Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [28]
‘What happened?’
‘According to my father, his manner alienated people.’
‘So he was like that even then.’
‘He had this Baltic or Lithuanian accent and of course . . . the hand. But that was all right. I think people felt sorry for him. But he was crooked. He cheated in exams – though according to my father he didn’t need to. He was contemptuous of the undergraduates, because he was a bit older and had fought in the war.’
‘For both sides, I gather,’ said Bond.
‘Perhaps he wanted to be on the winning side,’
said Scarlett. ‘And he had undoubtedly seen things at Stalingrad – or Volgograd as they’re trying to call it again now – that made him feel older, or more worldly . . . But quite a few of the British students had broken off their studies to go and fight.’
Scarlett was interrupted by the waiter, who had come to clear the remains of the shellfish.
‘You’re going to have fried sole now,’ said Scarlett.
‘Can I order some wine?’
‘Be my guest. Or Gorner’s,’ said Bond, tapping the thick envelope in his breast pocket.
Scarlett lit a cigarette, pulled her feet up under her on the red-cushioned seat and wrapped her arms round her ankles. As the sun disappeared behind a
tall building, she pushed her dark glasses on to the top of her head and, Bond thought, looked suddenly younger. Her dark brown eyes engaged his.
‘Gorner became obsessed by the fact that people didn’t like him and he put it all down to xenophobia. He viewed Oxford as an e´lite English club that wouldn’t let him join. I imagine one or two of the rowing types probably did tease him, but my father reassured me that most of them were perfectly polite and kind. I think it was this experience that somehow put the iron in his soul and he determined to take his revenge on what he saw as the stuck-up English. He became obsessed by English culture and all that rather dreary stuff about cricket and fair play and tea-time. He thought it was all a gigantic fraud. He took it far more seriously than any English person. He made a fetish of British foreign policy and the Empire and thought he could show how brutal and unfair it had all been. I suppose the whole process must have taken some years to come to fruition but, to cut a long story short, he hated England because he felt it had laughed at him, and he decided to devote his life to destroying it.’
‘Perhaps he’d already had feelings like that,’ said Bond.
‘What do you mean?’
‘When he changed sides in the war. Perhaps, when it became clear that the Nazis couldn’t beat the British, he thought the Russians were the next best bet.’
‘ That’s clever of you, James. I didn’t know you were such a psychologist.’
‘ The waiter wants you to try the wine.’
Scarlett gave the Baˆtard Montrachet a quick sniff.
‘ Tre`s bien. Where was I?’
‘Being flattering.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, my father got wind of the fact that Gorner was unhappy and he tried to sympathize. He was only a tutor that Gorner went to see occasionally, he had no responsibility for his welfare, but my father’s a kind man. He asked him to dinner at our house. Poppy and I must have been there, as little girls, but I don’t remember. He sympathized with him about being an outsider and told him his own father had found it hard, coming from Russia, but that England had a good reputation with immigrants. Half the science faculty at Cambridge were Jewish e´migre´s, for heaven’s sake. Then my father made his big mistake. He asked him about his hand.’
Bond put down his knife and fork. ‘What did he say?’
‘My father said he’d known someone in Cambridge
before the war – in Sidney Sussex College, I don’t know why I remember that – who had the same thing. He was trying to be reassuring, to let Gorner know he wasn’t the only one with this peculiarity, but I suppose it was something Gorner’d never spoken about before. I suppose he was very ashamed of it. As though he or his family hadn’t properly evolved.’
Bond nodded and filled their glasses.