Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘An emissary? You?’

  ‘No. I have to go back to Lancaster in a day or two, to resume my studies. You’ll meet the emissary, whom you know already, at dinner tonight.’

  Dinner in the Fens that evening was informal and therefore eaten in Ptolemaeos’ monolithic kitchen. The dishes had been concocted that afternoon by Ptolemaeos’ two female attendants, who had departed, as usual, at sunset, leaving instructions with Piero for heating up their creations. Those present were Ptolemaeos Tunne, Piero Caspar and Fielding Gray; also Ivan (‘the Greco’) Barraclough, a Fellow of Lancaster and a very old friend of Ptolemaeos, and his page or esquire, Nicos, a young Greek from the Mani.

  ‘First course,’ said Piero: ‘Fenland snails in Fen garlic butter. Fen garlic is twice as strong as the usual kind and a wrongly reputed aphrodisiac.’

  ‘Now then, Greco,’ said Ptoly to his old chum, as the snails were served: ‘I have a job for Nicos.’

  ‘Nicos already has his job – for me.’

  ‘Time that stopped, dear boy. You can’t hang on to him forever – too embarrassing for all of us, especially him. He’s doing no good as an undergraduate – failed again last summer, I hear, and even Tom and Len between them won’t be able to keep him on the College books much longer. He’s getting too long in the tooth just to hang around being your study fag, and altogether a salutary change is called for. So I’m going to make Nicos independent of you – on probation at least. What do you say, Nico?’

  ‘I owe much to the kyrios Barraclough,’ said Nicos, as if by rote. He looked eagerly at Ptolemaeos, then dubiously at Barraclough.

  ‘But by this time,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘you owe even more to yourself. I’m going to send you off to Venice, Nicos, to make a little enquiry for me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Nicos, eyes gleaming.

  Greco Barraclough started drumming his fingers on the table.

  ‘Details later,’ said Ptoly; ‘Piero will provide them. Basically, you have to examine some records in a church and take a look at the village cretin in a place called Samuele, not far from Oriago. I shall want to know how he looks, with whom he’s living, whether he is properly cared for, all that kind of thing.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do,’ snapped Greco, ‘while all this is going on? Who is to keep my files in order? Who is to drive me?’

  ‘You can do it all very well yourself. You’re just pampered,’ said Ptoly.

  ‘It’s all very well for you to talk. You have Piero.’

  ‘Yes. And I pay him properly. You keep the wretched Nicos on baked beans and a shoelace.’

  ‘He has sworn an oath – when he first came to me in the Mani.’

  ‘Legally that oath was never of consequence,’ said Ptoly, ‘and morally it has long since expired. Right, Nico?’

  ‘Right, kyrie Tunne.’

  ‘So apply to Piero for details first thing in the morning,’ said Ptoly, ‘before you go back to Lancaster with the Greco.’

  ‘If he applies to Piero,’ said the Greco poutily, ‘he will not be coming back to Lancaster with me.’

  ‘Then he will be welcome to stay here until he goes to Venice,’ said Ptolemaeos Tunne, ‘or is well able to make such other arrangements as he may wish.’

  Theodosia and Carmilla walked in the desolate Rose Garden; Theodosia pushed Sarum’s pram, since it was Daisy the Nanny’s day off, and Carmilla walked beside her, on her right.

  ‘He’s too big for a pram,’ said Theodosia, ‘but it provides a kind of camouflage.’

  Sarum of Old Sarum mouthed at her from under the hood.

  ‘Does Canteloupe know yet?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Theodosia. ‘He wants another heir, though as yet he is not very clear about what will happen to this one. He just says there must be another boy…in case things go wrong.’

  ‘I see. What is he proposing? Parthenogenesis?’

  ‘The same as for Sarum. I am to choose the man.’

  ‘Not what was promised.’

  ‘He promised me there would be nothing of the kind with him. Nor could there be. He did not specifically preclude what he is now asking.’

  ‘You had a right to presume – absolutely to presume – that such a thing was precluded.’

  ‘I think so. But I do not wish to anger him. I love him, Carmilla.’

  ‘What have you done so far?’

  ‘I have told him I shall consider the matter.’

