The Midden (14 page)

'If you've got any sense at all, you'll keep out of my way in the morning,' she told the
Major, and left him to hobble shoeless up the steps to the kitchen door. Five minutes later she
was upstairs, asleep.

Major MacPhee sat on the edge of his bed feeling sorry for himself. His head ached, the
stitches over his eye hurt, so did his lips, and one of his teeth was loose. His hands were
bandaged and worst of all he had lost an expensive pair of shoes. Not that they were both lost,
but a pair of shoes had to be a pair and he'd lost one. He was proud of his shoes in a way he
would never be proud of himself when he was sober. They were possibly the most important things
he possessed to mask his wretchedness. Especially the brogues. He'd bought them at Trickers in
Jermyn Street and had polished them assiduously every evening as he sat on the edge of the bed
before, as he put it, turning in. And now he had lost them and Miss Midden was furious with him
too. She'd been furious with him before but this time he knew her anger to be different. It was
less coarsely abusive and far colder than he had ever known it to be.

The Major was a connoisseur of anger. People had been angry with him all his life,
contemptuously angry and scoldingly angry, but nobody had ever hated him. There was nothing to
him to hate. He was simply silly and weak and had never had the courage to do anything. Things
were done to him and always had been. 'You bloody little wet,' his father had shouted at him time
and time again, 'can't you stand on your own two feet?' And his mother hadn't been much better.
Kinder, but perpetually scolding him and making him wash his face and hands or, more often, doing
it for him. He had been brought up having things done to him and for him. He had tried to escape
from his own dependence over and over again, but each time he had been defeated by fear and his
own passivity. And with each defeat he had come to hate himself more. In the end he had run away
to sea. He hadn't even done that properly. He had drifted away to sea as an assistant cook on an
oiler that made short runs between Rotterdam and small ports along the coast. The job hadn't
lasted but it had taught him how to get work on ships and he had joined a cruise liner as a cabin
steward. It was there that he had observed how the rich and elderly passengers behaved. It was on
his third voyage that a retired army officer whose cabin he attended took a fancy to him. He was
a Major, too, and had saved up for the cruise in the faint hope of finding a rich widow whom he
wouldn't find too repulsive to marry. Instead he found the young Willy MacPhee and did things to
him. It wasn't the first time. It had happened on ships and in ports. He was used to it, used to
being beaten up and forced down onto his knees. But the Major was different. He was the genuine
article, even if he was poor, and he knew how to dress. MacPhee could tell that by the labels
sewn inside his jacket pockets and by the cloth. But most of all by his shoes. They too had come
from Trickers and the leather gleamed with polish. He had five pairs, three brown ones, all
brogues, and the one thing he wouldn't allow the steward MacPhee to do for him was polish them.
'I always do it first thing before turning in. Had to when I joined the army and I've made a
habit of it ever since. So don't let me ever catch you touching them. Understand that,
steward?'

'Yes sir,' MacPhee said in an attempt to adopt a military bearing himself. 'Understood,
sir.'

In fact he did touch them and, when the real Major died of a heart attack in Barbados brought
on by the unexpected vigour, and unwonted sexual expertise of a very rich woman from Sunningdale,
he inherited them. Or stole them. He stole several suits, too, and hid them in his locker. It was
at that moment MacPhee decided on his future career. He would join the army and have his own
suits made for him and buy brogues at Trickers. When the ship docked in Southampton MacPhee went
ashore for the last time and looked around for a recruiting office. The only one he found was for
Royal Marines. The Sergeant had turned him down. 'You can go for a medical, lad, if you want it.
But I shouldn't bother. You're not up to standard. Not RM 1 anyway. Try the Army,' he had said
with kindly contempt.

