Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Maisie, let’s have no more of that. See you at lunch.’

  Fielding bent his head discontentedly over his notes about the Grinder and his manifold cousins, while Maisie closed the door very slowly and softly, which was her way of showing greater displeasure than if she had slammed it.

  ‘The selected play is Twelfth Night, or What You Will,’ said Milo Hedley to Marius.

  Milo was watching Marius while he was having a shower after hockey. Since this was happening in the changing room of Marius’ House, to which Milo did not belong, Milo, although he was a School Monitor and therefore highly privileged in many respects, had no business to be there at all.

  ‘We shall all have to take several parts,’ Milo went on: ‘Your main one will be Olivia – the one who falls in love with Viola, thinking her to be a boy.’

  ‘Who will be reading Viola?’

  ‘Miss Malcolm. For God’s sake stop turning your back on me. You’re behaving like a little girl.’

  Marius turned to face Milo.

  ‘Ah. Something went wrong when you were circumcised, I see. Show me closer.’

  Marius showed him closer. Milo put out both hands and adjusted Marius’ penis, as deftly and delicately as a doctor, so that he could examine a small scar near the lip of the bulb. He then restored the organ to its owner.

  ‘I was circumcised rather late, you see,’ said Marius, ‘so that may have made it difficult. It certainly hurt a lot afterwards. Oddly enough, my father had a similar scar – so my mother told me – also from being circumcised. Though of course he was done when he was a baby.’

  ‘And you were done… “rather late”. How late, Marius? Why?’

  ‘My mother didn’t want it done when I was born. She despised Jewish customs and thought…that it would spoil my appearance. Please pass me that towel.’

  Marius turned off the shower and stepped out. Milo draped the towel round him – or rather, he let it drop on to his shoulders without himself touching him.

  ‘It doesn’t…spoil your appearance. You know why not Marius? Because your beauty is not pagan – or at least, not pagan in the Greek style. An Apollo or an Eros or a Faun without a foreskin would be quite hideous. But you are something else again. A different sort of deity… Egyptian, perhaps. There were tribes in Egypt, you know, that practised circumcision.’

  ‘I thought Egyptian gods had animal heads.’

  ‘Not necessarily the minor ones. But perhaps that is what you need…the head of a fox or a hawk. Why were you cut in the end if your mother didn’t want it done?’

  ‘It was too tight. So I am to play Olivia. Whom else?’

  ‘The Duke Orlando…who also fancied Viola, even before he knew she was a girl.’

  ‘I thought he was in love with Olivia.’

  ‘With her as well, at any rate to begin with. So Marius-Orlando will desire himself as Marius-Olivia. Lest all this should go to your head, you will be sobered up by reading Plato’s Apology with Raisley, while Miss Malcolm reads Gibbon with me. And lastly, Marius, you will be inducted into the duties of a stable boy in a training establishment…so that you would be capable of standing in for another at a need. The actual training at Ullacote is done by a certain Captain Jack Lamprey – ex-Army man, Hamilton’s Horse. A sympathetic fellow, you’ll find, a sort of extremely coarse-minded dandy. Foul-mouthed and witty with it, like an upper-class – no, a donnish – Serjeant-Major.’

  ‘Tessa hates horses,’ said Marius. He discarded the towel and began to pull on a pair of elegant Cambridge blue drawers, pausing very briefly to examine the penis which made of him an Egyptian deity.

  ‘Miss Malcolm will be busy with Gibbon, the sabre and the local churches. By the way, I’m going to give you a stallion when we ride tomorrow. You’ll need to get used to them. It’s a stallion you’ll be trained on at Ullacote.’

  ‘Rather rough on an apprentice?’

  ‘This is a very sweet-tempered one. Raisley bought him a long time ago, then sold him, but has bought him back. He’s a steeplechaser. Name of Lover Pie.’

  ‘Lover Pie?’ said Marius, quivering all over with excitement: ‘I won a lot of money on him at Newmarket, nearly three years ago.’

  ‘He don’t go on the flat any longer. Fences now.’

  ‘But he’s still entire?’

  ‘A stallion, as I said.’

  ‘My word,’ said Marius, ‘Jeremy will be thrilled.’

  ‘Jeremy?’

