The Midden (13 page)

All this had pleased Black Midden immensely. Other people felt differently. Having planned a
celebration party to mark the completion of the statues he was thwarted when the entire outdoor
staff had gone on strike and the cook and the indoor women had left without notice. For a year
Black Midden had held out against local opposition to the revolting statues by importing staff
from outside the county at enormous cost. Finally, ostracized by every one of his own relatives
and by the rest of the county, he had retired to Lausanne only to die of monkey-gland poisoning
in an attempt to restore his virility in 1931. By then the statues had been dismantled by a
blasting squad from the quarries at Long Stretchon in the course of which a number of windows in
the Middenhall had also been blown out, largely, it was thought, thanks to the attempt of his
nephew, Herbert Midden, to bribe the demolition men into blowing up the entire house. Black
Midden's revenge was revealed only with the reading of his will, drawn up by the most experienced
lawyers in London. He left the house, demesne, lands, and estate, together with his entire
fortune, to the youngest Midden over the age of twenty-one in each succeeding generation with the
proviso that the Middenhall be kept in unaltered condition and a room be provided for any Midden
who wished to have one.

At the time these terms had not seemed too burdensome. No sane Midden would want to live in
the awful house and the income from the Midden Trust was considerable. By the time Miss Midden
inherited the place things had changed.

At first the change had been almost imperceptible, so much so that some Middens Lawrence
Midden the bank manager in Tween was one maintained that with their disreputable uncle's death
things had gone back to normal.

'Of course, there is that indestructible palazzo,' Lawrence admitted, giving vent to his
feelings about foreigners, art, and extravagance at the same time, 'but the Trust provides for
its upkeep and I am told that there are ample funds.'

'In Liechtenstein,' said Herbert bitterly. 'And who are the Trustees? Do we know anything
about them? No, we don't. Not one damned thing except their address, and it wouldn't surprise me
to learn that it is a post box. Or poste restante, Hell.'

It was true. Black Midden's funds had been so discreetly dispersed into numbered and hidden
accounts all over the world that, even if the Middens had tried to find out what their total was
and had got past the barrier of secrecy erected in Liechtenstein, they would never have found
out. But the quarterly payments arrived regularly and for some years it had been possible to
maintain the gardens and the artificial lake with its little island in their former condition.
The Middenhall itself didn't need maintaining. It was too gracelessly solid for that. All it
seemed to require was sweeping and polishing and dusting, and this was done by the indoor
staff.

But change, however imperceptible, did come, as Frederick Midden, the pathologist, pointed out
with morbid glee. 'The process of extinction is marked by a number of fascinating bodily
conditions. First we have the healthy person whose physiological state we call normal. Then we
have the onset of disease, which may take many forms. From that we move on to the dying patient,
who may linger for a considerable time. Parts of the body remain unaffected while vital organs
degenerate, sometimes to the point where pre-mortal putrefaction begins to take place as in gas
gangrene. Now, consequent upon this most interesting process the patient is said to die. In fact,
paradoxically, he may become far more alive than at any time during his previous existence.
Flies, maggots '

'For God's sake, shut up,' Herbert shouted. 'Can't you see what you've done to Aunt
Mildred?'

Frederick Midden turned his bleak eyes on his aunt and agreed that she didn't look at all
well. 'Why isn't she eating her soup?' he enquired. 'It's very good soup and in her condition,
and out of delicacy for her feelings, I won't give my opinion '

'Don't,' Herbert ordered. 'Just shut up.'

But Frederick insisted on making his point. 'All I have been trying to tell you is that
changes take place in a variety of unforeseen ways.'

