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She wakes up aching, which is hardly new. Not since she hit this side of sixty, and then this side of seventy. Young men hold doors open for her, stand to let her take their seats on busy trains; her, with a discreet knife tucked in her sensible shoes and a hundred fingers ready for a hundred triggers should she choose to press that button, choose to make that call.
But oh, how it aches.
“Ma’am,” says Mallory, climbing to his feet when she opens her eyes.
She frowns up at him, sits up straighter in her neat hospital bed and touches a hand to her side. She takes the broadsheet he holds out to her and – with a suspicious glance at his impassive face – she takes stock of the date and then turns the page. She thinks. She touches, again, very delicately, the bandage on her side, and she turns to the obituaries.
“Well, if you insist,” she says, with a sigh.
“Your retirement, ma’am.”
“Yes, how was the funeral?” she asks, scanning her obituary. She smiles, once or twice. “Nothing too ostentatious, one hopes.”
Mallory inclines his head. “It was well attended. You were well loved.”
“I should bloody well think so, too.”
She turns absentmindedly to the crossword and tuts to see it already almost completed. “You cheeky beggars. I know this handwriting. Nicked it from Bond, did you?” She glances up at him with narrowed eyes. “He believes I’m gone?”
Mallory nods and folds his hands behind his back. A young man, holding a door open. Sighing again, she lowers the newspaper and folds her own hands neatly in her lap.
“You will look after them all,” she says. “Call it my final order.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
He adds, slowly, “Bond is recovering well, too.”
“Oh, yes? Well, of course he is.”
Lapsing back into silence, she watches him. She will not make this any easier for him. At last, Mallory clears his throat and says – looking so firmly back at her that she knows he’d rather look away –
“We took the liberty of booking you a holiday, ma’am. To break in your new passport and your...” He pauses, but only briefly; he’ll grow out of that. “New identity. How does a Caribbean cruise sound?”
“The Caribbean?”
She thinks. Sand, sea, undoubtedly sun. She’s had dealings with the region, of course, sent agents out there in the name of interagency cooperation with the Americans and all that tosh. She visited the Cayman Islands once, briefly, with her husband. But that was for work, and operated in the night, and left the taste of blood in her mouth.
A cruise to the tropics. Swimming pools. Cocktails. Age appropriate company. A song and dance with every meal.
“No, that won’t do,” she says. “That won’t do at all.”
Mallory moves a hand in some small, economical gesture, cut off before it has barely even begun. He shifts on his feet like a schoolboy.
“Well, go on.” She waves a hand in dismissal, this one last time. “Off you go, then. Cancel it. I’ll make my own arrangements.”
Mallory nods.
“Ma’am.”
He leaves; the man in charge of MI6, off to cancel an old lady’s cruise. Nobody, she reflects, and she picks up the paper to study Bond’s crossword. He missed five cryptic clues, which she begins to pencil in, slowly and carefully to avoid any strain on the bandage on her side. Oh, how it aches. Nobody will ever call her M again
*
She was a serious girl with a serious face. Her mother always worried that the rations, the bombings, the pollution would stunt her growth. Her mother always worried that she would not find a husband.
She taught herself to spot the enemy aircraft by sight and sound.
Both her parents died when she was young.
That was all a long time ago, now.
*
She heads east onto the continent. In Paris nobody looks at her face, and she eases herself into the middle of a guided tour of the Louvre, and inevitably ends up at the top of the Eiffel Tower. She takes a photo for a smiling young couple who are clearly reminded by her of their grandmother.
She goes north through Belgium, buys herself a box of chocolates and eats them all slowly one-by-one on a business class flight on Mallory’s expenses. It is freeing to travel unguarded, although she misses the knife in her shoes
The mountains of Norway make her think of Scotland. The thought of Scotland makes her breath ache, and she goes north further still. She stops on the edge of the ice and snow. It shines like new. It looks so clean. Pristine.
She spends a night in a small hotel with a log fire and a glass of brandy, talking with an elderly gentleman for so long into the night she could almost imagine staying, like a glimpse through the window into someone else’s life. She could put her feet up and buy some slippers.
In the morning, she checks out and goes south.
*
Of course she thinks of him sometimes.
