On Her Majesty's Secret Service [antikvár]

1 Seascape with Figures It WAS one of those Septembers when it seemed that the summer would never end. The five-mile promenade of Royale-les-Eaux, backed by trim lawns emblazoned at intervals with tricolour beds of salvia^ alyssum and lobelia, was bright with flags and, on the loiigest beach in the north of France, the gay bathing tents still marched prettily down to the tide-line in big, money-making battalions. Music, one of those lilting accordion (Waltzes, blared from the loudspeakers around the Olympic-teize piscine and, from time to time, echoing above the music, Oman's voice announced over the public address system that Philippe Bertrand, aged seven, was looking for his mother, that Yolande Lefevre was waiting for her friends below the clock at the entrance, or that a Madame Dufours was demanded on the telephone. From the beach, particularly from the neighbourhood of the three playground enclosures -'Joie de Vivre', 'Helio' and 'Azur' - c^e a twitter of children's cries that waxed and waned with the thrill of their games and, farther out, on the firm sand left by the now distant sea, the shrill whistle of the physical-fitness instructor marshalled his teenagers through the last course of the day. It was one of those beautiful, naive seaside panoramas for which the Brittany and Picardy beaches have provided the setting - and inspired their recorders, Boudin, Tissot, Monet - ever since the birth of plages and bains de mer more than a hundred years ago. To James Bond, sitting in one of the concrete shelters with his face to the setting sun, there was something poignant, ephemeral about it all. It reminded him almost too vividly of childhood - of the velvet feel of the hot powder sand, and the painful grit of wet sand between young toes when the time 9