This is the arrangement. Tenants may come and tenants may leave, especially the kind of tenants Mr Fodrek caters for, but Peter Bond goes on for ever. Well, he’s still there for now anyway. And he finds a kind of reassurance in the fact that his landlord calls round for rent, and wants it cash in hand, month after month. It’s old-fashioned. It’s not the way things are done any more and Peter likes that. Mr Fodrek doesn’t say much – pleasantries not required – and Peter doesn’t say much back. It’s perfectly, perversely civilised. Is Mr Fodrek contented? Doubt it. Is he wealthy? Shouldn’t think so, not from rents like his. Does he mind his own business? Aye, he does, and he keeps his nose out of Peter’s, which is one of the benefits of living in a shithole. Even the landlord doesn’t give a fuck about you, so long as you keep up, more or less, with the payments. And Peter knows that, if he ever does leave – which it may come to some day because the bank balance is slowly but inexorably shrinking, the pension credits just don’t equate to the drink debits – if he ever does leave Mr Fodrek still won’t say much. He’ll pay someone fifty quid to sort of clean the flat, and the next tenant will move in. Maybe he dreams of the day the building becomes uninhabitable, and everybody moves out, and he sells the site for redevelopment and makes himself a half-millionaire. Maybe, but if he does his dream is buried deep and it doesn’t make him smile.
Christmas, 1962. Christmas Day was a Tuesday and for most people in Scotland a working day, but Peter was home for the English holiday.
Prompted by his father calling him Jimmy three times in the space of a minute, he made an announcement.
I’m calling myself Peter nowadays, he said.
Oh aye? his father said. How’s that?
I prefer it, he said. But also …
His mother said, I can’t see what’s wrong with the name we christened you with, James.
His father said, We gied him two, Peggy. If Peter was good enough for my faither then it’s good enough for the boy, if that’s how he wants tae be kent.
The boy! He was twenty-two, a man by any measure except theirs. They were small-time folk, Hugh and Peggy Bond, who thought of him as their small-time wee laddie, a minnow who’d gone off to swim in the big pool that was London. Even if he could get a word in to explain the real reason they’d think he was overreacting. A nine-day wonder, son. Why should you change your name? And his older sisters, Elspeth and Etta, if they were consulted, would say the same, too wrapped up in their own families to bother thinking it through. But he knew. He knew it had to be done.
What it was: he had to distance himself from the other James Bond. He was getting sick of people doing double takes whenever he introduced himself. When the other Bond had just been a character in a series of books it hadn’t been such an issue, but now there was a film, Dr No, and it was clear to Jimmy/Peter that something big was happening, that ‘James Bond’ was going to be around for a while and he would have to do something about it.
It wasn’t Hugh and Peggy’s fault. How could they have known in 1940 that some Old Etonian ex-Naval Intelligence officer was going to start writing spy novels and call the hero James Bond? It wasn’t their fault and yet somehow he blamed them – their naivety, their small-mindedness – for not seeing it coming. Hugh and Peggy Bond: a case study in being oblivious to the bigger picture.
It wouldn’t have mattered so much if he had been on the outside. On the outside he could have made something of it. People would enjoy having a plumber, a car mechanic, a teacher even, called James Bond. But in 1962 he wasn’t on the outside, he’d been allowed in, taken in, and nobody on the outside – family, friends from school if there’d been some but there weren’t, he’d kept up with none of them – knew what he did and therefore why his name was so ironic. But he did. He was the butt of a joke he couldn’t share with anyone except the very people taking the piss. Literally taking the piss. A couple of guys were developing a routine around the film’s theme tune. Standing on either side of him at the urinals one of them would do the guitar riff while the other came in with the brass section. They said, How’s it going, 007? They’d enjoyed attempting to imitate his accent before: now they had the Edinburgh tones of Sean Connery to model themselves on. It was pathetic but inevitable. Reinventing himself as Peter gave him a bit of leeway.
