Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Drugs?’ said her mother.

  ‘Absolutely not, I’d say,’ said Jakki. ‘You never saw four people who looked less as if they’d been doped. But they are all in cahoots. They look as if they’ve got some secret, or soon will have, which no one knows about except them and probably never will, but, boy oh boy, are they laughing their lights out behind everybody else’s back.’

  ‘It is entirely normal,’ Ivan Blessington said, ‘for younger pupils to fall under the influence of school masters or older pupils. That is part of what education is about. Being influenced. If for good, good. If not, then the younger pupils will find out, in time, that they have been duped, and so will have had an early and useful lesson in the ways of a disagreeable world.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Jakki, ‘but suppose they’ve been influenced for very, very bad? So bad, that it will turn out to be more than just a lesson in the ways of a disagreeable world, it’ll turn out to be some horrible shame or desperation.’

  ‘You are exaggerating,’ said her mother comfortably. ‘The Headmaster will be keeping an eye open, and would anticipate anything really harmful by dissolving the alliance. Right, Ivan?’

  ‘Right,’ Colonel Blessington said.

  ‘The Headmaster,’ said Jakki, ‘has over six hundred boys and girls to keep an eye on and only two eyes.’

  ‘He has others to help him.’

  ‘Among them, Mr Conyngham. Mr Conyngham,’ said Jakki, ‘is rich and intensely respectable. He has been at the school many years, and has a marvellous record as a teacher. No one is ever going to suspect him of anything.’

  ‘Then why,’ said her mother, ‘do you?’

  ‘I just feel,’ said Jakki helplessly, ‘that in some odd and invisible way, Marius and Tessa are being made use of or betrayed. Or soon will be. I think they are the victims of obsession (their own and other people’s) and I have made up my mind to warn them. I have arranged to travel back to school with Tessa tomorrow, and I can start on her in the train.’

  ‘I shouldn’t interfere, if I were you,’ her father said. He hesitated a moment, then, ‘Let me tell you a tale. A few years ago, when I was still working for the Corcyran Bank, I got wind of a very nasty piece of international mercantile intrigue. Now, it happened that at the time I was having a brief bout of religion–’

  ‘–Male menopause,’ said Betty cosily.

  ‘–And although there was nothing actually criminal in the intrigue I had come across, it seemed to me to be immoral and dishonourable and above all un-Christian. And so I did something at the memory of which I have blushed, sweated and cringed with remorse ever since–’

  ‘–You aren’t blushing, sweating and cringing now,’ said Caroline.

  ‘–Time the healer,’ her mother remarked.

  ‘–I peached,’ said Ivan. ‘I knew someone who, I thought, would resent the game which the Corcyran, among other banks, was playing…would resent it as much as I did and would see that an end was put to it.’

  ‘And was it?’ Jakki smiled eagerly. ‘Was an end put to it?’

  ‘The man to whom I took my information,’ said Ivan, ‘was a senior civil servant with whom I’d had frequent correspondence while I was Military Attaché in Washington. He heaved a very deep sigh, and explained politely that I was meddling with something which I did not and, given my mental outlook and limitations, never could understand. My interference would achieve nothing, he told me, except that on grounds of security certain highly inconvenient and expensive alterations would have to be made to certain current lines of planning (which would then, incidentally, become from my ingenuous point of view even nastier than before) in case I was imbecile enough to try to interfere any further. I was then removed from the Corcyran Bank–’

  ‘–Pensioned off,’ countered Betty.

  ‘–At a rate that was a mockery and an insult. I was also given to understand that I had let down the side; imperilled the honour and prosperity of the nation; infuriated a lot of old chums who were in one way or another involved in this vital and intricate endeavour; and, for good measure, made of myself a cretinous, contemptible, self-righteous, po-faced, middle class, goody-goody prig. Ivan Blessington, the school sneak.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to sneak on anybody,’ said Jakki in a small voice; ‘I was only going to give a word of warning–’

  ‘Worse, far worse,’ her father said. ‘Sneaking is merely delation: the telling of tales. Giving words of warning is knowing better, it is claiming moral superiority, an act of intolerable arrogance…particularly when you haven’t the faintest idea, on your own showing, of what (if anything) is going on. So heed your old father, my darling Jackie–’

  ‘–Who’s giving words of warning now?’ said Caroline gleefully.

