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Julian asked me why I was trying to provoke him.

Theo had recently spent the night in hospital for the removal of a cyst which was thought to be the immediate cause of the pain in his leg and lower back. The doctors had also performed a biopsy, which revealed an inoperable tumour in his lung. Theo himself had stayed remarkably calm, even cheerful, claiming that his years in the Unit had taught him how adaptable the main organs of the human body could be. Not to mention the organs of Syrian Hamsters, domestic cats, and eagerly amenable beagles. I found it hard to share his bravado, especially when he started calling the tumour his internal tattoo, a swirl of indelible cancers etched across the inside of his chest.
Mother,
it said.

I blamed the cancer on Julian Carr. If only he'd offered us the medical resources available to Buchanan's as soon as I'd asked. If only he hadn't mentioned Lucy Hinton's mouth. I stubbed out my twenty-first cigarette of the day and lit my twenty-second.

‘Give me the pack,' Julian said. ‘You know it's wrong.'

‘I'm not your statistic, Julian.'

‘Give me the pack.'

‘I'm not your controlled experiment. I have a certain amount of free-will.'

‘No you don't. That's why we pay you.'

I took another drag and Julian sighed deeply and then swore. He lurched forward and grabbed one of the cigarettes from the glass box on the table and lit it, inhaling deeply. He told me not to look so surprised.

‘You're supposed to have stopped,' I said.

‘I'm murdering a cluster of brain-cells,' he said. ‘To bring myself down to the common level' He exhaled smoke through his nose. ‘You think I'm all suit, don't you? You think that's all I've become. Well I've got problems too, you know.'

'Sure. Like whose life to ruin next.'

He looked at the end of his cigarette and made a face and crushed it out in the ashtray. ‘God knows how long they've been in that box. Give me a Carmen.'

I gave him a Carmen and watched him light it. ‘I really thought you'd stopped,' I said.

‘I'm having a hard time.'

‘I weep.'

‘Please, Gregory, be a bit nicer.'

‘Why?'

‘My wife left me.'

I went to light another cigarette, but Julian had the box of Carmens now and I didn't want to ask for it back. ‘I'm sorry,' I said.

He shrugged and said, ‘That's love.'

‘And marriage,' I said.

'So we're the same now, Gregory. We're both alone.'

'Speak for yourself.'

‘Can I ask you something?'

‘I'm not alone, Julian. It's not the same thing.'

‘What do you do in the evenings?'

As he said it he inhaled sharply on his cigarette, so I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not. ‘You could come round sometime,' Julian mumbled, and now I thought he really meant it. ‘We could order pizza.' It was as if a layer of pain was coming to the surface, forgetting its own weight. ‘Isn't that what single men like to do?'

‘I don't know, Julian. I live with Theo.'

‘You're my oldest friend,' Julian said. ‘And you don't even like me.'

‘I never said I didn't like you.'

‘Tell me why you don't like me.'

‘Alright then. Lucy Hinton. Lucy Hinton's mouth.'

'She had an amazing mouth.'

‘Don't do it, Julian. Don't taunt me. What did she do with her mouth?'

'She ate, she spoke, I don't know, she smoked. It was amazing, that's all.'

'So you kissed her?'

‘No. I wanted to, but I never did. She spent most of her time kissing you.'

'So you never kissed her?'

‘Never,' he said. ‘But I always wanted to.'

And the way he said that made me believe it was true. For the first time since I'd known Julian I felt superior to him, and it was a feeling I knew I could grow to like. I even felt slightly sorry for him, but I rose above it.

‘Lucy Hinton,' I said. ‘She was one of the great kissers of all time.'

‘I did terrible things,' Walter says. ‘I rolled cigarettes in the pages of my army issue bible.'

‘You can't have been the only one.'

‘I smoked the whole New Testament. And I should never have killed Emmy's mother. I killed my own wife, for heaven's sake.'

‘No you didn't. Don't be silly.'

‘Passive smoking.' Walter looks grim. ‘She didn't stand a chance.'

