Goldfinger

by Ian Fleming

Bond thought: That would happen today! The Loire is dressed for just that – chasing that girl until you run her to ground at lunch-time, the contact at the empty restaurant by the river, out in the garden under the vine trellis. The friture and the ice-cold Vouvray, the cautious sniffing at each other and then the two cars motoring on in convoy until that evening, well down to the south, there would be the place they had agreed on at lunch – olive trees, crickets singing in the indigo dusk, the discovery that they liked each other and that their destinations could wait. Then, next day (‘No, not tonight. I don’t know you well enough, and besides I’m tired’) they would leave her car in the hotel garage and go off in his at a tangent, slowly, knowing there was no hurry for anything, driving to the west, away from the big roads. What was that place he had always wanted to go to, simply because of the name? Yes, Entre Deux Seins, a village near Les Baux. Perhaps there wasn’t even an inn there. Well, then they would go on to Les Baux itself, at the Bouches du Rhône on the edge of the Camargue. There they would take adjoining rooms (not a double room, it would be too early for that) in the fabulous Baumanière, the only hotel-restaurant in France with Michelin’s supreme accolade. They would eat the gratin de langouste and perhaps, because it was traditional on such a night, drink champagne. And then … Bond smiled at his story and at the dots that ended it. Not today. Today you’re ...