Devil May Care

expensive hosiery.
    An hour later they were at dinner in the via Carrozze. A telephone call from the hotel by Larissa had apparently secured her husband’s permission for the innocent date and one by Bond had added a second person to his reservation.
    The restaurant was wood-panelled and traditional. The waiters in their short white coats were all Romans of a certain age who had spent a lifetime in their chosen profession. They were swift and precise in their movements, polite without being deferential.
    Bond watched as Larissa chatted over ravioli, glistening with truffle oil. She told him her father was Russian, her mother English, and that she’d been educated in Paris and Geneva before going to work in Washington, where she’d met her husband. They had no children.
    ‘So of course my husband does a good deal of travelling,’ she said, sipping a glass of Orvieto. ‘Our base is in Paris, and I travel with him some of the time. To the better places.’
    ‘Let me guess,’ said Bond. ‘Rome, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong –’
    ‘No, I can’t bear Hong Kong. I stay at home when he goes there. I’m quite a home girl, really.’
    ‘Of course you are,’ said Bond.
    Early thirties, bored, he thought, part Jewish on her father’s side. She had a beautiful mouth whose upper lip occasionally stiffened into something almost like a pout.
    Her skin had a light honey glow, but her air of innocent respectability was a front. There was an unrepentant wild-ness in her eyes. She would have to pretend that it was all an aberration, that she was ‘not like that’, but that would only make it more exciting for both of them.
    ‘You look distracted, James.’
    ‘I’m sorry. Do I? I blame the two Bs.’
    ‘And what are they?’
    ‘Brainwashing and bereavement.’
    ‘Goodness. Tell me more.’
    For a moment, Bond was tempted to confide in this animated and beautiful girl – to tell her about his wife of a few brief hours, Tracy di Vicenzo, and how Blofeld’s men had killed her, how he himself had fallen into their clutches, the whole Japanese nightmare and his part-redemption in Jamaica. But confidences were unprofessional. He had already allowed his strange, distracted mood to let him say more than he should.
    ‘Another time,’ he said. ‘When we know each other a little better.’
    He steered the conversation back to Larissa, noticing as he did that his evasiveness had made him more interesting to her. Reluctantly at first, but then with increasing self-absorption, Larissa took up the narrative of her life.
    When they arrived back at the hotel, she stopped outside the front door and placed her hand on Bond’s forearm.
    ‘My husband has had to go to Naples for the night,’ she said, looking down at her feet and licking her lips a little nervously as she spoke. ‘He told me when I called him earlier. You could come up to our suite for a drink if you like.’
    Bond looked down into the large brown eyes as the fulllips parted in an expression of modest excitement. Then he heard himself utter three words that in all his adult life had never, in such a situation, left his mouth before. ‘No, thank you.’
    ‘What?’ It seemed as though she truly hadn’t heard.
    ‘No, thanks, Larissa,’ said Bond. ‘It’s better this way. I –’
    ‘No explanations,’ she said. She stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’
    He watched her as she walked over to the desk, collected her key and made for the lift. As she stepped in, she hesitated, turned and waved.
    What a girl, thought Bond. He lit a cigarette and went outside to smoke it.
    Perhaps this was the sign he’d been waiting for. A couple of years ago he wouldn’t even have waited for coffee at the restaurant before getting her back to his room at the hotel. Although there had been times when he’d tired of the game, even been repelled by it, he’d been sure it would be a lifelong compulsion.
    Yet tonight … Now he knew for sure that an epoch had ended and he knew what he would have to tell M when he returned to London. It was over. He was resigned to a life of interdepartmental meetings and examining cables at his desk, with only his shared secretary Loelia Ponsonby – now mercifully back at her post after giving birth to two healthy boys – to distract his eye occasionally from the paperwork.
    After the business with Scaramanga in Jamaica, Bond had spent eighteen months – it seemed longer – pushing paper round