  ‘Jeremy Morrison. Friend of mine. He was with me at Newmarket when we backed Lover Pie.’

  ‘Indeed? If I were you… Marius the Egyptian… I shouldn’t go telling anyone about Lover Pie. It’s a secret, you see. Raisley is hoping…to spring a little surprise.’

  ‘Goll-liiieee,’ Marius said, reverting three or four years in his infatuation; ‘then Mum’s the word.’

  When Nicos and the Greco had finished their report to Ptolemaeos Tunne on how matters stood at Samuele, Ptolemaeos made two comments, the first brief, the second more ample:

  ‘To begin with,’ he said, ‘let us say that it does my corrupt old heart good to see that instead of being separated from each other for good, which is what I had intended, you two have been re-united in a different and saner fashion. It is an object lesson on the benefits sometimes unintentionally conferred by interference.

  ‘Secondly, it is clear to me, as it must be to you, that if there is any menace to Lord Canteloupe – which we should all deplore – it must lie with this atrocious fellow, Jude Holbrook.

  ‘Now, as to this latter.

  ‘Having studied the documents which Major Gray produced, and being now acquainted with the history of the whole affair, I know that Lord Rollesden-in-Silvis, alias Humbert fitzAvon, debauched in Venice the entire Albani family except the father…who, to get him out of the way before anything worse happened, sent him off to hide from the invading forces of Bonaparte in the Albani Villa at Samuele. While there, fitzAvon raped or seduced a little peasant girl, was compelled by the villagers and the priest to marry her when she became pregnant, and was then lynched for vengeance on the evening after his wedding. The child of the Signora fitzAvon, later called Filavoni, was a boy, and from this boy is directly descended the idiot Paolo, whom you have just been to inspect.

  ‘As Albani thought and wrote, when he found all this out, there was no point in revealing that fitzAvon had really been the heir of Lord Canteloupe (at the time still called Lord Muscateer) and that the peasant girl’s brat was now, therefore, the legitimate heir apparent to the peerage; nor did he inform Canteloupe of his son’s marriage:

  ‘“The family was ancient and noble,” he wrote in the second of Fielding’s manuscripts. “It was not, in my view, fitting that its line should continue through the coupling of such a vile man as I now knew Lord Rollesden to be, and of such a woman as the peasant hoyden whom he had been forced to make his wife… By concealing the fact of Lord Rollesden’s marriage, I should be leaving my Lord Muscateer free to assume that his heir was now dead without issue and to make such arrangements as he could for the more proper inheritance of his earldom and estate. The bride, now the widow, knew only that she had married one Humbert fitzAvon… There could be no chance, therefore, that she would claim or presume on the place that was now legally hers (and her child’s)… Some time later I learned that Lord Muscateer had been raised to the high dignity of an English Marquessate… This only confirmed me in thinking that I had been right to protect so illustrious a House against continuance through the get of a vicious criminal on a common country bawd.’

  ‘And so say all of us,’ said Ptolemaeos Tunne, ‘in the very similar circumstances which obtain now. What possible point or use would there be in restoring the Marquessate to the right line, and so to that poor idiot in the marshes? And indeed, neither I nor anyone else in the know would dream of trying to do so – except possibly (from your description of the man and his behaviour) this mean, shrivelled, stunted Holbrook, who, bereaved of his m
other and now a sick man, has no pleasures or satisfactions left to him save possibly for that of making mischief. Should he finally discover this secret, as he may do if he wishes to persist, then for the sake of making mischief and revelling in spite, Holbrook might just do, or cause to be done, an intolerable injury to our friend Lord Canteloupe.

  ‘It is therefore our duty to find some effective way of silencing Holbrook. Just in case. To this end I am already forming a delicate and rather amusing plan, and I shall charge you, Nico, and you, Greco, as the two good and equal friends you have become, with its implementation in due course.’

  ‘Like master, like man,’ said Jeremy Morrison to Alfie Schroeder of the Billingsgate Press: ‘if I am to come to the true depths of the age old secrets of the soil, then I must first seek the old wisdom of the generations that have laboured on it since the beginning of time. This means, first, immersing myself in their manner of life.’