He was proved right. None of the Middens had foreseen the coming of war in 1939 and the
changes it brought about. The Middenhall was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for the
duration. Herbert Midden was killed in an air raid on Tween and succeeded by Miss Midden's
father, Bernard, as heir to the estate. Since he was only eighteen when he was captured at
Singapore by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war as a POW, it was left to Lawrence, now in
his eighties, to do what he could to see that the house was damaged as much as possible by the
various units that occupied it. The unspoken prayer in everyone's minds was that the Germans
would do their bit for the architectural heritage of England by dropping their largest bombs on
the place. But it was not to be. The Middenhall remained inviolate. In the grounds Nissen huts
proliferated and a rifle range was constructed in the walled garden while round the estate itself
a barbed-wire fence was erected and the lodge at the top of the drive became a guard house. What
went on inside the camp no one knew. It was said that agents and saboteurs were trained there
before being dropped into Occupied Europe; that much of the planning for the invasion on D-Day
took place in the billiard room; that somewhere in the grounds a deep shelter had been built to
house resistance fighters in the event of a successful German occupation of Britain. The only two
certain facts were that the Canadians had used the house as a hospital and that at the end of the
war German generals and senior officers were held there and interrogated in the hope that the
mental disorientation produced by the architectural insanity of the Middenhall would persuade
them to cooperate.

There were other consequences of the war. Black Midden's hidden funds were, according to the
Trustees in Liechtenstein, badly hit by the fall of Hong Kong and, worse still, his investment in
certain German industries had been wiped quite literally off the face of the earth by
thousand-bomber raids by Lancasters. To cap this series of financial catastrophes a number of
gold bars the old man had placed for safe keeping in a bank in Madrid had disappeared, along with
the directors of the bank. The news, together with the suspicion that the Trustees were lying,
confirmed Lawrence Midden in his loathing for anything foreign, and particularly foreign bankers.
'It could never happen in England,' he murmured on his deathbed two weeks later.

But change continued. As Britain withdrew from the Empire, Black Midden's fortune declined and
with it the quarterly cheques. At the same time people from all over Africa and Asia who claimed
to be Middens also claimed their right to accommodation and full board at the Middenhall. They
brought with them their colonial prejudices and a demanding arrogance that was commensurate with
their poverty.

The house became a cauldron of discontent and heated argument. On summer evenings the verandah
echoed to shouts of 'Boy, bring me another pink gin,' or 'We used to get a damned sight better
service from the kaffirs in Kampala. Nobody in this bloody country does a stroke of work.' Which,
since the 'boy' in question happened to be a young woman from Twixt who was helping her mother in
the kitchen where she was the cook, did nothing to enhance the quality of the lunches and dinners
and may well have accounted for the discovery of a slug in the coq-au-vin one particularly
vehement evening. Miss Midden's father, a mild man who had spent most of his life since the war
working in an office in Stagstead nursing various digestive complaints caused by his stint on the
Burma railway, found the situation intolerable. He was constantly having to placate the cook and
the other staff or having to find replacements for them. At night he would lie awake and wonder
if it wouldn't be better to up sticks with his family and disappear to somewhere peaceful like
Belfast. Only his sense of duty restrained him. That and the thought that the damned colonials,
as he called them, were bound to die before too long either naturally or, as seemed only too
likely, as a result of mass poisoning by a justifiably demented cook. All the same he had moved
into the old farmhouse and had tried to forget the Middenhall by being away for a few hours in
the evening and at night, sitting by the old iron range in the kitchen and reading his beloved
Pepys. But the house had worn him down and in the end, a broken man, his ill-health forced him to
retire to a rented apartment overlooking the sea in Scarborough. Miss Midden remained behind to
take over 'that hell-hole'.

She had done so readily enough. She was made of sterner stuff than her mild father and she
resented the way he had been treated by the very people he had been supposed to be defending in
the war. 'Those damned colonials,' those Middens who had scuttled from the Far East and India,
from Kenya and Rhodesia as soon as their comfort was threatened and who had fought no wars, were
going to learn to mend their manners. Or leave the Middenhall and make way for more deserving
cases. Within months of becoming what they jokingly and disparagingly called 'The Mistress of the
Middenhall' she had mastered them. Or broken their spirit. Not that they had much to break, these
gin-sodden creatures who had lorded it over native peoples whom they called savages and whom they
had done nothing to educate or civilize. She did it simply and with malice aforethought, a great
deal of forethought, by choosing Edgar Cunningham Midden, or E.C. as he liked to be called, as
her target. He it was who, having spent a lifetime bullying and beating his way to the top of
some obscure province of Portuguese East Africa where he had a vast commercial empire, had once
threatened to bastinado a black student from Hull University who had made the mistake of taking a
holiday job at the Middenhall and had spilt a bowl of soup on E.C.'s lap while serving at dinner.
Miss Midden had not wasted words on the old brute. She had simply and deliberately broken the tap
on the central heating radiator in his room during a very cold spell, had refused him the use of
an electric fire and, to compound his discomfort, had used her knowledge of the intricate system
of plumbing in the Middenhall to cut off the hot water in his bathroom. E.C.'s complaints had
been met with the retort that he wasn't in Africa now. And when he demanded another room
immediately 'and don't waste time about it, have my stuff moved by the servants' before stumping
off downstairs to a late breakfast, Miss Midden had complied with his request.

