Read Online The Janeites by Nicolas Freeling - Free Book Online Page B

you’d expect: perfunctory, boring and offensive with chemically perfumed cleansing agents, like a public shithouse. Takes less than an hour but you have to drive out to that horrible airport. Raymond mounted on his donkey in early-morning traffic is content to be unhurried and do some exercises to loosen a stiff neck: the fellow in the car behind would be thinking oh-dear-god, the things they allow out on the roads nowadays. Well then, why doesn’t he pass me? Since I’m trundling in the centre lane why does he sit so stupidly behind me? Unforgivable, thus to sink into a morass of footstep-doggers; spies; Assassins. This ghastly man stayed glued to his heels, was next door in the all-day parking lot, behind him at the check-in, herded with him into the waiting-room; destabilizing him.
    Climbing aboard the shuttle, with these sinister manifestations about him – now he can’t move at all. Dr Valdez slips into the narrative style of the Bloods.
    ‘Boogie grim-lipped passes to the Attack! Obscured by fog the mighty mass of Illtyld looms to starboard. Illtyld the only Tunnel passable by four-motored planes! This is the moment – the pilot glued to his instruments – Blackhawk chooses to launch the deadly assault… Blackhawk slim and muscled, embodiment of greeneyed evil, now known to be a WOMAN !
    ‘Has vowed an undying hatred towards Boogie for the rejection of monstrous unnamable Love! Mercifully Orfea the magical musician has foreseen the DEATHTRAP , just as she rejected the evil lesbian love of Blackhawk.’ And while regressing comes the childhood query: Why did Orpheus with his lute make trees? It seemed an odd instrument to choose.
    A little later in boyhood one tried to put some polish into the narrative. Extremely unconvinced about the sudden rescue of Marina by the Pirates (though these belong to the great-pirate-Valdez, so one has to forgive them.) And why was one reading Pericles ?Purely on account of it being judged Forbidden to good Catholic schoolchildren because of the Bordel scenes …
    There isn’t even space for his simple stretching exercise. The business-men – instantly pop-crackle-snap went all their locks and lids, and they’re all staring at the little plastic screen praying it might tell them something nice. Failing to move his muscles Raymond tries to limber the mind.
    The pilot limbers his wires and his wheels. Exhilarating when he turns the power up. But when he gets the go, takes off the brakes and we run, all the brave knights close their visors and sweat inside their armour; they are Afeared and mustn’t show it. Whereas Raymond is a professional. Death is simply the hope for a moment of dignity and recollection. ‘Into Thy Hands I commend my Spirit’. In the Society we do it every day.
    Airborne, it is time to be a Doctor for a moment. He is going to meet William’s wife; a step, one hopes, in understanding suggestions. Only the Fellow can cure himself.
    Sure. Just like any doctor, he’d passed his exam, got his diploma, the Society threw him straight in to where they knock the Greeny out of you. Six months – about all you can stand, your first tour – with Médecins-sans-frontièrs: the starving- black -babies. Dehydration you learn quick. The pill, the needle, if you can find space for it between skin and bone; you know you haven’t one chance in a hundred. Your reward? – those amazing luminous eyes of the mother willing you to say You-I-Save. The pill and the needle are of no consequence: what you are is Hope.
    I am bloodbrother with William. He said, ‘You never know for sure that you will jump to meet the bullet. It’s supposed to be the automatic gesture, taking the place of thought. That was the training.’
    To be sure: in Africa he had thought of the professional voice, the Jesuit professor in the quiet classroom.
    ‘You are standing in line, in the camp. It is freezing, it is burning: that’s no odds. He walked down your line, neither fast nor slow, tapping