Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘I don’t know about Scholar Emeritus,’ said Marius, wishing to épater the company: ‘my mother is having a fit of five star meanness and may well start claiming the actual purse that usually goes with a scholarship.’

  ‘Then she won’t get it,’ said Raisley Conyngham, resenting the attempted diversion but wishing to kill the point raised by it. ‘When you received the award two years ago, she agreed that your family was too rich to take the money with a clear conscience; and you were therefore not called “Scholar Esuriens”, a needy scholar, but “Scholar Emeritus”, a scholar, that is, by Merit or Desert…a title which you will in any case forfeit if you continue in such mental slackness as you have just displayed. You have read this play carefully, as instructed?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then you should be aware that at no time does the Duke or anyone else assume that Viola is a castrato. In a speech that is soon to come, the Duke treats Viola, whom he knows as Cesario, as a growing boy with an unbroken voice. In a scene that comes somewhat later, Olivia falls in love with Cesario as with any young man. Both presume that he is entire – immature, no doubt, but entire. How, then, could he have been presented as a castrato?’

  ‘If he wasn’t,’ said Marius, ‘why did he ask the Captain to present him as a “eunuch”, and why did the Captain agree to do so with the words “be you his eunuch”?’

  He turned to look over the valleys in the evening, heedless of Conyngham’s pedantry.

  ‘Listen to me, boy,’ said Conyngham. ‘I am engaged in, among other things, training you and Teresa in exactness of thought. Later on I have an amusing little exercise for you both which will require absolute precision of timing and action. And conception. These must therefore become habitual with you at all times and in all pursuits, literary or other. Only if you are exact in all things can I depend upon you to be exact in the enterprise which I have in mind for you. So now, Marius: if the Duke treats Cesario as a boy who is growing towards the pains of manhood, and if the Lady Olivia treats him as a youth already capable of loving in the full sense, it is clear that Viola/ Cesario was not presented, at Court or anywhere else, in the capacity of a “eunuch”. This being the case, now answer your own question: why the use of the word “eunuch”, twice, in Act One, Scene Two?’

  ‘Either the use was figurative, sir,’ said Marius, who had realised that he was expected to wrangle the question as tirelessly as a schoolman, ‘in reference to Cesario’s treble voice; or it was a private joke between Cesario and the Captain, both of whom knew that Cesario had no male parts whereas the Duke and the Court could not know this; or they did indeed intend to pass off Cesario as a castrato but changed their minds before he was introduced.’

  ‘Better,’ said Raisley: ‘but your last suggestion necessitates an unwarranted intrapolation; and you have failed to render what is perhaps the most obvious explanation of all. You provide it, Teresa.’

  ‘Confusion of thought, sir, by Cesario and the Captain. Or simply slack usage.’

  ‘Nearly. Set her right, Milo.’

  ‘Confusion of thought, sir, and/or slack usage, not by Cesario and the Captain, but by Shakespeare himself.’

  ‘Good. Do not let your reverence for the Master conceal from you, Marius and Teresa, that inconsistency and sloppiness in Shakespeare’s characters as often as not reflects the inconsistency and sloppiness of their creator…which we may charitably explain and excuse on the grounds that he laboured under the grinding and immediate pressures of the commercial theatre, and was often much disordered by drink, jealousy, disease or lust.’

  ‘This is lover pie,’ said Raisley Conyngham to Marius the next morning. He pointed into the stallion’s stall, from which the incumbent looked back with blasé disdain. ‘Bring him out, Jack,’ he said to Captain Jack Lamprey, a short, chunky man, bald under his cap.

  ‘Bring the old bugger out, Jenny,’ said Lamprey to a loitering stable lass.

  Jenny brought him out. Lover Pie stood quiet and bored by her side in the yard while Marius, Raisley Conyngham, Milo Hedley and a lowering individual who had been introduced to Marius as ‘Major Glastonbury’, politely and studiously examined the pair of them. The stable lass was messy, busty and lusty. Lover Pie was grave, grey, rather plump, well muscled in the behind, wide and handsome between the ears, and very strong in the chest.

  ‘Jenny will be over you, young Marius,’ said Jack Lamprey, ‘and old Leery Whelks will be over Jenny, and I’ll be over the whole bloody lot of you. Since the forms have been signed and passed and all that sort of shit,’ he lilted like a professor quoting poetry in his inaugural lecture, ‘we’d better begin the way we mean to go on, and no time like now. I’ll take the Lover, Jenny,’ he said, doing so, ‘and you take Master Marius and find him some clobber. Then bring him back here and we’ll give him a few bloody horrible fatigues. And Jenny,’ called Lamprey, as she seized Marius by one arm with both hands and led him zestfully away, ‘don’t try to feel him up while he’s changing. He’s a little bit shy. His friend, Mr Conyngham, your employer and mine, wouldn’t like it at all; and anyway I want him fit and up to his work.’

