Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘Thea tells me that both Canteloupe and Ivan Blessington have been saying the same,’ Carmilla said.

  ‘Not that it matters much,’ said Len: ‘who cares about the groundlings anyway?’

  ‘We all used to,’ said Provost Llewyllyn, who for some time had been pursuing them from behind; ‘but I for one have found that their appeal diminishes with the years.’

  Len and Carmilla turned to look at him, then halted until he came up to them. They then secured him between them, one arm apiece, and carried him slowly onward.

  ‘I have had an idea,’ said the Provost, merrily vibrating his now unneeded stick a few inches above the grass, ‘which I am going to convey to you both. Shall we invite Fielding to come and write the second half of his book here in Lancaster? He could have one of the best guest suites – the Orde or the Bevis. It’s not good for him to be skulking alone at Broughton, and I have always doubted the desirability of that woman with whom he consorts in Buttock’s Hotel.’

  ‘“Desirable” she was and still is,’ said Len, ‘if rather plump. I think you mean her “suitability”, Provost.’

  ‘I suppose so. She has a vulgar mind. Yet I believe her to be honest,’ he muttered, casting his mind back to his one private encounter with Maisie Malcolm some eighteen years before.

  ‘If you think she’s unsuitable for Fielding,’ said Len, ‘why did you sell her your share of Buttock’s?’

  ‘Because at that time I wished to be rid of it,’ said Tom Llewyllyn, ‘and because the money was good. Now: shall we or shall we not invite Fielding to come and finish his book in the Bevis Guest Suite? I for one could relish a dose of him just now. I am in the mood to be refreshed by his pithy contempt of humanity. What do you say, Carmilla Salinger?’

  ‘By all means invite Fielding,’ said Carmilla, as the trio stopped to survey Holy Henry in the middle of his pool, ‘but don’t expect me to help you entertain him. Or not for the next few days. I have another cross to bear.’

  ‘Darling?’ said Len.

  ‘You remember Myles Glastonbury? Captain of Cambridge Royal Tennis the first year that Thea played?’

  ‘A dull young man and not even physically appetising. Hardly, indeed, wholesome.’

  ‘It appears he has a passion for me. Thea and Canteloupe have persuaded me to let him come here and state his case. I feel like Portia or Olivia, besieged by unwanted men.’

  ‘And quite as rich as either of them,’ remarked Tom.

  ‘Rather more so,’ supplemented Len.

  ‘Though let us not forget,’ said Tom, ‘that in both cases Mister Right emerged from the distasteful ruck – to share the lady’s great possessions.’

  ‘Myles Glastonbury,’ said Carmilla, ‘has his own possessions. His father, Prideau, owns an estate near Hereford and many racehorses. Thea went to stay there once.’

  ‘Why didn’t he get keen on Thea?’ asked Len. ‘She was the one he played tennis with.’

  ‘He is said to admire my mind,’ said Carmilla.

  ‘Well, if you need a respite from him, you know where to find your old friends,’ said Len. ‘In the old place,’ he said, gesturing over the lawn in the direction of the Provost’s Lodging. And then to Tom, ‘I’ll go and summon Fielding, Provost. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, dear?’

  ‘Please, Len,’ said the Provost, as if he no longer cared very much.

  My God, thought Carmilla, he’s crumbling daily. Just for a few minutes the prospect of inviting Fielding Gray gave him back something of his old vigour and gaiety; but already that stimulant has ceased to act.

  ‘Carmilla will bring you back to your Lodging when you’ve had enough of your walk,’ said Len. ‘The sooner I start telephoning Fielding, the better. He can be very slippery.’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s worth it, after all,’ said Provost Llewyllyn.

  ‘Nonsense, darling,’ said Carmilla: ‘you’ll be delighted when he gets here.’

  ‘Yes. No. No. Len, Len…’

  But Len was already out of earshot of the thin old voice. For a while the Provost continued to survey King Henry; then he began to cry.

  ‘What I have done,’ he snivelled, ‘is as bad as if I removed or desecrated this statue.’

