X20 (29 page)

Nevertheless, he remained resolute. He was sure he could find a reliable non-smoker, given time and the financial backing of Buchanan's for his new salary-plan. This involved a small initial fee which would double each year. The longer the test-course lasted, the more value the data would have to Buchanan's, and the larger the fee would become. Obviously this would depend on the fulfilment of all contractual requirements, probably to include living near a Research Unit, but then after the first few months the nicotine itself would add its own unique enticement.
All I need to be happy,
Julian wrote,
is to find my Mr X.

I envied him for knowing what he wanted. And he'd almost certainly get it, probably before I ever progressed from staring at computer screens, recording lost operas while women discussed my incapacity for true love.

‘Men can't change the way they think,' Madame Boyard said, ‘because they mostly believe they're perfect already, or at least half-way serviceable. They can't accept that love is a kind of death, with an after-love after-life which is different from the life they know.'

‘We should ignore them,' Ginny said. ‘But you start loving them and then you can't stop.'

‘Of course you can,' I said. ‘Just do something else instead.'

‘Nothing else matters anymore. Not even my singing. I've given up jogging.'

‘You can't be in love then,' I said. ‘It's supposed to be good for you.'

Madame Boyard and Ginny sighed in unison. They were flawlessly in tune. Then Madame Boyard asked me if I was frightened of women, at which point I stood up and put on my jacket.

‘Now then Gregory.'

Madame Boyard stood up and blocked my exit. ‘Calm down,' she said. ‘Here,' she picked up her bag and I thought she was going to offer me some money, but she took out two cigarettes and put them on the table. ‘Have these,' she said. ‘And calm down.'

‘I've given up, remember?'

‘I won't tell anyone.'

I should have told her in no uncertain terms that it had absolutely nothing to do with smoking. But I was distracted by Ginny, who deftly picked up one of the cigarettes and dropped it into the top pocket of her denim jacket. She looked up at me innocently, and whatever the differences between Lucy and Ginny, I now suspected one essential similarity. All women, without exception, were mad. That would explain many and mysterious things it was otherwise impossible to understand.

‘It was supposed to be fire-resistant,' I said. ‘It had a BSI label'

I closed my eyes, hoping it hadn't happened, but along with the bonfire stench of burnt wood and charred bricks, there was the distinct smoulder of green tobacco. I could hear steam hissing and men shouting. I could hear Haemoglobin barking. I opened my eyes and saw Haemoglobin turning excited circles in the headlights of a fire-engine parked between us and the house. Bands of blue light rolled around the dark garden, colouring in Emmy and Theo and Walter as they washed past. Only Julian was immune, standing in the shadow of a fire-engine talking to a fireman, trying to find out what had happened.

‘He might still be in there,' I said.

‘No,' Theo said. We had to shout above the wind and the hissing of the fire-engines. Theo turned up the collar of his raincoat.

‘Maybe he found some shelter?'

‘No,' Emmy said. She was re-zipping her oilskin jacket. She was wearing Theo's jeans.

‘There must be
some
hope, surely?'

Theo came very close to me so that he didn't have to shout. His face had grown thin, the scar on his lip more visible. He put his hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me. He said:

‘Tobacco burns at a temperature of 800 degrees centigrade.'

Emmy reached out and held my hand.

‘We know how you feel,' she said.

‘I lost a pet macaw once,' Walter said, but Emmy gave him a sharp look and he stopped. Disorientated, I did my best to focus on Walter's yellow storm-hat. It made Walter look like a fireman.

‘His name was Mac,' Walter said.

I wanted to blame someone. Then it would somehow make sense. I stared hard at Walter's bell-shaped hat, wondering if a man his age would remember dropping a lit pipe into a waste-paper bin full of paper. Dry paper. And old wooden pencils.

‘It's not Walter's fault,' Emmy said. ‘He came up to the Club so that we could have some time on our own.'

‘He did all the right things,' Theo said. ‘He called 999 and then he called us.'

‘You don't understand,' I said. ‘My mother only bought it because of the label.'

