Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘I’ve got to lock the place, my darlings,’ announced the ephebe. ‘It’s my week as Duty School Monitor. Sorry, but please go quietly.’

  ‘Oh Milo,’ said Marius and Tessa, and swayed in their seats.

  Jakki sat still and closed her lips very tight.

  ‘You can continue your discussion fresco,’ said Milo Hedley.

  ‘Cold outside.’

  ‘I see. Then if Miss Blessington will give me just a tiny smile instead of trying to impersonate a Gorgon, I will leave you all here for ten minutes more, while I make the rest of my rounds and then return.’

  With difficulty, Jakki made herself smirk, for Tessa’s and Marius’ sake, not for her own she told herself; so that they could sit in the warm. Milo Hedley waved, sauntered down the steps of the rostrum and was gone.

  ‘Now you’ve placed us under an obligation to him,’ Jakki said. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘What have you got against him?’ said Marius.

  ‘He’s too got…up,’ said Jakki. ‘I don’t like him and I don’t trust him and I can’t bear watching you two writhing like hooked eels when you see him.’

  ‘We do nothing of the kind.’

  ‘I agree. You don’t really. You just rub your thighs together as if you were trying not to piddle on the floor. See you next lecture.’

  Red in the face and sniffing ominously, Jakki departed.

  ‘What brought that on?’ said Marius to Tessa. ‘She always looks forward to our talks.’

  ‘She didn’t want to be beholden to Milo. She loathes him – that’s clear enough. But come to think of it,’ said Tessa, ‘there’s no reason why he should have interfered with us. This lecture hall is locked by the School Porter at six p.m., not by the Duty School Monitor at noon. No one has ever interrupted us like that before. It’s something that Milo has thought up. Do you think he wanted to be rid of Jakki?’

  ‘He was very scathing with her, certainly.’

  A small man, in a tight, belted jacket worn with knickerbockers and green checked stockings, entered the room. He had crinkly brown hair and a very inviting smile which displayed brilliant rows of slightly oversized teeth. As this smile reached its climax, Milo Hedley came in and halted very close to the little man, just behind him, like a highly confidential equerry.

  ‘Mr Conyngham,’ muttered Marius to Tessa. ‘So that’s why Milo wanted Jakki out of the way.’

  Uncertain what to do next, Tessa and Marius sat tight while Raisley Conyngham, with Milo still very close to him and just behind him, came up the aisle of shallow steps. He then stopped and turned to face down Tessa’s and Marius’ row of benches, and smiled again, this time more briefly and less theatrically.

  ‘Teresa Malcolm,’ he said, ‘and Marius Stern. Niece of the celebrated hotelier – or should we say ‘hotelière? – and son of the famous publisher. Well. I thought it was time we met, so I told Milo to arrange it. Though as it happens, you, Marius, have just been switched to me for special and individual instruction in Latin and Greek verse, so we shall meet again very soon in any case. It will be agreeable to teach someone who promises well (as I am told) in these civilised exercises.’

  He looked, thought Tessa, rather like Dennis Price in a very old black and white film called Kind Hearts and Coronets, which she had seen with Rosie during the holidays, before Rosie had left with Marius for Saint-Bertrand. Rosie had said that it was a trivial film and had not been pleased by the cynical jokes. Tessa had loved every moment of it. She rather thought, now, that she was going to love every moment of Raisley Conyngham, but felt a slight chill in her stomach in anticipation of the absent Rosie’s almost certain disapproval.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Conyngham to Tessa, ‘I shall call you “Teresa”, though I know most people call you “Tessa”. Teresa has…a maturity…which Tessa does not. Now, come and shake hands with me, both of you.’

  Tessa and Marius shuffled along the benches to meet him in the aisle. First he greeted Tessa; a brief, civil handshake, nothing more. Then:

  ‘Have you kept up your riding?’ he asked Marius, as he shook his hand with similar brevity. ‘They say your father was the finest horseman, in his day, in the Household Cavalry. Too large a man to race, of course. So will you be, in another year’s time. But I hope you are keeping it up.’

