Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘Evil horses of legend. First Tessa Malcolm tried to come to Marius’ rescue. She was prevented, and so she is all right. Then Galahad came. He is not all right. And then, somehow or other, a girl, a woman rather, some stable lass – she dashed in and took away that blanket, and the whole thing died down.’

  ‘Brave,’ said Aunt Flo. ‘But there’s a lot here don’t smell quite right.’ she paused, stroked the brown blanket beside her rhythmically and without attending to her action, and said:

  ‘That blanket, the one on Lover Pie. Too thick, too heavy. But what do we know of it? Nothing. And that’s all we shall ever know. Except that it seems to have been right at the centre of the trouble… I find myself thinking of Myles and his mother, Konya, Prideau’s wife, both dead of inexplicable illnesses, having first incurred Raisley’s displeasure. But the connection between all that and what happened here today – it isn’t clear, girl. It never can be. All too vague. Best just let it go. As for Galahad, it could be a blessing in disguise. His father died of cancer last year and his mother is full of it, like a partridge stuffed with chestnuts. Soon there will be no money, only mine, and that’s little enough these days. It’ll run to Sandy Lodge and a few bottles a week: not to that school. He didn’t know it, I hadn’t yet found the courage to tell him, but he was going to be taken away from that school this July. Simply not enough money, girl. But he didn’t know it, thank God, and now he’ll never know it. Are we there?’

  ‘Yes. Time to say goodbye.’

  ‘I shall ring up those people,’ said Aunt Flo, ‘the Humanist Society or whatever they call themselves, and have them pick up the remains. They’ll get rid of him without fuss. What do we want with white coffins and unctuous voices?’

  ‘Isn’t he a little too old for a white coffin?’

  ‘You know what I mean, girl. Smelly old men pretending to grieve for the death of one so young and pure, but revelling in it, full of glee that their cracked and pallid limbs still move while his sweet flesh is already rotting. No; we’ll have no banners and no bugles for young Galahad; let the Humanists and the worms take him to themselves in silence.’

  Jeremy, since he was about to go abroad for a very long time, had put his car up for sale in a garage and had come down to the course by train. (He would have had a chauffeur driven car, had he not been anxious to get out of England without being spotted by the press or the public in any instance of luxurious behaviour not consonant with his professed role as disciple and pilgrim of the soil.) Having learnt this while they had a restoring drink together, Fielding offered Jeremy a lift back to London, where he, Fielding, wished to spend one night (only) before returning (as he then thought) to his guest suite in Lancaster College, there to go grinding on at The Grand Grinder.

  ‘You know,’ said Fielding as they drove towards Lewes, ‘Tessa hated horses and they hated her. Something almost chemical, her Auntie Maisie once said. Now, at one stage Tessa got near that horse-blanket – when she and that boy took it from Marius.’

  ‘Later on, Marius went to fetch it back again,’ said Jeremy, ‘and I went with him. Tessa had been sick near it. On it, too. She was lying on the ground asleep. So Marius took the blanket away…while I…while I talked with that boy, as you call him – Milo Hedley.’

  ‘You stink, Jeremy. You stink of gypsy – like that boy was dressed. So while Marius was walking to his doom, you were fucking Master Milo.’

  ‘Master Milo was fucking me.’

  Fielding began to laugh. He laughed so much that he had to pull into a lay-by.

  ‘Not that I was any more use than you,’ he said when he had at last ceased gulping and choking with merriment. ‘Marius loved you. He knew and trusted me. But when he was in trouble…for his life…we both stood about like a pair of fairies. Cowards. Poltroons. Two of a kind. May I share your shame, Jeremy? May I come with you to the East? I’ve got enough money to be going on with, and you’ll need company, and if you ever start feeling grand or important, I’ll be there to remind you that you’re just a pusillanimous pathic who stood about quaking with terror, as indeed did I myself, while the little boy who loved you was in hazard for his life.’

  ‘I loved you,’ said Tessa to Milo. ‘I should have let you do whatever you wanted with me…starting with the kiss, which I longed for between the sinews behind my knees…as soon as we got home tonight. I shouldn’t even have made you bathe first or throw away those horrible clothes. I should have been your…odalisque. But you couldn’t wait. You had an itch, and you waggled yourself at that Jeremy thing – it must have been him, I saw you together just afterwards – and you both climbed up into the horsebox, and started frotting and squealing like two little pigs. I heard you.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Go home to Auntie in a pet?’

