‘His final report before leaving Buchanan’s suggests he was on the point of producing an inoculated strain. There’s some formulas and things but I’m not a botanist, I’m just a doctor.’
‘You’re a PR man.’
‘I’ll ignore that. At the end of the report Barclay reminds us that the defeat of TMV represents an almost alchemical discovery for the tobacco industry. It makes all sorts of other advances feasible, and might even be the first step towards the development of a leaf free of the toxins which sometimes make people think that cigarettes are dangerous. Or in other words, a totally safe cigarette, which would be of incalculable benefit to the industry.’
Theo deflected sympathy by dismissing his illness as nothing more than a lost bet. God had run out of remorse for the death of his mother. God had forgiven himself. ‘I feel quite flattered by how long it took,’ Theo said.
‘A safe cigarette,’ Julian reminded me. ‘Think of all the lives you’ll be saving.’
‘He said no.’
‘One tobacco plant, just to check how close he is. Otherwise we can’t help him. It’s your call.’
The bed sagged alarmingly in the middle so we both sat on the floor, our knees pulled up to our chins.
‘Your language was a bit strong,’ I said.
‘Well how was I to know she was English?’
‘I thought she took it very well, considering.’
’Some people are so easily offended.’
After Cosini threw us out it seemed like a good moment to remind Ginny that I only lived round the corner. On the way we passed a shop which sold cooked chicken and wine, so we ended up eating in my place after all. I offered Ginny a guided tour of the room, and she suggested we skip the chair section if it looked like over-running, so all things considered it was turning out rather well.
We were down to the last third of the wine when Ginny said: ‘You don’t have any pictures on your walls.’
I wasn’t really paying attention. Instead I was wondering how to direct the conversation towards the subject of destiny, especially as it might apply to me and Ginny.
‘You don’t even have any photos,’ she said. ‘Don’t you like to look at photos of your family?’
I said it had never really occurred to me. Perhaps she liked poetry.
‘What about Lucy?’ she said. ‘You must have photographs of Lucy.’
I said of course I did. Perhaps she was still hungry.
‘Can I see her?’
’Sorry?’
‘Lucy, I’d like to see a photo of Lucy. You know, the woman you love.’
‘Oh, that Lucy,’ I said. ‘No. Actually, I. Not here, exactly. And she looks better in my head than she does on Kodak.’
‘You mean she’s plain?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘of course she isn’t. She just gets a sexier wardrobe.’
‘What?’
‘In my head.’
‘I do believe you’re embarrassed.’
‘I’m not embarrassed.’
‘Then why hide her?’
Ginny pretended to look under the mattress, which meant I had to lean away. Avoiding the chicken carcass, I banged my head against the door. She rolled forward onto her bare knees and the skirt of her dress flapped around her thighs. She opened the top drawer of my chest-of-drawers.
‘Not in there, then,’ she said. She inspected the balls of my socks.
‘You have beautiful hands,’ I said.
‘Or you use it as a bookmark.’ She picked up a couple of the larger history books and fanned the pages.
‘Ginny, really, I don’t have a photo.’
‘Of course you have. You’re in love with her.’
Eventually she seized on the Helix tin, which was the only place left I had anything to hide. She opened it up and I couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed or not. She stepped her polished fingernails through the HB pencils and picked out Julian’s cigarette.
She held it up, showing it to me as though I’d never seen it before. It was showing its age. It was crumpled like an old person’s clothes.
‘Why do you keep a cigarette in a tin full of pencils?’
‘Because that’s no ordinary cigarette,’ I said, at last seeing my chance, ‘that’s a magic cigarette.’
‘I was prepared to tell him I might have been wrong, even though I knew I wasn’t wrong.’
‘He said you were probably right, and smoking could be a terrible thing. But he didn’t believe it. Is that what love is?’
‘I came to understand why the women in the Estates might want a cigarette from time to time, as a source of comfort.’
