James Bond: The Authorised Biography (41 page)

Bond was rung up by his friend in the Greek Embassy. He was apologetic for the time he had taken over Bond's inquiry.

‘Inquiry?’ said Bond.

‘Yes,’ said the Greek. ‘About that island called Spirellos.’

‘I'd clean forgotten about it,’ said Bond.

‘Perhaps you should go there for a summer holiday,’ said the Greek. ‘It's a nudist island, like the Ile de Levant off Toulon. It's very smart – lots of young girls, and I'm told it's very popular with old men like you.’

And then Bond realized the truth. He should have guessed earlier. Ever since the
Thunderball
affair he had known of M.'s taste for health foods and nature clinics. What could have been more obvious than for him to have moved on to naturism? Bond only hoped that M. had enjoyed himself. But somehow he doubted whether he would be going back.

15

‘The Bastard's Gone’

H
ONEYCHILE GAVE A party. The beautiful white yacht, the flawless evening with the full moon rising, candlelight and good champagne, the island glittering against a phosphorescent sea – it should have been romantic. Instead that whole evening seemed unreal and quite extraordinarily sad. The telegram from M. had settled things. Bond was resigning from the Secret Service and marrying Honeychile. The party was to celebrate the fact.

Honey had laid on all the guests, along with the champagne. There was a retired U.S. Army General (who had a speech impediment or was very drunk), a beetle-browed Greek millionaire with bright gold teeth, a recently divorced young actress and several distinctly baffled guests from the hotel invited, presumably, to fill the space. Most of them seemed like wakes attending a burial at sea.

Bond was the only one who seemed entirely at ease. He wore a beautifully cut white dinner suit and had a presence to be proud of. It seemed absurd to think that this tall figure with the lean tanned face was in his early fifties. He was extremely affable, laughing and joking and cheerfully talking golf to the General – this in itself a notable ordeal. Was he really happy – or resigned? Or was this one more role that he was playing? What a strange, enigmatic man he was.

Honey, for all her youth and nervous energy, was looking older now. She also seemed distinctly anxious; vibrant and restless as a yo-yo, chatting to everyone and flashing her extraordinary smile.

‘The smile on the face of the tiger,’ said a voice beside me. It was Sir William Stephenson who was benignly watching what was going on.

‘Well, she's succeeded – like the tiger,’ I replied.

‘I wouldn't be so sure,’ he said, ‘She's not the first one to have tried, you know.’

But if James Bond was harbouring doubts about his future, he was keeping them strictly to himself. I saw him smiling frequently at Honey. When I congratulated him he nodded and replied that he thought that he'd enjoy himself. This seemed an odd remark from someone on the eve of marriage.

‘You're really giving up the old life then?’ I said.

The grey eyes narrowed. ‘Oh yes, I think so. All that's over. Time for a change. I'm getting on, you know.’

‘What are your plans,’ I asked.

‘Oh, I've a great deal to catch up on. I really won't object to being out to grass. Between us we've a lot of friends around the world, and Honey's business interests will be taking up my time. I thought I'd even try my hand at writing. There's that book I started on self-defence. Fleming was very keen that I should finish it. He even suggested a tide.’

‘What was that?’

‘Stay Alive!
From now on that will be my motto.’

But despite Bond's optimism about his future, the air of melancholy lingered. As I left the yacht somebody was playing the Beatles’ record, ‘Yesterday’. I noticed Bond was on his own and staring out to sea. An era suddenly seemed over.

*

He had promised to conclude his story whilst he and Honey stayed on in Bermuda to complete formalities for their marriage – ‘that will be my last task for the Secret Service’. (Honey apparently had wanted the invaluable Captain Cullum to give them a shipboard wedding. Bond had vetoed the idea.) He also said he needed to make his official resignation from the Service. This would apparently take a little time.