  ‘Yes. And then go to my friend Rosie in France.’

  Shall I tell her? he thought. Shall I tell her what Raisley discovered (along with all the rest, like her providential allergy to horses), that her ‘Auntie’ is an ex-whore and her mother? That her ‘Auntie’ used to give exhibitions in front of chosen gentlemen, sometimes by herself, sometimes assisted by one or more members, male or female, of her own profession, on at least two occasions (at one of which Raisley himself had been present many years before) partnered by a dog? Shall I tell her all this for a fine and mighty revenge for her sneering about Jeremy? No; I shall not tell her. It would poison forever the sweetness of what little we have had and of the vision of the kiss behind the knee. That kiss will never now be given nor received: but if we part in relative kindness I can still remember, con amore, how I kissed her in the crook of her arm and had been promised, eagerly promised, a kiss behind her knee.

  ‘I’m glad you have someone to go to,’ he said. ‘You know that Marius is now Raisley’s – and mine, if I want him – forever?’

  ‘That remains to be seen. It may not be long before he realises that he has been tricked. You used me for that, Milo. There was something about that blanket.’

  ‘A smell of horse, which you didn’t like. It made you sick. And when Marius took it out on the course, it had a smell of Tess – of Tessa’s sick – which the horses didn’t like. It drove them wild. Is that what you are thinking?’

  ‘Very roughly, yes.’

  ‘And to whom are you going to tell that story? To whom are you going to say, “Horses don’t like me, so when they smelt my sick, on a blanket which Marius had been tricked into taking among them, they started to go mad?” To whom are you going to tell that tale, little Tessa?’

  ‘I’m going to tell no tales to anybody. You needn’t worry, Milo. There’s a lot I don’t understand and nothing at all that I can prove. I can’t make trouble, and I wouldn’t if I could. After all, I once loved you all, and I still do, in a way. So no trouble, Milo. It’s a shame about that poor little Palairet, of course, but he was born to die in a dud cause, so why make a fuss about him? I’m going now. Say goodbye for me to Marius and Mr Conyngham.’

  ‘Going? Dressed like that?’

  ‘Why not? I’ll take one of the race trains to London. There’ll be a lot of people on that who will smell even worse than I do.’

  ‘Got the fare…little one?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course.’ Tessa passed a filthy sleeve over her face to wipe away a drop under each eye. ‘Goodbye, Milo. Please send my things on from Ullacote to school.’

  ‘So Greece was a success?’ said Carmilla to Ivan Blessington.

  ‘Yes. Greece was a lovely. As your sister would put it. Greece was a beaut.’

  ‘You’ve heard that Fielding Grey has gone off to India with Jeremy Morrison? He says he’ll get on with The Grand Grinder there, but somehow I doubt it. Something has happened to Fielding, Ivan: he’s seen right through himself; he’s found himself wanting. I don’t think he cares any more what he does, what he writes. He’s gone with Jeremy to kill time. That’s all he’ll ever do now: kill time until time kills him.’

  ‘Well…we can always print the
Grinder as it stands. Although it’s the wrong length for commercial ends, it has the makings of a minor classic.’

  ‘Yes. What a pity that Fielding should write something pretty near a classic, and should no longer know nor care.’

  ‘At first,’ said Nicos to Ptolemaeos Tunne, ‘this Holbrook was suspicious. But eventually he agreed that poor Paolo should have some opportunity of sexual experience (other than what may or may not happen between him and his aunt), and he accepted our offer to produce a suitable lady at our expense and to allow her to appear, in Paolo’s eyes, as a gift from his patron, Mr Holbrook.’

  Nicos and the Greco were at Tunne Hall, reporting back to Ptolemaeos on events in Samuele.

  ‘And so,’ the Greco took up the tale, ‘on one pretext or another, Paolo’s aunt was got out of the way one afternoon – I think Holbrook sent her into Oriago on a shopping expedition, saying that he himself would supervise Paolo – and we produced Tiresiana.’

