Before The Cock Crow (First Born of Egypt)

by Simon Raven

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Tessa. ‘Oh Milo, please kiss me.’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  He kissed her gently on the forehead.

  ‘Raisley Conyngham,’ Milo continued, ‘says that there used to be a prostitute in London – retired now – who sometimes gave the same kind of exhibition. Mandie, or Marilyn, she was called, I forget the exact name just now: Marie or Myra, something rather like that; she was famous in her day. Raisley went to one of her performances. Very dull work, he told me, except for one moment when Muriel or Maida or whatever opened up her legs and put the goose’s head and neck into her–’

  ‘Milo, please stop. Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘As part of your education. And to see how you react. Quite admirably. No silly prudishness, but politely urged objection when the thing grows tasteless.’ He stood up. ‘Come along,’ he said, ‘we have a long drive back to Ullacote. If you were over seventeen, we could stick up an L-plate and give you driving lessons. I should like to see those delicious legs of yours straddling the controls. I’m glad you’re wearing a dress today. I get dreadfully fed up with those boring, impregnable jeans.’

  ‘Milo. Say something nice to me.’

  ‘Very well. If you will say something nice back.’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘Sweet Tessa, adorable Tessa… I love your elbows, little one, and I love your knees. It is my wish to kiss the inside of your elbow…’ He held her arm, which was bare to the upper part, and kissed the fold of it. ‘…And also to kiss you one day, not now, just above the top of your stocking, behind the knee…and between the sinews. May I?’

  ‘Yes. If you will only believe what I am going to say to you. I love you, Milo; love you.’

  ‘Good. Then from now on you will do whatever I ask you? It will not be to give me your maidenhead, I promise you that: unless, that is, you wish to. But curious things may be going to happen to us all before very long, and I must be assured of your absolute obedience above all else.’

  ‘You always were.’

  ‘Even if it meant…harming Marius?’

  ‘Surely you cannot wish to harm Marius?’

  ‘No. But he may be required to take risks. If so, you must not dissuade him.’

  ‘I shan’t…if he is willing.’

  ‘He may not know he is taking risks. But you, being female, might see the risks where he does not. If so, you must not tell him.’

  ‘Oh Milo. I love Marius.’

  ‘Youjust said you loved me.’

  ‘I do, I do. But Marius is like my brother, something I never had…just as his sister Rosie is like my sister. I cannot see him take risks without warning him.’

  ‘You decide,’ said Milo coldly. For the first time that afternoon he ceased to smile.

  Looking at Milo’s blank face, Tessa felt the ice creep into her soul. ‘Oh Milo, Milo… Very well. If you will do as you say, and kiss me behind the knee…not now, but later… I shall obey you in this too. But Milo, you must smile again.’

  ‘Of course. And you must not displease me ever again as you have just done. You will find that it is very easy to extinguish the smile on someone’s face but sometimes very hard to rekindle it. In this case, there is no trouble.’ Milo resumed his Archaic smile. ‘But later on there might be,’ he said, ‘if you should disobey me at some difficult moment.’

  "'τοαις δε αποψηφισμενοις ηδεως αν διαλεχδειην,"' read Marius to Raisley Conyngham: ‘“But with those who voted for my acquittal I should like to converse about what has happened, while the authorities are busy and before I go to the place where I must die.”’

  ‘Very good,’ said Conyngham.

  They both looked down from Dunkery Beacon across the moors.

  ‘When I was doing my National Service,’ said Raisley Conyngham, ‘we spent two days and three nights on a manoeuvre on these moors. Although it was midsummer, I have never been so cold and utterly miserable in all my life. I acquitted myself so badly that I very nearly didn’t get my commission. In fact, I should not have done, had not Giles Glastonbury done some fiddle on my behalf through a friend in the War Office. I knew Prideau at Cambridge, you see, and through him I’d met his cousin Giles, and I suppose Giles thought I might be useful one day and so was worth a substantial favour. And so I was. He has claimed several favours in return, from time to time, one of them being my appointment of Jack Lamprey as my Private Trainer. Do you get on well with Jack?’

  ‘I think so, sir. I like him, and I do my best to please him.’

