The Ian Fleming Files Read Online Free PDF Page B

never heard
of anyone marrying the same woman twice. You crazy pommies. Cheerio, cobber.
Nice shooting by the way.” Sydney winked and the Bedford rumbled off down the
lane.
    Fleming slammed
the door shut and hurried quickly up the steps to his front door.
     
    The esteemed
Fleming clan was at a wedding rehearsal in Oxford University’s Christ Church
college chapel. Slanting shafts of multicolored light stabbed down through the
stained glass and splashed onto the chapel’s Baroque organ from 1693, its
ornate shrine with saint’s relics and the famous 12th Century altar upon which
a very old and small hand-held sanctus bell rested.
    Fleming, wearing a
dark blue suit and his Eton Rambler’s cricket club tie, sat at a pew beside his
mother, the formidable Lady Fleming who was squinting her beady eyes at the
couple consulting with the priest: her son Peter Fleming and his wife the chic theater
star Celia Johnson. Peter was an intelligence officer serving under General
Archibald Wavell, then supreme allied commander in the far east. He was a good
looking man, like his younger brother, with a neatly clipped mustache and a
gold signet ring on the third finger of his left hand with the initials “P.F.”
He wore his hair carefully parted and greased down. Celia was a skinny,
luminous brunette with big almond eyes. She was currently having an annus
mirabilis thanks to back to back successes with her stage portrayals of
Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca .
    Lady Fleming had
the hard, strong-featured, self-absorbed face of an aristocrat and was dressed
in a floral print dress that hung like a drape from her ample bosom. Her head
supported a hat that was Ascot-worthy, a massive wide-brimmed bonnet with two
probing, antennae-like peacock eye feather clips made by a mad milliner in
Mayfair.
    Lady Fleming slept
with a .22 under her pillow.
    “When are we going
to see you up there?” she said. 
    “On the silver
screen? I don’t know, mother, perhaps Celia can get me an audition. Actually,
it’s called a ‘screen test.’”
    “Up there!” She
nodded to the front of the chapel. “The altar! You’re thirty-two years old,
Ian!”
    “I’m a little
preoccupied at the moment. You may have heard there’s a war on.” 
    “What about Anne
O’Neill? I thought you two were serious?”
    “Can we change the
subject?”
    “As you wish.
How’s that job I got you?”
    Fleming paused.
“There’s a possibility I may fly to Portugal to attend a naval conference on
Godfrey’s behalf.”
    “Look out Dick
Tracy!”
    “You had dinner
last night with Eileen Nearn.”
    “Who?”
    “The French
ambassador’s new paramour. Beautiful English brunette. The reason he’s here and
not partying with Petain and the Nazis.” 
    “She might have
been there with a dozen other forgettable people. The evening was a trifle
bore. Who told you what I was doing?”
    “What did she have
to say about Admiral Darlan?”
    “She’s twenty-two,
Ian. I don’t think she knows who Admiral Darlan is.”
    “She knows. That’s
all her French ambassador boyfriend has been talking about for the past week.”
    “Why the interest
in Darlan?”
    “If Hitler gets
his fleet we’re done for.”
    “Does Godfrey have
a plan?”
    Fleming hesitated.
“Let’s hope so. I’m updating our records and our biography of Darlan is
somewhat scant. It’s hard to write a character assessment when we know so
little about the man. Other than that he is a little man. Ha ha.”
    “Still stuck in
archives, I see.”
    “Do you remember
anything from last night?”
    “I remember plenty
but we weren’t discussing French military strategy nor were we preparing
biographies of stunted French admirals. Really, Ian, you have a position at the
Naval Intelligence Department it’s time you stopped milking your mother for gossip.”
    Fleming tried a
different tack. “Wasn’t there a new play you wanted to see?”
    She jerked her
neck