The lift eased to a stop and as Bond stepped out into the drab Ministry-of-Works-green corridor and into the bustling world of girls carrying files, doors opening and shutting, and muted telephone bells, he emptied his mind of all thoughts of his shoot and prepared himself for the normal business of a routine day at Headquarters.
He walked along to the end door on the right. It was as anonymous as all the others he had passed. No numbers. If you had any business on the eighth floor, and your office was not on that floor, someone would come and fetch you to the room you needed and see you back into the lift when you were through.
Bond knocked and waited. He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Mondays were hell. Two days of dockets and files to plough through. And week-ends were generally busy times abroad. Empty flats got burgled. People were photographed in compromising positions. Motor-car ‘accidents’ looked better, got a more cursory handling, amidst the week-end slaughter on the roads. The weekly bags from Washington, Istanbul, and Tokyo would have come in and been sorted. They might hold something for him.
The door opened and he had his daily moment of pleasure at having a beautiful secretary. ‘Morning, Lil,’ he said.
The careful warmth of her smile of welcome dropped about ten degrees.
‘Give me that coat,’ she said. ‘It stinks of cordite. And don’t call me Lil. You know I hate it.’
Bond took off his coat and handed it to her. ‘Anyone who gets christened Loelia Ponsonby ought to get used to pet names.’
He stood beside her desk in the little anteroom which she had somehow made to seem a little more human than an office and watched her hang his coat on the iron frame of the open window.
She was tall and dark with a reserved, unbroken beauty to which the war and five years in the Service had lent a touch of sternness. Unless she married soon, Bond thought for the hundredth time, or had a lover, her cool air of authority might easily become spinsterish and she would join the army of women who had married a career.
Bond had told her as much, often, and he and the two other members of the OO Section had at various times made determined assaults on her virtue. She had handled them all with the same cool motherliness (which, to salve their egos, they privately defined as frigidity) and, the day after, she treated them with small attentions and kindnesses to show that it was really her fault and that she forgave them.
What they didn’t know was that she worried herself almost to death when they were in danger and that she loved them equally; but that she had no intention of becoming emotionally involved with any man who might be dead next week. And it was true that an appointment in the Secret Service was a form of peonage. If you were a woman there wasn’t much of you left for other relationships. It was easier for the men. They had an excuse for fragmentary affairs. For them marriage and children and a home were out of the question if they were to be of any use ‘in the field’ as it was cosily termed. But, for the women, an affair outside the Service automatically made you a ‘security risk’ and in the last analysis you had a choice of resignation from the Service and a normal life, or of perpetual concubinage to your King and Country.
Loelia Ponsonby knew that she had almost reached the time for decision and all her instincts told her to get out. But every day the drama and romance of her Cavell-Nightingale world locked her more securely into the company of the other girls at Headquarters and every day it seemed more difficult to betray by resignation the father-figure which the Service had become.
Meanwhile she was one of the most envied girls in the building, and a member of the small company of Principal Secretaries who had access to the innermost secrets of the Service – ‘The Pearls and Twin-set’ as they were called behind their backs by the other girls, with ironical reference to their supposedly ‘County’ and ‘Kensington’ backgrounds – and, so far as the Personnel Branch was concerned, her destiny in twenty years’ time would be that single golden line right at the end of a New Year’s Honours List, among the medals for officials of the Fishery Board, of the Post Office, of the Women’s Institute, towards the bottom of the O.B.E.s: ‘Miss Loelia Ponsonby, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Defence.’
She turned away from the window. She was dressed in a sugar-pink and white striped shirt and a plain dark blue skirt.
Bond smiled into her grey eyes. ‘I only call you Lil on Mondays,’ he said. ‘Miss Ponsonby the rest of the week. But I’ll never call you Loelia. It sounds like somebody in an indecent limerick. Any messages?’
‘No,’ she said shortly. She relented. ‘But there’s piles of stuff on your desk. Nothing urgent. But there’s an awful lot of it. Oh, and the powder-vine says that 008’s got out. He’s in Berlin, resting. Isn’t it wonderful!’
Bond looked quickly at her. ‘When did you hear that?’