  ‘So up with the lark and to bed with the bee,’ said Alfie, ‘and hey presto! The wisdom of the peasant will be upon you – as they used to say of the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘Something of the kind. “Hey presto” is rather optimistic. It could take a very long time.’

  ‘And how long have you been at it so far?’ said Alfie. He watched the two photographers, whom the paper had sent with him, as they made forty-seven finicking photographs of a Georgian dovecot. Could have done it better myself, he thought, with my old box brownie, God bless its remains wherever they are. Could have done it much better at a hundredth of the cost. But, of course, they’ve got a very powerful union these days. They have to be allowed everywhere, whole squads of them. The photographers moved on, to make seventy-nine more finicking photos, this time of the ivy over the ogival arch of one of the downstairs windows. Any minute now, thought Alfie, they’ll be taking about a million arty poses of Piers Ploughboy here, and then there’ll be no peace for anyone; so I’d better get on quickly.

  ‘How long have you been at it?’ he repeated.

  ‘Just a few weeks,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘And what exactly is your regimen?’ said Alfie. ‘I mean, you don’t seem to be living in a peasant hovel or anything.’

  ‘No one on this estate lives in a peasant hovel,’ said Jeremy sternly.

  ‘Sorry.’ This boy’s pa, thought Alfie sadly, or Tom Llewyllyn, or any of the old gang, would have seen the joke (such as it was) and laughed. Heigh-day, he said to himself, then aloud:

  ‘I meant, you don’t seem to be living in an ordinary farm-worker’s accommodation. You’re still up here at the Hall.’

  ‘That is expected of me. I am the ’Squire; I live in the ’Squire’s house. In every other respect, I live the life which has been lived by an apprentice farm-worker since…since…’

  ‘…Since the beginning of time,’ suggested Alfie wearily.

  ‘No. We’ve had that phrase already.’ Was there a glimmer of humour here? thought Alfie. Would God there were.

  ‘Since man first tilled the earth,’ Jeremy said. ‘Yes,’ he said with some satisfaction: ‘my life is the life of all those that have been dedicated to the land and its service, since man first tilled the earth.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alfie. ‘And in this way you are going to become saturated in the primeval wisdom of the soil? Or would you prefer “atavistic” for “primeval”?’

  ‘I think “primeval” will do very well,’ Jeremy said.

  Was there, oh dear God, was there just a trace of merriment in his eye as he said that?

  ‘And how long do you expect to go on with this?’ Alfie enquired. ‘As you’ve just remarked, it could be a very lengthy business.’

  ‘Indeed it could be. Or perhaps,’ said Jeremy, ‘just perhaps, the whole thing might come to one in a flash. The old rhythms might suddenly find a true response in my mind – after all, I come from a line of farmers that goes back to a vassal of Queen Boadicea – yes, the old rhythms and the old routines might begin to fill my being with the old wisdom sooner than I originally hoped.’

  ‘So it’s going to be a matter of “hey presto” after all,’ said Alfie, losing patience. ‘One morning, not a week from now, you’re going to wake up knowing the whole fucking thing backwards, and there’ll be no more need of wailing about “the mystic knowledge that goes back to the grey dawn of history” – I think I have you right,’ he said, consulting his notebook, ‘or getting yourself up,’ he said, looking at Jeremy’s clodhopping boots and hitched trousers, ‘to look like a People’s Hero of Agriculture on a bloody propaganda poster.’

  Jeremy grinned, very briefly, then gazed straight on Alfie’s red and blue square face with his white and round one.

  ‘My father warned me that you enjoyed your little joke,’ he said; ‘but I think…don’t you, Mr Schroeder…that you’d better take me seriously.’

  Before Alfie could ask why, one of the photographers had tapped him on the shoulder, said ‘Come on, grandad, our turn now if you don’t mind’, pushed him briskly to one side in case he did, and started ordering Jeremy into a series of affected and contorted postures, which he willingly endured as the price of being finished, at such a very opportune moment, with Mr Alfie Schroeder.

  ‘You see,’ Jeremy said to Carmilla, who had come over from Cambridge for the night, as they lay in bed at Luffham-by-Whereham, ‘he can’t be sure that I was bluffing and so he won’t dare call the bluff. Can we please do it properly this time instead of just coming all over each other?’