However much I blinked it kept on happening, over and over again. Bananas asleep in the bean-bag. The tobacco starting to burn. Bananas waking up, sitting up straight, breathing in deeply. His nose twitching and his green-marbled eyes smiling themselves Chinese. His back straightening. His tail sweeping slowly one way and then the other, brushing the old black corduroy of the bean-bag.

‘The bad news or the good news?'

Julian had to shout to make himself heard. He was the only one of us properly dressed for the weather, in his charcoal overcoat and black leather gloves. ‘The back of the house is burnt-out,' he said, in a more normal voice now that he was closer, ‘but the front is almost completely untouched.'

‘Fancy that,' Theo said.

‘They're looking for clues as to how it started, but the main thing is that nobody was hurt. Thank God.'

‘Gregory has had a shock,' Theo said.

‘We've
all
had a shock,' Julian said.

When nobody disagreed with him, he walked back towards the fire-engines.

‘I loved that cat.'

‘He wouldn't have suffered,' Theo said.

‘We don't know.'

‘800 degrees centigrade.'

Trembling with pleasure, perched on the bean-bag, his body alive with sensual satisfaction. He is always about to jump, to escape, but the smell of burning tobacco changes slightly as different plants reach different stages of combustion, a little more interesting, a little more intense. The work-bench flames then collapses and the arm-chair explodes, but the bean-bag remains cool and intact, living up to its label. Bananas, eyes wide and green, inhales deeply, smiles, disappears slowly behind veils of blue-green smoke.

‘He's dead, isn't he?'

‘It's never easy,' Emmy said.

‘I blame myself.'

‘There was nothing you could do.'

‘I shouldn't have introduced him to ashtrays.'

‘He would have died happy,' Theo said. ‘Charged up with nicotine. He beat the discomfort that comes from knowing that satisfaction never lasts. He was satisfied without end. It was the perfect death.'

‘Not dead but happily sleeping,' Walter said.

‘Dead, burnt,' I said. ‘Gone forever.'

Against 800 degrees of heat the bean-bag had been defenceless. It had forgotten its promise to my mother. It had been no help to Bananas. It could do nothing to protect its memory of Lucy's back and buttocks. The frailty of the bean-bag led to an eradication so thorough I was left stunned, unable to think clearly.

‘It doesn't make any sense.'

‘Death is natural,' Walter said.

‘And it really is possible to die happy,' Theo said. ‘I promise you.'

‘He'll always live on,' Emmy assured me, ‘in our memories.'

And I was just beginning to consider believing them when Julian came back.

‘Damp in the wiring,' he said. He looked at Theo. ‘This wouldn't have happened if you'd stayed at Buchanan's. Your plants would have been safe.'

‘I don't want to argue,' Theo said. ‘Not here.'

‘Why should we argue? This isn't your problem. This isn't even your house.'

‘I was thinking of Gregory.'

‘Anyway, it could have been much worse.'

Julian then told us that the front room wasn't even water-damaged, and still not thinking properly all I could say was thankyou. He said that's what friends were for.

‘I loved that cat.'

Julian slapped me on the back.

‘Cheer up, Gregory,' he said. ‘It might never happen.'

‘You look dreadful,' Ginny said. ‘Why did you come?'

‘Madame Boyard said I should. What happened to your shirt?'

I looked down and saw it was full of tiny burn-holes.

‘You didn't think I'd just let you go?' she said.

It was more than a week since I'd been to the library, and I'd spent most of that time walking around Paris. Each morning, to give myself a sense of purpose, I devised a complex itinerary, bristling with rules. I had to make long detours, for example, to avoid the red diamond signs outside tobacconists, or I would set out for Montparnasse at night-time, never deviating from a route which connected every cinema on the Left Bank showing a black and white film, preferably in French, but always with a W in the title. Wherever I went, following whatever rules, I boldly tested the theory of love at first sight by looking at a lot of girls for the first time.