It was the first of many rejections. In the end he got a job as a manservant for a military
family in Aldershot and spent three years studying the way officers talked and comported
themselves. He picked up the lingo and heard stories he would be able to repeat as if they were
his own. The need to become an officer, if only in his own mind, became an obsession with him.
Outwardly subservient, he was inwardly rehearsing the confident manner and practising the
assumptions of the military. On his evenings off he would go to the pubs and learn army lore from
the NCOs and ordinary privates whose disrespect for most officers taught him even more. He learnt
in particular to steer clear of the other ranks who would most likely see through his pretence
and ask awkward questions. Officers didn't do that. They took you at face value and it was only
necessary for a Captain or a 2nd Lieutenant to say sheepishly that he was in the Catering Corps
for there to be no further questions asked. The Royal Army Service Corps was another useful foil.
The danger lay among the better regiments, whose officers received deference. MacPhee had
sufficient wiliness to know that he must never rank himself too highly, Major was quite
sufficient, and that he must live among elderly people and gentlefolk who knew better than to be
too inquisitive.

He observed all this in the Colonel's house, where occasionally some old Indian Army hand
would call Mrs Longstead 'Memsahib' and junior officers were not encouraged to express their
opinions too readily. And all the time the real Willy MacPhee seethed with envy and only very
occasionally went on a bender, in every sense of the word, in London or Portsmouth. But that was
a long time ago. Since then he had drifted about the country from one barracks town to another
acquiring the patina of the man he would have liked to be. In the end he had found and been
accepted by Miss Midden. The position suited him perfectly. The Middenhall was far from any large
town and the Middens from overseas were too old or self-centred, and, like him, too dependent on
Miss Midden to show more than superficial curiosity about the 'Major's' past. And until this
weekend Miss Midden herself had accepted him without making her understanding of his pretence too
obvious.

But now it was different and he was afraid. With painful care he undressed and put on his
pyjamas and got into his narrow bed and wondered what to do to please her. He also wondered,
though only slightly, where he had picked up the smell of dogshit. Presently he went to sleep.
Eight inches below him the cause of the smell slept on. The Valium and the whisky still worked
with the residual Toad to keep Timothy Bright unconscious. Only towards dawn did he stir slightly
and briefly snore. To Major MacPhee, woken by the sound, those snores were an indication that he
was far from well. It wasn't simply his bodily injuries that alarmed him. His hearing had
evidently been affected too. He reassured himself by thinking he must have imagined what he had
just heard, or even that his own snoring had woken him. He turned gingerly over and went back to
sleep.

It was seven when he woke again, this time because his bladder was full. He got up and limped
through to his little bathroom. When he came back and sat heavily down on the bed he thought for
a moment there was something wrong with the mattress. It wasn't a very thick one but it had never
had a hard lump in it before. The next second he was absolutely sure his brain had, as Miss
Midden suggested, been damaged. There was a groan and the lump underneath him (it was Timothy
Bright's shoulder) moved. Major MacPhee lay still, except for his racing heart, and listened in
terror for another sound but all was quiet in the room. Unless...unless he could hear someone
breathing. He could. There was someone under the bed, someone who had snored and groaned.
Transfixed by fear he tried to think. He succeeded, though only in the most primitive form.
Childish panic held him in its grip. For ten minutes he lay still listening to that dreadful
breathing and tried to summon up the courage to get up and turn the light on and look under the
bed. It was almost impossible but in the end he managed it. Very, very carefully he pulled the
curtains he wasn't going to turn the light on then bent down and peered into the shadow under the
bed.

The next moment he was upright and stumbling towards the door. The face he had just seen had
fulfilled his worst fears. It was covered with blood and was ashen. There was a murdered man
under his bed. Or one who hadn't yet been murdered but was dying. And the man was bollock-naked.
The Major fled into the dining-room and was about to go through it to the hall and call Miss
Midden when he was stopped in his tracks by the thought of her reaction. She'd told him to keep
well clear of her in the morning and she had meant it. But he had a dying man in his room, or a
naked man who'd been murdered. Major MacPhee's wits failed him. All his pretence dropped away
from him and left him as childish and helpless as he had ever been in all his life. All he could
see was that this was the ultimate in having things done to him. His own bruised and stitched
face shrank in on itself, and he too was ashen. He had no resources to fall back on. Leaning
against the wall he trembled uncontrollably. He trembled for twenty minutes before recovering
sufficiently to sit down. Even then he couldn't think at all clearly. His sense of guilt swept up
from its hiding-place in his mind, swept up and over him. He had never overcome it and now it
flooded his whole being, intensifying his terror. Finally he got to his feet and went to the
sideboard where there was a decanter of whisky. He had to have a drink. He had to. Major MacPhee
sat at the dining-room table and drank.