  ‘Why not suggest artificial insemination?’

  ‘Because Canteloupe wants the child to be conceived by a full and proper act of copulation. To Canteloupe a child born of injected sperm would be bogus, not the genuine article. And so, as I say, he has told me to choose a man. I can take as long as I like to look around…provided I am clear what the right true end of it must be. But it cannot be, Carmilla. Even with Jeremy, whom I loved so much, it could not be.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then what shall I do?’

  ‘Nothing. Just bear the matter in mind. If you keep it calmly and constantly before you,’ said Carmilla, ‘sooner or later a solution will present itself.’

  ‘On guard,’ said Milo Hedley to Tessa in the school gymnasium. ‘Remember: the angle and poise of your whole sword arm must be such that it is protected by the hilt of your sabre.’

  ‘Very uncomfortable,’ said Tessa.

  ‘Then take that.’

  With a twist of his wrist he prised the bare steel button on his weapon all along her forearm to the elbow. Although Tessa’s jacket protected her skin, the smart was vicious.

  ‘Careful, Milo.’

  ‘You be careful. You asked for lessons. I am doing you the compliment of assuming you really want to learn. On guard. That’s better. Hold it for one…two…three…four…five seconds. Stomach in, knees flexed, right foot forward at a right angle – parallel with your sabre. You are to present as narrow a silhouette as possible. Not bad. That will do for now. And what,’ said Milo as they removed their masks, ‘did you make of Raisley Conyngham?’

  ‘A very appealing gentleman.’

  ‘Good. We need you, Raisley and I. We need you and Marius.’

  ‘Need us?’

  ‘You are the only two people in the whole school with anything which approaches distinction. Everyone else is dowdy.’

  ‘You wait till Marius’ sister, Rosie, comes.’

  ‘She has not come yet. So we need you and Marius. The only two people fit to work with.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘An exercise and an experiment in ingenuity. A demonstration of cerebral superiority. You’ll see.’

  ‘You sound rather like the young man in that movie Rope,’ said Tessa. (Hitchcock’s Rope was another film she had been to with Rosie in the holidays; it received a partial accolade from Rosie on the grounds that it did at least have serious thought behind it.)

  Milo grinned. ‘We do not have murder in mind. Something much more amusing.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. Tell me more.’

  ‘It will also be an exercise in discipline. Do not ever let me catch you exposing your forearm again.’

  ‘So I have money,’ said Fielding to Jeremy; ‘I can pay for it all; please come.’

  The door of the Gun Room opened. A long, lugubrious but trimly moving figure came in with a tray on which were tea and muffins.

  ‘Tea, Mr Jeremy,’ intoned the figure. ‘Good afternoon, Major Gray. I hope I see you in health.’

  ‘Thank you, Corporal.’

  ‘“Chamberlain” these days, sir, if you please. Chamberlain to my Lord Canteloupe, on loan to my Lord Luffham.’

  ‘Of course, Chamberlain. A stupid slip of the tongue.’

  ‘You were lucky he let you off so lightly,’ said Jeremy after the ‘Chamberlain’ had retired. ‘He is very jealous of his title.’

  ‘I suspect he gave me special treatment as a member of my old regiment. Loyal they are, that lot. Will you come with me, Jeremy? It won’t cost you a penny. A marvellous trip, better than
any we’ve done before. The Turkish part alone–’

  ‘–All that’s over, Fielding.’ Jeremy pushed the muffins towards Fielding, not as one offering them to a guest but as one who rejects them for his own part. ‘I thought you’d realise that when I didn’t answer your letter. I thought you would understand…that all that was in another world. “Presume not that I am the thing I was.”’

  ‘What was the matter… “With the thing you was”?’

  ‘Trivial. Light-minded. Travelling just to kill time. Amusing myself with – to be candid – frivolous and superficial companions. Immature.’

  ‘You once came to me for a philosophy,’ Fielding said. ‘You seemed to think that my record, as a man and a writer, was rather impressive.’

  ‘I know different now. I have seen something of your world…the world you inhabit both as a man and a writer…and I can measure the futility of your achievement. A lucky knack. Worthless. Of no importance whatever.’

