Never Say Die (James Bond 007) 1 / Overcoming the Monster (1 of 2)

1 / OVERCOMING THE MONSTER

The English, as a seafaring nation, have always been a hard-drinking people.  This is a tradition, which is almost a symbol of their national identity.  Going back to the first days of piracy and rum-running in the days of Sir Henry Morgan, through to the First Opium War in 1839, with the British officers all being loaded up on gin and tonic and bitter lemon cordials when in battle, even with the spread of public houses in the Victorian era through to their continued use during the Depression with the excessive consumption of beer and ale.  James Bond for that matter, was no longer a hard-drinking Englishman, he displayed the early signs of an alcoholic.    

The symptoms of alcoholism vary on a case-by-case basis of course but an individual drinking in isolation and being ashamed of doing so is often a tell-tale sign.  If one were educated in the Freudian delusions of psychosexual development, the oral stage or hemitaxia as it’s called, proposes that Bond had been insufficiently suckled as an infant.  Adding water, or vodka, to such line of argument are the undeniable facts that he already drank like a sea fish (a creature that actively drinks the seawater it swims in), smoked like the chimney of a Victorian townhouse and, putting it candidly, womanized wholly and consistently.  Yet the real reason, or the action behind the recent sudden excessiveness in the man’s nature, was in fact down to shock.  The seismic nature of this particular type of shock is often the reason behind why many a modern man loses his footing in the stepladder of life – the reason being – the tragic death of a loved one. 

Exactly two months to that day, the evening where James Bond wondered whether he was an alcoholic or not, it had been the  most important morning of his life, his wedding day.  James Bond said the words ‘I do’ at ten-thirty on a crystal-clear New Year’s Day in the British Consul General’s drawing-room at Station M – the Munich station.  The woman standing at his side, his fiancée – Contessa Teresa di Vincenzo (Tracy) – had also said the words and meant them just as much as he did.  Her last to him were, ‘There’s a red car coming up fast behind.  Do you want me to lose him?’ and Bond had simply told her not to bother.  They had all the time in the world.  There had been an almighty noise, the sound of shattering glass and the roaring of its engine.  When he came to, the car’s wind-screen had disappeared, as if hit by a monster fist.  Tracy was lying forward with her face buried in the ruins of what had once been the steering-wheel.  Her pink handkerchief had come off and the bell of her golden hair hid the colourless countenance.

Bond saw the dark patches appearing around the pale shoulders a moment later and saw them every night when he closed his eyes to sleep.  He often saw it on the bed linen or on the adjacent pillow.  The drink kept him awake for only so long.  When he came to in the mornings, often rugged and considerably well-hung, that bitter taste one often gets from overdoing it on the tongue, it was to the rasping whine of the red car’s eight-cylinder engine.  The image of the broken, syphilitic nose of the man responsible; the international gangster, Ernst Stavro Blofeld turned up with its wide hideous mouth, sneering at him. 

The bastard was proud.  One bullet in his volley of shots had found its target and, along with the Lancia Spider’s wind-shield, shattered Bond’s hopes and dreams of a modest, meaningful life. 

In his room at the Hôtel Splendide, a fine establishment in the seaside resort of Royale-les-Eaux (about five miles from the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer), seven cigarette ends had piled up in the glass ashtray when the moon on the hem of the English Channel appeared behind the closed window.

The dark outline of the drunken man sat in an antique dining chair smoking coolly.  The tendency with all hotel rooms is to have at least one chair per room.  The Splendide was rated as a five-star establishment and was one of the most luxurious along the coast, so the chair he sat in was heavily inlaid with Mother of Pearl.  The left arm of it balanced the ashtray (which was full) and the right arm nursed the Englishman’s.  He was too drunk to notice the white light, bleeding through the slats of the blinds and spreading out over the carpeted floor in front of him like some sort of spotlight.  A half-empty bottle of Macallan Lalique ’21 – a single malt vintage and a wedding present to himself – sat on the glass-coffee table in front of him.  The Scotch, in addition to the six martinis probably still left on the counter at the hotel bar, had rendered him dumb but not quite asleep.

The drunk was the remains of Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR and one of the most effective Double-O operatives to walk through the doors of the Secret Intelligence Service since its inception.  Looking at him now, one could see that he was a handsome man tiptoeing on the precipice of middle age, but not particularly extraordinary.  He looked like a cold-hearted bastard, with a cruel mouth and greyish-blue eyes to fit.  He had made sexual conquests throughout his military and career in the intelligence service, his life from an early age had been nothing but a heap of six-to-four against.  Now he was a ghost of his former self.  His boss, M (who had quite a soft spot for him though he never dared to display it), had haphazardly signed him off on annual leave.  When his man closed the door gingerly behind him he had been unsure as to whether he’d see 007 again.

Bond wasn’t the suicidal-type, he didn’t believe in it.  He saw the extinction of one’s life as cowardly – as a  refusal to stand up to the hardships of existenc.  Although he often found himself in bizarre and totally dangerous circumstances, he had no true desire for self-destruction.  He simply returned to his flat in Chelsea, got in his 1930 four-and-a-half-litre Bentley, drove down to the Port of Dover, took the Channel ferry, sped along the coast to Royale-les-Eaux.  In order to feel closer to his wife. 

It was here in this French coastal town that he had met two of the most important women in his life.  That evening when he thought about it, he had met both Tracy and Vesper Lynd here.  That whole ghastly affair had wrapped itself up nearly ten years ago now.  Perhaps there was something about this place.  He wasn’t a superstitious man, often opting to fly on Friday the thirteenth when he could, leaving new shoes on the table and the sort of things that most English get in a huff about, but Royale-les-Eaux seemed to be a resort of double-cross and death for him.  Despite his drunken stupor, he considered it a wise decision for this to be the last time he visited this place, it held one too many bad memories for him, two of the best and worst chapters in the story of his life.   

Now it was around one-thirty in the morning.  Basked in the clearest illumination of moonlight, the mess of clothes and the thickness of the Morland cigarette smoke made the luxury apartement look like a dingy back-street bawdy house.  The red curtains to the balcony and at the front were drawn and the room had been without ventilation or the touch of the cleaning lady for the last couple of days.  It smelled rather stale.  Hooked on the door handle was the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.  The stout cleaning lady from Picardy whose job it was to handle the fifth floor had adhered to it for the mean time.  If she saw the sign up again tomorrow morning, she had promised herself to notify the hotel manager and have the room unlocked and someone sent in. 

The room itself was at the front of the building and looked out over the seafront – but nobody had seen the Englishman go outside onto the balcony, she had made sure of that.  The main road into town ran adjacent to it and was terribly noisy, the rumble of sports car engines a routine occurrence, a regular noise considered almost casual by the locals, like the crashing of the tide or the horned grebes singing in the trees.