  Jenny grinned, showing a gap where one front tooth should have been, and whistled gaily through it.

  ‘That horse needs a race, Raisley,’ Major Glastonbury said.

  ‘I know, Giles,’ said Conyngham. ‘I have one in mind. Two, in fact.’

  ‘At clappy Regis Priory in early April,’ piped Lamprey, ‘and poxy Bellhampton Park a few days later. Smelly little courses, both of ’em’ – to Lamprey the only proper course in England was Cheltenham – ‘but they’ve got nice, comfy park fences which we hope he won’t whack his knackers on. Two three miles ’chases, or just over. The Paignton Trophy and Hamilton’s Cup.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Glastonbury, ‘my cousin Prideau has a mare in those two races.’

  ‘I know,’ said Conyngham: ‘Boadicea. When are you going on to Prideau?’

  ‘After luncheon.’

  ‘So soon? Why not stay a night? As you see,’ said Conyngham, as Jenny emerged leading by the hand a cloth-capped, polo-necked, tightly jeanned Marius, ‘we have interesting company.’

  ‘I dare say. Tempting,’ said Glastonbury, ‘but no. This is a quick stage, as I said on the telephone: lunch is all I asked for and lunch is all I’ll have.’

  ‘Why the hurry? Prideau Glastonbury – with respect – is not the most beguiling company in the world.’

  ‘And so say all of us. But I’m fond of him–’

  ‘–So am I, ever since Cambridge, but I wouldn’t exactly hurtle from here to Hereford to be with him–’

  ‘–No more would I,’ said Giles, ‘were it not that he’s specially asked me to hurry. I have something to report.’

  The two men walked away from Lover Pie, who was now receiving the attentions of Marius, under the immediate instruction of Jenny and the more aloof supervision of Jack Lamprey. ‘At least,’ Jenny was saying, ‘it don’t smell as gungy as a mule’s.’ Milo paused, amused by Marius’ discomfiture, uncertain whether or not he was required to leave this entertainment and attend on Conyngham. A nod from Conyngham summoned him to his side but now as ever he halted between six inches and a foot behind him.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Giles, ‘that Prideau’s boy, Myles, has got trouble. When he was Captain of Royal Tennis at Cambridge a couple of years back his second string was a girl called Theodosia Salinger – very remarkable, a female getting a Royal Tennis Blue–’

  ‘–Half Blue at Cambridge,’ said Milo, ‘full Blue at Oxford–’

  ‘–Theodosia Salinger,’ said Glastonbury, ignoring the interruption, ‘who later married Canteloupe. Now, Myles met Theodosia’s twin sister, Carmilla, and fell for her like Humpty Dumpty. But Carmilla, who likes short, sharp romps, it seems, thought Myles was much too stodgy, and wouldn’t touch him. So Myles began to pine away. For two years he went on pining until it was getting rather hairy; at which stage I was deputed, as an old friend of Canteloupe, to try
to persuade Canteloupe to persuade his wife, Theodosia, to persuade her sister, Carmilla, at least to give the lad a chance. Prideau expects a full report on how all this is going on. Why are you listening?’ said Giles to Milo.

  ‘So that I can ask him later if I wish to remember exactly what you’ve said,’ said Raisley Conyngham. ‘My memory is fair, but Milo has almost total recall. And what have you to report to Prideau?’

  ‘That Carmilla has reluctantly agreed to invite Myles to Lancaster College, where she’s a don, and to try to be decent to him…at least to the extent of explaining kindly why he don’t fill her bill.’

  ‘The trouble with Myles,’ said Conyngham, ‘is that he is nine times as boring as his father, without any of his father’s amiability.’

  ‘Right. But I must still go to Prideau and give him what comfort I can. The real reason,’ said Giles Glastonbury, ‘that I asked to stop off for lunch was to see how Lamprey’s getting on. After all, I was responsible for recommending him to you.’

  ‘He is coarse but capable.’

  ‘Delighted to hear it. When he was one of my subalterns,’ said Giles, ‘in Germany in the early 1950s, he was about the worst officer in the world…though funny with it. But I think he has a hand with horses.’