He’d taken Christmas Eve as leave too, so he could come up by train on the Saturday, have three days in Slaemill and go back to London on Boxing Day. Some people in London still found it hard to make him out even though he’d toned the accent down a lot. Now Hugh was looking at him queerly when he spoke. Ye’re awfie English gettin, he said, but there was a touch of pride in his resentment. Peggy, who’d spent years rooting out Scotticisms from her own speech and endlessly correcting her children’s language, glowed with pleasure, not least because to her the difference between how father and son spoke only underlined how far up in the world Peter had already risen.
First night home, she greedily watched him fight through the mountain of food she’d prepared for him. She’d started setting it on the kitchen table before he’d even got in the door, from the minute, in fact, that the timetable said the bus from Drumkirk was dropping him off in the High Street. She stood with her back against the bunker, arms folded. She and Hugh had already had their tea. From a chair at the other end of the table Hugh watched him, equally intently. Peter felt like he was the sole entrant in an eating competition and they had bets on about how much he’d put away before he burst.
So anyway, Peggy said, deciding to ignore the name change, how’s the Big Smoke? You’re like a wire. You’re not looking after yourself.
In fact he’d begun to get a paunch, from sitting behind a desk all day and swilling too much English beer after work.
I’m fine, Mum.
You’re not. Don’t look at me like that. I’m your mother. I know about these things. You’re not getting fed properly.
This’ll make up for it.
Don’t be cheeky. So do you still like it, London?
It’s great.
Job gaun weel? Hugh said. Keeping your nose clean, are ye?
Spotless, he said, between mouthfuls. I’ll be a permanent under-secretary before you can blink.
Hugh frowned. Is that good, is it?
I’m having you on, Peter said. That’s the top civil-service job, the highest you can get. I’ve nae chance.
No chance, Peggy said automatically.
You have to have been to public school and Oxbridge, Peter said, and eventually you get a knighthood for services rendered.
I see, Hugh said cautiously. Ye shouldna joke aboot these things, son.
It’s no joke. They beat folk like us back with their brollies.
His irreverence made them nervous. Shades of Mad Uncle Jack maybe? His mother moved the subject on.
A lot of paperwork, I imagine? she said.
What’s a lot of paperwork, being a permanent under-secretary? Somebody else does all the graft for you up there. That’s why they’re all OBEs. Other Buggers’ Efforts.
Peggy looked wounded. Hugh tutted. Just for a moment Peter felt he’d overdone it.
I meant your job, Peggy said. You must have so much on your desk all the time.
Och, I get through it, he said.
His parents were very literal people. Peggy doubtless had him barely visible behind great piles of paper, while Hugh, who liked the sound of phrases like oiling the machinery of government or, a newish one, the corridors of power, probably pictured him striding down long passages in a bowler hat with an oil can and a rag. The kind of ‘man frae the ministry’ you might see calling on the Broons in the Sunday Post. In reality he didn’t wear a bowler hat and mostly what he did was read information and sort it into files. Routine stuff that had him nodding off at two in the afternoon. The other Bond would have been tearing his hair out, but Peter had the right temperament. There were hunters and gatherers in Intelligence. He was a gatherer.
But it must be so difficult keeping on top of things, Pe
ggy insisted. Especially if your colleagues aren’t …
If they aren’t what? he asked. Keeping on top of things too?
You know, she said. Trustworthy. Like that terrible man in the navy.
What man?
Oh, what’s his name, Hugh? Vessel?
Well, that would be the navy right enough, Peter said.
Vassall. John Vassall, that’s it, his father said, taking his cue.
They must have been desperate to mention him: a clerk at the Admiralty who’d just been imprisoned for eighteen years for spying for the Russians. Peggy would take it as a personal affront, a threat to her son’s good name, that such treachery could lurk at the heart of the British state, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. Worse, the Russians had been blackmailing Vassall with photographs of him in compromising poses with other men. Viewed from the parish of West Mills, Peter reckoned, it must all look unimaginably sordid.