  ‘Don’t be tiresome, Caroline,’ said her mother.

  ‘–Heed your poor old wounded and cast off father,’ Ivan said, ‘and learn from him, now, to mind your own moral business, and to leave Marius and Tessa and Milo Hedley and Mr Conyngham, and the whole bloody universe besides, to mind theirs.’

  After dinner with Fielding on Saturday night in the L’Estrange Arms Hotel at Broughton, Theodosia and Carmilla felt like a walk.

  ‘Otherwise that horrible food will congeal on my stomach and stay there forever like a tombstone,’ Carmilla said.

  So all three stumped along the golf course to Fielding Gray’s common little house, where Carmilla and Theodosia were given very long, but also very strong, whiskies and were invited (if not quite in so many words) to state their business in Broughton Staithe.

  ‘We need your name on our list with a novel for next year,’ Carmilla said.

  ‘I wish you could have it, my dear. But I’m as dry as the Gobi. Written out.’

  ‘Only because no one’s been taking an interest. From now on Carm and I shall,’ Theodosia said.

  ‘The sexiest girl in the world cannot make an impotent man come,’ said Fielding, who had had three large cognacs after dinner. ‘Even the most intelligent readership, such as you two, my darlings, would provide, cannot rouse an extinct novelist to invention.’

  After that it rather seemed as though the subject were closed. And so, to fill the silence:

  ‘Who,’ said Theodosia at last, ‘is that beautiful man in the picture over the fireplace? And what on earth is he wearing?’

  ‘That is my grandfather,’ said Fielding, ‘on my mother’s side. He is wearing cross country running kit as worn in the mid-1890s. A very few years later, they allowed the drawers to end on, or even slightly above, the knees; but at that date they had to fit halfway down the calf. This portrait was done from a photograph taken on the day my grandfather broke the record in the East Anglian Cross Country Championship, otherwise known as the Grand Huntingdon Grind. In those days, the race was run over fifteen miles of fen, forest and wilderness, and finished on Huntingdon steeplechase course, of which those that survived had to make one complete round, somehow contriving to get themselves over all eight fences and the open water jump, before finishing at the post where they’d begun. Grandpa broke one arm falling,’ said Fielding, his excitement and loyalty mounting, ‘ripped open the palm of his hand on some brambles, sprained his ankle over the last fence, and still hobbled in to win by a nose from the reigning champion and cut ten seconds off the record. Fucking, bloody marvellous,’ he shouted: ‘I wish I could have been half the man he was.’

  Both the girls raised their glasses to the picture and drank a stout measure. Then Theodosia said, ‘That portrait shows no signs of his injuries. I suppose the photo from which it was made was taken before the race?’

  ‘After,’ said Fielding, ‘after. The photo showed everything – but when the picture was painted from it, Grandpa told the artist to leave his wounds out, in case he should later be asked about them and have to tell the full story. He was a modest man, you see. Not a gentleman. A grammar school boy who was apprenticed to the family baking firm in Cambridge. That was
the bit my mother always left out, silly bitch. She was a real suburban snob – but she did love Grandpa and had wonderful tales to tell of him.’

  ‘Now you tell them,’ said Carmilla and Theodosia.

  ‘His record for the Grand Huntingdon Grind stood for several years,’ Fielding said, ‘and was only broken while he was with the Yeomanry in South Africa. My mother always said he was “listed as a Gentleman Trooper”, but in fact he was just a Yeoman like any of the rest of them, who’d saddled his own horse to follow the call. There’s a photo of him somewhere, sitting on his grey with his sabre at the “carry”, a plain Yeoman from his uniform and trappings if ever there was. But after he’d been in South Africa only a few months, a really grand thing happened. Grandpa was commissioned a Cornet “in the field”,’ said Fielding, ‘like being made a knight in the old days – a proper knight at arms, not some greasy politician or alderman for his odious services rendered – and this was the way it came about…’

