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

I remained silent for a moment, I couldn't help shooting another surreptitious, Lorenesque glance at the run, which was still following its course. It wouldn't be long before her tights split apart, and then she'd have to take them off, and what would happen then?

'Wasn't James Bond supposed to be a field agent?' I asked unexpectedly, unexpectedly to her at least, because she gave a startled laugh and answered, still laughing:

'Yes, of course. But what's that got to do with anything?

'I don't know, but he spends money like water, and it's never seemed to me that he has any problems with budget restraints.'

Young Pérez Nuix laughed again, and perhaps not only out of politeness, but because my facile joke had genuinely amused her. It may have been the wine or her growing sense of ease and confidence, but her laughter, I noticed, bubbled up unaffectedly and unimpeded, just like Luisa's laughter when she was in a good mood or caught off guard. This wasn't to me an entirely new facet of her personality. I had seen it in the building with no name and on the occasional night out withTupra and the others, but, at work, people's qualities and characteristics seem muffled: feelings of annoyance are contained and amusement postponed, there's not enough room or time. Her laughter also contributed to the further destruction of her already injured tights.

'Bear in mind,' she replied, 'that real-life agents have never enjoyed Fleming's fortune nor the financial backing of the Broc-colis. And without them, everything is harder, meaner and more prosaic'

She said this as if I should know who the last rather comically-named people were, if, that is, it was a real name (broccoli' in Italian is the plural of 'broccolo' which has the unfortunate secondary meaning of'idiot'). And I had no idea who they were.

'I don't know who they are,' I confessed, not bothering to pretend I knew more than I did. They were obviously well-known in England, despite their evident Italian origins, but I'd never heard of them.

'For decades Albert Broccoli was the producer of the Bond films, along with a guy named Saltzman. In the more recent movies, his name has been replaced by those of a Barbara Broccoli and a Tom Pevsner. I suppose she must be the daughter and that her father is now dead, in fact, I seem to recall reading an obituary a few years ago. The family must have made a fortune, because the films, can you believe it, have been going since 1962, and they're still making them I think-anyway, I always go and see a Bond movie when I can.'

'I must ask Peter about it,' I thought, 'before he dies,' and it seemed odd to me that such a fear and such an idea should occur to me: despite his advanced age I never imagined the world without him or him without the world. He wasn't one of those old people who wear their imminent disappearance on their face or in the way they speak or walk. On the contrary. Both the adult and the young man he had been were still so present in him that it seemed impossible that they would cease to exist merely because of something as absurd as accumulated time, it doesn't make any sense at all that it should be time that determines and dictates, that it should prevail over free will. Or perhaps, as his brother, Toby Rylands, had said many, many years before, 'When one is ill, just as when one is old or troubled, things are done half with one's own will and half with someone else's in exactly equal measure. What isn't always clear is who the part of the will that isn't ours belongs to. To the illness, to the doctors, to the medicine, to the sense of unease, to the passing years, to times long dead? To the person we no longer are and who carried off our will when he left?' 'To the face we wore yesterday' I could have added, 'we'll always have that as long as we're remembered or some curious person pauses to look at old photographs of us, and, on the other hand, there will come a day when all faces will be skulls or ashes, and then it won't matter, we'll all be the same, us and our enemies, the people we loved most and the people we loathed.' Yes, I would have to ask Wheeler about those dedications from the fortunate and ill-fated Ian Fleming, who had known great success but few years in which to enjoy it, how they had met and how well they had known each other, 'who may know better. Salud!'-that is what Fleming had written in Wheeler's copy in 1957. Since starting work with Tupra I'd had less time to go and visit Peter in Oxford, or perhaps it was rather that I had too much time and my spirits were heavier, but then again my visits to him always helped fill up the former and somewhat lift the latter. However, we never let more than two weeks go by without talking for a while on the phone. He would ask how I was getting on with my new boss and with my colleagues and in my new and imprecise trade, but without demanding any details or enquiring into the present-day activities of the group, that is into our translations of people or interpretations of lives. Perhaps he knew better than anyone how fundamentally reserved I was, or perhaps he didn't need to ask, perhaps he had a direct line to Tupra and knew all about my main activities, my advances and retreats. Sometimes I thought I sensed in him, however, a desire not to meddle, not to draw me out and even not to hear me if I began telling some story related to my work, as if he didn't want to know, or as if being on the outside made him jealous-that was possible, when someone like me was on the inside, and I was, after all, a foreigner, an upstart-or as if he felt slightly hurt to have lost, in part, my company and to have brought about that loss himself in his role as intermediary, through his intrigues and his influence. I never noticed in him a hint of spite, nor of self-reproach, nor resentment at my absence, but something resembling the mixture of grief and pride, or unspoken regret and suppressed satisfaction, that sometimes assails patrons when their proteges break free, or teachers when they see themselves outstripped by their students in audacity, talent or fame, even though both parties pretend that this hasn't happened and won't happen in their lifetimes.

The person he was most interested in was Pérez Nuix, despite his growing distance from that group to which he had belonged in another age, so remote and so different. I wasn't sure whether this was because he had heard so much from Tupra about her qualities ('That very competent half-Spanish girl of his,' he had said of her when I had still not met her, 'I can never remember her name, but he says that, with time, she'll be the best of the group, if he can hold on to her for long enough.' And he had added as if remembering another such case: 'That's one of the difficulties, most of them get fed up and leave') or because he occasionally thought I might get together with her and thus leave behind me my sentimental daze and my occasional sexual toings and froings, far less frequent than he imagined, the old tend to deem anyone whom they believe to be still virile, and therefore still young, as promiscuous-I mean truly and successfully so. Wheeler could see that the months were passing and that the situation with Luisa had still not been sorted out, as he would have preferred-there wasn't so much as a flicker, not even a tremor, even of the kind that leaves the doors more firmly shut than before; because even if they only open a crack, there is still a slight fluster of agitation-and so from his distance, fumblingly, not to say blindly, with a touch of ingenuousness and respectful paternalism, he would act as a very tentative matchmaker whenever a female name cropped up in our conversations, and that of Patricia Pérez Nuix was, inevitably, the most persistent and enduring.

'Do you get on well with her? Are you, would you say, comrades?' he asked me once. 'Contrary to what is generally believed, the best relationship you can have with the opposite sex is one of comradeship, it's the best way to make conquests and it lasts longer too.' On another occasion, he questioned me about her abilities: 'Do you find her talk interesting, her view of things, the details she picks up on? Is she as good as Tupra says she is? Do you have fun with her?' And on a third occasion, he was even more direct or more curious: 'Is the girl pretty? Apart from her youth, I mean. Do you find her attractive?'