Slowing Down (18 page)
For several days I suffered no temptation, but then, seeing someone I knew in my local getting a cigarette out, I asked him if he could spare one and he said ‘Of course’ and it tasted marvellous. I was again hooked and used this poncing technique for some time. Only once was I refused. A gruff Northerner in the bar attached to the golf club near the lake where I used to fish said ‘No – buy your own’ and quite soon after that I began to, but only ten at a time, when I was out of the cottage. Then I took to leaving a packet behind the counter in the local pub and asking for one, but only when I needed it.
At that time I tried to hide my lapsing from my wife with the use of a product called Gold Spot, a small spray that concealed all ‘odours on the breath’. It seemed, however, that she’d begun to be suspicious. What, she asked me, was the pile of matches in my bathroom doing stacked behind my tooth-mug? I told her my mother had claimed they destroyed ‘unpleasant odours after an Eartha Kitt’. Even so, Diana had noticed how often in London I was visiting the local at odd times of the day.
The denouement came when I was invited to speak at a conference on art and business in Belfast. I spoke entirely on art, having as much aptitude and indeed enthusiasm for business as a solitary anchovy. By this time, when not in London or Berkshire, I’d given up even trying, and during one of the most boring and suspect lectures on buying art
for profit, I sneaked out through a side entrance and sat on a concrete block near the water smoking a much-craved Sweet Afton (I always support the
tabac du pays
, Gauloises in France, for example).
What I didn’t know was that, under a wet leather hat like a cow-pat and, very bent to ease my back, under a heavy coat of the same origin, I was giving a good impression of Quasimodo. I was unaware that a press photographer, recognizing a grotesque image, had taken several pictures, one of which appeared on the front page of an Ulster paper days after I’d gone with my name printed underneath it.
Among the other participants at the conference was an old friend, the novelist, fashion editor and columnist Polly Devlin, married now for many years to my old flatmate of the fifties, Andy Garnett. On my last evening we had had a jolly booze-up in a huge hotel, as security-minded as an Iraqi police station, and directly opposite a beautiful Victorian pub (unspoilt) where some of the action of that great film
Odd Man Out
took place. I smoked, but told Polly that I tried to keep it secret from Diana.
After I’d gone back to London the ‘Patience Sitting on a Monument Smoking’ photograph appeared, and Polly sent it to me with a joke about being able to blackmail me if she threatened to tell Diana. What she didn’t know was that Diana, being in charge of the business side of my life and supervisor of my professional engagements as well (the latter often confused by me, especially as my latest ‘senior moment’ is to forget what date it is), opens all my post if it hasn’t got ‘Personal’ written on the envelope.
Shock! Horror! And confrontation! It was irrefutable evidence, the equivalent of a knock-me-down clue in a TV
detective or legal drama which, produced at the last moment in court, reveals the real villain.
For a start Diana was furious with Polly about the joke and it was a long time before they made it up. As for me, after a real dressing down (justified, I have to agree), she sent me back to the hypnotist for another brainwash.
It was like the second take of a scene in a movie, only this time my part in it was less convincing. I had doubts before going into the room, but felt obliged to give it a whirl.
Take Two: the man behind the desk, the couch (or was it an adjustable easy chair for the hypnotic sequence?), the pyramid, even higher than before, the almost identical lecture which, if I had taken his place I could have delivered myself, largely because I agreed with everything he said, the packet of Benson and Hedges, the brand I had taken to, the heavy, hopefully final near-chain-smoke, the disposal on command of the packet, the easy slide into a mesmerized state of unconsciousness.
This time I came to convinced, but less so than before, that it had (or might) have worked. My instructor was opening the window to clear at least a little of the smoke I was responsible for.
I said I certainly didn’t want a cigarette and would try harder this time to avoid giving in. I thanked him and was about to leave the room to pay the bill (quite hefty, but it would soon have been covered by the money I’d save by not adding to the profits of Benson and Hedges) when he said something so perspicacious as to give me pause. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well I hope this time it really does take, only,’ he told me, ‘you’re a rebel.’