  ‘I go out in the park during the holidays, sir.’

  ‘Not enough. We must have you on horseback while you are here as well. The arrangements for riding at this school are quite damnable. But Milo will see to it.’

  He glanced at Milo, who nodded acknowledgement of the order. Marius was called upon, he felt, to express neither gratitude (which he felt) nor reluctance (which he also felt, as riding might complicate an already complicated schedule) nor indeed any opinion of any kind whatever. He would do what he was told, it was already clear to him, or he would incur displeasure; and for some reason, a reason of the gut rather than of the heart or of the head, it was unthinkable to him to risk incurring Conyngham’s displeasure.

  Jakki, walking sadly away towards her Domus Vestalis (a different one from Tessa’s) saw a boy who was loitering about with a yo-yo, some fifty yards from the door of the lecture room. This was a contemporary of Marius called Palairet, who was not bright enough to be taking his ‘O’ Levels that year nor sufficiently interested in art to go to art lectures. Although Jakki did not know him well, she had met him at Buttock’s when he had come to stay with Marius some eighteen months before, while they were both on holiday before their last term at their prep school, Oudenarde House in Sandwich. She had also run across him quite often since, usually when he was with Marius. So both good manners and a vague liking for Palairet, now made Jakki stop for a friendly word or two, though she knew she was not looking her best.

  ‘Cold, hanging about,’ she said.

  ‘I’m waiting for Marius. Is he coming?’

  ‘No. He’s still in there with Tessa. If you wanted to see Marius, why didn’t you come to the lecture?’

  ‘And sit there for a whole hour before I can talk to him? When we first came here,’ he said to Jakki, ‘although we were in different houses, we used to meet every day…for the whole of our first year. Now he never comes near me unless I hunt him out.’

  ‘He’s very busy, you know. ‘O’ Levels coming this summer. Under sixteen hockey and fives now, and then there was under sixteen footer before Christmas.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I used to play in all the teams with him at Oudenarde, but somehow I haven’t kept up with him here.’

  ‘Stiffen up, you wreck,’ said Jakki. ‘You’re nearly as bad as I am. I never see him either, except at those lectures.’

  ‘You are a year junior to him.’

  ‘That’s not meant to count any more.’

  ‘No. I was going to Eton, you know, where it still does, I think. I only switched when Marius told me he was coming here.’

  ‘Why are you telling me that?’

  ‘When I told Marius that I was coming here too,’ Palairet said, ignoring Jakki’s question because (his manner implied) the answer would be indelicate, ‘he told me how glad he was. We’d always been friends at Oudenarde House–’

  ‘–Didn’t he beat you up there?–’

  ‘–He hit me in the throat. An accident, of course. Not his fault. So after that we were better friends than ever, all through our last year at Oudenarde – we used to go riding together as well as games – and all through our first year here. And now…he can’t even find time for a game of squash.’

  All this was uttered without self-pity, in a level tone of voice, as a matter of social fact. Palairet was behaving perfectly decently, thought Jakki, simply stating a case which in many ways resembled her own (for although never really close to Marius, she had known him pretty well for some years and was miserable at the way he ignored her) and which for that very reason (as he no doubt thought but was too tactful to declare) would be of some interest to her. The trouble with Palairet, thought Jakki, was that alt
hough he was a sensitive and considerate boy, he was also, in one word, dull: wholesome and unremarkable in looks, unsexy (rather like a picture of Harry Wharton her father had shown her in an ancient copy of The Magnet), faithful to the death, straight as a die, a real white man – Palairet was a walking cliché straight out of Dornford Yates or John Buchan, or rather, since Yates and Buchan were not boring (Jakki now thought), straight out of that super-bore, Henty. No wonder Marius avoided him – as indeed Marius avoided her. Well, perhaps she was dull too. ‘A jolly girl’ or ‘a really good sort’, a kind of female Palairet. God forbid, thought Jakki, and having nothing further to say either for Palairet’s comfort or her own, she gave a kindly shrug of farewell and proceeded on her way to her Vestal House, there to have a wholesome and featureless lunch (a sort of Palairet of lunches, she thought) with sixty-seven other assumed and assorted Vestals.