Without Emmy or any members of the Suicide Club, the posters and the photographs and the Paracelsus inscription above the door come into clearer focus. It's the first time in several days that Walter and I have been alone, and because he asks me nicely I give him something to read. Unfortunately, under his cream-white stetson, he now seems no happier than he was before. He looks up and says:

‘This girl Lucy. You shouldn't have done what you did.'

‘I know. But that's finished now, like cigarettes. It's all in the past.'

‘You should get out more, like Emmy says.'

‘And you should stop smoking like Emmy says.'

‘Well she's right. That's another terrible thing. I was forty-five when she was born, but I'd have changed if I was younger. I'd have given up. She was such a pretty girl, just like her mother.'

‘It wouldn't have made any difference.'

‘Who knows? We all want to be better than we are, even Stella.'

‘Please, Walter, I've heard more than enough about Stella.'

'Sharp as a tack.'

‘Nobody can force me to meet her.'

‘Pretty too.'

‘Not if I don't want to.'

‘Delicious as an MCC.'

‘Walter. Manners.'

‘Alright then, she's ugly.'

‘Is she?'

‘Find out for yourself.'

'She probably won't even like me.'

‘You're probably right. She's not a cigarette. There's no satisfaction guaranteed.'

‘I want a cigarette.'

‘You want satisfaction, it's not the same.'

‘No, I really want a cigarette. I mean right now.'

Walter tosses back the pages I gave him earlier and tells me to write something down instead, so I ask him to tell me a story, and without hesitation he starts 1916, the morning of the Battle of the Somme.

He is a private in the Black Watch and his platoon is ordered into line by a second lieutenant from the Blues and Royals. Cold and wet and miserable the platoon is marched away from the trenches. At an abandoned farm-house Walter and the other men are ordered to make their weapons ready, while a deserter from the Catering Corps is pushed towards them. His hands are tied behind his back and he is made to stand against the battered wall of the farm. He is blind-folded. His whole body is shaking and he is not offered a last request. He is given a cigarette. His teeth chatter so violently that when the cigarette is put between his lips he bites it in half. Horrified, he spits out the loose crumbs of tobacco, narrowly missing the officer, who steps back in disgust and gives the order to fire.

Walter, along with the rest of his platoon, shoots the unknown deserter dead. There is no justice involved. The officer doesn't collapse from passive smoking. Nor does he make the war-time mistake of striking the third match. He hands out the extra tobacco ration which pays off the Firing Squad.

Walter remembers smoking his Firing Squad cigarettes, and he did it for the same reason as everyone else, because whenever he wasn't bored he was scared of dying, like everyone was. It was because in the middle of a war there was nothing else which he wanted which he could also have. It was because only the very secure and the very stupid could ignore any opportunity for comfort.

People nowadays, they imagine they'd act differently.

Dr and Mrs Julian Carr used to live in a street of detached houses like an evolved version of the street where my parents lived. Now Julian lived there alone. Although I'd learnt that possessions themselves didn't generate happiness, in Julian's house they provided a fairly convincing imitation, and I had the feeling that he paid someone to keep the house exactly as it was when his wife left. That was sad, I think. Julian was on the phone when I arrived so while he talked I took a close look at the wedding photographs on the mantelpiece. Lucy Carr had shoulder-length hair and a spectacular smile, but her eyes were too blue and her hair was very blonde.

'Sorry about that,' Julian said. ‘Hard to get away these days.' He was just loosening his tie when the phone rang again.

There was a
Tobacco World
magazine on a coffee-table. I flipped through it and found an article praising the way Julian had undermined the LUNG demonstration. The magazine was more than a year old, and a photo made the Unit look grey like a nuclear installation. I tossed it back onto the table and wondered exactly why I was here. Partly, it was because I'd been invited, and with the inconvenient decency I'd inherited from my parents I didn't know how to refuse. But it was also because I was keen to cultivate my feeling of superiority over Julian, knowing that he'd never kissed Lucy Hinton.

