Bond slid very quietly out of Bryce’s bed and stood there for a moment, looking down on her as she slept deeply, lying on her side, one breast innocently exposed. She was a beautiful mature woman, Bond thought, pulling on his trousers and remembering the last time he’d made love – weeks and weeks ago – and how different in almost every degree his partner had been then. He moved to the door in bare feet and turned the handle slowly, thinking about the rest-house on the edge of the Zanza River Delta with Blessing Ogilvy-Grant in his arms. He smiled with a certain bitterness – that was when all his misfortunes had begun.
He left the bedroom door ajar by an inch and padded downstairs to Bryce’s study. He switched on the light and sat at her desk, sliding open the top drawer and taking out her passport. The date of birth pretty much fitted – and he was more than happy to shed a few years. The name was both masculine and feminine. All he needed to do was have the photograph and the gender designation changed – and he had exactly the man in mind who could do that. He would become Bryce Fitzjohn, ‘professional actor’. ‘Actress’ could be easily tampered with. He slipped the passport into the back pocket of his trousers and went through to the sitting room, where he poured himself an inch of brandy into a tumbler and sipped at it, turning his back to the warm embers still glowing in the grate of the fireplace, thinking back agreeably over their evening together.
Bond had arrived on time (in a taxi from Richmond station) and when Bryce opened the door to him she kissed him on the cheek – a good sign, Bond thought – and he smelled the scent of ‘Shalimar’ on her. She was wearing a black velvet dress to just above the knee with a low scoop neck. Two diamonds glittered at her ears and her thick blonde hair was brushed casually back from her brow. There was a bottle of Taittinger champagne waiting in an ice bucket on a table in the sitting room that she asked Bond to open. They toasted each other as they had done that evening across the dining room in the Dorchester.
‘Here’s to breaking and entering,’ she said.
‘Where’s this little restaurant of yours?’ Bond said. ‘We don’t want to be late.’
‘It’s about ten yards away. I thought it’d be nicer to eat at home.’
They both knew exactly what was going to happen later and that knowledge provided a satisfying sensual undercurrent to their conversation as they ate the meal she cooked for him – a rare sirloin steak with a tomato and shallot salad, the wine a light and fruity Chianti, with a thin slice of lemony torta della nonna to follow.
They were both worldly and sophisticated people of a certain age, Bond reasoned, and no doubt her sexual history was as varied and interesting as his. Well, maybe not quite . . . Still, the point was, Bond thought as he looked at her clearing away the plates, that there was no pretence involved here. No artificial wooing or effortful foreplay. They both candidly wanted each other, in the way that men and women know this instinctively, and they were going to bring this state of affairs about with as much fun and seductive expediency as they chose.
They went back through to the sitting room, where Bond lit the fire. They drank a brandy, smoked a cigarette and talked to each other – deliciously postponing the moment they were waiting for. In fact Bond sensed the timbre of her voice change, dropping, growing huskier, as she told him of the disaster of her last marriage – there had been two – to an American film producer with, it turned out, a significant drug problem. He thought it was remembered emotion, but he quickly sensed that the huskiness in her voice was desire: it was a signal, and when Bond stood up and crossed the floor to her and kissed her she responded with an ardency that surprised him.
They made careful love in her wide bed, Bond relishing the smooth ripeness of her body. Afterwards, she sent him down to the kitchen for another bottle of champagne and they lay in bed drinking and talking.
‘You say you’re a “businessman”,’ she said, studying his lean form as he lay there beside her. ‘Import – export, whatever that means. Yet you’ve more scars on your body than a gladiator.’
‘I had a difficult and dangerous war,’ Bond said.
She reached over, her full breasts shifting, and touched the new puckered rosy coin below his right collarbone.
‘You’re still fighting it, so it seems.’
He kissed her to stop her speculating further.
‘I’ll tell you all about it one day,’ he said. And they began to make love again.
Bryce’s alarm clock rang at five in the morning and she slipped out of bed, washed and dressed. Bond dressed also and the unit car that came to pick her up for the studio detoured to the station so he could catch an early train back to London.
