'Broccoli, Saltzman, Pevsner, they're all foreign names, I mean non-British. It's striking, isn't it, a little odd, that the producers of Bond should be German or Italian in origin.' That is what I in turn replied, taking a sip of my drink and at the same time giving in to my onomastic-geographical curiosity and not urging her to get to the point. They must have been false Englishmen and women too, the members of those wealthy families. For one reason or another, there really were quite a lot of them. 'Even if they had British nationality or were born here, they still sound false.'
'Well, it seems perfectly normal to me, I don't know what you mean by "false." People have the mistaken idea that there isn't much of a racial mix here or that any foreign presence is very recent, like that Abramovich man who's taken over Chelsea or Al Fayed or other millionaire Arabs. Great Britain has been full of non-English surnames for centuries. Look at Tupra, look at me, look at Rendel, look at you. The only one of us whose name doesn't come from elsewhere is Mulryan, and he, I bet, is really an Irishman.'
'But I'm not English, I don't count,' I said. 'I'm to all intents and purposes a Spaniard, and I'm only here temporarily. At least I think I am, that's my feeling, although, who knows, I might end up staying. And you're only half-British, aren't you? Your father is Spanish. Nuix, I assume, is a Catalan name.' I pronounced it as it should be pronounced, not as a Castilian would, but as if it were written 'Nush.' I had noticed that the English, on the other hand, called her 'Niux,' as if her name were written 'Nukes.'
'He was Spanish, yes, but he isn't any more,' replied young Nukes. Anyway, I'm not half anything, I'm English. As English as Michael Portillo, the politician, you know who I mean, at one point it looked as if he might be the next Tory Prime Minister, his father, though, was an exile from the Spanish Civil War. The next leader of the Tories was that fellow Howard, he may have changed his surname, but he's Romanian originally. And many years ago in Ireland, there was that President with the unequivocally Spanish name De Valera, as nationalistic as any O'Reilly, and who, incredibly enough, emerged out of Sinn Fein. Then you have the Korda brothers, who for decades dominated this country's film industry and the painter Freud, and the composer Finzi, and the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, and that director who made
The Full Monty, Cattaneo or Cataldi, I can't quite remember. There's Cyril Tourneur, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and the poets Dante and Christina Rossetti, and Byron's lugubrious friend, Dr.John Polidori, and Conrad's real name was Korzeniowski. Gielgud is a Lithuanian or Polish name, and yet no one spoke better English on the stage; Bogarde was Dutch, and then there was that old actor Robert Donat, who played Mr. Chips, his name was an abbreviation of Donatello, I believe. There were prestigious publishers like Chatto and Victor Gollancz, and the bookseller Rota. Then you have Lord Mountbatten, who started off as Battenberg, and even the Rothschilds. Not to mention the Hanoverians, who have reigned here for centuries now, however they may conceal the fact by calling their dynasty Windsor, a name-change that only occurred thanks to George V. There have always been loads of such examples, and most are or were as British as Churchill or Blair or Thatcher. Or as Disraeli, for that matter, Prime Minister during Queen Victoria's reign, and there's very little that's English about his name.' She paused for a moment. She was better informed and more cultivated than I had thought, she had probably studied at Oxford, like so many civil servants; or perhaps because she herself had a foreign surname she had learned all these antecedents by heart and identified with them. She felt entirely English, which was interesting, she would never suffer any conflicts of loyalty; it seemed to me that her reaction betrayed even a certain patriotism, which was more worrying, as is anyone's patriotism. She finished off her third glass of wine, lit another of my Pelopon-nese cigarettes and took two puffs, one after the other, as if she had finally decided to come to grips with her subject and these were her final preparations, the equivalent to the little mental run-up she often took at work before she came over to talk to me, beyond I mean just greeting me or asking me some isolated question; taking a drink and smoking a cigarette marked a new paragraph. All this movement (she had been gesticulating during her proclamation of Britishness and her assurance that she was no compatriot of mine, contrary to my belief or, rather, feeling) had caused the run in her stockings to advance downwards and it was getting close to the top of her boot now; on its upward path it had already reached the edge of her skirt, and so I would not see it grow further in that direction unless her skirt inched up a little or she hitched it up herself, but why would she do that, though it wasn't impossible that she would do so distractedly, or perhaps that was just wishful thinking on my part. The paragraph, however, turned out to be a full stop: 'Oddly enough,' she said in another tone, 'the favor I want to ask you has to do with English people with foreign surnames, and with a daughter and a father, I'm the daughter, and the father is my own, which is why this is such a big favor. We're not as rich as the Broccoli family, of course, and that's part of the problem.' She stopped, as if unsure whether it was appropriate to slip in the odd joke, hesitating between solemnity and frivolity, almost everyone who ends up asking for something opts for the former, fearing that otherwise their plea will lack force. And exaggeration is obligatory, it's up to the person listening to water down the gravity of the request. Lying and fantasy are less obligatory, but it's still as well to assume their presence-absolute credulity when given an account of some drama or danger can prove disastrous to the person hearing it. And so while I did not prepare myself to suspend belief, I did prepare to combat or undermine it because I am, by nature, credulous until, that is, I hear a false note.