  Having filled the girls’ glasses, Fielding began the old story, heard so often from his mother: ‘So when at last all the supplies were exhausted, my darling, and all the officers and non-commissioned officers of the squadron were mad or dead, your grandfather led the Forlorn Hope from the stockade on the hill, out across the merciless veldt…’

  Sitting in the Sunday night train from Waterloo to Farncombe, Jakki remembered her father’s story and refrained from offering Tessa warning or advice. Even if she discounted everything which Colonel Blessington had said, the fact remained that she was Tessa’s junior, and at their school, to press advice on your senior (even in these days of equality and universal Christian names) simply was not the thing. After long cogitation, Jakki decided on a compromise; and at last, as the train left Guildford Station, she screwed up her courage to say:

  ‘Lovely Tessa, why have you gone away from us? From Rosie and me? Why do you spend all your time with Milo Hedley and none of it with us?’

  ‘I am with you now,’ said Tessa, low and husky. ‘I was with Rosie all last night – we still share a room – and all today.’

  ‘Yet you are not with me and you were not with Rosie. In your heart you were, and are, with Milo Hedley and Raisley Conyngham.’

  Tessa said nothing.

  ‘Why do they fascinate you so much? Mummy asked whether they were giving you drugs, and I said no, never that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tessa. ‘Milo had an elder brother who was an addict – now dead from injecting bad heroin: it was mixed with Vim or baby powder or something. People who take drugs are the most boring on earth, Milo says. Their only interest, their only subject of conversation, is their addiction and the methods of supplying it. They’re so boring, Milo says, that they deserve to be dead and the sooner they die the better. He was glad when his brother died – quite apart from the fact that he will now inherit more money – because his brother was a disgrace to manhood – and to mankind. Here we are, I think.’

  As they walked along the platform of Farncombe Station, Jakki reflected that Tessa, having deftly seized the opportunity offered for digression, had not made the slightest effort to answer the original question. Too late now to ask again. She could not say in front of the ticket collector, in front of the taxi driver:

  ‘Tessa, oh Tessa, why have you gone away?’

  ‘Grandpa’s third brother, Uncle Bill,’ Fielding was saying to Carmilla and Theodosia on Sunday night in Broughton, ‘was the black sheep of the family. The family baking firm had invented a new kind of meat pie, in honour of Grandpa’s big race at Huntingdon, called the Brampton Grind, Brampton (once visited by Pepys) being one of the villages through which the contestants had to race – hopping on one foot (as I forgot to tell you last night) for the entire half mile between Brampton Church and Brampton Butts. Though “Brampton Grind” was not, one would have thought, a good name for sales (suggestive of everything which a pie should not be) the locals knew the history behind it and so bought a lot of it, being the men they were, and offered it around. Since it was made to a very special formula, it caught on all over Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, and later even further afield: in Hertfordshire to the south, in Suffolk, Norfolk and even Lincoinshire. A lot of money was made, and Uncle Bill’s three plain daughters began to appear in furs. No harm in that, as they were fairly modest ones, but Bill overdid it in other ways. He got in with a fast-spending Newmarket set and in no time at all the duns were gathering. Whereupon he sold everything he had that was saleable for ready money – including his priciest asset of all, which was the secret formula for the filling of the Brampton Grind – and then he vanished to Australia.’

  ‘What happened to the three plain daughters?’ enquired Carmilla.

  ‘They went too, as did Bill’s wife, Aunt Effie. The girls were genteel and snooty and did not care for Oz at all, but Effie adored it. She’d always had a taste for the rough and had once openly avowed that her dream was to be raped by six navvies coram populo. How she got on about that no one ever established, but the legend was that anyone who came wooing the girls in Australia (attracted by the money which Bill was making by selling the Brampton Grind under another name in Melbourne), was first made to pleasure Aunt Effie in order to prove his sexual bona fides. On one occasion, the results were so spectacular that Effie expired of heart failure in coitu secundo, whereat Bill had a purple slab put up over her which proclaimed that her untimely death was a result of lifelong and unstinting labour in the Service of the God of Love.