  ‘And with sluts like that Jenny. She’d eat out of his navel – and wouldn’t need asking twice.’

  ‘But I wonder,’ said Glastonbury, ‘whether he will be all right with your little protégé, Marius Stern?’

  Milo Hedley coughed discreetly.

  ‘Milo?’ said Conyngham.

  ‘Captain Lamprey will be just right for Marius,’ said Milo. ‘Marius the Egyptian, the pampered godling – he needs to be made to jump about…to obey orders on the spot instead of first addressing his fastidious intelligence to finding fault with them…and Captain Lamprey and Gat-Toothed Jenny will certainly see to that.’

  He pointed to the group round Lover Pie, who stood majestic and courteous while Jenny clawed the air above the head of the kneeling Marius and said, ‘You’ll get it fucking right, if we stay here till the moon goes down.’

  ‘And that’s as true as turds come out of arseholes,’ fluted Jack Lamprey in his immaculate Cambridge/Bloomsbury.

  Fielding Gray walked across the golf course, toward the dunes and the sea.

  He had now finished the first part of The Grand Grinder and sent it off, under recorded cover, to Salinger, Stern & Detterling. There his work would be examined by Ashley Dexterside, who would send copies on to Carmilla and Theodosia, his self-appointed but most acceptable editors.

  Fielding felt confident that he had done the thing well, that it was suitable in style and tone, that the ironies had been neatly implied rather than clumsily underscored, that the provincial splendours and miseries had been deployed in all their bravura and pettiness. Only two considerations now troubled him. First, he knew that he was going to be very hard put to it to produce a second part, of length enough to make the book an economic publication, without padding or lying. Secondly, he knew that in one respect at least, he had already been false: while giving full play to his genuine admiration for his grandfather, the grand grinder, and his quasi-heroic achievements, he had concealed the fact that he remembered the old man to have been, during his last days, a self-opinionated and philistine bully…who for his part made no secret of his distaste and contempt for his ‘soppy and soapy’ little grandson.

  But as he passed the second of the rotting gun emplacements, he suddenly saw how these two embarrassments could be made to cancel each other out. A large section of Part Two could surely be devoted to confessing that he had hitherto concealed his grandfather’s nastier qualities and the mutual mistrust and misliking which had existed, in Fielding’s boyhood and just before the old man’s death, between them. He could turn the glittering medal and show the green and tarnished copper on its reverse. By so doing he could legitimately fill many pages and also spring a salutary and entertaining surprise on the reader, who would have come by now to regard his grandfather as improbably and rather tediously immune from the human frailties which attached to everyone else in the book. When it was demonstrated that the grand grinder, like all the rest, had his faults and these less amiable than those of many, a proper balance would have been struck in the matter. He would also, thought Fielding, confess, by way of sales-making self-immolation, that his grandfather’s detestation of himself (‘a snobby, snoopy, funky boy’) had been well merited.

  And of course the old man would have found his judgement amply confirmed by later events in Fielding’s career. The trail of seduction and shabby evasion which had led to his dismissal from school; the relish of gay trappings and the shirking of plain duties which had marked his military progress; the perverse and treacherous ingenuity which had made him such name as he enjoyed as an ‘unwholesome’ novelist – all this the grand grinder had, in general terms, foreseen and, by licit extrapolation from his stated views, predicted. How the old Yeoman would have sneered at the dainty uniforms of Hamilton’s Horse, at the pretty little dress spurs worn at dinner by those that would run a mile sooner than mount a horse…though this, thought Fielding, going off at a tangent, was not quite fair to his old regiment. Some of his companions in Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons had been expert horsemen… Giles Glastonbury for one and Jack Lamprey, worthless officer as he was, for another.

  Jack Lamprey, thought Fielding, as he walked by the sullen waters of the Wash: Jack Lamprey, who had now, after nearly thirty years, suddenly cropped up again, not an hour since, in amazing connection with Raisley Conyngham.

  It had happened like this. Dissatisfied and irritated by Maisie’s account of the Ullacote expedition, brooding uneasily about the purpose and purport of this alleged ‘reading party’ and the roles which might be thrust on Marius and Tessa in the course of it, Fielding had eventually decided to open the matter up and by way of so doing had telephoned, first of all, to Ptolemaeos Tunne, once a very keen follower of horse racing and still knowledgeable in the field – certainly knowledgeable enough, thought Fielding, to be informative about an owner as unusual in type and occupation (a schoolmaster, for Christ’s sake) as Raisley Conyngham.