  ‘What have you done?’ said Carmilla, who knew what was coming.

  ‘I have destroyed the elms of the Avenue.’

  ‘Nonsense. That was a decision of the College Council which had to be taken. Those trees were diseased.’

  ‘What of the tree-nymphs?’

  ‘Either they are dead and at peace,’ said Carmilla, who had had this conversation with Tom many times, ‘or they have gone elsewhere and are happy there. If they were not happy, they would have returned to haunt us.’

  ‘They never went. They stayed. And they did not die when the trees died. They lurk in the meadows and the wilderness and in the Fellows’ Garden, by the Judas Tree. I hear them calling in the night wind.’

  ‘No one else does.’

  ‘Then all but me are deaf. They say that they will soon find a way into my garden, the Provost’s Garden. This they cannot at present do, because my garden is enclosed on all sides by the Lodging and other buildings, and dryads cannot move through human habitations and under a roof. The moment they have a roof between them and the sky, they do indeed die. So they are waiting until somehow a path is made for them, and then they will enter my garden to take their vengeance.’

  Carmilla began to propel the Provost slowly back across the lawn and toward the path that led to his Lodging. As they went, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a young man come through the Gate Arch from King’s Parade and enter the Porter’s Lodge; a young man who was wearing a dark blue overcoat with velvet lapels and was carrying two hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of suitcase; a young man with a pasty complexion, close eyes, and a turned down mouth: Myles Glastonbury. He’ll go to my rooms, thought Carmilla, and just wait. However long I take getting Tom back to the Provost’s Lodging, however long I loiter there with Tom and Len, Myles Glastonbury will wait. It’s really too bad of Thea and Canteloupe to make me have him here, thought Carmilla. How long did I say he could stay? One night, I think: but they stood out for three: ‘Give him a fair run,’ they said. Well, if he’s got any decency in him he’ll very soon realise that he isn’t wanted and take himself off tomorrow.

  Maisie Malcolm had been looking forwards, now that Tessa was safely out of the way, to a companionable few weeks with Fielding Gray in Buttock’s Hotel. She was therefore very annoyed when he telephoned from Broughton Staithe to say that he was about to leave Broughton, not for London, but for Lancaster College.

  ‘Len rang up,’ he said.

  ‘Bugger Len.’

  ‘He says that the Provost is out of sorts and needs cheering up by his old friends.’

  ‘Bugger the Provost and bugger his old friends.’

  ‘Bugger me in fact?’

  ‘Yes. I hope your balls drop out and bounce and knock your silly head off.’

  Fielding laughed and hung up. Maisie meditated for a while on the perversity of men who were always strewn about the place when not wanted and would not come when they were. She decided to telephone Fielding and say would he, after all, come fairly soon to Buttock’s, as she rather – well – missed him. When she dialled Fielding’s number at Broughton there was no answer: Fielding had already gone.

  Jack Lamprey, having learnt a little more (if not much) about Raisley Conyngham’s scheme with Prideau Glastonbury, decided he would ring up Fielding Gray and tell it to him. The more people one had on one’s side the better, Jack reflected, and he was eager to demonstrate his good faith to Fielding in case Fielding should indeed keep his threat and go telling nasty tales of Jack’s army youth to the Jockey Club (not that Fielding would have much pull there, thought Jack, but he might raise a bit of a smell). What Jack had discovered, from overhearing (not by chance) a telephone conversation between Raisley Conyngham and Prideau Glastonbury, was that Tessa, or Teresa as Raisle
y called her, was to be kept absolutely out of the way on the occasion of Lover Pie’s race at Regis Priory, but was to figure, in some unexplained but clearly important role, in whatever was planned for the meeting at Bellhampton Park. Of her function there, Jack could gather only that it depended on the fact that she disliked horses and they disliked her.

  Jack tried Fielding’s Broughton number first and drew blank. Then he tried the London number he had been given, and got a voluble female who declared she was sick of the entire male sex, himself included, and that as for Fielding Gray she hoped his bowels would seize up and swell until they burst asunder, that she had no idea where he was to be found but hoped it was in Hades, and that was all about that.