  ‘Of the three plain daughters, Clara, the eldest, married an Australian cricketer called Higgson, by whom she had a girl who was famous for her ugliness. The story is that one day when Higgson was batting at Adelaide for Australia versus England, he put up a dolly to Frank Woolley. ‘You miss that catch, Frank,’ called Higgson, ‘and you can fuck my daughter.’ Woolley laughed so much that he did miss the catch, but did not, so far as is known, claim his reward. The second of Uncle Bill’s girls, Betsy Ann, became a Catholic convert and then a nun of exemplary piety…or so it was always thought, until one day the Mother Superior discovered her in the pantry with her skirts up and her arse parked on top of a milk churn. Her claim, that she was seeking to mortify the fleshly appetites of her sisters in the furtherance of their eternal salvation, was disallowed.’

  ‘And there was one more,’ said Theodosia. ‘Did she stay with her father?’

  ‘Wilhelmina May,’ said Fielding. ‘Yes, she stayed on with Uncle Bill as his housekeeper, until one day she took a drop too many of her homemade Marc de Melbourne and fell under a horse-drawn van in which the police went round arresting all whores that weren’t on time with their protection money.’

  ‘I shall be returning to London tomorrow, Monday,’ said Lord Luffham of Whereham at dinner, to his son, Jeremy Morrison. ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’

  ‘This is your home, sir, whenever you wish it to be.’

  ‘Then take a glass of wine with me, sir. Don’t just sit there with your water like a one-man temperance meeting.’

  ‘If you ask me, Father.’

  ‘I do.’

  The Chamberlain poured claret for them both.

  ‘Now then,’ said Lord Luffham: ‘what exactly do you plan to do here? I’ve heard a great deal about your giving up a glittering but futile career in Cambridge or London, in order to come back to the land. Now you’re back on it, what are you going to do with it that can’t be done fifty times better by those who are already working it for you?’

  ‘Honour my responsibilities to it.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Understand it. Respond and relate to it. Respect its needs and harbour its powers of provision.’

  ‘In practical terms,’ said Jeremy’s father, ‘and as I have just remarked, all that is already being very well attended to by someone else. You yourself are woefully ignorant of the soil and everything to do with it, and if you’re going to march round laying down the law to men who have spent their lives on it you will
cause much offence. Even if you take yourself off to an agricultural college for a few years first, what you learn there will be worthless in the light of their long labour and experience. My question is, Jeremy: what function, of any import whatever, are you going to fulfil on the estate?’

  ‘I am going to be Master of it.’

  ‘In name, no doubt.’

  ‘Master indeed. So first I must understand it. I know most of our people and have mixed with them since I was a boy. The trouble is that I have mixed with them only superficially, at festivals or cricket matches: I have played with them, Father, but not laboured with them. In order to understand them more deeply, and, even more important, in order to understand the soil on which they work, I shall lead the life of a farm labourer for as long as is necessary to bring me to proper consciousness of what the soil demands of those that work on it.’

  ‘The drudgery will weary and bore you. The company will embarrass you and be embarrassed by you. You will be granted privilege and indulgence, whether you like it or not, and you will cause resentment by taking a poor man’s bread.’

  ‘I shall work for nothing, of course. No one shall be displaced,’ said Jeremy, ‘because of me.’

  ‘If you do this work for nothing, if you do not do it from necessity, you will never really understand the nature of such work or of those that do it.’

  ‘At least my old companions in Lancaster will have to take me seriously. They will be thinking and saying that I have deserted their world through idleness and pique; but if I demonstrate how hard and thoughtfully I am prepared to work in my own world, they will be put to shame.’

  ‘They will simply say, “There is a young man who has inherited a very valuable estate and is now modishly trying to curry favour with his workmen.” Listen, boy: of course you are responsible to your people; and the more so as I myself have partly neglected them for many years because of my work in Parliament. So by all means care for your labourers, see to their welfare and give them justice. But don’t go making a fool of yourself by playing at being a peasant. No good can come of your stepping out of your place.’