  ‘You were keen enough yourself to do well in that world,’ said Fielding, stung. ‘Only you failed utterly and didn’t have the grit to go on with it.’

  ‘I have found something which makes that world a total irrelevance, Fielding. The land; my land. I am not speaking now just as a farmer or a proprietor. I must become part of it, become absorbed by and in it, mingle myself with the genius of my land. You and I can no longer be companions as we have nothing in common now except the past. And the past itself must be forgotten, as a time of waste, a bitter insult to the spirit of the waiting land.’

  Complacent, remorseless,? ‘special’, full of righteousness and excuse; self-loving, self-deceiving, unbalanced and extreme. I’m very well out of this, Fielding thought. If only I didn’t love him so much, even now; if only the days didn’t loom so lonely and so long.

  ‘Very well, Jeremy,’ he said. ‘I’ll count you out. But I’ll stay the night, if I may. I’d like a word with your father.’

  At dinner Jeremy drank no wine and left his father and Fielding tête à tête over the port.

  ‘Mr Jeremy thinks that conspicuous abstinence makes him a person of consequence,’ said the Chamberlain from his station under the portrait of Jeremy’s mother: ‘an unattractive delusion, my lord and Major Gray.’

  ‘Thank you, Chamberlain,’ said Peter Morrison, Lord Luffham of Whereham as now was; and when the Chamberlain had withdrawn and closed the double door behind him:

  ‘In a grotesque way that poor booby gets saner every day. I think he’s always rather taken the same view of Jeremy as I have, that he’s a stunner. One should add,’ Lord Luffham continued, ‘that this business of a spiritual return to the soil has all come on very suddenly. Just after Christmas, Jeremy had young Marius Stern down to stay and there was none of that talk then. Oh, Jeremy was going to give up Lancaster and the arty world and you with them, because he was sick of you all and you hadn’t taken him at his own evaluation, but at this stage he simply seemed to see himself as becoming the genial “squire”, as taking a proper interest in his own acres and his own people; for the rest it was “Heigh boy, and off to the races” – only the weather put paid to that. My point is, Fielding, that there was none of this mysticism, this religiosity, this fanaticism and self-righteousness that now seem to be going on. Or none, at least, until Master Marius departed to see Isobel in France.

  ‘Now, one evening while Marius was here, Jeremy was running down the sort of trips he’d had with you, being snide about them and saying how glad he was not to be going on the next. Myself, I thought this was pretty mean of him; but since it’s his house now, and I’m only here, when I am, on sufferance, I let it go by rather than quarrel. But young Marius wouldn’t have any of it. He accused Jeremy of “poisoning the past”, not his own phrase, he said, but one he’d learnt from his sister, Rosie. There could be many kinds of treachery between friends, Marius said, but of them all the worst was poisoning the past, which was what Jeremy had just been doing vis-à-vis Fielding. Jeremy didn’t care for that, I can tell you. So it’s my belief that to defend himself against any more such charges, with reference to yourself or others, he’s put out this spiritual smokescreen about the sanctity or whatnot of the land, hoping to obscure the meanness of his behaviour and present himself, through the vapour, as a chosen one who has been called. Quite a good way of preserving one’s self-respect in shifty circumstances and airing one’s consequence. To be fair, it’s the kind of thing you might have done at his age, if you’d really needed to; but of course you didn’t because you had a talent and were prepared to work at it, whereas Jeremy is all wind and piss. Shrewd, yes, particularly about money; but no real brains or intellect – and no tolerance of necessary grind. So if I were you, I’d now be thankful he’s given you your cards.’

  ‘Only I can’t be, Peter. I adored him, you see.’

  ‘The more fool you. You were always adoring someone or other that didn’t suit.’

  ‘I knew I had faults that bored or irritated him, we all do. So I tried to get rid of them – and I tried very hard, and successfully on the whole, to bear with his. He didn’t seem to think it possible that he had any, Peter: Jeremy simply was not aware that it was even possible for him to be just as tiresome or mal adroit or repetitious or spiteful as anyone else. But I bore with him, as I say, because I thought that one did bear with one’s friends, that that was one of the obligations of friendship, that one did one’s level best to keep things pleasant, that one overlooked their clumsiness or malice or parsimony if one possibly could. The trouble was that, latterly at least, he has not extended the same courtesy to me. The minute I committed some sottise he was on to me like a nest of vipers. So unforgiving, so cruel, so violent.’

