She stopped abruptly. She said, “Give me some more champagne. All this silly talking has made me thirsty. And I would like a packet of Players”—she laughed “—Please, as they say in the advertisements. I am fed up with just smoking smoke. I need my Hero.” Bond bought a packet from the cigarette girl. He said, “What’s that about a hero?”
She had entirely changed. Her bitterness had gone, and the lines of strain on her face. She had softened. She was suddenly a girl out for the evening. “Ah, you don’t know! My one true love! The man of my dreams. The sailor on the front of the packet of Players. You have never thought about him as I have.” She came closer to him on the banquette and held the packet under his eyes. “You don’t understand the romance of this wonderful picture—one of the great masterpieces of the world. This man”—she pointed—“was the first man I ever sinned with. I took him into the woods, I loved him in the dormitory, I spent nearly all my pocket money on him. In exchange he introduced me to the great world outside the Cheltenham Ladies College. He grew me up. He put me at ease with boys of my own age. He kept me company when I was lonely or afraid of being young. He encouraged me, gave me assurance. Have you never thought of the romance behind this picture? You see nothing, yet the whole of England is there! Listen.” She took his arm eagerly. “This is the story of Hero, the name on his cap badge. At first he was a young man, a powder monkey or whatever they called it, in that sailing ship behind his right ear. It was a hard time for him. Weevils in the biscuits, hit with marlinspikes and ropes’ ends and things, sent up aloft to the top of all that rigging where the flag flies. But he persevered. He began to grow a mustache. He was fair-haired and rather too pretty.” She giggled. “He may even have had to fight for his virtue or whatever men call it, among all those hammocks. But you can see from his face—that line of concentration between his eyes—and from his fine head, that he was a man to get on.” She paused and swallowed a glass of champagne. The dimples were now deep holes in her cheeks. “Are you listening to me? You are not bored having to listen about my hero?”
“I’m only jealous. Go on.”
“So he went all over the world—to India, China, Japan, America. He had many girls and many fights with cutlasses and fists. He wrote home regularly—to his mother and to a married sister who lived at Dover. They wanted him to come home and meet a nice girl and get married. But he wouldn’t. You see, he was keeping himself for a dream girl who looked rather like me. And then”—she laughed— “the first steamships came in and he was transferred to an ironclad—that’s the picture of it on the right. And by now he was a bosun, whatever that is, and very important. And he saved up from his pay and instead of going out fighting and having girls he grew that lovely beard, to make himself look older and more important, and he set to with a needle and colored threads to make that picture of himself. You can see how well he did it—his first windjammer and his last ironclad with the lifebuoy as a frame. He only finished it when he decided to leave the Navy. He didn’t really like steamships. In the prime of life, don’t you agree? And even then he ran out of gold thread to finish the rope round the lifebuoy, so he just had to tail it off. There, you can see on the right where the rope crosses the blue line. So he came back home on a beautiful golden evening after a wonderful life in the Navy and it was so sad and beautiful and romantic that he decided that he would put the beautiful evening into another picture. So he bought a pub at Bristol with his savings and in the mornings before the pub opened he worked away until he had finished and there you can see the little sailing ship that brought him home from Suez with his duffel bag full of silks and seashells and souvenirs carved out of wood. And that’s the Needles Lighthouse beckoning him in to harbor on that beautiful calm evening. Mark you”—she frowned—“I don’t like that sort of bonnet thing he’s wearing for a hat, and I’d have liked him to have put `H.M.S.’ before the `Hero,’ but you can see that would have made it lopsided and he wouldn’t have been able to get all the `Hero’ in. But you must admit it’s the most terrifically romantic picture. I cut it off my first packet, when I smoked one in the lavatory and felt terribly sick, and kept it until it fell to pieces. Then I cut off a fresh one. I carried him with me always until things went wrong and I had to go back to Italy. Then I couldn’t afford Players. They’re too expensive in Italy and I had to smoke things called Nazionales.” Bond wanted to keep her mood. He said, “But what happened to the Hero’s pictures? How did the cigarette people get hold of them?”