The James Bond Anthology

11 | THE SOFT LIFE

The blueberry arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline.

In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.

At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12th, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead. Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.

Bond reached out and gave two rings on the bell to show May, his treasured Scottish housekeeper, that he was ready for breakfast. Then he abruptly flung the single sheet off his naked body and swung his feet to the floor.

There was only one way to deal with boredom – kick oneself out of it. Bond went down on his hands and did twenty slow press-ups, lingering over each one so that his muscles had no rest. When his arms could stand the pain no longer, he rolled over on his back and, with his hands at his sides, did the straight leg-lift until his stomach muscles screamed. He got to his feet and, after touching his toes twenty times, went over to arm and chest exercises combined with deep breathing until he was dizzy. Panting with the exertion, he went into the big white-tiled bathroom and stood in the glass shower cabinet under very hot and then cold hissing water for five minutes.

At last, after shaving and putting on a sleeveless dark blue Sea Island cotton shirt and navy blue tropical worsted trousers, he slipped his bare feet into black leather sandals and went through the bedroom into the long big-windowed sitting-room with the satisfaction of having sweated his boredom, at any rate for the time being, out of his body.

May, an elderly Scotswoman with iron grey hair and a handsome closed face, came in with the tray and put it on the table in the bay window together with The Times, the only paper Bond ever read.

Bond wished her good morning and sat down to breakfast.

‘Good morning-s.’ (To Bond, one of May’s endearing qualities was that she would call no man ‘sir’ except – Bond had teased her about it years before – English kings and Winston Churchill. As a mark of exceptional regard, she accorded Bond an occasional hint of an ‘s’ at the end of a word.)

She stood by the table while Bond folded his paper to the centre news page.

‘Yon man was here again last night about the Televeesion.’

‘What man was that?’ Bond looked along the headlines.

‘Yon man that’s always coming. Six times he’s been here pestering me since June. After what I said to him the first time about the sinful thing, you’d think he’d give up trying to sell us one. By hire purchase, too, if you please!’

‘Persistent chaps these salesmen.’ Bond put down his paper and reached for the coffee pot.

‘I gave him a right piece of my mind last night. Disturbing folk at their supper. Asked him if he’d got any papers – anything to show who he was.’

‘I expect that fixed him.’ Bond filled his large coffee cup to the brim with black coffee.

‘Not a bit of it. Flourished his union card. Said he had every right to earn his living. Electricians Union it was too. They’re the Communist one, aren’t they-s?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Bond vaguely. His mind sharpened. Was it possible They could be keeping an eye on him? He took a sip of the coffee and put the cup down. ‘Exactly what did this man say, May?’ he asked, keeping his voice indifferent, but looking up at her.

‘He said he’s selling Televeesion sets on commission in his spare time. And are we sure we don’t want one. He says we’re one of the only folk in the square that haven’t got one. Sees there isn’t one of those aerial things on the house, I dare say. He’s always asking if you’re at home so that he can have a word with you about it. Fancy his cheek! I’m surprised he hasn’t thought to catch you coming in or going out. He’s always asking if I’m expecting you home. Naturally I don’t tell him anything about your movements. Respectable, quiet-spoken body, if he wasn’t so persistent.’

Could be, thought Bond. There are many ways of checking up whether the owner’s at home or away. A servant’s appearance and reactions – a glance through the open door. ‘Well, you’re wasting your time because he’s away,’ would be the obvious reception if the flat was empty. Should he tell the Security Section? Bond shrugged his shoulders irritably. What the hell. There was probably nothing in it. Why would They be interested in him? And, if there was something in it, Security was quite capable of making him change his flat. ‘I expect you’ve frightened him away this time.’ Bond smiled up at May. ‘I should think you’ve heard the last of him.’

‘Yes-s,’ said May doubtfully. At any rate she had carried out her orders to tell him if she saw anyone ‘hanging about the place’. She bustled off with a whisper of the old-fashioned black uniform she persisted in wearing even in the heat of August.

Bond went back to his breakfast. Normally it was little straws in the wind like this that would start a persistent intuitive ticking in his mind, and, on other days, he would not have been happy until he had solved the problem of the man from the Communist Union who kept on coming to the house. Now, from months of idleness and disuse, the sword was rusty in the scabbard and Bond’s mental guard was down.

Breakfast was Bond’s favourite meal of the day. When he was stationed in London it was always the same. It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black and without sugar. The single egg, in the dark blue egg-cup with a gold ring round the top, was boiled for three and a third minutes.

It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country. (Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.) Then there were two thick slices of wholewheat toast, a large pat of deep yellow Jersey butter and three squat glass jars containing Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ strawberry jam; Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade and Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum’s. The coffee pot and the silver on the tray were Queen Anne, and the china was Minton, of the same dark blue and gold and white as the egg-cup.

