James Bond: The Authorised Biography by John Pearson Read Free Book Online Page B

minutiae of life.
    As he drank, I had a chance to observe him carefully. He was, if anything, taller and slightly thinner than I had expected; the arms below the short sleeves sinewy rather than muscular. His denim trousers were unpressed, his hair was worn a little on the long side. What would one have thought of him from first impressions? A colonial administrator here on convalescent leave? An aging playboy between marriages? Only the face might make one wonder – that bronzed Scottish face whose hardness seemed so out of place among these lush surroundings.
    ‘You takin’ lunch today, Commander?’ asked Augustus.
    The Commander nodded.
    ‘Customary table?’
    Bond grunted his assent. I checked an urge to smile.
    ‘You must excuse me,’ said James Bond. ‘I am a creature of routine. A dangerous thing in my profession, but I feel here it does no harm.’
    The customary table proved to be the best in the hotel – set well back from the pool and shaded by a great hibiscus, busy with humming birds. Clearly the birds delighted Bond, taking up most of his attention so that it was harder to get him to continue with the story of his life. Once more he did the ordering – ‘I always have the lobster done with coconut and lime juice, and avocado salad; then perhaps some guavas and blue mountain coffee. Suit you? The usual, twice, Augustus.’ When the food came, he ate with relish.
    I asked him about getting thrown out of Eton. How did Aunt Charmian react?
    ‘Oh, she was wonderful, although I know that she was bitterly upset. You see, the dear old thing had this firm idea that I was infected with what she used to call “the curse of the Bonds”, and that her task in life was to save me from it. When I got into Eton she thought that I would be a gentleman at last. Now that I was leaving under a cloud she really thought that I was going to the dogs.’
    ‘Wasn't she angry?’
    ‘No. That was the marvellous thing about her. She never blamed me. She blamed herself. Made me feel dreadful. There was quite a rumpus in the family about me. My mother's people seemed to think that I should go to Switzerland and live with them. The family in Glencoe seemed in favour of sending me to prison. As a compromise I was finally packed off to my father's old school, Fettes. I rather liked it after Eton, stayed there until sixteen, then got fed up with it. Decided it was time to move on. Got to Geneva University. And that was where the trouble really started.’
    *
    Bond explained that the strange decision to study at Geneva came through the Delacroixs. Ever since the Eton episode old man Delacroix had kept pressing for him to spend some time in Switzerland. Finally James Bond suggested the idea of studying at the university as something of a compromise. The Delacroixs would pay but he would naturally have rooms close to the university; for by now James Bond was keen on having his independence. Above all, he wanted the chance to live his own life free from the crush of communal living in a boarding school.
    Surprisingly, he liked Geneva. One says “surprisingly” because the prim, staid city is hardly the background one associates with Bond. And yet as soon as he arrived he felt at home here. Part of the explanation may be that he was half Swiss, and part that he was suddenly experiencing freedom here for the first time in his life. But there was something else about Geneva that appealed to him, and he agreed with Ian Fleming on the subject. For both of them it had, what Fleming called, a ‘Simenon-like quality – the quality that makes a thriller-writer want to take a tin-opener and find out what goes on behind the façade, behind the great families who keep the banner of Calvin flying behind the lace curtains in their fortresses in the Rue des Granges, the secrets behind the bronze grilles of the great Swiss banking corporations, the hidden turmoil behind the beautiful bland face of the country’.
    This then was Switzerland for