I started counting churches, equestrian statues, Italian restaurants, anything to distract my mind from the need to make decisions. I stared at monuments until they all became alike. I walked like a man asleep, simply an occupied space which no-one approached, drifting along behind black-haired girls and old ladies smoking lucky cigarettes. Gradually, I began to lose the forward momentum in which life could be recognized, but I never let myself go completely: my touristic itineraries were a source of vigilance, a tabling of time. They were an effort at containment and gave me an easy, easily achieved sense of satisfaction, however temporary.

I could have gone on like this indefinitely, sleeping and walking and continuing to live, not insensitive but neutral, meaningless, like a rat abandoned in a lab. My mother was wrong, and nothing terrible happened to me. Disasters didn't exist, or they were elsewhere, even though the tiniest catastrophe might have been enough to teach me what I wanted to defend, either Lucy, or Ginny, or my imaginary magnificent future. But I wasn't ill and my days weren't numbered. In fact, if anything, each day still seemed used, peeled back at the edges, like a page which had already been written, bound, published, studied, studied again, dog-eared and over-read until nothing could be learnt from it. It left me with a sense of dissatisfaction so vague I was almost ashamed.

I didn't read history anymore, because life wasn't a conundrum I could solve by reading. Instead, I collected books of matches from careless restaurants, and back in my room, late at night, I practised striking them into my cupped hands like Humphrey Bogart in Paris in
Casablanca.
I burnt holes in my shirts. I held burning matches upside down and watched the flame climb towards my fingers, thinking that the match was an honest object. It made no pretence at being solid or dependable in my hands.

‘You've got holes all over the front of your shirt,' Ginny said.

And I hadn't shaved and I wasn't wearing shoes or socks. But then Ginny wasn't going to the opera either. She took off her denim jacket and hung it on the door-handle. She was wearing her vanilla ice-cream dress, the short one with the strawberries. No glasses.

‘I told you I wouldn't give up,' she said, and I remembered that while walking it had always been in the back of my mind that Ginny had an answer to all this. She believed in the absolutism and the absolution of love, and there was always the possibility that she was right.

I moved further along the bed to make room for her, but when the soft mattress sagged us together we both leant the other way, resisting the tendency of the bed. Ginny kicked off her trainers and drew her legs up beneath her, and we both bounced softly on the soft mattress. She blinked brightly.

‘Contact lenses,' she said.

‘You should wear your glasses.'

‘Do you prefer me in glasses?'

‘Ginny.'

‘Do you like me at all, Gregory? You've treated me appallingly.'

‘I haven't been feeling very well.'

She pushed herself up onto her knees and turned to face me, balancing herself against the wall until the bed stopped moving. She sat back on her heels. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and she had beautiful hands, she took hold of the thin straps which held up her dress.

‘I have everything Lucy has,' she said.

I could think of nothing to say back to her. Slowly, she peeled the straps off her shoulders and rolled the dress over her breasts until it lay crimped around her stomach. She abandoned the straps at her elbows. She was wearing nothing under the dress, but I didn't let that impress me. It was all meaningless, and a little sad, because I wasn't going to let her excite me. It wouldn't be fair on Lucy.

Ginny knew what I was thinking. She took a deep disappointed breath and her lungs filled with air, lifted her upturned breasts, held them trembling for a second, and then let them fall again.

She pulled the straps of the dress free of her arms. I looked closely at the material gathered around her stomach. I didn't know how to tell her it wasn't working, but then she leant over to the door-handle and reached into the pocket of her denim jacket. She brought out a single cigarette and a lighter, and swayed back to face me again, still kneeling. She put the cigarette between her lips.

‘Your larynx,' I said, pushing myself upright on the bed, pulling my feet up beneath me.

She wiped an eyebrow, and then moved the cigarette to the side of her mouth. Her lips relaxed and the cigarette dropped to a rakish angle I recognized from old films. I knelt in front of her, fascinated.

‘Your vocal cords,' I said.

The cigarette twitched when she breathed.

‘My lungs,' she said, the cigarette jerking. ‘Is this how Lucy does it?'

I nodded.

She held the lighter in both hands and scratched a flame from it. She raised it towards her mouth, and the white insides of her arms pushed against her breasts.