That morning, while Bond finished his breakfast with honey, he pinpointed the immediate cause of his lethargy and of his low spirits. To begin with, Tiffany Case, his love for so many happy months, had left him and, after final painful weeks during which she had withdrawn to an hotel, had sailed for America at the end of July. He missed her badly and his mind still sheered away from the thought of her. And it was August, and London was hot and stale. He was due for leave, but he had not the energy or the desire to go off alone, or to try and find some temporary replacement for Tiffany to go with him. So he had stayed on in the half-empty headquarters of the Secret Service grinding away at the old routines, snapping at his secretary and rasping his colleagues.

Even M. had finally got impatient with the surly caged tiger on the floor below, and, on Monday of this particular week, he had sent Bond a sharp note appointing him to a Committee of Inquiry under Paymaster Captain Troop. The note said that it was time Bond, as a senior officer in the Service, took a hand in major administrative problems. Anyway, there was no one else available. Headquarters were short-handed and the 00 Section was quiescent. Bond would pray report that afternoon, at 2.30, to Room 412.

It was Troop, reflected Bond, as he lit his first cigarette of the day, who was the most nagging and immediate cause of his discontent.

In every large business, there is one man who is the office tyrant and bugbear and who is cordially disliked by all the staff. This individual performs an unconsciously important role by acting as a kind of lightning conductor for the usual office hates and fears. In fact, he reduces their disruptive influence by providing them with a common target. The man is usually the general manager, or the Head of Admin. He is that indispensable man who is a watchdog over the small things – petty cash, heat and light, towels and soap in the lavatories, stationery supplies, the canteen, the holiday rota, the punctuality of the staff. He is the one man who has real impact on the office comforts and amenities and whose authority extends into the privacy and personal habits of the men and women of the organization. To want such a job, and to have the necessary qualifications for it, the man must have exactly those qualities which irritate and abrade. He must be parsimonious, observant, prying and meticulous. And he must be a strong disciplinarian and indifferent to opinion. He must be a little dictator. In all well-run businesses there is such a man. In the Secret Service, it is Paymaster Captain Troop, R.N. Retired, Head of Admin., whose job it is, in his own words, ‘to keep the place shipshape and Bristol fashion’.

It was inevitable that Captain Troop’s duties would bring him into conflict with most of the organization, but it was particularly unfortunate that M. could think of no one but Troop to spare as Chairman for this particular Committee.

For this was yet one more of those Committees of Inquiry dealing with the delicate intricacies of the Burgess and Maclean case, and with the lessons that could be learned from it. M. had dreamed it up, five years after he had closed his own particular file on that case, purely as a sop to the Privy Council Inquiry into the Security Services which the Prime Minister had ordered in 1955.

At once Bond had got into a hopeless wrangle with Troop over the employment of ‘intellectuals’ in the Secret Service.

Perversely, and knowing it would annoy, Bond had put forward the proposition that, if M.I.5. and the Secret Service were to concern themselves seriously with the atom age ‘intellectual spy’, they must employ a certain number of intellectuals to counter them. ‘Retired officers of the Indian Army,’ Bond had pronounced, ‘can’t possibly understand the thought processes of a Burgess or a Maclean. They won’t even know such people exist – let alone be in a position to frequent their cliques and get to know their friends and their secrets. Once Burgess and Maclean went to Russia, the only way to make contact with them again and, perhaps, when they got tired of Russia, turn them into double agents against the Russians, would have been to send their closest friends to Moscow and Prague and Budapest with orders to wait until one of these chaps crept out of the masonry and made contact. And one of them, probably Burgess, would have been driven to make contact by his loneliness and by his ache to tell his story to someone.¹ But they certainly wouldn’t take the risk of revealing themselves to some man with a trench-coat and a cavalry moustache and a beta minus mind.’

‘Oh really,’ Troop had said with icy calm. ‘So you suggest we should staff the organization with long-haired perverts. That’s quite an original notion. I thought we were all agreed that homosexuals were about the worst security risk there is. I can’t see the Americans handing over many atom secrets to a lot of pansies soaked in scent.’

‘All intellectuals aren’t homosexual. And many of them are bald. I’m just saying that …,’ and so the argument had gone on intermittently through the hearings of the past three days, and the other Committee members had ranged themselves more or less with Troop. Now, today, they had to draw up their recommendations and Bond was wondering whether to take the unpopular step of entering a minority report.

How seriously did he feel about the whole question, Bond wondered as, at nine o’clock, he walked out of his flat and down the steps to his car? Was he just being petty and obstinate? Had he constituted himself into a one-man opposition only to give his teeth something to bite into? Was he so bored that he could find nothing better to do than make a nuisance of himself inside his own organization? Bond couldn’t make up his mind. He felt restless and indecisive, and, behind it all, there was a nagging disquiet he couldn’t put his finger on.

As he pressed the self-starter and the twin exhausts of the Bentley woke to their fluttering growl, a curious bastard quotation slipped from nowhere into Bond’s mind.

‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.’

1 Written in March 1956. I.F.