  ‘Tiresiana,’ said Nicos, ‘liked the prospect. Paolo was big and beautiful and docile. He greeted Tiresiana in the way he greets most strangers, by exposing himself, and what she saw she found very promising. It was agreed that the kyrios and Holbrook and I should go outside and walk in the vicinity while Tiresiana and Paolo amused each other on the mattress which Paolo usually shared with his aunt in the kitchen – the only room – of their cottage. In consideration of her huge honorarium, Tiresiana was quite happy to lie roughly, and all was well set, except that Holbrook would keep popping back to peep, to make sure, as he said, that everything was in order and Paolo was behaving himself. At last the kyrios and I restrained him; and the three of us listened from about fifty yards away from the door of the hovel while the noises of pleasure – from both parties – mounted within.

  ‘Now your plan, kyrie Ptolemaeos, assumed that Paolo would so resent the fact of Tiresiana’s masculinity, when it was finally uncovered, that he would take vengeance on those who had cheated and deceived him, and with a little skill might be persuaded or induced to concentrate that vengeance on Holbrook.’

  ‘It was, of course, always an outside chance,’ said Ptoly Tunne. ‘But I remembered a passage in Defoe, in which two whores seduce an idiot but find his prick so huge that they take fright and deliberately toss him off without letting him fuck either of them. The idiot first wept, then sulked, then turned murderously violent. I was hoping something of the kind, when Tiresiana or whomever you employed turned out to be unfuckable, might happen here.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t,’ said the Greco. ‘According to Tiresiana, later on, Paolo was delighted with her prick, thought it was the most splendid plaything he’d ever had…so splendid that when the time came for Tiresiana to go, he wouldn’t let her. He thought that she had come to play with him, and be played with, forever. And he loved Tiresiana. When she called us all in after the performance was over, we found Paolo sitting with her, hand in hand, making little coos of tenderness, kissing her gently on her brow and cheek. When Holbrook offered Tiresiana his hand to help her rise, Paolo slapped it down and held Tiresiana to him. She had more sense than to struggle, indeed she pretended to be grateful to Paolo, thus rendering Holbrook’s role even more invidious. He addressed some brusque words in dialect to Paolo, made to disengage Tiresiana from his clutch…whereupon Paolo, eager to keep, and to defend from harm and insult, his new-found love, lifted Holbrook off the ground by his hair with one hand, so that he was dangling like a dolly, put the other to his throat, and there and then throttled Holbrook to death while Nicos and I made token gestures of prevention. What can two men do against a lunatic in a rage of sentimental passion?’

  Ptolemaeos, envisaging the scene, began to laugh, rather as Fielding had laughed when Jeremy confessed to being buggered by Milo.

  ‘And so,’ said Nicos, ‘Paolo is now confined to an island in the lagoon where there is a prison for the criminally insane (and doubtless has as full a life there as ever he did with his aunt in the marshes), while Holbrook lies unlamented beneath the church on San Samuele, and his secret with him.’

  Ptolemaeos, red and then black in the face, went on laughing. ‘So that’s the way it turned out,’ he spluttered: ‘Paolo turned murderous, as we hoped, but out of love and chivalry, not out of frustration and disgust.’

  He went on laughing; the Greco and Nicos joined him; the laughter became infectious, self-fuelling, uncontainable, so that even when Ptolemaeos slumped heavily in his chair and rolled to the floor, Nicos and the Greco continued to howl with merriment.

  ‘You see,’ said Theodosia to Canteloupe, ‘that boy would have loved me, in his gallant, childish way. Although chaste by nature, he would have done what had to be done because I asked him to, showing no reluctance or disgust (however he might have felt), not presuming it was his male right, demanding or claiming nothing in return. He would have been considerate and respectful and unfailingly kind. But now…now I must take the person I most closely associate with him. Marius. I must explain that I am asking him to do what his dead friend cannot, and to do it in the same way as Galahad would have done it…if, that is, you still wish me to go on with this enterprise for you.’

  ‘I do,’ said Canteloupe.

