Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘Marius will like that,’ said Tessa: ‘I can’t stand them, Auntie, as you well know.’

  ‘Will they put you off? You don’t have to go if you don’t want.’

  ‘Oh, I want, Auntie. I want. I shall miss you, miss you, miss you, darling Auntie, but I’ve always wanted to go to the country – the proper country – for a good long stay, and Mr Conyngham is such a super beak–’

  ‘–Rich too by the sound of it–’

  ‘–And it’s always nice being with Marius.’

  (–Nice? thought Maisie: well, all right, as harmless a word as any she knew–)

  ‘–And then there’ll be Milo Hedley.’

  ‘Milo Hedley? Mr Conyngham doesn’t mention him.’

  ‘One of the senior boys, a School Monitor and School Fencing Pink. He teaches me the sabre, and I expect Mr Conyngham will put up a net so that we can all practice.’

  ‘Fencing?’

  ‘Cricket, Auntie. There are girls’ Elevens as well as boys’ at school, and I might get into the Girls’ Under Sixteen next summer. I mean to try like anything,’ said Tessa, meaning it.

  ‘Well, God bless your heart then,’ said Maisie, wanting both to cheer and to cry at the same time and half-choking over the combination, ‘and off you go to Somerset this Easter, as sure as God Almighty put salt in the Seven Seas.’

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ said Isobel Stern to Jo-Jo Guiscard as they walked up the hill to the alimentation in Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, ‘that Marius is happily fixed up for the Easter holidays. Some master at his school has invited him to go to his house in Somerset where there are all sorts of lovely toys like swimming-pools and racehorses.’

  ‘Who is this man?’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Rather rich for a dominee?’

  ‘Name of Conyngham. Descended from that woman of George the Fourth’s, I suppose.’

  ‘Raisley Conyngham?’

  ‘Right,’ said Isobel. ‘How clever of you.’

  ‘Ptolemaeos used to talk about him. In the days when Uncle Ptoly still used to go racing, this Raisley Conyngham had an astonishing run of luck as an owner. Some three or four years ago…’

  ‘An honest owner, I hope? According to Marius’ Housemaster, who has written to me at Mr Conyngham’s request, Mr Conyngham is entirely respectable…in every way fitted to have charge of Marius.’

  ‘If Marius isn’t coming for Easter,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘there’ll be room for all of us. Not like at Christmas. Boys of that age take up so much space, somehow, but if it’s only Rosie, she can be tucked in anywhere.’

  ‘She can sleep on the camp-bed, next to Oenone,’ said Isobel:‘she worships that child. She’s been ditched by her friend, Tessa Malcolm, and Oenone was just the thing to fill the bill. A little girl of Oenone’s age won’t, you see, be easily able to escape her.’

  ‘We’d better not let him see us,’ said Jakki Blessington to Palairet.

  Both had arrived independently to watch Marius play Eton Fives against Eton for the first of the School Under Sixteen Pairs.

  ‘He’ll hate it if he sees us hanging about,’ Jakki said.

  ‘But how are we to watch if we’ve got to hide?’

  ‘Follow me,’ said Jakki. She led the way up some wooden steps which had been built into a scrubby slope opposite the rear ends of the Junior Fives Courts. When they were about halfway up:

  ‘Into the bushes,’ Jakki said.

  And there they were, cosily seated in a tiny hollow, quite invisible but with a perfect view of the action, in the space between the roots of two shrubs. They watched Marius arrive with the other players and then, a little later, Raisley Conyngham arrive with Milo in attendance just behind him, and Tessa behind both of them: the Lord of the Manor of Ullacote, thought Jackie, with his senior esquire and one of his pages.

  ‘Marius and Tessa,’ she said to Palairet, ‘are going to stay with Raisley Conyngham in the holidays. In his country house. It’s called “Ullacote”.’

  ‘Stupid name. Who told you?’