‘I want it all done properly,’ he said. ‘I'm not having anybody say that I left out of pique or that I've acted badly. I simply feel that the time has come …’

He raised both hands and made a slight grimace. This morning his confidence seemed to have deserted him and his face looked haggard. He had come down to see me in my room and we were sitting, as we had on that first morning after my arrival, out on the balcony. Bond was in the bamboo chair. When I think of him today, this is how I picture him – the strange mask of a face outlined against the sapphire waters of the harbour. Below us in the hotel pool the everlasting honeymooners giggled and splashed and swam; a fat girl was astride a plastic duck; the pool professional bounded from the spring-board, jack-knifed, then speared his languid way into the water.

Bond took no notice as he sipped his coffee and began describing the conclusion of that frustrating year he spent trailing his vanished enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Although Bond had saved M. from the threat of blackmail, the atmosphere within headquarters still seemed distinctly fraught. M. was as difficult as ever – particularly with Bond. (Indeed, Bond wondered if M. knew what he had done for him. Far from feeling grateful, he may have secretly resented him knowing what had happened. It seemed likely.) As summer ended Bond was still stuck behind his desk in London. This seemed ridiculous. Boredom enhanced his discontent, and he suspected that behind all this inaction, he was being quietly forgotten. By September 1961, when Fleming showed him at the start of
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
, Bond was about to kick. As Fleming revealed (Bond was to wish he hadn't) he was actually composing his letter of resignation from the Secret Service when the book began. It was against this background that one of the key episodes in James Bond's life suddenly occurred.

It all started with his visit to the grave of Vesper Lynd at the small French seaside town of Royale-les-Eaux. It was ten years since the Casino-Royale affair, and during this time he'd scarcely given her a thought. But when he found himself suddenly back at Royale, her memory began to haunt him. He had been on one more fruitless European trip to track down Blofeld and the soft September weather, the melancholy nostalgia of the time of year, caught him off guard. He had a private sense of failure – in his life as well as his career – and now he was indulging in remorse. The dead Vesper Lynd reminded him of all the women he had loved and who had died.

As he described her Bond made it clear that these deaths still troubled him, for as he said, ‘when it's too late you realize what you've done’. As he said this the sardonic mouth relaxed, the cruel eyes softened and I began to understand something of the tragedy that had occurred that autumn.

Fleming has described the way Bond met the girl he was to marry – the Countess Teresa di Vicenzo. Her father was a man called Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Deadly ‘Union Corse’ which still controls most of the organized crime in France and her ex-colonies. Her husband had conveniently vanished. She drove a white two-seater Zagato-bodied Lancia Flaminia – very fast. This was a favourite car of Bond's and when he first encountered her along the N.1 between Abbeville and Montreuil she seemed like just another rich, disposable young woman for Bond to pursue, sleep with, and forget. But in the sentimental atmosphere of Royale-les-Eaux that autumn, she became something more. He was soon calling her not ‘Countess di Vicenzo’ but plain ‘Tracy’ and saved her from the ‘Coup de Déshonneur’ in the casino by paying her gambling debts. He made love to her that night, and as she gave herself to him she cynically remarked that this would be ‘the most expensive piece of love of your life.’

But Bond wasn't feeling cynical and after that one night found himself in love with this vulnerable young blonde. In retrospect this must have been inevitable. For Tracy was the sort of girl Bond could never quite resist, part waif, part wanton and in constant need of his protection. There was a touch of Vesper Lynd about her, and by marrying her Bond felt that he could save her, and redeem himself.

This love affair took place against the events which Fleming has described in
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
– events which ironically proved M.'s hunch about Blofeld to have been correct. Blofeld was alive and still as dangerous and threatening as ever. Under the unusual cover of an official from the London College of Arms, Bond tracked him down to his mountain hideaway above Geneva and found Blofeld, his face restructured through skilful plastic surgery and his eyes hidden behind dark contact lenses. And it was here too that he met the unappetising Fraulein Irma Bunt of the yellow eyes, fought his great battle with the Spectre killers, and finally destroyed the Blofeld plan to bring Britain to her knees by waging biological warfare on her agriculture.