Edgar Cunningham Midden came back from his morning constitutional to find he had been
allocated a very small room above the kitchen which had previously been occupied by the man who
in earlier years had attended to the central-heating boiler which needed stoking during the
night. There was no bathroom and the view from the window was an unedifying one of the back yard
and the dustbins. E.C. had exploded at the prospect not only from the window but of walking down
a long corridor to a bathroom and had demanded his old room back. Miss Midden said she had
allotted it to Mrs Devizes and that she was already moving in. 'She didn't like her room so I've
given her yours,' she said. 'If you want it back you should ask her for it.'

It was the very last thing E.C. was going to do. Mrs Devizes, a Midden by marriage, was a
woman he detested and whom he had openly referred to as 'that half-caste'. He had suggested
instead moving into her old room only to be told that it was being redecorated. A week later,
during which he had been kept awake by the noise coming from the kitchen directly below him Major
MacPhee had been sent down to spend the nights there and to drop several large pots every quarter
of an hour the old bully left the Middenhall in a battered taxi. Miss Midden stood with folded
arms on the verandah and saw him off. Then she had turned on the other guests and had asked if
anyone else wanted to leave because, if they did, now was the time to do it. 'I have no intention
of allowing the staff to be treated impolitely,' she said, slapping her breeches with the riding
crop. There had been no misunderstanding her meaning. The guest Middens had behaved with great
civility to the cook and the cleaning women after that and had confined their quarrels to
themselves. There had been some further weeding out to be done but in the end Miss Midden was
satisfied.

Now, driving back to the farm, she was in a dangerous mood. Her plans for the weekend had been
thwarted by her own pathetic sentimentality. That was the way she saw it. She had taken pity on
the wretched Major from the very first day she met him at the bus station in Tween where he had
arrived in answer to an advertisement she had put in The Lady for a handyman. Standing there in
his little polished shoes and regimental tie and with an old raincoat over one arm he was so
obviously neither handy nor entirely a man that Miss Midden's first impulse was to tell him to
forget it. Instead she picked up one of his old suitcases, hoisted it into the back of the
Humber, and told him to get in. It was an impulse she had never been able to explain to herself.
The Major had been rejected so often that his anticipation was almost palpable. In other
circumstances Miss Midden would have followed her common sense but the bus station at Tween was
too desolate a place for common sense. Besides, she liked surprising people and the Major needed
a few pleasant surprises in his life. He was also easy to bully and Miss Midden had recognized
his need for that too.

'You'll just have to do,' she thought to herself as they drove away that first afternoon,
though what someone like the Major could do was an unknown quantity. Make a hash of everything he
attempted, probably. And ruin a weekend for her five years later.

'One of these days, one of these days,' she said out loud to wake him up as they drove up to
the back yard of the old farm. It was an expression of hope and increasingly of intention. One of
these days she would seize some sudden opportunity and break out of the round of relatives and
housekeeping and managing other people's lives and find...Not happiness. She wasn't fool enough
to chase that will-o'-the-wisp, just as she'd never supposed for a moment that marriage and a
family was an answer. She'd lived too long with family to think that. Families were where most
murders took place. Besides, Miss Midden had few illusions about herself. She was not a beautiful
woman. She was too stout and muscular to be called even attractive. Except to a certain type of
man. One of the nastier thoughts that occasionally occurred to her when the miasma of Major
MacPhee's sexual fantasies seeped into the atmosphere was that she might play some unspeakable
role in them. No, her hope and intention was that one day she would regain the sense of adventure
she had known as a child playing by herself among the fireweed and rusting machinery in the
abandoned quarry on Folly Down Fell. She had known ecstatic moments of possibility there and the
place held magic for her still. But now as she got out of the old Humber her feelings were
anything but ecstatic.