Rebel? The word is perhaps, over romantic for me. Che Guevara I’m not. What I am, though, is obstinate, sometimes provoked into anger by stupidity, deceit, bullying and my own conviction. I supported, fairly actively on occasion, CND, homosexual rights, the legalization of soft drugs, anti-apartheid and the right to early abortion. As you see, a typical liberal list. I have, too, on occasion, acted out of personal rather than public reasons. I am also a convinced atheist. Of none of this I’m ashamed, but I lie quite often, partially to escape hurting people but also to avoid, usually at the same time, heavy confrontations or doing something I don’t want to.
So, of course, not so long after my second session, I again started smoking, at first asking smokers to spare me one, then buying first ten, then twenty cigarettes, and was, I forget quite how, found out again.
Diana had been cured of arachnophobia by another healing guru, this time a young American, practising in Windsor, and I said I’d see him. So from Newbury I went to Windsor and there was the very agreeable Yank. As I left, he gave me a tape he’d recorded of our session. The end of it is this: ‘George, you weren’t born with a cigarette in your mouth and you won’t die with one either.’ Would that both parts were true! Even as I left him – and I’d liked him a lot – I recognized that my fall from a state of nicotine-free grace would not be long. I sat in a café in the shadow of Windsor Castle, drank a coffee, ate a Danish pastry and wished I was opening a new pack and holding a match or lighter to a cigarette. Diana had lost.
Back in London on TV, Nic O’Teen, a predictably demonic figure, strove with an addicted teenager. For more
grown-up smokers, a pretty girl physically set about a five-foot ciggy with a silly face and eventually knocked it, bent double, into a dustbin. Then there was a cheerful person wearing yellow rubber gloves washing up. The commentator told us that after eating is the most likely time to give in and advised us to do something to take our minds off it. Washing up, for instance: impossible to smoke while wearing wet rubber gloves. Finally there were two young lovers about to kiss, I got the impression in a cinema, but surely there I am mistaken, as it is prohibited. At all events, on contact she immediately pulls back and tells him in disgust, and with a predictable Estuary accent: ‘You tyest like aneshtry.’ I don’t think that even smokers, certainly not me, would lick out an ashtray for pleasure.
I am remembering these attempts to lead us into a smokeless universe and to help recover our sense of taste and smell. There is, however, a fake solution available at any chemist, a small if rather expensive tube called Gold Plus. It used to be red or green (mint) but now, in my recent experience, it’s black. Whatever the colour, it has a gold cap to justify its trade-name, which makes it look really expensive, as though it were a phial of a scent so pricey as to be saleable to all but millionairesses only in such a Lilliputian container.
To reinforce this illusion, when you remove the top there is a black push-button spray with a small white hole on one side. This you direct towards your open mouth and press down the knob at the top. I give it three squirts and it does exactly what it promises. It also kills the reek of garlic, curry and certainly the ashtray effect. I’ve known people to recognize it or ask what it is that’s making my breath smell
so medicinal (it is quite assertive), but I have never known anyone say ‘You’ve been smoking’, and even the girl rejecting the attentions of the young man might have been deceived.
About bad breath as such I can’t say much because so few people are prepared to tell you, or you them. There are, however, exceptions even here. For instance, in the fifties an Australian jazz band arrived here fronted by Graeme Bell on piano. It was an enormous success on its first visit, less so on its second appearance when the revivalist boom was beginning to fade somewhat.
They brought with them on both occasions a manager called Mel Langdon, a man who knew no fear. In Sheffield, when he was interviewed by a local journalist, a very tall, perfectly agreeable man, but famous throughout the British jazz world for his constant five-star bad breath, Mel found himself trapped in a corner of the dressing-room. This unfortunate ‘journo’ (Oz slang) furthermore had an unfortunate habit, being so tall, of leaning forward.
Now British jazz musicians, while quite prepared to joke viciously about this man’s physical handicap, would never have dreamed of bringing it to his attention. Mel Langdon had no such inhibitions. ‘I say, old man,’ he observed, ‘your Macbeth’s a bit tragic!’ This observation was overheard by several British ‘musos’ (another Oz abbreviation) and took no time to spread, like an Australian bush fire, throughout our ranks. Relieved at last by Mel’s frankness, we felt like medieval princesses rescued by a courageous (rather rude) knight facing a fire-breathing dragon.
