Devil’s Harvest by Andrew Brown Page B

food and was politely picking away at his vegetables. The agony of the moment was saved by Jane’s cellphone ringing. The ringtone was usually some default company missive, and Gabriel at first did not realise that the jaunty tune was emanating from her phone. Jane displayed a slavish obedience to the whims of electronic devices; the slightest mew from her iPad or iPhone was treated like an utterance from a newborn baby. Gabriel by contrast could barely find his way around the extraordinary array of options presented by his smartphone. How can you be so good at chemistry but you can’t work a cellphone, was Jane’s regular taunt. Well, chemistry is useful, nay, essential, all the time, was his response. A cellphone is about communication, Gabriel. Precisely my point, he thought but elected not to articulate.
    Jane whipped the phone out and started pressing buttons even as she stood up, a perfunctory ‘excuse me’ on her lips. Professor Ismail pulled his chair back and half-rose in a gentlemanly fashion. There was a scuffing of chairs as some of the English tried, too late, to afford her the same courtesy. By the time Coxley had extricated himself from the fold of the tablecloth and clambered to his feet, Jane was halfway across the room, cupping her hand to her mouth, and Ismail was repositioning his napkin.
    ‘Tell me, Gabriel. Where does your wonderfully intelligent wife work?’
    ‘BAE Systems. At its Filton Centre.’
    Ismail made no indication that he recognised the name.
    ‘She works for British Aerospace, the armaments manufacturer,’ Gabriel added bluntly, and with some relish.
    * * *
    ‘Dessert’ was too sophisticated a word to describe the next course; ‘pudding’ was closer to the mark, though even that might be considered flattery. Layered bread and butter made from cheap white bread and studded with bloated raisins like the bodies of dead flies. A number of guests moved directly on to coffee, Gabriel and the Sudanese professor included. At least the coffee had been filtered through real ground beans, although Gabriel noted Ismail pushing it genteelly to one side after his first sip.
    Symington engaged his guest at his end of the table in a discussion about the demise of the botany degree. Gabriel’s attention wandered: it was an old and pointless debate that started when the degree structures were changed. The head of department at the University of Leicester had stirred things up by writing an article in
ArtPlantae
titled ‘The last botany student in the UK’. Since then, various academics had contributed much hot air and little substance, in Gabriel’s view, to a discussion that was better placed in sociology: it had nothing to do with the standard of the degree and everything to do with the lazy perceptions of the prospective student body. There was an attitude – certainly prevalent in England and Gabriel suspected worldwide – that standards ought to be lowered in fairness to the less accomplished, that the dolts of the world might participate in intellectual spheres quite beyond their limited capabilities. He found the idea repugnant: he was particularly offended when those who would ‘equalise the playing fields’ accepted that heart surgeons and airline pilots should be exempt from such platitudes, but that ‘less essential’ disciplines – such as the sciences – should be subjected to this dilution.
    The lugubrious Hargreaves had warned him that his stance was ‘politically incorrect’ – a strange term that had surprisingly little to do with whether one was a card-carrying member of the Birmingham chapter of the Neo-Nazi Party. Hargreaves insisted that he would be seen as snobbish, and that it would bedevil his ambitions within the university hierarchy. But Gabriel did not see himself as a snob – his parents, now both in retirement, had hardly enjoyed a rarefied status, one a teacher and the other a librarian. If anyone was a snob it was Jane: she was an only child and