  I watched her breathe and asked her if she ever had the impression that anything we could do in Paris had been said and done before.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course it has. But not by us.’

  Two smartly-dressed women settled themselves at a neighbouring table. One of them selected a cigarette from a silver case, tapped it on the table, and then lit it, and even though I said a silent prayer begging her not to, she exhaled the smoke in Ginny’s direction.

  ‘I thought you said this was a non-smoking restaurant.’

  I shrugged, weakly, ‘Cosini must have changed his mind.’

  Ginny stared hard at the woman. Then she pushed back her chair and tossed her napkin onto the table.

  ‘Well we can’t just ignore it,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My larynx, Gregory, my vocal cords.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘your lungs.’

  Walter is in no better mood than he was yesterday, probably because yet again none of the Suicide Club has turned up. Emmy is here instead, and Walter, sulking in his chair, pulls the brim of his Homburg over his eyes. After yesterday’s outburst he makes me nervous, but Emmy has had to live with him between then and now, and perhaps as a kind of revenge she seems determined to talk about love, a subject we both know that Walter hates. She reminds me of the very first time she came here, when she wanted Theo to know she had nothing to do with the petrol-bomb thrown over the fence of the Research Unit, LUNG had been disbanded when the Estates business finished, and it wasn’t her fault if various idiots still wore the T-shirts. She’d also wanted Theo to know she was sorry he’d lost his job.

  In actual fact, all this was an excuse to see him again.

  There is no immediate reaction from Walter, who has at least refilled his tobacco pouch. He has a pipe on the go.

  ‘I loved him very much,’ Emmy says, and Walter snaps open the National Geographic he’s already read. He lifts it up to hide his face, and the dark eyes of a Yecuana woman stare out at us from the cover.

  ‘I’m not listening,’ Walter says. I’m not even pretending to listen.’

  ‘Good,’ Emmy says.

  The unique details of Theo’s life seem to reassure Emmy that he really existed. She tells me that the scar on his upper lip, for example, came from a game of roulette when the ball flew off the table and hit his lip so hard it pushed a tooth through from behind.

  Walter mutters something from behind the magazine.

  ’Sorry, Walter?’

  He lowers his screen. ‘Drivel,’ he says. ‘Think of the chances against something like that.’

  ‘I miss him,’ Emmy says.

  ‘We all miss him,’ Walter says. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘Which is why we should all try to keep busy. Stella says she’ll take you hang-gliding, to say thanks for the theatre.’

  ‘I haven’t decided if I’m going yet.’

  ’She’s looking forward to it,’ Emmy says.

  And I know I shouldn’t, because it’s exactly what Emmy wants and all I have to resist is temptation, but I ask her about Stella anyway. Emmy is ready.

  ’She’s a proficient parachutist, parascender and hang-glider,’ Emmy says, knowing this isn’t what I mean. I mean is she nice-looking and what kind of bones does she have. ‘She also wind-surfs, scuba-dives and pilots microlights.’

  ’Superwoman,’ Walter says. ‘Even better, Lois Lane.’ He flips back the pages of the National Geographic and starts again from the beginning.

  ‘And to relax she likes to climb mountains.’

  ‘It sounds very dangerous.’

  ’She’s always funny and she’s about your age and she has a fat black cat called Cleopatra.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘I don’t suppose she smokes?’

  Walter says: ‘Some people are never satisfied.’ He drops the National Geographic onto the floor, just for effect. ‘You don’t stand a chance,’ he says. He shakes his head. ‘Ex-smoker. Homeboy.’

  At which point I summon all my strength as a non-irritable non-smoker to confront this severe challenge from Walter’s delinquent temper. I ask him very nicely and politely if he isn’t a little hot under his Homburg.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Isn’t that your funeral hat?’

  ‘Well spotted,’ he says. ‘It’s because all you two ever talk about these days is dead people.’

  ‘He means Theo,’ Emmy says, ‘in his uniquely sensitive way.’

  ‘Well in that case,’ I say, ‘we’ll talk about something else.’

  I ask Emmy how she knew it was love.

  Julian tapped something into the computer on his desk. It was summer outside and he’d taken off his jacket. His pale blue shirt had white cuffs and castanet cufflinks in black silk.

  ‘My computer tells me you’re in excellent health.’

  ‘You know it’s for Theo,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to beg.’

  ‘I know that, Gregory, but you still haven’t brought me a tobacco plant. You’ve been less than helpful.’

  ‘If you’re still upset about the Suicide Club, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘I only wanted to join in. It’s not a crime.’

  ‘You failed the test. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘They didn’t want me to pass. How was I supposed to know what they used to call smoking clubs in London? In the nineteenth century, for God’s sake. How was I supposed to know the connection between John Wayne and Edward Duke of Windsor?’

  Because to anyone but an impostor it was obvious. They both died of lung cancer, which in the Duke of Windsor’s case meant he never grew up to be a King Edward. He also married a Mrs Simpson, but as she was no relation to the famous
tobacconist Simpsons this wasn’t relevant to the question.

  ‘Why didn’t they want me?’

  ‘You didn’t get the answers right.’

  ‘And now you won’t bring me a tobacco plant because Theo doesn’t want you to. Why not just take one? He probably couldn’t care less.’

  ‘I doubt that. You don’t know him as well as I do.’

  Referring to his monitor, Julian then made a big show of telling me that Theo had worked at the Research Unit for twenty-nine years, eight months and seven days. In that time he had progressed from research assistant to project supervisor.

  ‘It’s just facts,’ I said. ‘It’s not the whole story. And anyway, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Alright then, you tell me the title of his PhD thesis.’

  I didn’t want to argue. Most of the time, Theo was confined to his chair, even though the doctors said he would get better before he got worse, if he was lucky.

  ‘Deception Patterns in the Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Did you know that? I know that. It says it here on my screen.’

  Every other day we helped him into a taxi and he went to see Emmy. She was the one who took him for his cortisone injections.

  ‘His work for Buchanan’s has been an extension of his thesis, in which he noted that the symptoms of TMV remain dormant at temperatures over 27 degrees centigrade.’

  His face was thinner and his hair was crazier than ever. He’d recently developed a new pain in his leg.

  ‘His subsequent research has been designed to deceive tobacco plants into thinking that the temperature is always above 27 degrees, even when it isn’t.’

  Theo had no illusions about his illness. In the evenings, after everyone had gone home, he would explain to me that the problem with cancer cells was their ignorance. They had no specialization. They didn’t even know how to die, which meant that they simply took over the space vacated by healthy cells. They were essentially immortal, and useless. Theo knew how it would end, with a haemorrhage or failing lungs or a fatal infection, but he still managed at least a couple of cigarettes every day.