Sentence The Fourhundredandtwentyseventh

The plan was simple and basic, but therefore easy to agree: Pan was due to take a month's leave; while Daisy intended to spend it helping her sister Dandy in making preparations for their brother Duncansby's wedding, while Pan had intended visiting Arabia to further his studies of the region's political and economic structure, perhaps also taking in some of the archaeological sites he had missed on previous trips; that would leave him free to slip into Germany incognito – he would carry a passport identifying him as his twin sister Palestrina, who had died in infancy, a disguise he had used many times before since first adopting it at Cambridge, but had abandoned after meeting and falling in love with Daisy Dalmuir; oh, it wasn't that he had consciously chosen to be exclusively heterosexual, no, that would be too big an ask for any young man with cosmopolitan tastes, for he had thoroughly enjoyed the many affairs he had had with other men, particularly the married men who denied their bisexuality, and he always felt a particular glow of pride – whoever said it was a sin obviously knew nothing about being picked up in a bar and taken to an expensive hotel for some
vigorous love-making (and although he knew that was simply a euphemism for hard shagging, especially when the men were strangers whom he was unlikely to ever see again) so what did they know? but he had, over his four years at university, acquired a small stable of about a dozen stallions: from the hoity-toity English don, Professor Marmaduke Manners who liked to quote Shakespeare while having sex, to the rather strange entomologist, Doctor Richard Dick (and his pride at being named 'Dick Dick') with his fascination for dung beetles and their peculiar life cycle which, in his own way, he loved to emulate, and even Sir Hector MacMurdo bart (“don't forget his baronetcy,” said Philippa, the boy who shared rooms, clothes and, occasionally, men with Pantagruel) with his dread of a fatal diagnosis and iatrogenic tendency to manifest whatever symptoms his doctor might mention in the course of one or other of their weekly appointments, and then recount in detail to Palestrina while deeply embedded in her, on the verdure of Acorn Hill which had been rolled flat by their
passion; all these married men who had fucked her regularly, whenever they could escape from their other, usually family, obligations; but, since Daisy, he had relinquished his Palestrina persona and had not missed her, until now, and he wondered if his motivation for this forthcoming escapade was truly selfless, an attempt to clear his mind of those disquieting imaginings by ridding the world of perhaps the most evil and dangerous man in it, and of sparing the lives of the millions who would otherwise die because of him, or, in all honesty, the excitement of the possibilities for sex with some more strangers before settling down into the life of a civil servant, a middle class family man, perhaps even becoming a father – the idea of which he still found slightly ridiculous, with his own knowledge of himself; if indeed he survived this highly secret and dangerous mission, for he would have no back-up, had never had any training in either espionage nor sabotage, with only Professor Dane – who had never been one of his lovers, despite their close friendship, or maybe because of that – as an ostensibly casual acquaintance on the trip, but otherwise alone and dependent solely upon his own wits, his ability to charm the pants off a goodly number of men – not one of whom had complained, on finding that beneath the skirts and frocks she wasn't the girl they'd expected, for he had learned
well how to make up fully for what he lacked with the dexterity and skill by which he employed those facilities he did possess, combined with an innate and overwhelming desire to ensure the pleasure of the men to whom he gave his body totally, completely and with utter abandon – he fully realised that he may never return home nor see Daisy again; but his visions had been so horrific, so visceral, that he knew the only way he could expunge them would be to do his damnedest to prevent them becoming reality, even if that meant dying in the course of the attempt; so he packed Palestrina in the luggage he would be travelling with and sent it on ahead, for he would exchange that for the cases Daisy had packed for him and when he reached Clement's flat would shed his Pantagruel identity and adopt that of Palestrina; and then he would be she until she had achieved what she intended, for she did not consider failure as an acceptable alternative!