But the footsteps went quickly off down the passage.
CHAPTER 21 – VESPER
It was on the next day that Bond asked to see Vesper.
He had not wanted to see her before. He was told that every day she came to the nursing home and asked after him. Flowers had arrived from her. Bond didn’t like flowers and he told the nurse to give them to another patient. After this had happened twice, no more flowers came. Bond had not meant to offend her. He disliked having feminine things around him. Flowers seemed to ask for recognition of the person who had sent them, to be constantly transmitting a message of sympathy and affection. Bond found this irksome. He disliked being cosseted. It gave him claustrophobia.
Bond was bored at the idea of having to explain some of this to Vesper. And he was embarrassed at having to ask one or two questions which mystified him, questions about Vesper’s behaviour. The answers would almost certainly make her out to be a fool. Then he had his full report to M to think about. In this he didn’t want to have to criticize Vesper. It might easily cost her her job.
But above all, he admitted to himself, he shirked the answer to a more painful question.
The doctor had talked often to Bond about his injuries. He had always told him that there would be no evil effects from the terrible battering his body had received. He had said that Bond’s full health would return and that none of his powers had been taken from him. But the evidence of Bond’s eyes and his nerves refused these comforting assurances. He was still painfully swollen and bruised and whenever the injections wore off he was in agony. Above all, his imagination had suffered. For an hour in that room with Le Chiffre the certainty of impotence had been beaten into him and a scar had been left on his mind that could only be healed by experience.
From that day when Bond first met Vesper in the Hermitage bar, he had found her desirable and he knew that if things had been different in the night-club, if Vesper had responded in any way and if there had been no kidnapping he would have tried to sleep with her that night. Even later, in the car and outside the villa when God knows he had had other things to think about, his eroticism had been hotly aroused by the sight of her indecent nakedness.
And now when he could see her again, he was afraid. Afraid that his senses and his body would not respond to her sensual beauty. Afraid that he would feel no stir of desire and that his blood would stay cool. In his mind he had made this first meeting into a test and he was shirking the answer. That was the real reason, he admitted, why he had waited to give his body a chance to respond, why he had put off their first meeting for over a week. He would like to have put off the meeting still further, but he explained to himself that his report must be written, that any day an emissary from London would come over and want to hear the full story, that today was as good as tomorrow, that anyway he might as well know the worst.
So on the eighth day he asked for her, for the early morning when he was feeling refreshed and strong after the night’s rest.
For no reason at all, he had expected that she would show some sign of her experiences, that she would look pale and even ill. He was not prepared for the tall bronzed girl in a cream tussore frock with a black belt who came happily through the door and stood smiling at him.
‘Good heavens, Vesper,’ he said with a wry gesture of welcome, ‘you look absolutely splendid. You must thrive on disaster. How have you managed to get such a wonderful sunburn?’
‘I feel very guilty,’ she said sitting down beside him. ‘But I’ve been bathing every day while you’ve been lying here. The doctor said I was to and Head of S said I was to, so, well, I just thought it wouldn’t help you for me to be moping away all day long in my room. I’ve found a wonderful stretch of sand down the coast and I take my lunch and go there every day with a book and I don’t come back till the evening. There’s a bus that takes me there and back with only a short walk over the dunes, and I’ve managed to get over the fact that it’s on the way down that road to the villa.’