But Bond clearly felt that Fleming had failed to do justice to his love for Tracy. ‘When I decided I would marry her it wasn't quite the spur-of-the-moment thing he makes it seem. We had it all carefully planned out. Both of us realized that we had to settle down and that this was suddenly our chance. I was still debating whether to leave the Secret Service. I hadn't quite decided, but I would certainly have moved out of the 00 section – it wouldn't have been fair to her to have stayed. We also planned to give up the flat and move out of London – probably to Kent. I even found a house for sale that would have suited us – on the cliffs above St Margaret's Bay. You could see France from the bedroom windows.’

‘You'd have been happy there?’

Bond shrugged and smiled ruefully.

‘How can you ever tell? Certainly we both thought so. I'd learned a lot since my affair with Tiffany and neither of us was exactly innocent. She'd been married already and I'd had enough affairs to last a lifetime.’

‘But what about that old enemy of yours, the soft life as Fleming called it? Wouldn't the boredom of a settled married life have caught you in the end.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not with her. I honestly don't think it would. She wasn't in the least possessive and I think I'd – shall we say I'd mellowed since my time with Tiffany?’

He paused to light a cigarette. He was smoking heavily.

‘As you know, that madman Blofeld had to destroy it all. Even today I sometimes find myself unable to believe what happened. When the assignment finished I took my two weeks’ leave and we were married in Munich. We'd finally succeeded and we were very happy. That of course was the trouble. I still reproach myself for what occurred. Normally I'd have been on my guard and Blofeld wouldn't have been able to get away with it. For that matter, instead of marrying Tracy, I should still have been after him. Instead of which I let him go. Still, one pays for one's mistakes. Or rather, this time Tracy did.’

‘Fleming described it all. We were driving to Kitzbühel for our honeymoon – I hadn't been there since before the war, but for me it always had been one of those special places where I had once been very happy. I'd always promised that I'd take the woman that I married there.’ He paused. ‘You've no idea how many times I've been over those last few minutes in my mind. You see, it really was my fault. I think Fleming explained how we passed the filling station and saw a red Maserati standing there with two people in it. It was an open car, and the people were muffled up and wearing goggles. I didn't recognize them consciously, but you know how it is. There was something familiar about them, something that rang a warning at the back of my mind. Normally I'd have paid attention to that warning – you have to in a job like mine. That's how you stay alive. But I ignored it. I was happy and I ignored it. That was why she died. The man in the Maserati was Blofeld: the woman with him was Irma Bunt. When they overtook us and the Bunt woman fired at us, the shot was meant for me. Instead it caught Tracy. It went through the heart. She died immediately.’

Bond described this unemotionally, almost casually, as if it had all happened years ago to someone else.

‘Didn't you want revenge?’ I asked.

‘No, not particularly. There was no point in it – no point at all. People were very kind – even old M. in his funny way. Bill Tanner came out to help clear up the mess and Marc-Ange came and buried her. Not that it made the slightest difference. She was dead and that was that and of course I thought that I had killed her. You see, so many women I had loved had died, and suddenly it all came home to me. Aunt Charmian had always talked about the curse of the Bonds. It was a sort of joke, but now I honestly believed it. It was partly shock, of course, but I believed that I was damned – that I could never hope to get away from this one life I knew. I felt I was condemned to go on in the Secret Service.’ He smiled. ‘Stupid, wasn't it?’

He lit another cigarette and then the telephone rang in the room. I got up to answer it. The operator said, ‘London on the line.’ There was a pause, the line clicked, and another voice said crisply, ‘Universal Export for Commander Bond.’ I called him in. I heard him say, ‘Oh, hullo Bill. You at last. Where have
you
been? Yes certainly – I've quite made up my mind.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, I see.’ And then, annoyingly, he shut the door.

He was on the telephone some time, twenty minutes or maybe more. When he came out onto the balcony he seemed preoccupied and sat smoking, saying nothing. Finally he said, ‘Sorry, but something’s just cropped up. May I use your telephone again?’ I heard him ask the operator for Sir William Stephenson.