She stepped out of the car so they could say their goodbyes discreetly.
‘What’re you doing this weekend?’ she asked. ‘I’m only free on Sunday. This film has another three weeks to run at the studio and I’m in every scene.’
‘I’ve got to go to America,’ Bond said. ‘Just for a week or two. When your film’s finished I’ll come and take you away somewhere very, very special that only I know.’
They kissed goodbye and Bond whispered in her ear, ‘Thank you for last night. Unforgettable.’
‘For me too,’ she said and squeezed his hand. Then they parted and Bond, with a full heart and a smile on his face, joined the jaded commuters on the platform at Richmond station. As he waited for the train he took Bryce’s passport from his pocket and felt a twinge of guilt. But if she was working for another three weeks she wouldn’t be going anywhere and wouldn’t miss it. When he came back he’d replace it in her desk drawer – she’d never know. His conscience was assuaged somewhat by the fact that he hadn’t made love to her just to steal her passport. He had every intention of seeing his Vampiria, Queen of Darkness, again. He had been stirred and affected by her in a way he had almost forgotten was possible. He’d be back – as soon as he’d administered swift and rough justice to the people who had so nearly killed him. Bryce had no idea how inadvertently important she had been to his plans – he’d find a way to show her his gratitude.
At Waterloo station Bond had his photograph taken in a booth, then he made a telephone call – to one of the numbers he’d retrieved from his flat – and took a taxi to Pimlico, to a shabby street of dirty peeling stucco houses aptly named Turpentine Lane. He rang the door of a basement flat and an elderly man in his sixties, wearing a flat tweed cap and smoking a moist roll-up cigarette, answered the door.
‘Mr Bond, sir, always a royal pleasure.’
‘Morning, Dennis,’ Bond said, stepping past him into the flat to be greeted by a noisome smell of cooking.
‘Good God, what’s that?’
‘Cow-heel stew. Bugger to cook – takes three days – but it tastes something marvellous.’
Dennis Fieldfare was a forger de luxe, occasionally called upon by Q Branch when they felt their own expertise wasn’t sufficient. Bond had first met Dennis when he’d needed a post-dated visa to Cuba that would have to pass microscopic inspection. It had raised not the slightest suspicion and had been so good that he’d decided to add Dennis’s name to his personal pantheon of experts to be called on, as and when.
Bond showed him Bryce’s passport and his photograph.
‘Swap the picture, change the sex and tweak “actress” for “actor”.’
‘That’s a bloody insult, Mr Bond. A simple-minded child could do that,’ Dennis said, professionally aggrieved.
Bond gave him £50. ‘But I need it very fast – this evening – that’s why I came to you. Keep the original photo safe – I’ll want you to change it back in a couple of weeks. And this is strictly between you and me, Dennis.’
‘Doddle, Mr B. And I never seen you,’ Dennis said, enjoying the feel of the money in his hand. ‘Six o’clock all right?’
At six o’clock that evening Bond had his faultless new passport and was now irrefutably Bryce Connor Fitzjohn, actor, eight years younger than he actually was but he had no complaints there. In fact, he was rather pleased by the coincidence. He had used the name ‘Bryce’ as a pseudonym before, in the early 1950s as an alias for a long train journey he’d made from New York to St Petersburg, Florida. He’d been John Bryce then and it had worked very well. He hoped Bryce Fitzjohn would prove equally effective. He had a feeling the new name would bring him good luck.
From Dennis’s Pimlico flat he went directly to the BOAC terminal at Victoria and bought himself a first-class return ticket to Washington DC, leaving Heathrow airport at 11.30 the following day. It was perhaps an unnecessary expense to choose first class but Bond, despite being an exceptionally well-travelled man, was not the happiest of fliers. The more pampered and indulged he was on an aeroplane the less uneasy he felt when any turbulence or bad weather was encountered. Anyway, he thought, if you’d decided to ‘go solo’ you might as well do it in style.