Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'Use them against the Duke and Duchess?' I asked, interrupting him. Against an ex-King? Or against the Gestapo?' The whole business really did sound like a lie, although it obviously wasn't.

'It went without saying that we should use them against the Gestapo, although I don't think we would have stood much of a chance. No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler's hands.'

'We understood? Not in so many words?' I was surprised by such expressions. 'Do you mean that they didn't give you clear orders?'

'MI6 was obsessed with never saying quite what it meant. But you soon learned to decode their orders, especially if you'd been at Oxford. I don't know if they still keep up the custom now. What they said to us, more or less, was: "Under no circumstances must they fall into enemy hands. It would be preferable to have to mourn them." The truth is that I would have interpreted this exactly as did he and the officer from the NID with whom he had shared responsibilities. And he went on to speak about the latter in an amused, almost jocular, gossipy tone: 'I bet you can't guess the name of the naval commander accompanying me.'

'No, I can't,' I said. 'How could I?'

'In fact, almost no one knows about this, not even his biographers.' Then he called out: 'Estelle!'And he automatically corrected himself: there was, after all, a witness present, even though I was a trusted friend and had occasionally heard him call her by her first name before. 'Mrs. Berry!' Mrs. Berry appeared at once, she was always close by, ready to be of service to him. 'Could you please bring me the Chocolate Sailor's passport? You know where I keep it. I want to show it to Jacobo.' That was what he said-'Chocolate Sailor.' 'Now you'll see, it will amuse you no end.' And when, after a few minutes, Mrs. Berry reappeared and handed him a document (I heard her go up the stairs to the top floor and then come back down again), he showed it to me with an almost childlike expression of shy pride on his face: 'Look.'

It was a safe-conduct pass or Courier's Passport as it said at the top, issued by the British ambassador in the city where I was born and valid only for a journey to Gibraltar and back, dated February 16,1941, right in the middle of the Second World War, and then renewed ten days later and made valid for a journey to London via Lisbon. 'These are to request and require, in the Name of His Majesty,' it read, 'all those whom it may concern to allow Mr. Ian Lancaster Fleming charged with despatches to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him every assistance and protection of which he may stand in need.'

'Oh, I see,' I said, unmoved. 'Ian Fleming.' Wheeler seemed a little disappointed by my lack of surprise. He didn't know that I had already stumbled on the dedications that the creator of James Bond had written in copies of his novels ( To Peter Wheeler who may know better. Salud!), which was why the fact that they were friends or acquaintances did not catch me entirely unawares. 'So they shared an adventure,' I thought, then said, in order to cheer him up: 'So the two of you shared an adventure in Spain, before he became a writer. How amazing.'

'This passport is from the following year. He gave it to me later on, when he was already famous, as a souvenir of our time in Portugal more than of our time in Spain. We were stuck there with that frivolous pair from June to August. Mrs. Simpson, I mean the Duchess, was not prepared to go into exile, which is how they saw it, without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bedlinen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service, all of which was supposed to arrive from Paris, via Madrid, in eight Hispano-Suizas hired by the multimillionaire Calouste Gulbenkian, a risky journey in those days. (Oddly enough, that was the same year in which Gulbenkian, who was Armenian in origin, was declared "Enemy under the Act" and thus lost his British nationality and became Persian instead; so when he helped the Duke and Duchess, I don't know if he was still a friend or an enemy.) Anyway, we had to wait in Estoril and accompany them each night to the casino, either Ian Fleming or myself or, more often, to be on the safe side, both of us. It's hardly surprising that there are so many casinos in the Bond novels: since the 1920s he had been a frequent visitor to the casinos in Deauville, Le Touquet, and later Biarritz; he loved to play, especially baccarat, which was a real stroke of luck because it meant the Duchess was kept entertained when he was around. (He never won very much and even lost, he was a fairly conservative player, placing low bets, not like the fictional character he created.) As for the Duke, at least he was a reasonable conversationalist. We had a somewhat bland but cordial relationship: he had studied here, at Magdalen, and so when I couldn't think how else to entertain him, I could always resort to telling him the latest Oxford gossip. He would listen in amazement, and with a touch of possibly feigned innocence, especially to news of any sexual shenanigans. But he didn't know how to laugh. A dull man and possibly not very bright, but worldly in a pleasant way and, of course, with impeccable manners: after all, there's no denying that he came from a good family.' And Peter laughed again at his little joke. 'Finally, we managed to send the royal couple off safe and sound, along with all the silver and porcelain and bedlinen, in a British destroyer that had been anchored in the Tagus, and it was with great relief that we saw them head off across the Atlantic, bound for the Bahamas. We parted company then, Ian Fleming and I, and didn't meet again until some time later. He was a personal assistant to Rear Admiral Godfrey and had a lot of contact with Hillgarth and with Sefton Delmer, I think he and the latter had been together in Moscow and they collaborated on the PWE's black game…'-'Black game,' he said. I had heard young Pérez Nuix use the term 'black gamblers' once, or was it 'wet gamblers'; it had made me think of cardsharps anyway. I didn't know what those initials, PWE, meant, but I didn't want to interrupt Wheeler.-'We lost track of each other, well, that was normal during the War, we were sent here, there and everywhere, wherever they chose to post us, and you always said goodbye to someone knowing full well that you probably wouldn't see them again. Not because it simply wouldn't happen, but because they or you or both of you might easily die. It happened every time I had to leave and say goodbye to Valerie… Every time…' His voice had been growing fainter and fainter until, when he spoke those last words, his voice was barely a murmur; he had probably worn himself out with speaking. He did not go on. He placed his two arms on the stick that lay across the arms of the chair, as if he had just engaged in some physical exertion and needed to rest. He looked tired, I thought, and his gaze was slightly abstracted. 'Yes, Sefton Delmer's black propaganda, that's what it was,' he added thoughtfully, then fell silent again. Perhaps he had remembered too much, mechanically at first and with great animation subsequently, but all memories lead to more memories and there is always a moment, sooner or later, when one comes upon a sad one, a loss, a nostalgia, an unhappiness that was not an invention. People then sit with eyes lowered or gaze abstracted and stop talking, fall silent.

'I don't know who Sefton Delmer was, Peter,' I said. 'Nor what PWE means.'

He raised his eyes and fixed them on me, wearily and with a certain bewilderment too. He said:

'Why are we talking about this? I don't know how it came up, I've forgotten.' The truth was I had forgotten too. 'Why don't you tell me something? You must have a reason for coming here today, without warning. I'm delighted to see you, but tell me, why have you come today?'