‘He said hundreds of thousands of smokers died every year, but he said it just to please you.’
‘And to please him back I said a hundred thousand dead smokers didn’t mean that a hundred thousand non-smokers never died.’
‘Or that the smokers wouldn’t have died if they hadn’t smoked.’
‘Exactly. That’s what it is,’ Emmy said, ‘that’s what love is. Being prepared to change.’
‘He apologized, I remember, for nothing in particular.’
‘And so did I. It’s not all just death and dying, or even bad lungs and bad breath, I know that now. I read a book.’
‘It’s not all being cool and Humphrey Bogart. It sticks in the sleeves of your clothes and causes heart blindness and vertigo. Not to mention the chemicals and the carcinogens.’
‘I liked the chapter on snuff best. It could be made to smell like everyone’s favourite smell. The things they mixed in with it’
‘Phenol and isoprene and arsenic,’
‘Peach and lavender. Sometimes essence of geranium.’
’Sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrobenzene.’
‘Blackcurrant and raspberry.’
‘Z-napthylamine.’
‘Nutmeg and vanilla.’
‘N-nitrosomethylethy lamine,’
‘Bergamot and cascarilla and rosemary,’
‘Benzo(a)-pyrene, vinyl acetate.’
‘Peppermint and sandalwood and valerian fresh from the flower.’
‘Formaldehyde.’
‘Menthol’
‘Methanol’
‘Cardamon.’
‘Cadmium.’
‘Cinnamon.’
‘Cyanide.’
‘Cinnamon. We mustn’t forget that side of it.’
‘No, we mustn’t forget either side of it.’
‘And that, I suppose, is love.’
‘Magic cigarettes are generally in better condition than this one. Younger-looking.’
She smelled it. ‘It actually smells quite good.’
‘Don’t be fooled. It changes when you light it.’
‘In prison they use cigarettes as money,’ she said. ‘My sister told me.’
‘I know. They have a long history of standing for something else.’
‘If I kiss it do I turn into a prince?’
She put Julian’s cigarette in her mouth and closed her red-sticked lips around the filter. She held it there like a drinking straw, not quite sure what was in the drink, and then rolled her eyes and pretended to inhale, before flourishing the cigarette away from her and pretending to exhale again, batting her eye-lashes like a Spanish cigarrera.
’So very elegant,’ she said. ‘So very unintelligent.’
Then she took the cigarette and put it lengthways under her nose, holding it there with her top lip so that it looked like a straight white moustache.
‘Funny, no?’ Her voice was squashed between her stretching lips, but when she tried her Rhett Butler impression the cigarette fell off, though she caught it before it reached her chin.
‘Frankly, my dear,’ she said, ‘I can’t do Humphrey Bogart.’ She clamped the cigarette between her happy teeth, and I told her to be careful. She had no idea of its powers.
‘Oh yes I do,’ she said, ‘it kills people.’
‘I mean apart from that.’
‘I ought
to be going soon,’ she said.
‘Already?’
‘Need a good night’s sleep to rest the vocal cords, the larynx, you know.’
‘I ought to know by now.’
‘And the lungs of course,’ she said.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘fine.’
She handed me Julian’s cigarette.
‘Tell me why it’s magic,’ she said, but something had changed in her. She’d suddenly gone sad on me, and she inspected the hem of her dress all the time I was struggling through an explanation of how maybe, I don’t know, in a parallel universe or something, if we were smokers and everything, which we weren’t, but if we were, or not necessarily us, but anybody who smoked the magic cigarette, then we, or they, would fall in love with the next person they saw. Or even fall in love with the person they shared it with, if they were both smokers, in a parallel universe and so on.
‘You think so?’
‘You never know.’
‘This is no good, I better go,’ she said.
‘What’s no good?’
She stood up and was pulling on her jacket. ‘What’s no good, Ginny?’
‘Don’t,’ she said.