  Some time later she realised how childish she had been and fretted to make amends; but she had not heeded when Jack spoke his name, and had not the slightest notion who, what or where he was. So she could not get back to Jack and though she could have been in touch quite easily with Fielding Gray at Lancaster, she decided not to be: first because she disliked the oily tone in which Len, the Provost’s Private Secretary, always addressed her on the telephone, and secondly because she had nothing of substance or certainty to tell Fielding except that she, Maisie, had behaved like a silly, malicious old cow.

  ‘Well, young ’un,’ said Gat-Toothed Jenny to Marius during the five minute break which she allowed him at mid-afternoon, ‘how do you like being a stable lad?’

  Marius looked at her huge, hanging breasts, then down to her vast hips, then up again to the kind, common, eager face.

  ‘Know me if you see me again, will you?’ said Jenny. ‘Answer the question, my pretty gentleman: how do you like your new work?’

  After a long pause Marius said:

  ‘It is dirty, disgusting and exhausting. Each day I long for it to be over. And yet there is nothing more satisfying in the whole world than learning from somebody who really understands and loves what he is doing. What she is doing, in this case. Will that do for an answer?’

  ‘Pretty well, me darlin’,’ said Gat-Toothed Jenny, ‘it’ll do pretty well.’

  So far from taking himself off, Myles Glastonbury showed every sign of staying, if he could manage it, forever. On his second night in Cambridge, after Carmilla had spent three hours explaining to him, or rather repeating to him, that she could not possibly respond to his infatuation (for such she insisted it must be), and after she had then bidden him Godspeed, excusing herself from seeing him off in the morning on grounds of work, he had primly pursed his face and solemnly informed her that he had a ‘head cold’ coming on and that he must therefore remain in the College at least until the day after next and possibly far longer.

  Before Carmilla could recover from this piece of information, he had wished her good-night and gone. A few minutes later she had got enough of her wind back to telephone Len in the Provost’s Lodging and seek his assistance in dislodging her importunate guest. Len said he would visit Glastonbury in his guest room early the next day and try what he could: would Carmilla mind if the fellow were quite simply expelled by order of the Provost? No, Carmilla would not: but let the use of courtesy, if possible, prevail.

  Later on, while discussing this problem with Fielding Gray (now happily installed in the Bevis Guest Suite and dining nightly with Len and Tom in the Provost’s Lodging – for it was seldom, these days, that Tom went to High Table), Len discovered that for many years, off rather than on, Fielding had known one Major Glastonbury, who appeared to be some kind of cousin to Myles’ father, Prideau. After Fielding had entertained Len to an account of the duel which Giles had fought with the Graf von Augsburg in the ruins of Hanover, Len proposed that Fielding should accompany him on his visit to Myles the next morning, as Fielding’s acquaintance with Myles’ family might help (though exactly how, neither Len nor Fielding was very clear) to keep Myles’ dismissal from the College precincts as quiet and friendly a matter as possible.

  However, when Len and Fielding arrived in the Adcock (Bed-sitting) Guest Room at nine-thirty the following day, they found that Myles Glastonbury was, beyond doubt, an ill man. He was still in pyjamas, sitting huddled in a blanket within millimetres of the electric fire; his face was chalk; his teeth rattled every few seconds; his ‘head cold’ had evidently turned, overnight, into a virulent dose of ’flu.

  Len immediately departed to summon the College Matron, as he said, and also, as he didn’t say, to warn Carmilla of this tedious development. Fielding was left to amuse Myles, in so far as the wretched youth was still amusable, and could think of no better way of doing so than repeating the story, which he had told Len the previous night, of how Myles’ Uncle (or would it be Cousin?) Giles had tricked the Graf von Augsburg into over-confidence, at a late stage of the duel in the ruins, and then nearly sliced his head off his shoulders.