  ‘The trouble with you,’ said Maisie Malcolm to Fielding Gray, ‘is that you’re a horny bastard, and that you’ve got the horn for my Tessa.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Fielding: ‘the last time I had a horn was in bed three months ago – and by the time I’d got my hand down to test it, the damned thing had gone.’

  Fielding, who was stopping in London to pick up his Venetian manuscripts en route for the Fens, was being allowed to stay at Buttock’s because it was mid-week and Tessa was at school. Maisie had decided it would be a good opportunity to have a go at him about his lech for Tessa, which, she maintained, was unsettling Tessa to the verge of oestrus.

  ‘You are imagining the whole thing,’ said Fielding. ‘I love Tessa, and I think and hope she loves me: we have a kiss and a pat whenever we meet, and there is an end of it.’

  ‘She’s sly, that Tessa. Though she’s my own, I admit that. She fancies you and she’d do whatever you asked if she thought I wasn’t looking.’

  ‘I shan’t ask anything,’ said Fielding. ‘What has got into you, Maisie?’

  ‘That Christmas present you sent to her. That picture. It was worth a hundred pounds if it was worth a penny.’

  ‘I thought she’d appreciate it.’

  ‘Dirty pig. You thought you’d get yourself into her bedroom under pretence of seeing how she’d hung it, and then you’d start touching and peering and pawing–’

  ‘–Maisie. We can’t go on like this. We can’t sell the hotel because of Tessie Buttock’s will. Would you like to buy my half of it?’

  ‘Can’t afford. You may be able to fork out five hundred quid for pictures to corrupt little girls with, but I’m absolutely skint–’

  ‘–No you’re not. You may not be able to buy my share of the hotel,’ said Fielding, ‘but you’re certainly not skint. You know the trouble with you, girl? You’re having the change of life. You’re imagining things, as I said. Like this ridiculous business of me and Tessa. It’s so long since you’ve had it off yourself that that’s making it even worse. What you need,’ shouted Fielding, ‘is a great big fuck, twenty great big fucks, and you’ll begin to be sane again. The only trouble is, who can we get to fuck you? Well, I’ll have a go, by God, yes I’ll do what I can for you, you fat old whore. I’ve got an idea, by God it makes me feel quite young to think of it – so down with your knickers and up with the Curaçao bottle – just like the old days. That’s it. You always did enjoy your work, didn’t you? And Jesus Christ, you’re sopping wet already.’

  ‘There are two documents,’ said Fielding Gray to Ptolemaeos Tunne. ‘One is in the form of a Greek Reader for Children, which tells the story of the early life of Viscount Rollesden-in-Silvis, alias Humbert fitzAvon, in the guise of an animal fable.’

  ‘And who wrote that?’

  ‘It was written by a Venetian merchant called Fernando Albani. Rollesden-in-Silvis had disgraced himself in England and had been spirited away, through his father’s influence at Court, on a secret and pseudo-diplomatic mission to Venice under the alias of fitzAvon, one of the habitual family forenames. Some time after he reached Venice, he chanced to help Fernando’s adolescent son – who was called Piero, by the way – to escape from a bordel which was being raided by agents of the Inquisition. Having thus put the family in his debt, he proceeded to claw it back with huge interest. The first document, the Greek fable, was written by Albani on the strength of what he came to know, later on, of Rollesden/fitzAvon’s history up to the time of Piero’s rescue from the cat house. The second document was written in French, correct but dull, and gave an account of what happened during the time between Piero’s rescue and fitzAvon’s death, some years later, while a refugee from the armies of Bonaparte in the marshes near Oriago, or to be more precise, in the village of Samuele some five kilometres from the Laguna Veneta.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ptolemaeos. They reached the end of his lawn, looked briefly over the hedge at the winter fens (a grey, Daliesque plane divided by an infinitely receding dyke), and turned back towards the house. ‘Or rather, I don’t see,’ Ptolemaeos said. ‘Why was the first instalment written in the form of a Greek fable?’