  ‘Good. Everyone seems to enjoy trying to please Jack. Rather odd, if one thinks about it carefully, but undeniably the case.’

  ‘A question, sir, if I may?’

  ‘You may.’

  ‘From what you say, you must have been at Cambridge, where you met Mr Prideau Glastonbury, before you did your National Service. Rather unusual, sir?’

  ‘But not unheard of. I’d hoped that if I went to Cambridge straight from school – as one was allowed to do if one’s college could take one – something might turn up or be got up to get me out of National Service later on. No such luck. Not even Giles could manage that – he could arrange promotion but not exemption. The only way I could have avoided it would have been by switching to science or medicine, which was unthinkable. I am for the Classics, as you know. Which brings us back to the Apology. And so, Marius the Egyptian – as Milo would say – you have read the passage that follows the one you have just translated?’

  “‘αλλΑ μοι, ω ανδρες, παραμεινατε,”’ said Marius from memory: ‘“But wait with me, my friends; for nothing prevents our talking together while there is still time.”’

  ‘Good. Very good. You learnt it because you liked it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what follows that?’

  ‘Socrates says that the state of death will either be an eternal sleep, and therefore painless, or the habitation of another world, where he will meet Orpheus and Hesiod and Homer, so that either way he has nothing to fear.’

  ‘And your verdict on this prediction?’

  ‘I do not think,’ said Marius, ‘that even the company of Orpheus and Homer could make an eternity of consciousness tolerable.’

  ‘So for Socrates’ sake…and our own…we must hope that after death there is only sleep.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Marius carefully, ‘one’s sojourn in the afterworld were limited strictly to a span during which it was still of interest. But I do not think that this is proposed here.’

  ‘It isn’t. Plato posits either absolute and immediate death or an immortal soul. Elsewhere he writes of the possibilities of transmigration or metempsychosis; but not here. Socrates would have been stuck, on the showing of the Apology, talking to Homer and Co. forever. Just imagine, that dismal Hesiod drizzling on and on at one ad infinitum. There is a question in your eyes, boy.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Why have we started the Apology at the end?’

  ‘Because it is the best part, and we shall not have time for any more. Just as well: all that boring squabble about whether Socrates did or did not corrupt the youth of Athens. It didn’t matter then and it certainly doesn’t now. There were and are in the world weak people, who will sooner or later be corrupted however carefully they are guarded, and strong people who will not – unless, of course, they want to be. That is all there is to be said in the matter. We can take the Apology as read.’

  ‘As I understand you, sir, we shall not in any case have time to read it. Why not?’

  ‘Other work, boy. Time is going on and we must step up your hours in the stables. Only two days to Regis Priory.’

  ‘All I have to do is travel with the horse in its box, and lead it round the paddock.’

  ‘Yes. That is all you have to do…at Regis Priory. But you must be practised in holding the horse as the jockey mounts…and in leading the horse on to the course, where you must go with Lover Pie, if the day is cold, and re
move his blanket at the last moment. None of this is quite as easy as it sounds. Jimmy Pitts, the jockey, is a sharp-tempered fellow – gets it from his father, Johnny Pitts, who was always too keen to go for the whip. If you annoy Jimmy by leading Lover Pie too quick or too slow on to the course, or by removing the blanket clumsily, you’ll certainly regret it.’

  ‘Perhaps, sir, I shall regret even more not having read the first seven eighths of Plato’s Apology.’

  ‘“I could be round with you were the occasion different,”’ said Conyngham; ‘but just for once I shall let that pass. Attachment to your book and to your author is no light matter. But there will be time for Plato, Marius, I promise you that. Sour winter will be the time for Plato. Now it is spring, beloved of sweet lovers and merry fellows and, not least, of gentlemen adventurers.’

  Marius’ skin tingled.

  ‘I understand you, sir,’ he said: ‘we have great matter afoot.’

  ‘Aye, lad.’

  ‘And what part in it for Tessa?’

  ‘Teresa’s part is to hate horses. For Regis Priory she will stay home and play at chess or the sabre with Milo. Later on…her part will be, as I say, to hate horses – and to be hated by them.’

