I had finished cooking his supper and I put it up on the counter. He ate as if he was really hungry. I asked him if it was all right. He said it was wonderful and I felt warm inside. What a fantastic bit of luck this man, and just this man, coming so magically out of the blue! I felt humble about it. It was so much a miracle. I swore to myself to say my prayers that night, the first time for years. I hovered about him slavishly, offering him more coffee, some jam to finish his toast with. Finally he laughed tenderly at me, ‘You’re spoiling me. Here, I’m sorry. I forgot all about it. It’s time for your cigarette. You’ve earned the whole caseful.’ He lit it with a Ronson, gun-metalled like his case. My hand touched his and I felt a small shock pass down my body. I suddenly found I was trembling. I quickly took the dishes and began washing them. I said, ‘I haven’t earned anything. It’s so wonderful you’re here. It’s an absolute miracle.’ My voice choked and I felt stupid tears coming. I brushed the back of my hand across my eyes. He must have seen, but he pretended not to have.
Instead he said cheerfully, ‘Yes. It was a stroke of luck. At least I hope so. Can’t count the chickens yet. Tell you what. We’ve got to sit these two hoodlums out. Wait until they make a move, go to bed or something. Would you like to hear just how I came to turn up tonight? It’ll all be in the papers in a day or two. The story. Only I won’t be mentioned. So you must promise to forget my side of the thing. It’s all nonsense, really. These regulations. But I have to work under them. All right? It might take your mind off your troubles. They seem to have been pretty powerful ones.’
I said gratefully, ‘Yes, please tell me. And I promise. Cross my heart.’
11 | BEDTIME STORY
I hoisted myself up on to the drain board of the sink just beside him so that he could talk to me quietly – and so that I could be near to him. I refused another cigarette, and he lit one and gazed for a long minute into the mirror watching the two gangsters. I looked, too. The two men just stared back with a passive, indifferent hostility that seeped steadily across the room like poison gas. I didn’t much like their indifference and their watchfulness. It seemed so powerful, so implacable, as if the odds were on their side and they had all the time in the world. But this James Bond didn’t seem worried. He just seemed to be weighing them up, like a chess player. There was a certitude of power, of superiority, in his eyes that worried me. He hadn’t seen these men in action. He couldn’t possibly know what they were capable of, how at any moment they might just blaze away with their guns, blowing our heads off like coconuts in a circus sideshow, and then toss our bodies in the lake with stones to keep them down. But then James Bond began talking, and I forgot my nightmares and just watched his face and listened.
‘In England,’ he said, ‘when a man, or occasionally a woman, comes over from the other side, from the Russian side, with important information, there’s a fixed routine. Take Berlin, for instance, and that’s the most usual come-over route. To begin with they get taken to intelligence headquarters and get treated at first with extra suspicion. That’s to try and take care of double agents – people who pretend to come over and, once they’ve been cleared by security, begin spying on us from inside, so to speak, and pass their stuff back to the Russians. There are also triple agents – people who do what the doubles have done, but change their minds and, under our control, pass phoney intelligence back to the Russians. Do you understand? It’s nothing but a complicated game, really. But then so’s international politics, diplomacy – all the trappings of nationalism and the power complex that goes on between countries. Nobody will stop playing the game. It’s like the hunting instinct.’
‘Yes, I see. It all seems idiotic to my generation. Like playing that old game “Attaque”, really. We need some more Jack Kennedys. It’s all these old people about. They ought to hand the world over to younger people who haven’t got the idea of war stuck in their subconscious. As if it were the only solution. Like beating children. It’s much the same thing. It’s all out of date – Stone Age stuff.’