  ‘No,’ said Carmilla, who had been saying this ever since the resumption (at his request and to her delight) of their sexual rendezvous – ‘Anyhow, I’m not ready to do anything again just yet,’ she said. ‘Why won’t this Schroeder dare to call your bluff?’

  ‘He knew my father in the old days. He knows that my father once provided a confidential service – parliamentary information of a very special kind – for his employer, Lord Billingsgate. He knows, too, that I am immensely rich – multiply three thousand acres by two thousand pounds an acre, and see what that gives you.’

  ‘Six million,’ said Carmilla.

  ‘Right you be. Alfie boy knows that, and he also knows that we – that is, I – now have a great deal more in the funds. Enough to ring a lot of noisy bells that might embarrass him. All ways round, he may reckon that he’d better not chance his arm.’

  ‘But if he does…chance his arm…and makes you look a fool?’

  ‘His text has to have my imprimatur before it can be printed–’

  ‘–Clever boy–’

  ‘–So if he starts knocking my ideas or making bad taste jokes, the thing just gets torn up. His paper wouldn’t like that – time and expenses wasted. So the odds are that he will produce something which I like, and then his paper can print it, and everyone will be happy.’

  ‘Except, perhaps, Mr Schroeder.’

  ‘Who will soon recover his spirits when he receives a nice letter of thanks with a cheque inside, made out for him to endorse and pay over “to his favourite charity”, a face-saving formula which he will interpret as meaning himself. I’ve got a huge thing on. Want a feel?’

  ‘Did you ever let Fielding Gray have a feel?’

  ‘He never asked for one.’

  ‘If he had?’ said Carmilla, having one herself.

  ‘I don’t know. At the beginning, perhaps; but not if he’d asked recently. For some time now I’ve been getting ready to say goodbye to him.’

  ‘What a swine you are.’

  ‘Can I have a feel now?’

  ‘Yes… Yes, like that. Just lately it’s started to go stiff. Like a little boy’s. Erectile, I think they call it.’

  ‘How very exciting.’

  ‘Careful, it’s not quite like a boy’s, even more tender and hates being bent. Good…good…nice Jeremy. Clever Jeremy. Tell me, nice, clever Jeremy: why did you have to ditch Fielding Gray quite so savagely? Everyone at Lancaster is very hurt on his behalf. Me too.’

  ‘Yet here you are with me.’

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nbsp; ‘That doesn’t mean I approve of your behaviour. I’m just using you,’ said Carmilla, ‘in the same way you are using me, as flesh to assuage lust.’

  ‘That’s not supposed to be moral,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘It’s quite all right if we are both honest about it, to ourselves and to each other. Stop evading the issue. Unkindness to Fielding; and disloyalty to the College at the same time. Your sudden departure hit Tom Llewyllyn, and Len, and others, very hard. After all, you’re the son of one of Tom’s oldest friends, and they’d bent over backwards to do you favours. As you well know, Tom has never been himself since those elms died two years ago, and what with your desertion of the College and of Fielding Gray – another old friend of Tom’s, remember, you’ve really put the boot in.’

  ‘The farm-worker’s boot?’ giggled Jeremy.

  ‘What time do you get up?’ said Carmilla, abandoning any attempt to get Jeremy to treat seriously his hateful conduct. ‘What time do you begin your daily charade? Not too early, I hope. I don’t need to leave for Cambridge until ten o’clock.’

  ‘I’m letting myself off tomorrow. I sometimes do, though I didn’t tell Mr Schroeder.’

  ‘Fraud. But this is genuine enough,’ she said, laying her cheek along the length of it.

  When Lord Luffham of Whereham went down to his old school to address the staff and the Sixth Form, and then be gowned in Royal Purple as ‘Domus Huius Alumnus ita Honorabilis ut Honoratus’, Jeremy decided to go too, officially to support his father but in fact to escape, more or less legitimately, another day on the soil, and to take a look at Marius.

  ‘So how is the land?’ his father said, as they drove up the School Hill. ‘I notice that you are deserting it today.’

  ‘In your honour, my lord.’

  ‘Yes…well, I shouldn’t absent myself too much, if I were you – at least not until that article of Schroeder’s is safely published.’