John Pearson - James Bond - The Authorised Biography

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.

HONEYCHILE 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 Deshonneur’ 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.