by John Pearson
They made a point of being very honest with each other. Even during the exciting days aboard the Queen Mary, Bond had told her all his drawbacks as a potential husband – the hazards of his job, the fact that he was in a sense ‘already married to a man called M.’. He also told her that, much as he liked the idea of children, it would be unfair to think of having them until he was retired from the 00 section. But it was not until they were safely settled into Wellington Square that they discovered there were other problems.
Fleming described how James Bond sent May a telegram in advance saying that he was coming and ordering flowers and Floris bath essence for the arrival home. It is revealing that there was no mention in the telegram of Tiffany. For the truth was that Bond was just a little scared of May, and how she would react to another woman in the flat. As it happened he need not have worried. He had forgotten that May was away in Scotland, visiting her mother in a village near Glencoe. He and Tiffany had the first ten days in London quite alone.
It was an idyllic time. One of those rare occasions when Bond felt entitled to relax. M. had been satisfied at the way the diamond racket had been dealt with, and Bond felt justified in self-indulgently enjoying life – and Tiffany.
She was the perfect mistress for him now. This was the first time he had lived with anyone since Marthe de Brandt, but he was never bored. One of the reasons why he had avoided living with his women previously was that he had dreaded being bored. With Tiffany he was kept busy teaching her a whole world she had never seen. She was an apt pupil, Bond a dedicated teacher.
He showed her London, not the London of the guidebooks, but his private London – London of the river and docks, the City empty on a Saturday evening when there was just one pub by Cannon Street still open, Covent Garden in the early morning. They ate in the last Chinese restaurant in Limehouse (Bond had first met the owner in different circumstances in Hong Kong), and dined at the Ritz (‘the finest dining-room in Europe’) at Scott's (the inevitable grilled plaice and black velvet at Fleming's ‘Honeymooners’ table’) and at a taxi-driver's shelter in Victoria (‘the best sausages and mash in London’).
Bond also showed her the crown jewels, the Soane Museum, Savile Row, the reptile house at London Zoo and took her on a late-night tour of the London sewers. They bought smoked salmon in a shop off Cable Street, caviare in Clerkenwell, steak in Smithfield, and had champagne and strawberries sent from Fortnums.
The only time they clashed was when Tiffany wanted to go to a theatre. Bond refused. In the event they spent the time in bed.
For both of them, the greatest source of pleasure lay in novelty. Neither had lived like this before. In her disorganized wild way, Tiffany kept house – cooking when they were hungry, stacking the dark blue Minton unwashed in the kitchen, pulling the covers over the bed when they had finished making love. The flat looked as if a boys’ club had adopted it.
At the time Bond didn't mind – rather the reverse. Like most meticulous and over-organized people, he had a secret longing for disorder. It seemed a breath of life, a much-needed shake-up. Order brought James Bond boredom – anarchy rejuvenated him. Then things began to change.
They had gone off to spend their second weekend together at Le Touquet, putting the Bentley on a Bristol Freighter flight at Lydd and staying in some style at the Hotel Westminster. As Bond told her, this was a treat – to celebrate their time together, and to mark the end of their brief ‘honeymoon’. On Monday morning he returned to work. They had to make the most of these last hours of holiday. They gambled wildly, ate compulsively, made love extravagantly. They arrived back in London late on Sunday night. May was waiting.
May had a certain way of sniffing when she disapproved. It was a private signal Bond had always recognized. She sniffed when she surveyed the flat, her ‘handsome closed face’, (as Fleming once described it) eloquent with mute distaste.
‘If ye'll be excusin’ me,’ she said, ‘I'm just a wee bit tired. I'll get started on the place tomorrow.’ And in the morning Bond and Tiffany were woken by the angry sound of washing-up as May got going in the kitchen. It was the clarion-call to battle.
Bond was very male in the way he had closed his mind to May – also in the cowardice and his assumption that ‘things would work out’. They didn't. Almost from the start these two women in his life reminded him of two determined cats – one of them old and wily, the other young and in its prime, circling the same disputed patch of territory. Both were fighters.
