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‘I don't greatly appreciate your behaviour,' she said.

And eventually she was willing to prove it by grabbing hold of my arm and forcing me to stop. I gave up and agreed to a coffee, even though I had no idea of what to say to her. I remembered once finding her attractive, but that was before the kiss on the bridge, and since then I'd found myself hoping desperately for implausible encounters with Lucy. I started watching out for travelling productions of
The Magic Mountain
(Shenandoah version), or fly-posters announcing the imminent European tour of Lucy Lung and the Carcinomatones. But still I never woke up to a letter from her, and I had to accept the increasing likelihood that I might never see her again.

It was like losing the organizing principle in my attempt to make sense of anything, meaning there was no destiny, no process beyond our control leading us always closer to an inevitable reunion. At the same time, looking back over the details of my recent history, I found no significant connections and none of the consolation of meaning offered by history books. I discovered, without great surprise, that I knew nothing of the laws which presided over the events of my life. I didn't know how to live and I would never know.

It wasn't an easy thing to explain to Ginny. She looked very sad and beautiful in the softened light beneath the Carmen Blonde awning which shaded our table. She was wearing sunglasses and a tartan shirt I hadn't seen before, but it was all too late. Our clothes wouldn't speak for us, I knew that now, so I avoided her eye and watched the street beside us move one way and then the other. My eyes stopped at the solid familiarity of numbers, from the cc ratings on parked motorbikes to the number 20 sub-titled on a stretch of bill-board opposite, beneath images of desire distilled into fearless people subduing wild places. On the back of a
Figaro
being read at the next table I registered the date and the edition number, and the race-times for a meeting at Vincennes.

‘I'm thinking of going back to America,' Ginny said, watching me closely. I tapped my coffee spoon against my saucer and then against the table-top. ‘I didn't get the understudy part.'

The man reading the newspaper lit a Gauloise, and Ginny glanced across at him. ‘They wouldn't allow it in America,' she said, but her heart wasn't in it.

‘They have guns instead,' I said.

She looked at me over the top of her sunglasses, hoping it was a joke. At that angle I could see the raised edge of a contact lens. ‘I mean for killing people,' I said. ‘They don't need cigarettes anymore because they have guns instead.'

She smiled because she wanted to have something to smile about. Then she sniffed, and pushed her sunglasses back up her nose.

‘You're really quite hung up on cigarettes, aren't you?'

‘Well so are you, with your singing lungs.'

‘I guess we both are.'

‘I wouldn't say that.'

‘Hung up, I mean. Maybe that makes us compatible.'

She covered my hand with hers to stop me tapping the spoon, and I realized that for at least a few moments I'd forgotten I had no idea of how to live.

Ginny leant over the table towards me.

‘I don't plan to just let you go,' she said.

She took off her dark glasses and I looked at her lips, then at her eyes, which were aimed down at my mouth. I could already taste the blandness. I could already anticipate the same disappointment as last time, on the bridge, when it had hardly tasted like a kiss at all. It didn't compare. It didn't even come close to the unforgettable sensation of kissing an ashtray.

17

Walter wants to know if I believe in the human soul

‘Does it exist, how big is it, what does it mean?' he asks, making sure to include all the essentials. ‘Because I wouldn't want to blame everything on tobacco. That really would be sad.'

He is wearing a black beret, flattened over one ear like the sculpted hair of a lounge-singer. It is a beautiful blowy spring day, and we've just come in from the garden. Walter is recovering from taking wild swings with his walking stick at the potato-like plants which are over-running the grass, and Haemoglobin is slumped at his feet, bewildered by his inability to remember the map of where he last urinated. After bounding about idiotically he'd eventually decided on the gates, almost hidden behind the trees which were beginning to bud.

Walter and I have been taking a look at the gorge, where Walter crossed his hands over the crook of his stick and peered out over the edge.

‘Remember the ashes?'

Of course. And in particular the way they'd blown upwards and outwards and away from us over the gorge, like seeds, with no immediate intention of settling. I gazed down at the faraway mud-flats and the slow brown river.

‘Good old Theo,' Walter said. ‘Always up in the air.'

The gorge had its usual hypnotic effect. It appealed alternately to my urge to jump and my fear of jumping, leaving me in a state of suspension somewhere in between. I agreed with Walter and disagreed with him. I was happy to remember the flight-path of Theo's ashes, and I was sad. I was excited about getting out more, like Emmy said I should, but I was also terrified. What if Stella didn't like me? What if she did?

I turned away from the gorge and looked at the wreckage of the house. At the back the brick was charred black, and broad leaves were starting to crawl from the empty window frames. The fire, which had started in the lab, had eventually been defeated by the humid walls, dividing the house almost exactly in half. The brick at the front was still bright and the colour of cigarette filters.

Looking at the two-tone house, Walter asked me if I believed in ghosts, but he was shivering and he looked miserable so I suggested we come back indoors, for Haemoglobin's sake. Walter now has a pipe and a cup of tea and looks just about warmed through.

‘What I mean is,' Walter says, waving his pipe at me, Ms there a part of all of us which is durable and unique?'

I'd like to give Walter more of my attention, but I have work to do with the Helix tin. It has now been on the Calor Gas heater for three days and the leaves have dried and browned.

‘I can't believe only chemicals rule the way I am,' Walter says. ‘And I like to think I'd have been the same if I'd never smoked. Are you listening to me, Gregory?'

