Free X20 by Richard Beard Page A

am.’
    â€˜I mean, are you absolutely positive that this is factually accurate?’
    â€˜Gregory. Your Uncle Gregory smoked sixty high-tar cigarettes every day of his adult life. What else did you want him to die of? You’re not thinking of smoking are you?’
    â€˜Of course not.’
    â€˜Promise?’
    Julian didn’t understand either. He became arch and suggestive when I wanted him to be sympathetic, as though Lucy was just another blonde girl. He said the important thing was to stay calm and not to worry. I asked him if he was going out for the evening and he said he didn’t know. I was terrified, abject before my desire.
    I lit the candles with my Swan Vestas. I turned off the electric light. Wanting something to do with my hands, I opened the bottle of wine. Julian had said it needed to breathe. I was wearing a tie. I was a boy dressed up and pretending to be a man in one of the smallest rooms in the William Cabot Hall of Residence for Men, and I suddenly realized that nothing here could possibly match the incomparable success I’d imagined for the evening. I felt out of place, absurd, worthless.
    And anyway, it was too late. She wasn’t coming. She would have found something more interesting to do than dinner on this evening with me, like watch television. I licked my fingers to snuff out the candles, and then decided it would be less dangerous to blow them out instead when there was a gentle knock, three times, tap tap tap, on the door.
    A club for smokers is not a new idea. At the end of the nineteenth century there were a number of smoking clubs thriving in London. They were called Divans and among the most famous were Whites in Devonshire Street and The Slipper Club in the Strand. Divan as a word derives from the Persian. It has vacillated its way through the English language swerving in meaning from a collection of poems to a courthouse to a room entirely open on one side towards a garden to a type of long seat but at one stage stopping at a club for smokers. The word divan then, is a good example of how a single point of departure, in this case a word, can come to mean many different things and travel far beyond itself.
    The Divans of the late nineteenth century allowed gentlemen to smoke in peace (see Disraeli, Endymion XX 1880). They were also places of refuge from women, who were strictly excluded from membership. It’s different now of course, at the end of another century. Smoke has been democratized, and it features in everyone’s photographed past. It has become a sign of the commonness of our humanity, the link between a Maori and a Mau-mau. It has been the century’s open addiction, the world-wide admission that breathing by itself is simply not enough.
    But it’s different now, like I said. It turns out that pleasure kills, as the strictest of history’s theologians always promised. A hundred years ago it must have all seemed so splendid, such an innocent pleasure so cleverly packaged and so obviously harmless that with hindsight it almost convinces, as feared by the Seventh Day Adventists, as the most perfect invention of hell itself.
    â€˜When I first wake up and feel depressed. When I’m tired and worn out or when the children get a bit stroppy. When I’m violently mad and about to throttle them. You know.’
    â€˜Here. Take these whenever you like. Do not exceed the recommended dose.’
    It was mostly women who came to Theo’s clinics, often with young children. They had a lifetime’s habit of sacrificing their own desires to please other people, and smoking was the solitary repeatable indulgence that could be called exclusively their own. Small comfort through it was, it was still a comfort.
    â€˜I was sort of on my own, and you can’t really sit and read a book so you think what the heck can I do and instead of twiddling your thumbs. I don’t know what made me do it. I just went round the corner, bought a