Julian came back, apologetic. He took off his suit-jacket. He'd invited me to eat but he didn't have any food in. He did, however, have some beer, so he lit the gas coal-imitation fire and we sat facing it, drinking little bottles of French beer and leaning back against the sofa. He rolled up his sleeves and matched me cigarette for cigarette, not seeming to care how many I'd smoked already that day, and he offered me more beer as if the speed we drank each bottle was a direct measure of how much we were enjoying ourselves. Theo was right. Julian had never been mean.

He gestured casually towards the magazine and asked me if I'd seen the article.

‘No,' I said.

‘It doesn't matter. All that LUNG business was just a sideshow. You were always the main reason I stayed here.'

He opened another two bottles and said he was sorry about Theo. ‘Really I am,' he said. ‘I wanted to help him but they wouldn't let me.'

‘Who wouldn't?'

‘The company. You've built me up into something I'm not. I'm just an employee, and I do what I'm told. You should have brought him along this evening.'

‘Who?'

‘Theo.'

‘He's with Emmy.'

‘Not at the house, then?'

‘No, at her place, Walter's place. Why?'

‘I'd like to get to know him better.'

With each bottle of beer, I found it harder to dislike Julian. He apologized for the way he'd talked to me about Lucy Hinton, blaming it on the breakdown of his marriage.

‘It isn't as if I did anything wrong,' he said. ‘We wanted children.'

Julian went quiet. He closed one eye and looked down the neck of his beer-bottle while I noticed that every picture in the room was either a photo or a painting of his wife, mostly publicity shots from race-tracks with Lucy Carr perched high on the seats of numbered motorcycles. She had interesting knees. A series of pastel portraits brought out the delicate angle of her elbows.

‘I tried,' Julian said. ‘I even gave up smoking for the sake of the baby. But nothing happened.'

‘I didn't know,' I said, automatically wondering how many other things I didn't know about him.

‘It was those tests I did as a student. Gregory, have you ever been in love?'

‘I think so,' I said. ‘I don't know.'

‘Probably not then,' he said. ‘I'm lonely on my own.'

And I nodded sympathetically, calmly swallowing some beer, increasingly confident that along with superiority I could safely allow myself to feel a little pity. Poor old Julian.

‘At least you have all those old guys,' Julian said. ‘They all go home at night, I suppose?'

‘Of course they do.'

'So both our houses are empty. We're just the same really.'

I assumed that Julian's self-pity was making him ramble: my house was nothing like his. It was never empty. Even without the Suicide Club and Jamie there were always the animals, and also the ghost of course. Theo was never away for long, and Walter had a key which he often used when he wanted to give Emmy and Theo some time alone. There was always something happening, even if that wasn't the way I'd planned it, and it occurred to me, without regret, that I'd failed miserably in my attempt to keep the world at bay.

Julian was saying that these days he only had one ambition left.

‘It's more of a dream really,' he said. ‘I want to help create a cancer-free cigarette. That's why I wanted one of Theo's plants. Imagine it. Imagine smoking as much as you liked without ever having to worry.'

‘Buchanan's would make a fortune.'

‘Buchanan's couldn't care less,' Julian said. ‘If the market slips here they just concentrate on the millions of non-smoking women in China. They don't know the meaning of worry.'

The phone rang again, and Julian went to answer it. This time when he came back he was still holding the telephone, and he looked puzzled. He held out the receiver.

‘It's for you,' he said. ‘There's been a fire.'

‘What has she got that I haven't? What do I have to
do?'

Ginny was following me home from the library. I walked no slower than I'd normally walk which was a little faster than Ginny would walk if she wasn't trying to catch me up. This meant that sometimes she had to break into a run to keep up with me, for which she was well prepared by all that jogging. I didn't tell her when I was about to change direction so sometimes I bumped into her, or left her stranded on the opposite pavement. I rarely looked back but it hardly mattered because before long she always caught me up again.

This had all started because I didn't do smoke-breaks anymore. I hadn't been to the opera to hear her rehearse and I'd refused her invitations to the cinema and even to Cosini's.