  ‘Mr Conyngham wrote to Mrs Malcolm who told my mother who told my father who told me…last weekend. I’d already told my father and mother, you see, that I don’t trust Mr Conyngham. My mother thinks I’m talking rubbish. My father is more sympathetic, but says that if one gets up a fuss, one only makes a fool of oneself and embarrasses other people. He’s quite right, of course. Anyway, as he said last weekend, I shall be having a much nicer time than Marius and Tessa, because now he’s earning more money – working for Salinger, Stern & Detterling – he can afford to take us all on a driving holiday to Greece. Mummy and me and Caroline. That’s my sister. You haven’t met her.’

  ‘No,’ said Palairet, ‘but Marius used to talk about her.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jakki, ‘did he now? And what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing really. He used to talk of both of you as if you were the same person. “Jakki and Caroline Blessington wear proper trousers, like boys,” I remember he said once, “trousers which come right down to the heel and the instep – not those damn silly things which flap about showing knobbly ankles.”’

  ‘Anything else?’ said Jakki, looking with pleasure at her proper boys’ trousers (complete with fly) and wishing that Marius had remembered them as hers, and not her sister’s as well.

  ‘Nothing much. “Jakki and Caroline said last hols that their father can’t afford riding lessons like ours.” That,’ said Palairet dismally, ‘was when we used to go riding together at Oudenarde House.’

  ‘Pretty stuck up of him to mention it.’

  ‘No. He was just sorry for you.’

  ‘Oh. Which one of us said…what you said he said we said?’

  ‘He didn’t appear to distinguish.’

  ‘Well, at least Daddy can now afford to take us to Greece in a car this Easter,’ said Jakki. And then, making a stratagem of necessity, ‘So I shall just ignore this whole business of their going to Mr Conyngham’s, as there is nothing I can do about it. I shall make my mind a blank (as my mother would say), and see what has happened by the time I get back.’

  ‘But you don’t like it, do you?’ Palairet said.

  ‘Marius’ match is starting. He’s the first to throw the ball up… I must say,’ said Jakki after a little while, ‘these Eton boys play very snootily. They’re so dainty and blasé they can hardly be bothered to hit the ball.’

  ‘You don’t like it, do you?’ Palairet insisted. ‘Tessa and Marius going off with Conyngham? Anyhow, where are they going?’

  ‘I told you: Mr Conyngham’s house: Ullacote.’

  ‘But where is it?’

  ‘Near a place called Timberscombe, which is near a place called Dunster, which is near a place called Minehead. In Somerset.’

  ‘I shall be near there. I spend part of each holidays with my aunt in Burnham-on-Sea. Only twenty-five miles or so from Minehead. I could take a bus to Minehead and call, couldn’t I?’

  ‘How would you get from Minehead to Timberscombe? There’s probably one bus a month. And anyway, you’d have to take a taxi, which you couldn’t afford, out to this Ullacote place… Zowiiieee, did you see Marius smash that one off the ledge?…and in any case, Pally, what on earth would you say when you got there?’

  Another person who was playing Eton Fives that afternoon was Theodosia Canteloupe, but she was only playing by herself, ‘knocking up’ in the court at the end of the Great Court. She could now keep two balls in play without much difficulty and was experimenting with three. This was demanding work, with a fascination of its own, but, oh, she thought disloyally, if only Canty and Leonard weren’t so decrepit we could find a fourth and have a game. A proper game, she thought, as she lobbed one ball off the wall to the back of the court, retrieved the second off an easy ricochet from the top of the buttress and sent it back to join the first, scooped the third up from the bottom of its bounce on the step, sent it high up to give her time, high up just under the roof, and lumbered to the back of the court, too late to catch all three of the balls there but i
n time to return two of them. A proper game, she thought, a match, what am I doing here now but a sort of juggling act – enough. She killed the two balls still in play, gathered up all three, and turned to go.

  ‘Brava, brava,’ said Canteloupe and Leonard, who had been standing near the back of the court and watching her (though she had not noticed them) for nearly ten minutes.

  She started to put on her Cambridge Badminton sweater. The weeks are going by, she thought: Canty has kept his promise and will continue to keep it, but he will also expect me to keep mine. He will remain silent: I must go, presently, and rut. As her face came through the neck of her sweater, she saw a little gleam in both men’s eyes: a gleam of eagerness in Canteloupe’s, eagerness for birth and posterity; and in Leonard Percival’s, a gleam of near dead but still inquisitive prurience, all that was left to him of lust.