May brought ‘the Commander’ his customary boiled egg and copy of The Times. Tiffany insisted that he preferred kippers and Cooper's marmalade and the Express. May began tidying compulsively – Tiffany produced more mess than ever. May sniffed. Tiffany slammed doors. Bond shaved, dressed, dodged both breakfasts and was late arriving at the office.
For the remainder of that week the battle rumbled on with May and Tiffany embattled in the flat and Bond a somewhat wary referee longing for one thing only – peace. This was a situation he was not prepared for, the sort of warfare where this ‘man of war’ became a coward. He could take on a Smersh, a Chiffre, a Mr Big, but he would suffer agonies at the thought of having to lay down the law to May – or Tiffany.
The sad thing was that suddenly he seemed to have lost the best of both worlds he had known. Tiffany's insouciance had left her. So had May's order and discretion. During the weeks that followed Wellington Square became a sort of no-man's-land.
Bond became edgy in the office and bad in bed. He felt tired. The unshakeable Miss Goodnight became difficult. Bond's work suffered. He felt M.'s hidden disapproval in the background – and at the same time his ‘available male rating’ with the secretaries plummeted.
He still loved Tiffany, in some ways more than ever, but she had started to annoy him. The female debris that surrounded her no longer seemed appealing. Nor did her ignorance. She drove the Bentley and dented the offside wing. Once he would have ignored it. Now he was annoyed, and there were tears.
Finally Bond asked Bill Tanner, M.'s Chief of Staff for his advice. This was something Bond had never done before. He wasn't one for revealing his personal affairs to anyone, but Bill Tanner was an old friend, a married man, and eminently sane. His advice was quite uncompromising. ‘It looks as if you've got to choose. Either you marry, get a house and kick out May – or you risk losing Tiffany. You can't have both.’
In fact, Bill Tanner's words were truer than Bond suspected. Early that June, May was on the edge of handing in her notice, whilst Tiffany was growing more and more depressed. She was having to find out the hard way James Bond's defects as a potential husband.
She still loved him, and thought him glamorous and kind as ever. When they were together life could still be wonderful. But, as she sometimes asked herself, what was in all of it for her? She had no friends in London. Bond was away all day. May was a bitch.
Nor had she any money. Bond could be generous, in certain strictly limited ways. He loved to give her presents, often expensive presents – a diamond clip from Cartier, a jumbo-sized bottle of scent, silk underwear, the luxuries of life. But when it came to bread-and-butter he was downright mean. She found the housekeeping he gave her quite inadequate; this too became a source of friction.
The truth was that Bond had really no idea about money, nor the cost of running a ménage. May was an economical old Scot who had always managed everything, cut the expenses to the bone and worked wonders with the salary of a civil servant. Tiffany was not. The life that she had led had made her quite indifferent to money. It had always been around her in large quantities and she had spent as she wanted. Now she was short for food and short on clothes. She couldn't buy a lipstick for herself. Inevitably they argued over money – something they both hated but could not avoid. It was almost a relief to Bond when, in the second week in June, he was sent off abroad on a brief assignment, even if it was the sort of faintly servile and routine affair that he would normally have loathed.
M. was predictably embarrassed
by the whole business, and cut the briefing to a minimum. From his few clipped phrases Bond gathered that his task was simply ‘to keep an eye on’ a British cabinet minister holidaying at Eze-sur-Mer. The man, not entirely to Bond's surprise, was homosexual – M.'s phrase was ‘one of them’ – and Bond had simply to make sure that no enterprising agent of a foreign power attempted to involve him in a scandal or to blackmail him. Recently there had been several cases which involved businessmen and politicians with such tendencies. The minister had been showing an extraordinary compulsion to get into trouble – there had been discreet warnings from the C.I.A. after the man's recent visit to the States, and, as M. said, ‘prevention is better than a messy scandal.’