  ‘Marius is now Conyngham’s,’ said Theodosia. ‘But Conyngham will wish him to keep up his connection with your sort of people, so he will let him come if you or I invite him for a few nights. Let one of us do that, Canteloupe, before he goes back to school, and I shall…go to him…while he is here. He will be full of all the arrogance and presumption of which Galahad would have been innocent, but because Galahad loved him I think I shall be able to go through with it.’

  ‘A good, strong, healthy, intelligent boy,’ said Canteloupe with relish, ‘with a salutary strain of Jew in him. An excellent choice, if only there were no doubt about his mother’s side. But it’s no good trying to be too careful. We thought there was no doubt about Fielding and his heredity, Baby and I – that was perhaps the main reason we chose him – and look how poor little Tully has turned out.’

  ‘So Marius has gone for good,’ Tessa said to Jakki and Caroline Blessington as they all walked in Hyde Park. ‘We shall see him again, of course, and he will know us, and be polite, even friendly. Nevertheless he has gone from us forever.’

  ‘Where shall you go now?’ said Jakki.

  ‘I shall be with Auntie Maisie at the hotel.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Marius has gone, you say, and Milo was never really there. So to whom shall you go now?’

  ‘I wanted to go to Rosie in France until school starts; but there came a telegram which said there was no room.’

  ‘Her mother sent this telegram?’

  ‘It was signed “Rosie”. “Best wishes, Rosie.”’

  ‘Come with us now,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jakki; ‘come with us and we will show you our photographs of Greece, of Dodona and Delphi and sweet Argos, of sandy Pylos and Olympia and Thebes…’

  ‘Kind of Ptoly to leave so much of his money to the College,’ said Len to Tom Llewyllyn.

  ‘Only proper. His niece Jo-Jo has got plenty already, and he has no other relatives. Come to that, he needn’t have left Jo-Jo anything at all…which would have meant more for us.’

  ‘Don’t be greedy, Provost. I’m very glad Piero has come out of it so well. Now that his loyalties need no longer tie him to Tunne Hall…except by way of maintaining the place…he will make an admirable Fellow of this College.’

  ‘Yes. Of course, he’ll be very preoccupied with arranging Ptoly’s last rites – and his rather onerous duties as executor. I hope it doesn’t affect his Tripos results.’

  ‘We can smuggle him in whatever happens.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I must have him in as soon as Term starts and ask his advice about the dryads in my garden. These Sicilians know a thing or two about all that.’

  ‘We have failed with Teresa,’ said Conyngham to Marius and Milo. ‘Milo has failed with Teresa. But you, Marius, will
stay?’

  ‘For as long as you will have me,’ Marius said.

  ‘I see…now then. You are invited to spend two nights with Lord Canteloupe in Wiltshire,’ said Raisley Conyngham, passing Marius an opened envelope which had been addressed to Marius. ‘I think you should go. People say Canteloupe and his kind have had their day, but the fact is that they are still here. Would you like to go?’

  ‘If you think it is for the best.’

  ‘Write and accept. We must get you a new suit. Your dark grey one is ruined.’

  ‘I shall never forget,’ said Marius, ‘how you stripped it off me and washed away the filth underneath.’

  ‘An act of corporal charity, as they say in the Roman Church. And a pleasure, my dear Marius. Beautiful things like you should not be handled lest they lose their gloss; but if there is, just for once, a valid and even an exigent excuse for handling you, who would not take it? You were in no condition to clean yourself you had to be cleaned; you had to be handled and washed and wiped and touched. A great occasion, never to be repeated. You might almost regard it as a baptism, as a laying on of hands. There are many ways, Marius, in which hands may be laid on, to kill or cure, to corrupt or cleanse, to excite or to soothe, to pervert…or to dedicate. Mine were laid on you to dedicate.’

  ‘To dedicate me to what?’

  ‘You will understand as time goes on. Now go and write to Lady Canteloupe, accepting their invitation.’

  Marius rose. ‘What about…what about Jenny, sir?’ he said. ‘Was she too a dedication?’

  ‘An initiation and a reward. I told you at the time. And a lesson. You may choose to remember Jenny when you are with Lady Canteloupe.’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘You will find out. Now tell me. Did Jeremy Morrison speak to you, when you met at Bellhampton, about his future plans?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But only vaguely. He is going to be a long time in the East, and he said he might fly me out there for a visit.’