I stood up. To get to the door she put her hands on my shoulders and moved me to one side.
‘Don’t what?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have come. It isn’t fair on Lucy.’
She didn’t open the door. She tried a smile. ‘There’s something you should know, Gregory,’ she said. She touched my hand with the tip of her index finger. ‘It’s not really magic. It’s just a cigarette.’
She reached up and took my lower lip between her teeth. Then she drew back and held me away from her.
‘There, that wasn’t so evil, was it?’
And then she left, closing the door behind her. Dazed, I looked at Julian’s cigarette, which now carried the print of Ginny’s lips on the filter.
Of course I knew all along that it wasn’t really magic.
Theo’s lab in the back of the house was like a last outpost of rain-forest. There were plants everywhere in bright red pots and yellow growbags, leaving greenness to express itself in every conceivable shade. Spotlights in the ceiling were overgrown by foliage but their light arrived as a kind of lime. The walls ran with damp and it was so humid there always seemed to be steam rising, just out of sight.
Emmy had taken Theo to the hospital and I tried to justify creeping around by remembering that it was my money which had paid for all this, for the double-glazing in the windows, for the work-bench and the microscopes, the slides, the petri-dishes and razor blades and glass bottles in various scientific-looking sizes. From the middle of the bean-bag, half-hidden beneath leaves, Bananas looked at me sceptically and Bananas was right. It was Buchanan’s money.
I squatted down and Bananas allowed me to stroke him behind the ears. The Suicide Club had changed Bananas. It was a long time since he’d been satisfied with the delicate inhalation of ambient air above ashtrays. His addiction had grown, and now he liked to lick ash from the ashtray as well. He’d also learnt his way into Walter’s tobacco pouch, where he would lie absolutely still with his nose covered in tobacco, his eyes closed with contentment. Theo had even bought him his own leather tobacco pouch, filled with Latakia, and Bananas kept it close to the bean-bag at all times. When he went through into the front room he would carry it between his teeth, but most of the time he slept in the lab, and I liked to believe he had a unique talent for smelling the potential of the green tobacco leaves.
But I was stalling, partly because I’d noticed that not all the tobacco plants in the lab were the same. Not only were they all different sizes, but some had different shaped leaves, or different width stalks. In the end I took one from above the bench because it was a carriable kind of size, and left Bananas to his rain-forest dreams, where it rained Latakia from heaven.
At the Research Unit I put the plant on Julian’s desk and although he’d wanted this for a long time, I was still surprised when he put his arm round my shoulder and suggested we take a walk. I asked him when I could expect to hear from the Buchanan’s specialists.
We were heading down towards the pond. I lit a cigarette.
‘What specialists would those be?’ he said.
‘I brought you the plant.’
We passed the tennis court.
’So you did,’ Julian said, ‘and I’ve been thinking about that. I can’t see that Dr Barclay is really our responsibility.’
‘I don’t follow. His whole adult life he’s worked for Buchanan’s and he has a cancer which comes from smoking Buchanan’s cigarettes.’
‘I’m sorry, did I miss something? Has a connection between cigarette-smoking and cancer ever been demonstrated?’
‘Don’t be a bastard, Julian.’
He turned on me. He poked his finger into my chest and I took a step back.
‘Now you listen to me, Gregory.’
He suddenly seemed bigger. He poked me again. ‘Just you listen to me. I’ve been in this shit-hole for nearly two years. Up until today I put you on the plus side of the experience, along with my resounding success against the LUNG people. On the minus side, I managed to lose Buchanan’s one of their best researchers.’
‘You said you’d help him.’
‘Like you helped me when I was trying to keep him at the Unit? My career is dying here, Gregory, and you’re not helping at all’
‘I just brought you a tobacco plant,’ I said. ‘It's what you wanted.’
‘You just brought me a RUBBER plant, you idiot, all the way from Barclay’s own private lab, which you built for him with Buchanan’s money. I have a wife you know. I have a future to think about.’
