John Pearson - James Bond - The Authorised Biography

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 Kitzbuhel 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.

‘I've just had London on the line. It seems they're serious. Could I come up and see you? Yes, straight away. Fine. Many thanks.’

Then he apologized to me, and said he would continue his story later that afternoon.

But he didn't. I lunched alone, then went to sleep beside the pool and woke just before five with a headache. The hotel suddenly seemed empty. When I rang Bond's room he wasn't there, nor was Sir William. I dined alone and was in bed by ten.

Next morning Bond was back again soon after breakfast. He seemed quite jaunty but he made no reference to his telephone call from London nor to what was going on. Instead he took out the gun-metal cigarette case, stretched himself out in the bamboo chair, and continued his story. That mask-like face was adept at concealing what he was thinking. He described the aftermath of Tracy's death. When he got back to London, May was waiting for him in the flat. Winter had started. Nothing had really changed. Even Bond's old arch-enemy Blofeld was still at large and still as menacing as ever. Fortunately M. did have sufficient tact not to give Bond the thankless task of trailing him again.

It took some time for the real shock of Tracy's death to hit him. He had such self-control that his grief remained inside him. Few people realized what he was suffering. Probably the only one who did was Sir James Molony, and his advice was simple. ‘Work!’ Bond did his best to follow it. But something indefinable had gone.

Everything he did was a disaster – he says that he's not certain why. ‘I can't believe that I was any less efficient or aggressive than in the old days but my luck had gone. Gamblers run out of luck. So do agents in the Secret Service. With Tracy's death all my luck turned. None of my 1962 assignments seemed to go right.’

The worst was the Prenderghast Affair and once again Bond's luck let him down; this time, however, with results that shook the whole structure of the Secret Service. Prenderghast was Station Head in Rome. Bond had known him for years and liked him. He had a distinguished record as a Fleet Air Arm pilot during the war and later served with Bond for some years in the 00 section. For the past five years he had been in Rome, and Bond never failed to see him when he was in the city. For Prenderghast was fun. He knew all the gossip and his apartment just behind the Via dei Coronari was a splendid place for lunch. Bond also found him a good friend and a sympathetic listener. He was intelligent, efficient and he knew his job.