Migraines, nightmares, the ghost of your father trying clumsily to justify himself. Stinking breath, worms in the throat of the man who died of cirrhosis of the liver. ‘You can’t ask other people to be transparent, Archie. Even you aren’t transparent.’
Dodging journalists. A few months before, at your father’s funeral, you fell into the hands of a clutch of reporters. Then the meeting:
‘Mother. I’m here.’
She remembers you in short trousers, Archie.
She doesn’t recognise you, Cary. She doesn’t know you’re a famous actor.
‘Archie, my boy. Is it really you? Have you missed your old mum?’
A life annuity. Finances administered by the office of Davies, Kirby and Karath in London. A house all to herself, where you can go and see her. No servants, though: ‘I can manage fine on my own, my darling, I don’t want people buzzing around me telling me what to do, and you see, keeping myself busy keeps me alive, my love.’
And here she is now, in 1954, in Bristol, in the strangest days of your life; you open the door and see the little old woman sitting at the end of the corridor. Will she recognise you, under a quarter of an inch of beard, and wrapped up in a grey duffel-coat? When you take off your hat (Cary hates hats!) your old mother’s face lights up with surprise. She gets up with a little start, throws up her arms and shrieks, ‘Archie! Son! I’m so happy to see you!’
The world has gone mad today.
A few hours after saying goodbye to his old mother, Cary — booked into a small hotel in Swindon under the name of ‘George Kaplan’, his bodyguards’ rooms on the same floor — sought sleep by reading this man Fleming’s little book. The protagonist was a bold and arrogant secret agent on a mission to the French town of Royale-les-Eaux. MI6 had given him an unlimited budget: stratospheric sums to bet at baccarat, extremely generous tips distributed to the hotel concierges, glass after glass of vodka.
For a few moments Bond sat motionless, gazing out of the window across the dark sea, then he shoved the bundle of banknotes under the pillow of the ornate single bed, cleaned his teeth, turned out the lights and climbed with relief between the harsh French sheets. For ten minutes he lay on his left side reflecting on the events of the day. Then he turned over and focused his mind towards the tunnel of sleep.
Cary looked up: around him, peeling, faded wallpaper. Bubbles had formed, distorting aeroplanes and small smiling women. There was a small, almost invisible hole in the pillow. Every now and again a feather came out. The light from the lamp was too faint. The only window looked out on to a little alleyway with no distinguishing features. Outside it was raining.
The plot was about espionage and games of chance. Bond had to trap a communist double-agent, Le Chiffre, by setting a trap for him in the Casino Royale.
Bond liked to make a good breakfast. He consumed half a pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon and a double portion of coffee without sugar. He lit his first cigarette, a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street.
Paragraph after paragraph of pointless details, depicting a lifestyle that struck Cary as brash and fake:
Bond’s car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4 1/2-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers. It was a battleship-grey convertible coupé, which really did convert, and it was capable of touring at ninety with.
Cary closed the book, put out the light and ‘focused his mind towards the tunnel of sleep’.
Frances Farmer arrived at two in the morning. Archie and Cary dreamt of her locked up in the lunatic asylum in Fishponds, but tranquilised by American paramedics, rednecks to a man, not even shouting, then alone, her knees in a puddle of urine with saliva and cigarette butts floating about in it.
‘Archie, my son. Have you missed your old mum?’
A crowd of people screamed from a single throat: a nine-year-old child coming home and being unable to find his mother, a famous actor meeting up with his mother after twenty-one years of separation; an English proletarian imprisoned in the body and the myth of the most stylish man in the world; an ex-actor racked with doubts about his future; the double of a certain Jean-Jacques Bondurant; a Caucasian with a terrible nostalgia for the invention of King C. Gillette; a secret agent involved in a bizarre diplomatic enterprise; a paranoid schizophrenic persecuted by ghosts; and last of all, one ‘George Kaplan’.
The little hotel was filled with voices and hubbub. The bodyguards, in their shirtsleeves, burst open the door but stayed out of the opening, then dived on to the floor of the room, revolvers at the ready. When they saw that Cary was (apparently) alone, they got back up, and one of them asked, ‘Is everything all right, Mr Kaplan?’
Cary, in a pair of dark-blue pyjamas with two or three white feathers stuck to it, and a beard almost half an inch long, looked at them and replied, ‘Yes. It was just a bad dream. Forgive me.’
When they had gone, Cary got up, brushed down his pyjamas, took a needle and thread from his jacket pocket and mended the hole in the pillow. He sat down on the bed and opened Fleming’s book again. Chapter 6 was called ‘Two Men in Straw Hats’.
Chapter 47
Flying over the Channel, 26 April
The communist agents were described as utter imbeciles, incompetents with shady attitudes, and recognisable from a hundred yards away.
James Bond walks along the footpath. On the other side of the tree-lined avenue, two strange figures leaning against a plane tree. They are dressed alike: dark, ‘rather hot-looking’ suits (how could you fail to notice a detail like that, from only a hundred yards away?) and straw hats decorated with a black ribbon. They are both wearing cameras around their necks, although one of them is carrying his in a red case, the other in a blue case. Bond makes his way towards them, wondering what sort of attack he’s going to have to deal with. Red-man nods to Blue-man, who takes out his camera, kneels down. and is ripped apart by a terrible explosion. The impact sends Bond flying and blows down the two nearest trees, the others escaping with scorched foliage. All around, the stench of roast mutton. The two figures are reduced to scraps of flesh. The explanation comes a few chapters later: two Bulgarian hired killers. Their instructions: to unleash a smoke screen from the blue case, while the red one was a bomb to be thrown at Bond. Protected by the smoke, the assassins were to make their getaway unharmed. In actual fact, both the cases were bombs, the goal being to eliminate Bond and leave no witnesses alive.
Scratching the dense bristles on his cheeks in disbelief, Cary had reread the whole section out loud, for the benefit of his escort.
‘Who does this guy Fleming think he’s kidding? First of all, there have been no reports of any bombing attacks by Soviet agents in Western Europe; secondly, a sequence of events of that kind is extremely unlikely; and last of all, if every enemy operation were to conclude with the elimination of the perpetrators, there would be no enemy left!’
‘Well said, and in any case Soviet agents aren’t like that, and neither are agents working on Her Majesty’s service: this man Bond is a dandy, and his conduct on the mission is thoroughly reprehensible. Besides, MI6 would never burden the Commonwealth Exchequer with the budget of such a bizarre mission, set entirely in the world of gambling.’
They were as boring as a conference of Flemish podiatrists.
This conversation had taken place in the truck bringing him to the little military airport from which they had taken off for the Free Territory of Trieste.
On the plane, Cary put aside the novel, and concentrated on the files.