Bond wanted to keep her mood. He said, ‘But what happened to the hero’s pictures? How did the cigarette people get hold of them?’
‘Oh well, you see one day a man with a stove-pipe hat and a frock coat came into the hero’s pub with two small boys. Here,’ she held the packet sideways, ‘those are the ones, “John Player & Sons”. You see, it says that their Successors run the business now.
Well they had one of the first motor-cars, a Rolls-Royce, and it had broken down outside the hero’s pub. The man in the stove-pipe hat didn’t drink of course – those sort of people didn’t, not the respectable merchants who lived near Bristol. So he asked for ginger beer and bread and cheese while his chauffeur mended the car. And the hero got it for them. And Mr John Player and the boys all admired the two wonderful tapestry pictures hanging on the wall of the pub. Now this Mr Player was in the tobacco and snuff business and cigarettes had just been invented and he wanted to start making them. But he couldn’t for the life of him know what to call them or what sort of a picture to put on the packet. And he suddenly had a wonderful idea. When he got back to the factory he talked to his manager and the manager came along to the pub and saw the hero and offered him a hundred pounds to let his two pictures be copied for the cigarette packet. And the hero didn’t mind and anyway he wanted just exactly a hundred pounds to get married on.’ She paused. Her eyes were far away. ‘She was very nice, by the way, only thirty and a good plain cook and her young body kept him warm in bed until he died many years later. And she bore him two children, a boy and a girl. And the boy went into the Navy like his father. Well, anyway, Mr Player wanted to have the hero in the lifebuoy on one side of the packet and the beautiful evening on the other. But the manager pointed out that that would leave no room for all this’ – she turned over the packet – ‘about “Rich, Cool”, and “Navy Cut Tobacco” and that extraordinary trade mark of a doll’s house swimming in chocolate fudge with Nottingham Castle written underneath. So then Mr Player said, “Well then, we’ll put one on top of the other.” And that’s just exactly what they did and I must say I think it fits in very well, don’t you? Though I expect the hero was pretty annoyed at the mermaid being blanked out.’
‘The mermaid?’
‘Oh yes. Underneath the bottom corner of the lifebuoy where it dips into the sea, the hero had put a tiny mermaid combing her hair with one hand and beckoning him home with the other. That was supposed to be the woman he was going to find and marry. But you can see there wasn’t room and anyway her breasts were showing and Mr Player, who was a very strong Quaker, didn’t think that was quite proper. But he made it up to the hero in the end.’
‘Oh, how did he do that?’
‘Well you see the cigarettes were a great success. It was really the picture that did it. People decided that anything with a wonderful picture like that on the outside must be good and Mr Player made a fortune and I expect his Successors did too. So when the hero was getting old and hadn’t got long to live, Mr Player had a copy of the lifebuoy picture drawn by the finest artist of the day. It was just the same as the hero’s except that it wasn’t in colour and it showed him very much older, and he promised the hero that this picture too would always be on his cigarette packets, only on the inside bit. Here.’ She pushed out the cardboard container. ‘You see how old he looks? And one other thing, if you look closely, the flags on the two ships are flying at half mast. Rather sweet of Mr Player, don’t you think, to ask the artist for that. It meant that the hero’s first and last ships were remembering him. And Mr Player and his two sons came and presented it to him just before he died. It must have made it much easier for him don’t you think?’
‘It certainly must. Mr Player must have been a very thoughtful man.’
The girl was slowly returning from her dreamland. She said in a different, rather prim voice, ‘Well thank you anyway for having listened to the story. I know it’s all a fairy tale. At least I suppose it is. But children are stupid in that way. They like to have something to keep under the pillow until they’re quite grown up – a rag doll or a small toy or something. I know that boys are just the same. My brother hung on to a little metal charm his nanny had given him until he was nineteen. Then he lost it. I shall never forget the scenes he made. Even though he was in the air force by then and it was the middle of the war. He said it brought him luck.’ She shrugged her shoulders. There was sarcasm in her voice as she said, ‘He needn’t have worried. He did all right. He was much older than me, but I adored him. I still do. Girls always love crooks, particularly if they’re their brother. He did so well that he might have done something for me. But he never did. He said that life was every man for himself. He said that his grandfather had been so famous as a poacher and a smuggler in the Dolomites that his was the finest tombstone among all the Petacchi graves in the graveyard at Bolzano. My brother said he was going to have a finer one still, and by making money the same way.’
Bond held his cigarette steady. He took a long draw at it and let the smoke out with a quiet hiss. ‘Is your family name Petacchi then?’
‘Oh yes. Vitali is only a stage name. It sounded better so I changed it. Nobody knows the other. I’ve almost forgotten it myself. I’ve called myself Vitali since I came back to Italy. I wanted to change everything.’
‘What happened to your brother? What was his first name?’
‘Giuseppe. He went wrong in various ways. But he was a wonderful flyer. Last time I heard of him he’d been given some high-up job in Paris. Perhaps that’ll make him settle down. I pray every night that it will. He’s all I’ve got. I love him in spite of everything. You understand that?’
Bond stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. He called for the bill. He said, ‘Yes, I understand that.’