He turned and walked away, back towards the Unit, leaving me by the edge of the pond with nowhere else to go. Then he stopped and turned back, pointed at me.
‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘Lucy Hinton.’
‘What about her?’
‘Of course I remember her. She had the most amazing mouth.’
DAY
15
A drunk student or a disaffected librarian had jammed a lighted cigarette between Sartre’s slightly parted lips. It was a fat French cigarette without a filter and every time I looked up Sartre had smoked a little more of it. Ginny said:
‘I shouldn’t have done it, Gregory. I’m sorry.’
The familiar sunshine of the library courtyard, mid-morning. Our friendship seemed to have stalled at these cigarette-length episodes, and any progress we might make was inhibited by the determined presence of Jean-Paul Sartre, who wasn’t so much smoking his cigarette as eating it, sucking it down like slow spaghetti.
‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. It was something I wanted to do and you were there and I couldn’t resist.’
She put her hand on my knee. She had beautiful hands.
‘I wouldn’t want to come between you and Lucy,’ she said.
‘Oh me and Lucy, Lucy and I.’
‘The woman you love.’
Apparently I made it obvious. It was the faraway look and a certain nervousness around other women. It explained my occasional air of dissatisfaction (no Lucy). More convincingly, it was only because I was deeply in love with another that I could be so naive as to invite Ginny to dinner, share a bottle of wine with her, take her back to my tiny room (with bed), and still think we could stay just friends. That’s how she knew it was wrong when she tried to kiss me. ‘But you didn’t have a photo,’ she said.
My own idea of love was less organized. However, it now included the realization that optimism by itself wasn’t enough, because hoping for a letter from Lucy hadn’t made it happen. Instead, Julian wrote to me again, this time from Hamburg, a city so exciting he found it hard to describe. For the first time in his life he was being paid to do what he wanted to do, and they’d set him to work on the old chestnut of how to obtain reliable data about the health consequences
of smoke-inhalation. Smokers are still liars, he wrote, so we can 7 just ask them. Confident that he could always have everything he wanted, Julian made it sound like a problem already solved.
He didn’t mention Lucy once, not even in passing, not even to hurt me, and that hurt.
‘You have it right now,’ Ginny said. ‘The faraway look that lovers have.’
‘I was thinking of something else.’
‘Let me make it up to you,’ she said. ‘Cinema?’
‘A film?’
‘Is usually what they show.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Great’
‘What about Lucy?’
‘I doubt she can make it’
‘I wouldn’t want to come between you.’
We decided to leave the actual choice of film to providence, so Ginny picked a day and I picked a time and Ginny picked one of the cinemas near the Sorbonne which replayed classics. By the time we’d done that, Sartre had swallowed all of his cigarette. On his lower lip, as evidence of the miracle, there lay a single golden flake of unburned tobacco, which I presumed he was saving for later.
No human being deserved to burn horribly in hell. Theo was trying to convince me of this so that we could talk reasonably about Julian Carr.
‘They say he has terrible problems with his wife,’ Theo said. ‘Poor thing.’
‘And that explains why he had someone break in and steal one of your tobacco plants?’
‘I don’t think so, Gregory. That was more because you cocked up and took him a rubber plant.’
Theo was standing at his broad work-bench, inspecting the lower branches of a plant which was about a metre high, produced white flowers once a year, and whose broad leaves were commonly dried and shredded into smoking material. These were just a few of the botanically accepted methods often used to differentiate a tobacco plant (Nicotiana affinis) from a common rubber plant (Ficus elastica). Theo said he missed his rubber plant.
‘Gave the place a homely touch,’ he said.
He was having a good day. His face was less haggard and he was moving more freely. I sat on the floor to watch him, my Twenty Centuries T-shirt sticking to my shoulders because I’d just run back from the Unit. Bananas turned sleepily in the bean-bag, rolling onto his back.
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