I didn’t know him, he reassured them. It’s a vast, complex business, government. Thousands of people working in dozens of different departments.
There’s aye bound tae be a few bad apples, I suppose, Hugh said.
Always, Peter said, thinking as he said it that there was worse to come – although, from his parents’ point of view, could anything be worse than homosexuality mixed with Communism? Rumours were flying around Whitehall about the Secretary of State for War and a showgirl called Christine Keeler. If true, they would make Vassall’s compromising poses look like family snapshots.
How come it’s always the nancy boys? Hugh said. Ye’d think the powers that be would be wise tae them by noo. Ye dinna get ony o that nonsense here.
Now, Hugh, his mother said. You know nothing about it. It’s way over our heads.
I ken mair than you do. All I’m saying is, the lads at the mill would ken how tae sort that kind o thing.
His parents understood that he was an Executive Officer in the War Office and, awestruck by that title, or so he assumed, they never dared probe too far into what it meant or what exactly it was he did. Checks would have been done on them to make sure he hadn’t sprung from a Nest of Communists, but even if they suspected they’d been investigated they’d be flattered. They were the best kind of citizens a state could possess, with a simple, unquestioning faith in the goodness and greatness of Britain. They saw his new work as an extension of his National Service, which in a way it was, since he’d been siphoned off from the square-bashing and weapons-training at Redford Barracks after just a fortnight, taken to a room for aptitude tests, an IQ exam, then the next day a two-hour interview, and at the end of all that offered the possibility of ‘special duties’. You’ve been spotted, the man who interviewed him had said. We’ll let you know in a few weeks, one way or the other. And they did. He finished his basic training, then went home for three days’ leave, then it was off to London. Peggy and Hugh were goggle-eyed with the effort of suppressing their excitement. His father said, Son, we’ll say nae mair aboot it. But we’re proud of ye, Jimmy. We canna tell ye how proud we are.
The man had introduced himself as Edgar. My name’s Edgar, he’d said. Presumably it was his surname because that was how it was back then. Never saw him or heard anything from him again. There was another man in the room who didn’t introduce himself at all, didn’t speak during the entire interview. Thick, black-rimmed glasses and a hand over his mouth, sitting off to one side, hard to get a good look at him.
You’re a bright young chap, Edgar said. The sort of chap we’re looking for.
What did he mean by ‘bright’? Intelligent but not intellectual, conscientious but not attached to a cause? Dull, in other words. And lower class, respectful, dependably unambitious. Since the revelations in the 1950s about a Cambridge spy ring and the resulting defections to Russia, the Service had been under pressure to clean up its recruiting procedures. One of the ways to achieve this was to bring in people who were not ex-public school, homosexual dilettantes. If you were Scottish and from a skilled working-class or lower-middle-class background (Hugh Bond was a foreman in one of the local paper mills), not only were you unlikely to be any of these things, there was also a good chance you’d had a solid education unsullied by imagination.
So what have you been doing with yourself since you left school? Edgar asked. Before you got called up, I mean.
He’d managed to get a start on a local paper, the Drumkirk Gazette, because his English teacher knew the editor, Mr Gray. That was how it was described, a ‘start’ not a ‘job’, with a paltry wage and a clear understanding that he was being done a favour that would last only as long as there was goodwill in Mr Gray’s heart. He was a trainee reporter. This meant he made the tea, sharpened pencils and sorted the mail. After two hours he was bored; but he was patient. After a week he was allowed out with one or other of the two full-time reporters, Bob Singleton and Bill Drummond, to cover court cases, football games, fêtes and motor accidents. Bob was a chain-smoking grizzled guy in his mid-fifties whose breath smelled of alcohol first thing in the morning and any time after noon. Bill was twenty years younger and loved himself, he wore sharp, cheap suits and combed his oily hair over a bald patch and was always fingering his moustache and catching his reflection in windows. They made out that they were intense rivals but in fact there was nothing to fight over; the news they gathered was petty and paltry and they growlingly divvied it up between them in such a way as to make their lives as easy as possible. They called Jimmy ‘the cub’ – Where’s the cub, Bill? Tell the cub to get the kettle on – and hardly ever addressed him to his face, but by sticking around them he learned how to listen, or how not to, how to ask the right questions or the wrong ones, how to pick out the essentials of a story or miss them. He knew he could be sharper and better than Bill and Bob without even trying, but he kept this opinion to himself. They were dying on their feet and so was the paper. There was a rival rag, the Drumkirk Observer, and the Gazette was losing sales and advertising to it week on week.
