‘I do.’
James Bond said the words at ten-thirty in the morning of a crystal-clear New Year’s Day in the British Consul General’s drawing-room.
And he meant them.
The Consul General had proved himself, as British Consuls so often do, to be a man of efficiency and a man with a heart. It was a holiday for him and, as he confessed, he should have been recovering from a New Year’s Eve hangover. And he had shaved many days off the formal period of notice, but that, he explained, he had occasionally, and improperly, risked in his career if there were exceptional circumstances such as the imminent death of either party. ‘You both look healthy enough,’ he had said when they first visited him together, ‘but that’s a nasty cut on your head, Commander Bond, and the Countess is perhaps looking a lit