  ‘So,’ said Raisley Conyngham to Tessa Malcolm, as he beckoned her to him from her modest place at the rear of his train, ‘our friend Marius has just won a great victory.’

  ‘But unfortunately, sir, his pair was the only one of ours that did win.’

  ‘I doubt if that will worry him much…your aunt, you will be happy to hear, is delighted that you will be coming to me for Easter. I have arranged with her to send anything you may need from Buttock’s Hotel directly down to Ullacote. You and Marius will therefore be able to accompany Milo and myself straight there on the first day of the holidays, and will not have the inconvenience of going first to London.’

  ‘But…won’t Auntie Maisie want to see me – and Marius – if only for an hour or so…before we go to Somerset?’

  ‘Why? It would only upset you all, Teresa – so short a meeting and so swift a parting.’

  ‘I expect you’re right, sir.’

  ‘I detect reservation in your tone. Do not, Teresa, presume too far upon your privileges as one of the weaker sex. A little more manliness, if you please. Now, while we are all at Ullacote we are going to read Twelfth Night, or What You Will. We shall all four of us have to take several parts, of course, but your main part will be that of Viola, the girl who has to dress and make her fortune as a boy. Her example should help to toughen you to masculine standards.’

  ‘Except, sir, that Viola falls in love with a man. And marries him.’

  ‘But suppose, just suppose, Teresa, that circumstances had compelled her to remain much longer, for the rest of her life perhaps, in a male role and costume. What of her Duke Orlando then? That is the possibility that I want you to bear in mind during the very careful study of the play which you will make before we all leave for Ullacote.’

  Since Fielding Gray had business and pleasure in London, he returned from Broughton Staithe to Buttock’s Hotel, where Maisie now allowed him to live and work, even when Tessa was there for the weekend. Since the hotel was half Fielding’s in any case, she would always have had great difficulty in keeping him out of it, had he cared to be obstinate. It was only because he did not care to be obstinate (anything rather than a row) that she had managed to exile him for so long in the past. But however all that might be, the old rule had now been resumed (though Maisie remained anxious that Fielding and Tessa should not both be there together for too long), and Fielding was once more established in his bed-sitting room, where he was grinding painfully away at The Grand Grinder.

  For truth to tell, though the idea had seemed quite a good one when Carmilla and Theodosia had hit on it down at Broughton, the memoir was turning out to be very sticky going. Although there were several entertaining episodes, the people concerned were of little abiding interest: mutatis mutandis, it was rather, thought Fielding, like Boccaccio – the racy adventures of cardboard cut-outs. This meant that the interest of the thing depended entirely on action, not at all on character; and that said, there simply was not enough action to keep it going. Unlike Boccaccio, who numbered his tales in hundreds, Fielding reckoned his in tens; and many of these (such as Aunt Flo’s spectacular death by water when the cistern turned rogue in the Ladies’ Lavatory on Market Day at Brampton) were decidedly brief.

  There was only one thing for it, thought Fielding, as he surveyed his completed notes on the third morning after his arrival at Buttock’s: I shall have to make up a lot of it myself. But of course this was just what he did not wish to do. He had only taken up the idea of a memoir because his own invention was wheezing; and even if he could supply enough additional and spurious incidents in the genre to swell out a passable volume, it was fair neither to his family nor to his public to fake what purported, in its humble kind, to be historical fact. Crossly reflecting on all this, then examining, to cheer himself up, the cheque for £878 which had arrived from Piero in part payment for the manuscripts by the first post that morning; thinking what a clever method this was of eluding the tax-gatherers; wondering uneasily whether the tax-gatherers had come across it before (after all, however casual the individual payments might be made to appear, their aggregate would be ungainsayable); deciding that, for the time being at any rate, there was nothing to be done about this; pondering on all these matters and many more related ones, such as Nicos Pandouros’ expedition to the Laguna Veneta (was he back yet?), Fielding was jolted nearly out of his wits when two liberal helpings of female bust descended past his cheeks with a swoosh, one on to each of his shoulders.

  Maisie.

  ‘Getting on all right dear?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stuck?’