When Bond told Tiffany that he was off to France for a brief assignment, she begged to be allowed to come along.
‘All I want is a bikini and a suite in the Negresco. I'm just a simple country girl at heart.’ Bond was tempted. On a job like this it was always a relief to be assured of some straight heterosexual company. But then he reflected that it would be a dangerous precedent to set; she would soon be demanding to go everywhere with him. Nevertheless he felt uneasy when he left.
Bond had five days of what the section used to call ‘Nanny duty’ watching the private and at times preposterous behaviour of this leader of the nation. It was a difficult assignment, not least because Bond had to act unofficially. The Minister had his own detective, a Scotland Yard man Bond had known for years. Luckily, Bond and the detective understood each other.
The Minister was staying at a villa near the sea, a long white house belonging to a Paris businessman of dubious repute. From the detective Bond obtained a copy of the guest-list – which he immediately checked over with Mathis at the Deuxime Bureau in Paris. That evening Mathis rang back to say that one of the names was known to the police. He was a man called Henri, part-time male model, mother Hungarian, father French. There was a record of petty convictions for theft and minor drug offences; the year before he had been on the fringe of a scandal which involved the death of an American Embassy official and a suspected leak of NATO information. Nothing conclusive had been proved against him, but Mathis said, ‘he's hardly the man I'd choose to be my brother's best friend.’
Bond alerted the detective who replied that there wasn't much that he could do, but Bond was worried – especially when he learned that Henri and the Minister had been seen together at a restaurant in Cannes. It was a tricky situation. All of Bond's instincts were against this sort of squalid prying into private lives and he was inclined to agree with the detective.
But on the other hand he had a job to do: after Mathis's warning he could hardly leave things as they were. If anything went wrong, M. would be holding him responsible.
He thought of having a discreet word with the Minister, but dismissed the idea at once. He could just picture the man's fury, and the letter of complaint to M. that would follow. He also thought of trying to see Henri and warning him off; that would be even clumsier and riskier. In the end he telephoned his old friend, Reynard, at his house near Grasse. Reynard knew everyone and was very shrewd. Bond suddenly had an idea.
Next morning the telephone rang early in the villa by the sea. The manservant who answered it replied that he was sorry but Monsieur Henri was asleep and could not be disturbed. The voice on the telephone then gave a name that made the manservant suddenly respectful. Seconds later he was knocking urgently on Henri's bedroom door. When Henri mumbled that he wanted to be left in peace, the manservant whispered the name. Five minutes later Henri was on the telephone to Paris.
It was Reynard who arranged the chauffeur-driven Rolls that called at the villa twenty minutes later, and Bond, from a car parked opposite, was relieved to see the slim young man in the immaculate brown suit hurry from the villa and get in. The car purred off. No one else within the villa stirred.
But the name of the film producer which had so impressed the manservant had been genuine – Reynard had seen to that. So was the screen test which the young man took in Paris late that afternoon – so was the part they offered him. In years to come, Bond was to watch the young man's burgeoning career in films with interest and was always proud of what he called his ‘skill as talent-scout’. ‘The only pity,’ as he says, ‘is that I never asked for my percentage.’
The rest of the assignment passed off without incident. The detective told Bond that the Minister was put out at the way the young man left without so much as a goodbye. Bond said he sympathized. The detective said that he was most impressed.
‘How did you do it? Fear, I s'pose?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Bond as he sipped his first Martini of the day.
‘Vanity. It's stronger.’
During these days when Bond was in the South of France, Tiffany remained dutifully in the flat. By now she and May had reached a state of stabilized hostility, but life was tedious and she was lonely. There was not much to do with Bond away. She remembered one of Bond's earliest remarks about getting married, ‘Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.’ At the same time she hadn't understood him. Now she did.
Thanks to Bond she had been admitted to England without a passport. Immigration had told her to obtain one later from her embassy. With Bond away it seemed an opportunity to do so; she took a taxi off to Grosvenor Square.