  ‘Time for a romp,’ said Jeremy on the telephone to Carmilla: ‘a farewell romp. I’m off.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘All over the place. First stop India, for a bit more devotion to the soil, and then Polynesia, Oz, New Zealand…’

  ‘What on earth do you want with Oz?’

  ‘I find Australians irresistibly comic. What about this romp? Can I come to Lancaster now?’

  ‘No. It isn’t suitable.’

  ‘Then you come here.’

  ‘That isn’t suitable either. The thing is, Jeremy, I have a guest here who has been taken very ill. He wished himself on me in the first place, but here he is and ill he is, and I must concern myself with him.’

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘He’s in a deep coma, and no one knows what’s caused it. He should be in hospital, but one of the Fellows is so fascinated by the case that he’s begged the Provost to keep him here.’

  ‘There’ll be a nasty row if he dies on you.’

  ‘I wish to hell they’d got him out. But this is a place of science and learning, and I must say his symptoms are rather fascinating…even from the layman’s point of view. So here he stays. And you know as well as I do, Jeremy, that whatever happens there won’t be a nasty row. Inside Lancaster, the Provost is Coroner, Judge and Lord of Appeal. If Myles Glastonbury dies in an embarrassing way, the Provost will sign the death certificate and the body will be put away under the Chapel, and nobody from outside will ever be allowed to stick his nose in or ask one single question.’

  ‘All right. Here’s this chap, whom you never wanted anyway, having a deep coma. So why can’t we have a romp?’

  ‘It would be tasteless. Anyway, Fielding Gray’s in the College. Wouldn’t that embarrass you?’

  ‘I think I’d better ring again in a few days. But time is running out, remember: I want to be off. That piece of Alfie Schroeder’s will be appearing at any minute, and after that there’s nothing to hold me. Tell me, did you actually do it with that chap in the coma?’

  ‘I told you: I never even wanted him here.’

  ‘He might have bored your knickers off, all the same. It has happened.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t.’

  ‘But you were close to him? At meals and so on?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Carmilla said.

  ‘Well then: is this coma thing catching? I mean, a fellow can’t be too careful these days with all these frightful diseases going round. So what has he got?’

  ‘I told you. Nobody knows, but an expert on blood conditions is fascinated by whatever it may turn out to be. Fielding says that Myles said, just before he went into his coma, that some enemy of his has touched his hair and infected him that way.’

  ‘Which has to be ballocks.’

  ‘Fielding says it happened somewhere in Balzac.’

  ‘And what does this blood expert say to that?’

  ‘He says that some types of poison, e.g. arsenic, could, just could, act through the follicles in the hair or lesions in the scalp.’

  ‘Well, well, well, well, well. I’d better have a few hand jobs and be in touch with you later.’

  ‘Jeremy…don’t sail away to India without seeing me.’

  ‘I should think not, old girl. I couldn’t bear to go, not without hearing you make that noise of yours one more time. Do you remember how you bellowed in Bishop Alcocke’s Chantry in Ely Cathedral? Like the Minotaur, it was. I’ve always wondered why nobody rumbled us…’

  ‘“In this age of remote control and bureaucratic centralisation,”’ Alfie Schroeder had written in GLOBE-2000, the weekly colour supplement of The Daily Globe, ‘“it is refreshing to find a proprietor who strives to share the physical labours and mental attitudes of his employees. THE HON JEREMY MORRISON, second son but in practice sole heir of Lord Luffham of Whereham, has undertaken to lead the working life of a farm apprentice until, as he puts it, ‘the ancient lore and vibrancy of the soil enters into my bones, until the primeval bond between man and the land from which he lives (like the bond between nurseling and mother) has bound me forever and inescapably to my Norfolk fields. In this way I shall achieve oneness, not only with the Good Earth but with the Good Men who till and tend it by my side.”’

  ‘And so on,’ said Len, who had been reading all this aloud to Provost Llewyllyn and Fielding Gray. ‘There is rather a fetching picture of Jeremy milking a cow, and another of him dining alone in his mansion and being waited on by a manservant.’