  Ptolemaeos had sounded rather truculent on the telephone, deposing that Piero was tiresomely insisting that they should take a holiday in the North as they both badly needed a change of air. ‘What rubbish,’ Ptoly Tunne had said: ‘all this fuss and bother to get a few hundred yards higher up.’ All the same, he seemed pleased, beneath the surface of complaint, that someone was taking the trouble to think of his health and well being, and after a while he consented to spill what beans he had in stock about Conyngham. Raisley Conyngham, he had told Fielding, was old blood (as blood went nowadays) and new money (his father married a chainstore heiress, both now dead). He had for some years been an owner of horses which raced with pretty fair success but only in National Hunt events. He currently owned some nine or ten horses, which were trained for him on his estate at Ullacote in Somerset by a private trainer, a certain Captain Jack Lamprey, formerly of the 49th Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons, commonly known as Hamilton’s Horse, under either title now defunct. My Regiment, Fielding had reminded Ptoly: Jack Lamprey was once a subaltern in my Squadron (the 10th) and was the most disgraceful officer in the entire Army List. Be that as it might, Ptolemaeos had pursued, it should be noted that to be allowed a permit as a private trainer was a rare privilege, accorded by the Jockey Club only to persons strongly recommended who would be training for men, like Conyngham, of affluence and fair repute. Was it all above board? Fielding enquired. What else should it be? responded Ptoly. The very facts that Lamprey held a permit, and that Conyngham was allowed a private trainer at all, guaranteed that.

  But who on earth could have recommended Jack Lamprey to the Jockey Club? Or to Conyngham? Fielding wanted to know. Jack Lamprey, when he had known him, was an idle, septic-mouthed, sottish, fornicating – Very likely, said Ptoly, but there had since been ample time for amendment
of Lamprey’s life. He was said to have an almost uncanny knack with horses, and in any case he had a well placed ally in the Jockey Club, a man of almost royal connections, called Giles Glastonbury – also once of Hamilton’s Horse. Giles Glastonbury, whinnied Fielding: a duellist, nearly a murderer. That was in another country, said Ptolemaeos blandly, almost in another world. In this country, in this year of grace 1981, Giles Glastonbury called cousins with the Queen (more or less) and was liked and esteemed in the Jockey Club – few members of which were likely to think the less of him because he had once carved a juicy slice with his sabre out of an ex-Nazi braggart called von Augsburg. And that, my dear Fielding, must really be that for today, as Piero wants me to make a list of the things I need packed for Scotland and Cumbria.

  Jack Lamprey, Fielding thought as Ptoly rang off: dear God. Still hankering for evidence (as evidence there must surely be) of disrepute or impropriety, Fielding had next telephoned to Giles Glastonbury at his Club, the Melbourne. Both Giles and he had been in the same Sabre Squadron as (the then) Lieutenant Lamprey in Germany in 1952; but whereas Fielding had been out of touch with him since leaving the Regiment in 1958, Giles, he thought, had clearly kept in touch with Jack and had, on Ptoly Tunne’s showing, absolutely advanced him. This being so, explanation was called for. Lamprey had been an atrocious young man: louche, insolent, perpetually insolvent, and in every way indecorous. Some account was needed to explain why and how such a horrible goose should have grown into so seemly a swan as to find favour extraordinary with the Jockey Club. So, braving the possibility that Giles might be playing backgammon and be strongly resentful of the interruption, Fielding had rung the Melbourne – only to be told that Major Glastonbury was not there and was believed to be out of London.

  Trail dead. No, not altogether. What was wrong with telephoning Lamprey himself? Why not? Fielding had been both Second-in-Command of the 10th Sabre Squadron while Lamprey was in it and then, after Giles Glastonbury’s temporary disgrace and eclipse, over that matter of the duel, Officer Commanding. Lamprey had ‘served’ under him for several years and had been much indulged by him: the episode of the cheque, for example, and the NAAFI Manageress – had it not been for Fielding’s tactful intervention, in exceedingly tricky circumstances, that would almost certainly have led to Jack’s being drummed out – a procedure on which Hamilton’s Horse still insisted (although the rest of the Army had long since praetermitted it) down to the tiniest and most humiliating minutiae, such as the snipping off with the Regimental Barber’s scissors, by the latest arrived recruit, of the cashiered officer’s fly-buttons. The memory of his rescue from this appalling rite, thought Fielding, must surely incline Lamprey to candour if it was asked of him; so why should Fielding not get hold of him now and request a little straight information in exchange for assistance rendered (albeit rendered nearly thirty years before)?