  ‘So that Fernando could give it to his younger children as a disguised preparation for what was to come later. By the time he wrote the fable, the two elder children, Piero and his sister, had died, as had Rollesden/fitzAvon, in really fiendish circumstances, and Fernando felt that he should leave the family and perhaps the world some account of the affair, which was rich in moral lessons. He apparently hoped that the two younger children, the twins Francesco and Francesca, would read the fable in the schoolroom, remember it until they were older, and then make the necessary connection and go back to it again. By this time they would be ready for the full horror of what was set out en clair in the second, the French, document, which they would easily be able to find if they took sufficient interest in the first to read carefully certain directions at the end of it.’

  ‘But if they never reverted to the first after they were grown, if they’d just forgotten it, they would never have been able to find and read the second. Your Fernando seems to have left a lot to mere chance.’

  ‘Yes. Deliberately. You see, he didn’t particularly want to dish up the dirt about his family, but the action was so strong and had such terrible results and implications, that he felt it to be his duty to record the whole truth of the matter, yet in such a fashion that only those who were prepared to work hard and pay close attention would be able to get at it. He did not preclude or deprecate the possibility of a fortuitous and persistent outsider’s coming on the code and cracking it. So he wrote what he wrote and disposed of it discreetly, and in his view it would be found and interpreted, by his children or others, if such was the will of God; if not, not. In any case he would have played his part by making the truth available–’

  ‘–If God wanted anyone to know it. Apparently,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘he wanted you to know it. How did you come to find these documents?’

  ‘That is a very long and fascinating story which I shall certainly tell you as part of the sale. But not tonight I think, or there will be no sleep for either of us.’

  ‘One more thing to look forward to,’ Ptolemaeos said. ‘What happened to all the people in these manuscripts? Fernando and his children and the versatile Mr fitzAvon?’

  ‘Death happened.’

  ‘But how? What kind?’

  ‘That is what you will be paying to find out. I am simply offering a trailer.’

  Ptolemaeos chuckled.

  ‘All right,’ he said; ‘I’ll buy it. Or rather, both. Piero will settle the details with you. He knows far more about it all than I do and will make a fair price.’

  ‘To avoid any nonsense about Capital Gains Tax,’ said Piero, ‘I am going to pay you in a series of casual sums, varying between £130 and £1,145, that kind of thing, at irregular intervals. These can be lost or disguised or explained away quite easily in your accounts and ours, whereas the full £30,000, paid in a lump, might attract attention.’

  ‘£30,000? Ptoly promised a fair sum, but this is munificent.’


  ‘Not if you knew how much money Ptolemaeos has got. He could easily afford ten times the amount, but that would be ridiculous. The operative figure, as I hope you realise, is the thirty: in a sense, I am paying the traditional fee.’

  ‘I don’t deserve that crack, Piero. The agreement of sale is that these documents should be used for purposes of scholarship or entertainment only.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you are selling the secret.’

  ‘A lot of people know it already. Besides, those documents constitute no threat to Canteloupe or his title, even if Ptoly chose to break his word about his use of them – unless they are used in conjunction with the Church Register at Samuele.’

  ‘And why should they not be? Would you like to cancel the sale before it’s too late?’

  A long silence.

  ‘No,’ said Fielding. ‘I need the money, and I trust Ptolemaeos.’

  ‘You don’t sound brim-full of conviction about that,’ said Piero, who was beginning to write in an enormous cheque book; ‘but I don’t think you need fret on Canteloupe’s behalf. I should tell you, however, that an emissary is going to Samuele to check up on the Church Register and see what’s going on there…how, for example, Paolo and his aunt are faring.’