  ‘Physically?’

  ‘That was lurking there, I think. But no: only oral.’

  ‘Go away and forget him, Fielding. Leave here early tomorrow, having said a civil goodbye, and then go and do some work.’

  ‘I haven’t got any to do.’

  ‘Find some. Make some. Surely Canteloupe will commission you to do something.’

  ‘I’m not short of money.’

  ‘What you need is work. Having something to do and knowing how to do it. It’s the only thing that keeps a man sane. That’s Jeremy’s trouble: nothing to do, because he’s never tried hard enough at anything to know how to do it. So now he’s taking up silly, high-sounding fads, like the holiness of the soil. It’ll be spiritualism next – no, even he can’t be silly or dishonest enough for that – it’ll be something which at least sounds right, like transcendental meditation.’

  ‘The only Englishmen who has ever written Latin Verse that might have taken in the Romans,’ said Raisley Conyngham, ‘is A.E. Housman. Milton made quite a good effort with his Latin Epitaph for Damon – but produced a howling false quantity in the very first line. So Housman bears away the palm with the few elegiac couplets he wrote, as preface to his edition of Manilius. Who was he?’

  ‘Manilius,’ said Marius, ‘was a Latin poet who wrote about astronomy.’

  ‘All this is by the way,’ said Raisley Conyngham. He examined the ceiling of the Addison & Steele Library, on which was painted rather an amusing mural of Addison helping the drunken Steele back into barracks when they were in the Horse Guards. ‘You are learning to write Latin verse: first because it will practice you in precision and flexibility of language; secondly, because it will help you get a scholarship at one of the two Universities; thirdly, because it is fun; and fourthly, because it is élite – not the sort of thing scruffy yobs do in comprehensives.’

  ‘Surely they wouldn’t want to?’

  ‘No. But neither would they want you to. Have you not heard the modern slogan: if I can’t, you mustn’t; and even if I don’t want to, you still mustn’t, in case, unknown to me, I’m missing out on something. Why, Marius, do yobs savage buildings and pictures? Not because they want to understand them but can’t – they don’t give a damn about that – but because someone else might understand them and take pleas
ure in them, and the yobs and their socialist supporters couldn’t possibly allow that. Enough of this. This version of yours of “When you shall hear the surly, sullen bell” is not a bad effort. Quandocumque igitur in the first line – too heavy and lifted straight out of Propertius. Pound, in his Homage to Sextus Propertius, translated it “When, when, when and whenever”: rather overdone, but you see the point. For the simple “When” in Shakespeare’s text, quando or quandoquidem or even cum would have been quite adequate.’

  ‘I needed to fill up the line, sir.’

  ‘That’s honest.’ Conyngham suddenly got bored. ‘Alpha minus minus minus,’ he said, tore Marius’ verses across and threw them into the enormous fire. ‘If the insurance people could see that fire,’ he said, ‘they’d have a fit and cancel the policy. An open fire in a library full of books. Faugh.’ Once again he switched the subject. ‘I thought you did rather well on that grey mare when we went out the other afternoon,’ he said. ‘I told Milo to choose a brute for you…and I was impressed with your performance.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘So sign these papers?’

  ‘What are they, sir?’

  ‘Part of the formalities we must go through if I’m to employ you as a stable lad over Easter.’

  It was on the tip of Marius’ tongue to enquire why Mr Conyngham should wish to employ him as a stable lad next Easter, when he remembered, or rather felt in the pit of his stomach, as he had in the lecture hall the other day, that Conyngham’s orders were not to be questioned or commented upon. To ask what the papers were was permissible: further parley was impossible. If Marius so much as expressed surprise (even gratified surprise) Conyngham would raise an eyebrow, take up the papers, and go away, probably forever. Marius passionately wanted him to stay; he signed the forms where Conyngham had marked them with pairs of crosses, and passed them across the table.