  Len passed the magazine to Fielding, who looked glumly at a picture of Jeremy, seated beneath a portrait of his grandfather, at the head of a table as long as a cricket pitch. About halfway down the table, under a portrait of Peter Morrison’s – Lord Luffham’s – dead wife, Helen, stood the Chamberlain, holding a pitcher of (presumably) Adam’s Ale and looking with adoration towards Jeremy. This picture carried the caption ‘Lord of the Manor Dreaming Dreams’ while another, of Jeremy behind a plough and a pair of huge shire horses, one of whom was copiously defecating, was entitled ‘Son of the Soil Faces Facts’. Fielding was too depressed to look for the picture of Jeremy a-milking and see what they had called that.

  ‘Carmilla tells me,’ said Len, ‘that before very long he’s taking off for the Far East. His excuse for leaving his holy soil in Norfolk will be that he wants to establish a similar rapport with the paddy-fields and peasants of the Orient. You see what his game is? To become an internationally recognised dispenser of sanctimonious drivel about “rituals of nature”, that kind of thing. He’s started here with what he calls the “lore and vibrancy of the soil”. No doubt he will soon extend his range to include fisheries, forests and wildlife sanctuaries, public parks, commons and beaches; from which it is an easy jump to recreation and health, and so to medicine, welfare and paediatrics, until he’ll end up delivering worldwide sermons on every aspect of existence from the Big Bang to the Great Pox. In time,’ orated Len, prancing about in front of the Provost, ‘we might even have to make him an Honorary Fellow.’

  ‘Thank God I shall be dead before that,’ Tom Llewyllyn said.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Fielding. ‘Popular success these days is a very swift process.’

  ‘So, mercifully, is popular neglect. You have to have durability to be made an Honorary Fellow here. And in any case,’ said Tom peevishly, ‘I don’t see that this grubby little write-up constitutes a foundation for popular success.’

  ‘Let us change the metaphor,’ said Len, who was being deliberately annoying, ‘and say that a seed has been sown. It could grow to heaven like the Beanstalk, overnight. Have we a set of rooms free in case Jeremy wishes to come into residence? Yes. The single storey E. M. Forster Set, which stands on one side of the Provost’s Garden, joining the Lodging to the West Cloister
. Like Forster himself, the E. M. Forster Set has got both wet and dry rot, but restoration will be completed in about three months – by which time Jeremy’s meteoric career as Gnomic Spokesman will doubtless have reached its apex. In a mood at once of pride and humility, the College Council will invite its charismatic alumnus to accept a Life Fellowship and life tenure of the Forster Set.’

  ‘Did you say,’ said Tom, ‘that the Forster Set is being restored?’

  ‘It has to be.’

  ‘Which means dismantling its walls?’

  ‘I imagine so, what with the state it’s got into.’

  ‘And its roof?’

  ‘They already have, Provost. Half of it had to come right off. You can see it, if you crane your neck, from the Withdrawing Room window.’

  ‘The dryads,’ said Tom.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’ll have a way through to the Provost’s Garden. They cannot walk through buildings inhabited by men, but they can go through empty and roofless ones.’

  ‘Then you must make them welcome,’ said Fielding, trying to humour the obsession.

  ‘I fear,’ said Tom Llewyllyn, ‘lest they prove unamenable guests.’

  ‘It’s a job for Tiresiana,’ said Don Simone Fontanelli to Nicos and the Greco, as the three of them examined Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in the Diocesan Museum in Cortona. ‘Very sickly, all this pink and gold,’ he said, and turned to inspect Signorelli’s Pieta.

  Piero had followed up his own suggestion that he seek out the former major-domo in his place of retirement at Palermo, and arrange for Nicos and the Greco to meet him. Fontanelli had been easy to trace and quite willing, once he fully grasped who Piero was and had been reminded of their old association in Venice, to be of specialised assistance. When roughly apprised of what was in the wind, he stated quite categorically that he would meet Nicos and the Greco at Cortona (no, nowhere else would do), and that he was to be paid full expenses and a fee of one million lire, half as soon as they all met, and half on production of the goods. To this, Ptolemaeos had assented, and the first meeting had now been effected at the agreed rendezvous, in front of the Angelico Madonna in the Cortonese Museum.