These pieces of leaf are evidence that I can do something constructive with my hands. It doesn't have to be all torching and burning and the scorched earth of smoking. Instead, in the spirit of creation, I shall now tailor the pieces of leaf into thin strips, about as long as a fingernail.

‘I prefer to believe that I have a soul,' Walter says. ‘And that my soul is impervious to nicotine.'

Into the Helix tin I pour a quarter-capful of 8-year-old whiskey, a present from Julian on the eighth anniversary of our meeting in Hamburg. The whiskey is supposed to soak into the strands of leaf and then evaporate, moistening the leaf while at the same time giving it a distinctive flavour. I want this to be my idea, but I expect it's been done before. Moistened, the strands of leaf look like threads of wool from a miniature brown tank-top, but I'm going to leave it alone now. I don't want to meddle and overdo it.

Finally, however, and this is simply to ease the process of evaporation, I prop open the hinged lid of the Helix tin with Jan Peto's pack of red Rizla papers.

'Sorry, Walter,' I say. ‘I didn't quite catch that.'

'Since you stopped smoking,' Madame Boyard said, ‘your work has deteriorated considerably. In the past three weeks, between the two of you, you've only recorded six operas.'

Madame Boyard was sitting at right angles to our two computers and leaning forward across her elbows, squashing her breasts even flatter than usual.

‘And two of those were short and comic,' she said. ‘So either smoke some cigarettes or concentrate a bit harder on your work. Do I make myself clear?'

‘Perfectly,' I said.

‘You're lucky to have these jobs at all.'

I thought of Julian, designing his own projects in Hamburg.

‘And I'd also appreciate it,' Madame Boyard said, ‘if you'd stop whispering all the time.'

‘Fine,' I said.

It wasn't me who whispered. Now that we'd given up smoke-breaks, Ginny would hiss messages at me while we were typing: why was I ignoring her, why didn't we go for a cigarette, what was wrong with me?

‘Unless of course,' Madame Boyard said, ‘the two of you have some other problem which I don't know about?'

The whole thing was absurd. I'd only taken the job to keep myself occupied, and now I was being told I wasn't any good at it. It made me envious of Julian, who described his life in Hamburg in great detail, in long letters to which I still didn't reply. This was partly because of Lucy Hinton, but it was also because I felt distanced by his obvious success.

He was now concentrating exclusively on the problem of data collection. He told me that tests could be carried out on people after all, subject to strict contract, of course, and that the well-known tendency for smokers to lie could often be corrected by the offer of large amounts of money. I was amazed by the figures he quoted, but then I'd never realized that Buchanan's were selling 12 billion cigarettes every year in Europe alone. Julian:
We don't give
all
the profit to the opera.

‘This is exactly what I mean,' Madame Boyard said. ‘You're not concentrating, Gregory.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘It's the withdrawal.'

‘Liar,' Ginny said.

Madame Boyard looked at her expectantly. Ginny shrugged. ‘It's very simple. I love him and he doesn't love me. And it's the opera archive which suffers.'

In a matter of fact kind of way, as if she was tired of whispering, Ginny then told Madame Boyard everything. She moved from splitting up with her boyfriend to our evening out at Cosini's, passing
Now Voyager
on her way to our fateful kiss on the bridge, which had grown so passionate and prolonged I hardly recognized it. I felt sorry for Madame Boyard. I assumed she'd be embarrassed, forgetting that she was French. She was also, like Ginny, a lover of opera.

‘No wonder you're getting no work done,' she said, patting Ginny's arm. Then she turned on me and asked me what was wrong with me. ‘It's not every day that someone falls in love with you,' she said, before listing, with great precision, all of Ginny's accomplishments and attractive physical features, including her bone structure.

English and embarrassed, I mumbled something into my keyboard about liking Ginny very much, in fact she was brilliant, but I already had a girlfriend, in England, so it was completely out of the question.

‘He doesn't even have a photo,' Ginny said. ‘And he refuses to talk about her. All I know is that she has black hair and she smokes.'

‘He could still love her,' Madame Boyard suggested. ‘To be fair. It's still possible.'

‘But that's not what love is, in my opinion,' Ginny said, and Madame Boyard nodded. ‘It's more about totally changing the way you think. It's irresistible. It's addictive and compulsive. It's intoxicating. If she was offering him this kind of love he wouldn't be here. Right or wrong?'

I told them both, as briskly as I could manage, that nobody could ever prove they loved anybody else and anyway, it was none of their business. ‘This isn't an opera,' I said.

Both Madame Boyard and Ginny reflected for a moment, and then agreed between themselves that I was wrong and love in the modern world
could
still be like an opera. You just had to make room for the big feelings these days, that was all.

Julian Carr didn't have this kind of problem. Julian Can-had everything. He had responsibility: he was running his own series of tests. He was a decision-maker, specifying exactly how many cigarettes should be smoked each day. He was a problem-solver, deciding that each person should fix their nicotine and tar intake by smoking a single brand to the exclusion of all others. He was forceful, insisting on regular monitoring sessions to ensure that his data was superior to anything inferred from monkeys. But he also turned out to be resilient, especially when he found out that the constraints of his system deterred all but the most desperate.
Wasters,
he wrote, cursing them for their random and unscientific lives. They were always dropping out of the programme. They missed appointments and admitted to accepting cigarettes from strangers. They smoked too many cigarettes when they were drunk, and too few when they were hungover. More significantly, they'd all been smokers before starting the tests, so Julian could never know how far their previous cigarettes distorted his results.