He was still there when Miss Midden came down at nine o'clock. The decanter was empty, the
Major had been sick on the floor, and now lay in a drunken stupor in his own vomit.

'You filthy bastard, you disgusting little phoney,' she shouted. The Major didn't hear her.
'Well, this is the bloody end for you. I'll have you out of the house before nightfall. By God, I
will.' Then she turned and went through to the kitchen in a blazing temper and made a pot of very
strong tea.

The Major didn't hear her. He was lost to a world that had too many horrors in it. But under
the bed Timothy Bright heard those words and shivered. He was cold, his mouth tasted vile, his
head hurt, and visions of a skinned pig flickered in his mind. In front of him a pair of bedroom
slippers loomed menacingly and it took him some time to realize there were no feet in them and no
legs above. Even so, there was something terribly threatening about them. They didn't belong to
him. He didn't wear cheap felt bedroom slippers. His were leather and wool. Slowly moving his
eyes away from the things he saw the legs of a wooden chair, the bottom of a door, a
skirting-board, the lower quarter of a wardrobe with a mirror in it, pink floral wallpaper, and a
brilliant shaft of sunlight that ran down it and a short way across the floor. None of these
things made any sense to him. He had never seen them before and the angle at which he now saw
them made them even more unrecognizable and meaningless. They intimated nothing to him. He did
not know them or understand them. They were the adjunct to his sick horror, which was internal.
But the words Miss Midden hurled at the supine MacPhee in the dining-room conveyed some meaning
to him. He understood 'You filthy bastard, you disgusting little phoney' and 'This is the bloody
end for you. I'll have you out of the house before nightfall. By God, I will.' Timothy Bright
knew that very well. He lay under the bed and tried to come to terms with his condition.

It took him some time, another hour during which heavy footsteps in the passage and the
slamming of a door echoed in his head. But finally, after some more muttered threats in the next
room Miss Midden had looked furiously down at the Major and had been tempted to kick him into
wakefulness he heard the front door slam and footsteps crunching on gravel.

Miss Midden, sick with disgust and revulsion that she should ever have taken the creature
MacPhee under her wing, had left the house and, passing through the narrow gate in the garden
wall, was striding across the open fell towards Carryclogs House. Sheep rose and scattered at her
coming. Miss Midden hardly noticed them. She too was absorbed in a private world of anger and
frustration. She was almost sorry the Major was still alive. She had seen him breathing. She was
also totally unable to understand what had come over the dreadful little man. He'd behaved badly
often enough on his so-called 'benders' in Glasgow, but in the house, her house, he had always
remained sober and obsequiously well-mannered. And now this had happened. Her only conclusion was
that he must be mad, mad and beyond help. Not that it was going to do him any good. She had
enough problems with the people down at the Middenhall without adding his alcoholic mania to
them. As soon as he was able to move she would have him out of the house, lock, stock and barrel,
even if she had to do it at the point of her shotgun. Certainly he would be gone before
nightfall.

As she came in sight of Carryclogs House, Miss Midden veered away. She had no intention of
revealing her feelings or the state of affairs to Phoebe Turnbird. Her own sentimentality was
burden enough and she wasn't going to allow Phoebe the pleasure of sympathizing with her. And
gloating. At twelve o'clock Miss Midden sat down on an outcrop of rock overlooking the reservoir
and ate the sandwiches she had brought with her. Then she lay back in the grass and looked up at
the cloudless sky. At least it was clean and blue. Presently she dozed off, exhausted by her late
night and her feelings.