Shortened to ‘tragic Macbeth’, it gave us at least a comical
expression for this widespread complaint, although British kindness or cowardice (take your choice) still inhibits us from instantly informing the unconscious offender of his rotting gums or faulty digestive tract. What we fear is umbrage and resentment, just as most of us feel if accused of having too much hair sprouting from our ears or nostrils.
In a longish and what my paternal grandmother called a dissipated life, I have only been told once that my Macbeth was tragicand that was eight years before I smoked consistently, so it must have been intestinal. In a classroom at Stowe, sitting next to an exceptionally beautiful boy, I said something, presumably flirtatious, and he, with the voice of a drill sergeant ordering a new conscript to get his hair cut, told me to face the other way if I wanted to say anything to him.
I was surprised, shocked and ashamed, but it had an effect. I brushed my teeth, gargled and, even if I didn’t need to, I would each morning heave and strain in what Stoics call (or called, in my time) ‘Egypt’. It gained this rather odd appellation because, under the steps leading up to the grand entrance of the North Front, a rather whimsical early nineteenth-century architect had designed a foyer in the Egyptian manner: hieroglyphics, columns à la Hoover factory and a lavatory. Naturally enough it was this that earned the loo its appropriate nickname, which soon spread throughout the school and was not uniquely applied to its original source. As a result the very name Egypt, used outside its lavatorial context, reduced most Stoics to ill-controlled giggles.
Both the Old and New Testaments were dangerous territories. To take just two examples, in the Old Testament, Moses led the Jews
out
of Egypt, in the New the Holy Family fled
into
it. Max Miller would have been proud of
the hysterical, if suppressed, laughter these harmless tales provoked.
Even today, over sixty years later, the mention of Egypt on a news bulletin can raise a smile. I wonder if all Old Stoics find it to have the same effect?
Once more the WingCo caught me out. This was when I was going to bed, probably after a nightcap, or eight. I left half a packet of Marlboro Lites lying in neat alignment with a lighter with lips on it, on the writing table in my bedroom. (I wasn’t, however, ‘elevated’, as the Regency port-swiggers termed it.)
I didn’t even try to defend myself this time, and only a day or two later we set out together to see Dr Kohn, my lung man.
First I had to have another scan. Yet again I was ordered to hold my breath, breathe out as fast as I could and then do it all again, but normally. Throughout, as before, like a
son et lumière
show, a psychedelic necklace flicked along the narrow gutter towards the top of the tube from which either one’s head or feet projected, like a girl in a conjurer’s act about to be sawn in two.
Dr Kohn first examined the new X-rays and compared them with those on my last visit. My second white spot on the lungs had, unlike the first, not disappeared between appointments. It was therefore still suspect, but without inserting a syringe big enough to knock out an adult African bull elephant in musk, there was no way to be certain. As before, I refused any physical intervention, but wanted to know if it had increased in size. ‘Yes,’ said Dr Kohn looking at both X-rays side by side, ‘but at most a millimetre.’
Although unable to memorize any Euro-revision of weights and measures, I gathered at least that this was a minimal growth.
As for my other threatener, emphysema, it too, while still there slopping about in the bottom of my lungs, was under control, my breathing (thanks, I’m sure, to my multicoloured puffers) steady and free from wheezing.
I told him, confirmed by the WingCo as if reporting an airman’s serious offence to a superior officer, that I was smoking again.
Dr Kohn didn’t explode as certain doctors would have done. It was my decision, he told me. Better if I didn’t, but he knew I refused to take several months off for an operation; and it was doubtful anyway if a surgeon would consent to perform one with my irregular heartbeat and other conceivably damaging factors. He took in also that at seventy-eight I was determined to enjoy myself rather than tremble and shake before the future. Diana, perhaps with reluctance (but at least she had tried her best to wean me off lighting up), accepted what he’d said.
He also added, rather reassuringly, that if I became really ill my present intransigence would in no way affect any future treatment.
We then had a little chat about the recent jazz night in a rather Hammer-film-Gothic nightclub for the benefit, appropriately enough, of St Mary’s cancer research. Dr Kohn wanted to know whether I would appear at their next one, almost a year ahead. ‘Of course,’ I said, and for nothing as before. After all, I owe a great deal to that hospital and besides, Dr Kohn’s belief that I’d be here to attend cheered me up no end.