She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘There’s nothing very clever about all that. I told you most of it. You know something about Italian women. But why do you say I’m cruel?’

‘If I was gambling and I took a knock like Largo did and I had my woman, a woman, sitting near me watching and she didn’t give me one word of comfort or encouragement I would say she was being cruel. Men don’t like failing in front of their women.’

She said impatiently, ‘I’ve had to sit there too often and watch him show off. I wanted you to win. I cannot pretend. You didn’t mention my only virtue. It’s honesty. I love to the hilt and I hate to the hilt. At the present time, with Emilio, I am half way. Where we were lovers, we are now good friends who understand each other. When I told you he was my guardian, I was telling a white lie. I am his kept woman. I am a bird in a gilded cage. I am fed up with my cage and tired of my bargain.’ She looked at Bond defensively. ‘Yes, it is cruel for Emilio. But it is also human. You can buy the outside of the body, but you cannot buy what is inside – what people call the heart and soul. But Emilio knows that. He wants women for use. Not for love. He has had thousands in this way. He knows where we both stand. He is realistic. But it is becoming more difficult to keep to my bargain – to, to, let’s call it sing for my supper.’

She stopped abruptly. She said, ‘Give me some more champagne. All this silly talking has made me thirsty. And I would like a packet of Players’ – she laughed – ‘Please, as they say in the advertisements. I am fed up with just smoking smoke. I need my Hero.’

Bond bought a packet from the cigarette girl. He said, ‘What’s that about a hero?’

She had entirely changed. Her bitterness had gone, and the lines of strain on her face. She had softened. She was suddenly a girl out for the evening. ‘Ah, you don’t know! My one true love! The man of my dreams. The sailor on the front of the packet of Players. You have never thought about him as I have.’ She came closer to him on the banquette and held the packet under his eyes. ‘You don’t understand the romance of this wonderful picture – one of the great masterpieces of the world. This man,’ she pointed, ‘was the first man I ever sinned with. I took him into the woods, I loved him in the dormitory, I spent nearly all my pocket money on him. In exchange, he introduced me to the great world outside the Cheltenham Ladies’ College. He grew me up. He put me at ease with boys of my own age. He kept me company when I was lonely or afraid of being young. He encouraged me, gave me assurance. Have you never thought of the romance behind this picture? You see nothing, yet the whole of England is there! Listen,’ she took his arm eagerly, ‘this is the story of Hero, the name on his cap badge. At first he was a young man, a powder monkey or whatever they called it, in that sailing ship behind his right ear. It was a hard time for him. Weevils in the biscuits, hit with marlinspikes and ropes’ ends and things, sent up aloft to the top of all that rigging where the flag flies. But he persevered. He began to grow a moustache. He was fair-haired and rather too pretty,’ she giggled, ‘he may even have had to fight for his virtue, or whatever men call it, among all those hammocks. But you can see from his face – that line of concentration between his eyes – and from his fine head, that he was a man to get on.’ She paused and swallowed a glass of champagne. The dimples were now deep holes in her cheeks. ‘Are you listening to me? You are not bored having to listen about my Hero?’

‘I’m only jealous. Go on.’

‘So he went all over the world – to India, China, Japan, America. He had many girls and many fights with cutlasses and fists. He wrote home regularly – to his mother and to a married sister who lived at Dover. They wanted him to come home and meet a nice girl and get married. But he wouldn’t. You see, he was keeping himself for a dream girl who looked rather like me. And then,’ she laughed, ‘the first steamships came in and he was transferred to an ironclad – that’s the picture of it on the right. And by now he was a bosun, whatever that is, and very important. And he saved up from his pay and instead of going out fighting and having girls he grew that lovely beard, to make himself look older and more important, and he set to with a needle and coloured threads to make that picture of himself. You can see how well he did it – his first windjammer and his last ironclad with the lifebuoy as a frame. He only finished it when he decided to leave the Navy. He didn’t really like steamships. In the prime of life, don’t you agree? And even then he ran out of gold thread to finish the rope round the lifebuoy, so he just had to tail it off. There, you can see on the right where the rope crosses the blue line. So he came back home on a beautiful golden evening after a wonderful life in the Navy and it was so sad and beautiful and romantic that he decided that he would put the beautiful evening into another picture. So he bought a pub at Bristol with his savings and in the mornings before the pub opened he worked away until he had finished and there you can see the little sailing ship that brought him home from Suez with his duffel bag full of silks and seashells and souvenirs carved out of wood. And that’s the Needles Lighthouse beckoning him in to harbour on that beautiful calm evening. Mark you,’ she frowned, ‘I don’t like that sort of bonnet thing he’s wearing for a hat, and I’d have liked him to have put “H.M.S.” before the “Hero”, but you can see that would have made it lop-sided and he wouldn’t have been able to get all the “Hero” in. But you must admit it’s the most terrifically romantic picture. I cut it off my first packet, when I smoked one in the lavatory and felt terribly sick, and kept it until it fell to pieces. Then I cut off a fresh one. I carried him with me always until things went wrong and I had to go back to Italy. Then I couldn’t afford Players. They’re too expensive in Italy and I had to smoke things called Nazionales.’

Bond wanted to keep her mood. He said, ‘But what happened to the hero’s pictures? How did the cigarette people get hold of them?’

‘Oh well, you see one day a man with a stove-pipe hat and a frock coat came into the hero’s pub with two small boys. Here,’ she held the packet sideways, ‘those are the ones, “John Player & Sons”. You see, it says that their Successors run the business now.

Well they had one of the first motor-cars, a Rolls-Royce, and it had broken down outside the hero’s pub. The man in the stove-pipe hat didn’t drink of course – those sort of people didn’t, not the respectable merchants who lived near Bristol. So he asked for ginger beer and bread and cheese while his chauffeur mended the car. And the hero got it for them. And Mr John Player and the boys all admired the two wonderful tapestry pictures hanging on the wall of the pub. Now this Mr Player was in the tobacco and snuff business and cigarettes had just been invented and he wanted to start making them. But he couldn’t for the life of him know what to call them or what sort of a picture to put on the packet. And he suddenly had a wonderful idea. When he got back to the factory he talked to his manager and the manager came along to the pub and saw the hero and offered him a hundred pounds to let his two pictures be copied for the cigarette packet. And the hero didn’t mind and anyway he wanted just exactly a hundred pounds to get married on.’ She paused. Her eyes were far away. ‘She was very nice, by the way, only thirty and a good plain cook and her young body kept him warm in bed until he died many years later. And she bore him two children, a boy and a girl. And the boy went into the Navy like his father. Well, anyway, Mr Player wanted to have the hero in the lifebuoy on one side of the packet and the beautiful evening on the other. But the manager pointed out that that would leave no room for all this’ – she turned over the packet – ‘about “Rich, Cool”, and “Navy Cut Tobacco” and that extraordinary trade mark of a doll’s house swimming in chocolate fudge with Nottingham Castle written underneath. So then Mr Player said, “Well then, we’ll put one on top of the other.” And that’s just exactly what they did and I must say I think it fits in very well, don’t you? Though I expect the hero was pretty annoyed at the mermaid being blanked out.’