  ‘Not really. Dissatisfied.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got some good news to cheer you up a bit. Or sort of good news. You’ll be able to stay here uninterrupted from now on right through to the end of July, if you want. Tessa’s going to be away the whole of the Easter holidays, and after that she’ll only be here Saturdays and Sundays for the whole summer term–’

  ‘–Quarter–’

  ‘–Quarter, and not even on Saturdays, I should think, if she gets into the Girls’ Under Sixteen Cricket Eleven.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus, Maisie. What’s all that got to do with my staying here? I thought that nonsense of yours was done with.’

  ‘Well dear, it is but then it isn’t…quite. I mean, nothing of that sort is ever really done with, now is it, and a whole month at Easter, if Tessa had been here too, might have a been a mis–’

  ‘–All right, all right. Thank you for letting me know I can stay. Though how long I’ll want to be here between now and July is another matter. And now tell me,’ said Fielding, crossing his arms and putting one hand up to each of Maisie’s bunjy pectorals, ‘where Tessa is going.’

  ‘One of the masters at her school has invited her to his country house in Somerset – her and Marius both.’

  ‘What master?’

  ‘Oh, he’d be well after your time, dear. A Mr Raisley Conyngham.’

  ‘The racehorse owner?’

  ‘Yes. Tessa hates horses but it’ll be nice for Marius. And there’s lots of other things for Tessa.’

  ‘How odd of this Conyngham. Why should he pick Marius and Tessa together?’

  ‘I expect he knew they know each other, and often live in the same house in the holidays.’

  ‘Why should he have known all that…unless he’s been making enquiries?’

  ‘Come off it, dear. You’re making too much of the thing. And no more of that just now,’ she said, moving his hands off her dugs and taking two almost military paces to the rear.

  ‘Tell me, Maisie. Does anyone – apart from you and me – does anyone at all know that you are Tessa’s mother?’

  ‘I think perhaps Gregory Stern knew, dear. Knew or guessed. He’d have remembered that one time he was with me, and what happened, and later on he’d have done his arithmetic – you know how sharp Jews are–’

  ‘–But you disappeared, absolutely, for several months before and after Tessa’s birth. And it was several years before she came to live with you as your niece.’

  ‘Not till I retired…but you know what Jews are with those long twitchy noses,
they have ways of finding things out. But why worry about that, dear? I only said that perhaps Gregory knew or guessed – he used to give Tessa presents you see, rather special presents – but since he’s been dead two years and more in any case, what’s the difference?’

  ‘I was only wondering whether it is conceivable that anyone else knows that Tessa and Marius are half-brother and sister.’

  ‘No, dear. Only you and me. Only Fielding and Maisie. And anyway, what’s that got to do with this invitation? You’re not suggesting that Mr Raisley Conyngham might be up to something? I hope not, because Tessa’s set her little heart on going, and Mr Conyngham’s references are quite unimpeachable.’

  Maisie knew a lot of long words as she always read Tessa’s holiday task books at the same time as Tessa, in order that they might discuss them together. These literary activities were a source of great joy to Fielding, who considered Maisie’s critical judgements to be pithy and accurate; but they also prompted much malicious amusement, at the juxtaposition of Maisie’s usual argot (that of a whore tempered to become a hotel proprietor and an ‘aunt’) with her grandiose and polysyllabic gleanings from Shakespeare or Burke. Normally he would have relished Mr Conyngham’s ‘unimpeachable’ references, but today he was too concerned with Mr Conyngham himself and his intervention in the lives of Marius and Tessa.

  ‘There was some story about a horse,’ he said, ‘a horse which Conyngham owned and didn’t have gelded even when it started to run in steeplechases.’

  ‘And what’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘It is…unusual. He seems to be rather an unusual man, don’t you think? A schoolmaster with a country house and rich enough to run racehorses…picking out Marius and Tessa together from hundreds of boys and girls…asking them to stay, not just a few days but nearly five weeks. It is possible that he might have some idea of their real connection?’

  ‘No, dear; how could he? He just knows they know each other. One or other of them probably told him. Use your common sense, and let’s not have any more of this silly mystery making. I know what it’s all about, of course: you’re jealous of this Mr Conyngham because he’s taking Tessa away from you.’