  ‘They had to get your uncle out of the way instanter,’ Fielding said. ‘I’m not quite sure how it was done. Canteloupe – Detterling, as we called him then – happened to be passing through Germany at the time, and I remember he had a hand in it. He pulled rank as an MP and drilled us all in the same lie about how Giles’ foot had slipped and turned an intended feint into a lethal lunge. The end of it was that Giles was whisked away to Hong Kong and I became OC of the 10th Sabre Squadron, which Giles had been commanding. But that is another, and very long, story.’

  Fielding’s narrative had clearly engaged Myles’ interest and to some extent mended his condition, for the time at least.

  ‘Did you ever know,’ he asked, ‘what Cousin Giles did when they got him to Hong Kong?’

  ‘Not really. I saw very little of him between the duel back in fifty-two and last Christmas at Canteloupe’s. I don’t suppose I saw him a dozen times in the interval – and then only at regimental jamborees.’

  ‘Well,’ said Myles, in a deep and beautiful voice somewhat blurred by accretion of phlegm, ‘they employed him as he’d been employed in India in the 1940s. Unofficial executioner. He was good at that. Did you know that there’s a vicious streak in our family? A killer instinct?’

  ‘I know that during the war, Giles once shot one of his own men out of hand, because he was asleep on sentry duty while in action.’

  ‘That was unpremeditated: the venial if rather extreme reaction of an officer who must ensure absolute discipline in time of crisis…and has hundreds of men in his care. But Uncle, or Cousin, Giles was quite good at planning murders too – murders which came out as “accidental death” with watertight explanations. I think you know Peter Morrison, now Lord Luffham?’

  ‘Intimately…once.’

  ‘Did he never tell you how Uncle Giles masterminded the assassination of an annoying Muslim in 1946? The whole thing was perfectly arranged so that the killers – young officers in the Wessex Fusiliers, which was Morrison’s regiment – should appear to have been carrying out their difficult duties in irreproachable fashion, in the face of intolerable provocation and violent physical threat by the Muslim. Then there was an “accident” – the equivalent of Uncle Giles’ foot slipping during the duel – and there lay the Muslim, conveniently dead, and nobody to blame except himself. Champagne and medals all round.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘My father told me. Uncle Giles and my father are great confidantes. So are my father and I.’

  Myles began to look pale and unhappy again.

  ‘Look,’ he said to Fielding. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re the sort people talk about. There’s your novels, for a start, your wounds, your hotel…and your friends. Not the least of these is Canteloupe – whom, as you say, one used to call Detterling…and in whose house you last met Uncle Giles…at Christmas. But you’ve known him… Canteloupe…for a very long time before that–’

  ‘–Since 1945–’

  ‘–Which means you must have known his first wife, Baby, and her cousin, Marius…the son of your publisher, Gregory Stern, now dead. You’ve known all these people, Major Gray?’

  �
��Yes. I have.’

  ‘Well, look… I’m rather ill, I think. What I’m saying may not make much sense to you and it may be coming out in the wrong order, but I beg you to take notice.’

  ‘Speak as you find.’

  ‘My father, Prideau, has always envied Giles’ exploits, and wants to show he’s capable of the same sort of thing himself. But my father does not want to kill or to inflict the slightest harm on anybody: he just wants to show that he can plot as well as Giles…exercise the same sort of cunning with the chess pieces. All right so far?’

  ‘All right so far.’

  ‘Now, my father, Prideau, has a friend called Raisley Conyngham, a rich schoolie who runs horses. He was up here with my father, not at this college, it doesn’t matter which, they’ve known each other for many years. As for me, Major Gray, I’ve hated this Conyngham ever since I can remember. Smooth and smarmy. Dangerous with it. He used to pat my head when I was seven or eight, and I always used to shrivel up with horror because I felt that he would just as soon have been slitting my windpipe and was quite capable of it. He knew he inspired this loathing in me and used to pat my head more and more often in consequence… I was once beaten by my father for hacking at Conyngham’s shins. You understand so far?’

  ‘I understand so far.’

  ‘Now listen, sir. I think something rather funny’s happening to me and I want to tell someone what I know while I still seem sane. I do seem sane?’