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I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide. Sea Fever. John Masefield
The river in The Fighting Temeraire is the Thames, of course, painted almost oil-slick bright by the old man Turner. The sun low on the horizon, the water irradiated by that reflected glow, like the cloud that closes the picture in, a glowering mist into which the dirty smokestack of the tug spills upwards.
He’d been over sixty when he painted it. An old dog learning new tricks about light and liquid, playing with expectations by shifting his subject off centre, anticipating the impressionists by a good ten years.
But then people aren’t boats. Q has known that for some time now. People are far more interesting. Sink, and sometimes still survive. Not always, he acknowledges. In fact almost never. The stars have to be aligned. The gods – or nearest local equivalent – favourably disposed. In Venice the best shot is to die for love, but even then, perhaps especially then, nothing is guaranteed.
Bond hasn’t noticed yet, that he cannot, will never drown. That something in the sorority of rivers has chosen him. It’s hardly Q’s place to say what.
The sun-dappled shallows, The dusk of the pool. Lost Rivers of London. Cicely Fox Smith
Q does not worry that he’ll be seen leaving. It is easy for him to not be seen, to flow through the world, quiet and ubiquitous and overlooked, like the tendrils of technology or lambent heat of the sun. Which Q enjoys as he leans on the parapet of Vauxhall Bridge, gazing idly upriver with glasswort-green eyes. Noticeable only to those who take time to notice.
Which on this occasion, and rather to Q’s surprise, includes 007.
‘Walking home?’
‘Only as far as London Bridge.’
‘Aren’t you facing the wrong way then?’
‘I’m just watching the river for a bit.’
Much as he spends his time underground Q prefers this. The glint as a clipper passes beneath the bridge, throwing up wash that rocks the drays and slaps against the bank; the warmth of the cast iron under his hands. He pulls away and turns back for the detour around Vauxhall Cross, over the buried path of the Effra.
He has walked home – it’s not an unpleasant walk on a summer evening, seven miles taking in Kennington Park and Burgess Park and Broadway Fields, and even more pleasant doing it what anyone else would think of as the long way, following the lush curve of the Thames to Deptford creek, and down the Ravensbourne to the thinner course of the Quaggy.
Bond falls into step.
‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Not at all.’
These are the currents that chiselled the city, that washed the clothes and turned the mills. Rising Damp. U A Fanthorpe
Quaggy of course means boggy, quagmirish. Further out the watercourse is known as the Kyd Brook, something Q is aware Bond would find amusing, but the narrow river has many tributaries, fingers that thread out into Kent through allotments and golf courses and private land, constantly channelling clean water into the grubbier reaches downstream, saturating neat lawns and overflowing the gutters of carparks with suburban rain.
Q’s small garden backs onto one of the places where they’ve tried to widen and create zigzags, slow the flow down to prevent it from flooding worse downstream.
Despite the raised elevation and the brick-and-pebbledash wall yellow iris and purple loosestrife grow freely. The meagre lawn is a carpet of moss, damp underfoot, dappled with kingcups and snake’s head fritillaries in their season. Q has a hollowed rowboat that he fills with cushions to lounge on, and a curvy, slippery brick patio where he takes a kitchen chair and drinks tea on bright but cold days. A witchhazel twists back on itself from a half barrel by the door, raised on more bricks to keep the soil dry, and over the brick wall itself is a cascade of ivy and white deadnettle, threaded with sticks of the butterfly bush, finding root somehow where the pebbledash has eroded.
A cat rescued from the deep, culverted, stream, chases butterflies along the top, confident that if he fell, Q would rescue him again.
Anglo-Saxon ornaments, unexploded payloads, bone dice and oyster shells. Thames. John Challis
‘Hello Q.’ Bond says. ‘I missed you.’
Q sits up, tugging the duvet to cover his chest. He doesn’t reach for the bedside lamp or his glasses. He can see Bond perfectly in the dim light of pre-dawn.
He would ask what 007 is doing here, but that would be beyond redundant. He could summon up his persona as the Head of Q Branch and become outraged, but that would be to insult them both.
Instead he blinks.
Bond doesn’t.
‘I’m waiting for an explanation.’ He says.
He looks well. Refreshed, if anything. Reset.
Also remarkably annoyed for someone miraculously still alive.
‘I was hoping you wouldn’t think to ask me.’ Q admits.
‘Well of course I’m going to ask you, Q. Presumably it’s something MI6 did.’
‘What? No. There’s no technology that would make you functionally immortal 007, don’t be ludicrous. And if there were I certainly wouldn’t deploy it without your consent.’
‘Functionally immortal?’
‘As far as I can tell.’
‘And what else can you tell me?’
This is the tricky bit. Q wraps his arms around his knees as he thinks. Decides to start with the basics.
‘Do you know what a genius loci is?’