The Paradise War Read Free

disarmingly. “We Rawnsons have bags of it.”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “Where’s your spirit of adventure?” My lack of adventurous spirit was something he always threw at me whenever he wanted me to go along with one of his lunatic exploits. I preferred to see myself as stable, steady-handed, a both-feet-on-the-ground, practical-as-pie realist through and through.
    “It’s not that,” I quibbled. “I just don’t need to lose four days of work for nothing.”
    “It’s Friday,” he reminded me. “It’s the weekend. We’ll be back on Monday in plenty of time for your precious work.”
    “We haven’t even packed toothbrushes or a change of underwear,” I pointed out.
    “Very well,” he sighed, as if I had beaten him down at last, “you’ve made your point. If you don’t wish to go, I won’t force you.”
    “Good.”
    “I’ll go alone.” He stepped into the street just as a gray Jaguar Sovereign purred to a halt in front of him. A man in a black bowler hat scrambled from the driver’s seat and held the door for him.
    “Thank you, Mr. Bates,” Simon said. The man touched the brim of his hat and hurried away to the porters’ lodge. Simon glanced at me across the rain-beaded roof of the sleek automobile and smiled. “Well, chum? Going to let me have all the fun alone?”
    “Curse you, Simon!” I shouted, yanked the door open, and ducked in. “I don’t need this!”
    Laughing, Simon slid in and slammed the door. He shifted into gear, then punched the accelerator to the floor. The tires squealed on the wet pavement as the car leapt forward. Simon yanked the wheel and executed a highly illegal U-turn in the middle of the street, to the blaring of bus horns and the curses of cyclists.
    Heaven help us, we were off.

2
D OOM ON
THE H ALFSHELL
     
    T here are worse things than cruising up the M6 in a Jaguar Sovereign with Handel’s Water Music bathing the ragged aural nerve ends. The car tops ninety without a murmur, without a shimmy. Silent landscape glides by effortlessly. Cool leather imparts a loving embrace. Tinted glass shades the wayworn eye. The interior cocoons, cushioning the passenger from the shocks and alarms of the road. It is a fabulous machine. I would throttle a rhinoceros to own one.
     
    Simon’s father, a merchant banker of some obscure stripe and well on the way to a lordship one day, had bought it for his son. In much the same way, he was buying Simon a top-drawer Oxford education. Nothing but the best for dear Simey.
    The Rawnsons had money. Oh yes, they did. Piles of the stuff. Some of it old; most of it new. They also enjoyed that singular attribute prized by the English above all others: breeding. Simon’s great-grandmother was a duchess. His grandmother had married a lord who raised racehorses and once sold a Derby winner to Queen Victoria, thereby ensuring fame and fortune forevermore. Simon’s family was one of those quietly respectable tribes that marry shrewdly and end up owning Cornwall, the Lake District, and half of Buckinghamshire before anyone has noticed. All of which made Simon a spoiled brat, of course.
    I think, in another day and age, Simon might have been sublimely happy idling away in a honey-stoned manor house in the Midlands, training horses and hounds, and playing the country squire. But he knew too much now to be content with a life of bag balm and jodhpurs. Alas, education had ruined that cozy scenario for him.
    If any man was ever untimely born, it was Simon Rawnson. All the same, he could not suppress that aristocratic strain; it declared itself in the very warp and woof of him. I could see the lad as the lord of vast estates, as a duke with scurrying minions and a stately pile in Sussex. But not as an academic. Not for Simon the ivied halls and dreaming spires. Simon lacked the all-consuming passion of the great scholar and the ambition necessary to survive the narrow cut and thrust of academic infighting. In short, he had a genuine aptitude for