Every Tuesday he went on a train to Edinburgh and attended classes in shorthand and typing in a seedy private college near Haymarket where all the other students were female and frumpy and suspicious of him. He, for his part, was filled with a total absence of desire for any of them. There seemed to be a financial arrangement between the college and the paper that made his journey worthwhile to both parties: each week a sum was deducted from his wage, a sum he managed to discover was greater than what the college received for taking him in. He swallowed his pride and said nothing, but when, not long after turning eighteen, his call-up papers came, he didn’t protest or seek a deferment. Other boys dreaded National Service and did everything they could to avoid it, but Jimmy Bond was off like a whippet.
Sounds like a lot of fun, Edgar said. Citizen Kane in, where is it again, Drumkirk? Are you going back?
Not if I can help it, Jimmy said, and the man with the hand over his mouth grunted his approval.
What do you think of all that trouble with Burgess and Maclean? Edgar asked. Not much of a Scotchman, eh, Donald Duart Maclean? He rolled the name out with as much of a burr as his southern tongue could muster. More of an English fop, wouldn’t you say?
Jimmy nodded agreement. Here was Edgar doing this pathetic put-on Scottish voice while he was concentrating on squeezing his own words out as flat as he could get them. He could hear his mother’s voice – Don’t say dinna, say don’t – and for once he was grateful for her efforts. He was in a play, or an audition for a play, and he wanted to set the right tone. He wanted to be a country cousin, not a barbarian.
Actually, he said, I don’t think anything much about it. He’s got nothing to do with me.
Quite, Edgar said, and the other man nodded. Nothing to do with you, Edgar said. You wouldn’t be inclined in that direction, would you?
No fear, he said vehemently, assuming they meant homosexuality, not the USSR. Another right answer, which also happened to be the truth. It was easy, given the cues he was getting. Don’t venture an opi
nion, say what they want to hear. When Edgar asked how he’d feel about a move to London, he hesitated just enough to reinforce the image of a backwater boy they could mould to fit their own purposes: he’d miss home, he said, but it would be a challenge, a chance to see the world. Inwardly he was praying this would be his pass out of Slaemill, West Mills, Drumkirk and Scotland.
If you’re selected, Edgar said, you will learn things about the world, and about yourself, that you would never otherwise know.
Four years later, he couldn’t believe how tiny home was. Not just Slaemill and its neighbouring communities tucked under the hills, but the whole country. He’d been back at least once every year and each time it shrank a little more, and the bustle and noise of London seemed magnified, and he wanted to be back amongst it. And it wasn’t that he’d made new friends there and was missing their company: it was the opposite. He didn’t want closeness. That was what he’d wanted to get away from. He realised he’d come home only out of a sense of loyalty that was fast draining away.
Sunday was interminable. He was reduced to reading the Sunday Post cover to cover, twice – including the Fun Section, which wasn’t fun the first time. In the afternoon, desperate, he walked to the next village, where he had a coffee in the only café: it seemed slightly ashamed to be open, the few customers ashamed to be patronising it. They spoke in low tones, as if in church. On the way back he bumped into a couple of old schoolmates. They exchanged news, but it was an unfond reunion. One of them worked in the paper mill, and talked about being trained to use a new Hyster forklift as if he’d landed the best job in the world. Peter could tell they thought he’d got above himself by leaving: he felt they’d diminished themselves by staying put.
And the Land Lay Still Page 30