It was the first time she had been inside an embassy but from the moment she entered she felt at home. Perhaps it was the smell, that curious American smell of mouthwash, air-conditioning and percolated coffee; perhaps it was the transatlantic tone of voice; perhaps it was the stars and stripes outside and the copies of the New York Herald Tribune. Whatever the cause, Tiffany was suddenly affected in a way she had not thought possible: she was homesick for New York.
There was a query on her passport; a good-looking young American major attached to the Embassy showed her to the office she required. He was from California and they chatted briefly about San Francisco. Suddenly she longed to talk about the places that she knew. And so it started. Five minutes later he was asking her to dinner. She refused, but was delighted to be asked. As she walked back across the square she was happier than she had been for weeks.
Good-looking majors working in embassies have ways of finding out the names of pretty girls who ask for passports. It is not legal but they do. This major also found her telephone number. This was not legal either: nor should he have rung Miss Case and told her that the passport office needed her next day at twelve. Just the same, she came, and when he asked her out to lunch, accepted.
This was the position, more or less, when Bond returned from France. He was at a strange disadvantage. Had it been anyone but Bond, he would have recognized the situation straight away. Tiffany had changed: she was alternately distant and over-loving, gentle yet rejecting, critical and then subservient. In short she was showing all the classic symptoms of a woman having an affair. But Bond, who had not been cuckolded since the age of twelve, was merely puzzled.
What was wrong with her? Was it her period? The condition seemed to last too long for that. Had he neglected her? He tried spoiling her – more scent, more underwear, another trip to France: but all too late. Never before had any woman treated him like this and all his wide experience of doting and adoring women had left him quite ignorant of the female heart. He made mistakes that no suburban husband would have made. Then, final degradation, he became jealous.
This unfamiliar emotion floored him completely, and he suffered like an adolescent youth. He tried to reason with himself. There were other women; no one was worth this sort of anguish – not even Tiffany. He suffered just the same.
It was a complete reversal of his character. Once away from her he tried to be sensible. It was no use. He was emotional by nature and had had no training with women he could not control. He tried to question her. Worse still, he threatened her. One night he hit her. He was very drunk. Next morning, sober, he was most repentant. She was icy. That evening, w
hen he returned, the flat was empty.
At first he could not believe it, even when May announced, ‘She's gone. The body's gone. She's left you.’ But there was a letter on his desk.
Darling James,
We have enjoyed ourselves, and I shall be always grateful. But the truth is that you don't need a wife but I need a husband. When we first met you told me that you were married to a man called M. I think I know now what you meant.
Do understand, my darling, I'm not blaming you. But I have met this major at the Embassy. His name is Nick. You'd like him, and he wants to marry me. I've said I will.
Do understand, dear James, that this is best for all of us. I know you love me, and that you will be hurt. But in time when the hurt is less you'll know that I am right.
Tiffany
Bond took it very hard. He had left many women in his time, but he had not been left before; he felt lonely, and betrayed. His pride was hurt. He realized that he had truly loved her.
Soft, sentimental as he was, he thought that he might still succeed in settling down and marrying her. Somehow he found the hotel where she was staying. He sent her a letter. It was returned unopened.
Presumably his vanity was hurt. At first he couldn't quite believe that she was serious. No woman had done this to him before. But when he finally did reach her on the telephone she calmly told him she was leaving for the States next morning. She did agree to see him – briefly.
Bond drove round to see her. He was still certain he could persuade her to come back to him and he was convinced that he loved her. Then he saw her; and he knew at once that everything was over.
She was waiting with her new fianc, and introduced him straightaway as ‘Nick’. He seemed a pleasant fellow, ‘nothing extraordinary to look at and not over-bright, but clearly top-grade American husband material.’ And Tiffany had a certain look he'd never seen before, ‘the look of a woman who has got her man – and is all set to eat him.’
