The Seacoast of Bohemia by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Feelings of content—no, of self-satisfaction, were paling before Castang left the airport.

For a moment there, euphoria; in the words of a more than usually imbecile beer advertisement.

‘Sail Away!

Dream your dreams.

You can always make your

F e e l i n g s

Come True!’

No no no, that plane wouldn’t crash. Within an hour or two, Vera, underplaying the scene, would decant a happy small boy, for this was all to him a delightful adventure, into the arms of a very happy Anita; it was to be hoped that she wouldn’t overplay either, since boys on the threshold of adolescence feel embarrassment among the acutest and most painful of emotions. But these are sensible people; they understand suffering and they understand self-control. Monsieur Rogier would know how not to ask too many questions.

He’d think his money well spent too, and this would be rather nice, and would definitely run to a new rather than a secondhand washing machine for his daughter Emma.

Why then does this euphoria seem to be petering away so suddenly? Because we have scotched the snake, not killed it? But this is not one of those action-packed thrillers. Vera is safe in the tin-and-plastic bosom of KLM: that may sound denigrating but those people are serious as well as Dutch, and it’s as safe as you can get. If anyone is vulnerable it’s Castang himself, here in delectable Prague, strolling around the old quarter and fancying an Urquell.

I’m rather dubious about the Ur Quell. The ‘original source’, said to go very deep. Let’s hope it does indeed go very deep, because Pilsen anywhere near the surface is pretty high on pollution levels.

Why am I hanging around here? Do some thinking. Is there any thinking still needed, about Monsieur Pierre or Pierrot, Per or Peer Leroux? His thinking about ‘Peer Gynt’ was sound as far as it went. It had been a help that he himself, born around the same time and, one suspected, in circumstances not much different, understood that the man should say ‘Who is Peer Gynt?’ and have crises about the meaning of this identity. A bright and a sensitive boy with a fundamental instability of character, feeble and indecisive; that idiotic kidnapping fits the pattern, and leave the rest to psychiatry. In the event (extremely unlikely) that a criminal charge was made and pushed through, and brought before a court, a judge would ask for a psychiatric report straight off, and the result would go far towards a verdict of guilty-but-with-diminished-responsibilities.

Now that the child was gone, Peer Gynt would lose interest. He would be busy already with other glowing grandiose schemes for becoming rich and powerful and making a fool of the world. He’d hardly even show himself disconcerted by the checkmating of this particular fantasy. It had never been ‘real’.

The wife would be more interesting. Himself he hadn’t even seen her, and Vera had seen so little. Was she no more than a poor thing, patient and passive, and unable to bear her own child? He felt pity, but inevitably, not very much.

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