*
She takes her shoes off to walk along the sand, but she keeps her pearls on. She can breathe in deeply with barely a twinge in the scar in her side, now. When she reaches the beachside bar, the sky is dark and the patrons turn to stare at her.
“Good evening,” she says, seating herself on a stool at the bar.
She raises an eyebrow at the silence that greets her.
“I knew a gentleman,” she says, “who used to frequent this establishment. An Englishman?”
The barman clears his throat. He glances around at a few of his customers. They shrug at him, so he turns back to her.
“This tall?” he asks, holding up his hand. “Angry?”
“Infinitely,” she says, with a nod.
The barman grins at her, spreading his arms. He exclaims, “A friend of Bond is a friend of ours!”
As simple as that. People pat her on the back. They buy her drinks. Later, someone brings out a live scorpion and they demonstrate their favourite game.
“And he did this for fun, did he?” she says.
She glances around at the bright, drunken, nodding faces that surround her. She purses her lips.
“Well,” she says, holding out her hand. “Why not?”
*
When she was six, she was evacuated, first to Winchester and then – when the bombs crept closer – to an aunt in Derbyshire, where the hills rose so high she surely could have touched any Spitfire that flew overheard. She could have flicked the Luftwaffe right out of the air.
She climbed to the topmost peaks to stand guard, to keep watch, but no aircraft came for her. When the war ended, she returned home to find the city changed in her absence, with gaps like missing teeth in every road. She counted every scar and every brick. She was a serious girl with a serious face and she promised her city she would never leave it unguarded again.
London would always need her.
*
And yes, of course she still thinks of him sometimes.
*
She is sitting on the beach smoking a mid-afternoon cigarette – a filthy habit, of course, and one that she quit when her husband died, picked up again when she died – when she hears it on the news. Her ears, forever attuned to certain keywords, pick out the important details as the newsreader’s voice drifts down to the shore.
London, a minor explosion at the top of the Shard, raining glass down on the city. But: a larger explosion averted, a miniscule death toll, a culprit detained. Rumours of an agent hospitalised.
She breathes out a slow stream of smoke. All that glass will be a devil to clean up, she imagines, and the repairs for that eyesore of a tower, too. She watches another wave roll in and break tenderly on the shore. It wipes the sand clean and smooth. Pristine.
“Just can’t keep out of trouble, can you?” she murmurs.
She climbs slowly to her feet and walks back up the beach. She makes a call.
*
London will always need her.
*
She steps into the hospital room and then she stops, just through the doorway. He looks up at her as best he can, with one eye bandaged shut and the other red and swollen, keeping his head as still as possible against the pillows. His face is half-obscured by an oxygen mask, but beneath the mask he looks shocked.
That’s what makes her stop, just through the doorway. He looks shocked. She has shocked him. She smoothes her skirt and briskly walks the final few steps to the chair by his bed.
“Look at the state of you,” she says.
She tuts. She sinks down into the chair, him following her with the gaze of one swollen eye all the while. The bloodshot white, the startling grey and blue.
“Don’t give me that look,” she says. “I’ve been enjoying my death very much, thank you. And you’re as reckless as ever, I see, which I suppose means you’re having a grand old time.”
She leans back in the chair. It’s too low and her knees are beginning to ache, but she takes in the sight of him. Cauliflower ear, butterfly stitches. He’s lost a fingernail somewhere along the way. She lifts his hand up to get a closer look at it, smiling thinly at the calluses she can feel beneath her fingers.
“Russia, was it?” she says.
He licks his lips, clears his dry throat with a rumble like an old dog, and pulls the oxygen mask down from his face.
“Yes,” he says.
“I thought so.”
Still smiling, she lowers his hand down onto the bed linen and she pats his wrist, where there are no bandages. Her fingers touch a dozen scars. He grins at her laconically, displaying the gap where a tooth was knocked out. A new one will be put in.
“Death suits you, M,” he says.
“Don’t get sentimental, Bond,” she says. “It doesn’t suit you. And you’d better call me Emma, I suppose.”
He shoots her an incredulous, one-eyed look.
“It grew on me,” she says.
He begins to laugh in deep, wheezing chuckles, head thrown back. She can see every deep crease around his eyes. After a moment she laughs too, with her hand on his wrist, with his scars beneath her fingers.
*
Yes, London will always need her.
The reverse is also true.