The Midden (17 page)

It remained so through the midday and into the afternoon. It was only then that Major MacPhee
rose from his vomit and on all fours crawled out into the hall. The silence suited him too. It
seemed to indicate that Miss Midden had gone down to the Middenhall and that he could use the
upstairs bathroom and not go through his room past the body under the bed to clean himself up.
Never, except by military convention, a very clean man, he felt the need to wash at least his
face and neck before getting dressed...He had reached the bathroom and had turned the tap on
before it dawned on him that his only clothes were in his bedroom and to get them he would have
to go in there. He held the edge of the basin and sensibly didn't look at his face in the mirror
but bowed his head over the warm water and dipped his face into it very gently several times. The
stitches above his eye stung. He washed his hands and somehow his neck with soap. He emptied the
basin and dipped his face into the water again and very carefully used a flannel to clean
it.

All this took time and had to be done slowly and deliberately. His physical state demanded it.
He felt awful, more awful than he could ever remember feeling in his life, even after a
particularly frightening experience with a sadistic sailor from Latvia in Rotterdam who had
threatened to kill him with a knife and had cut him, very slowly, right across the chest. But it
was his mental state that was worse. He had to get rid of the body before Miss Midden found it
and called the police. He had to clear up the mess in the dining-room. And she might come back at
any moment. He took a clean towel from the cupboard and dried himself and took it downstairs with
him, holding onto the banisters as he went. But when he came to the bedroom door his terror
returned and it was only the thought of Miss Midden and the police that compelled him to open it
and peer in.

What he saw held him rigid. His clothes were on the floor beside the overturned chair and
there was blood on them. There was more blood on the duvet and the pillow was bright with the
stuff. The Major whimpered and looked frantically round the room. Finally he crept in and made
his way to the chest of drawers for a shirt, all the time keeping his eye on the door of his
little bathroom. The man was evidently in there. Somehow he got the shirt on and had opened his
wardrobe for a clean pair of trousers and a jacket when he heard a noise in the bathroom. It was
a strange and horrible sound, a sobbing moan and a groan. The Major grabbed the clothes he
needed, took a pair of shoes from the rack, and hurried into the dining-room to finish dressing.
The situation was almost worse now than it had been when he thought the young man was dead. He
might just have got rid of a dead body, taken it out and hidden it somewhere before deciding what
next to do. With a live man that was impossible. To take his thoughts off the subject for a
moment he went out to the kitchen in his socks, fetched some water and a rag from the sink,
cleared up the vomit on the floor, and put the empty decanter back into the sideboard. He could
always fill it with whisky again. Miss Midden seldom drank the stuff and perhaps she wouldn't
miss it for the time being. He had just finished and was back in the kitchen when he heard
footsteps in the yard.

Miss Midden had returned.

Miss Midden had woken from her snooze under the clear blue sky and had got to her feet with a
refreshed determination. She wasn't going to go on living like this. She wasn't going to have her
weekends spoilt by a wretched sponger like MacPhee, for that's what he was, no more than a
sponger on her hospitality and good nature. She had had enough of him. But her feelings went
deeper than that. She had had enough of looking after the Middenhall and the spongers down there,
for that was really what they were too, arrogant, self-centred, spoilt spongers who had always
had servants to do things for them and who, if she hadn't been the sort of person she was, would
have driven her into the role of a servant too. MacPhee (she was no longer prepared to use his
phoney rank he was MacPhee and that was probably a false name too) had had his uses with them. He
made up a foursome at bridge, he listened to their repeated stories about Africa and the good
life they had enjoyed there and he was happy to sympathize with their views about the way things
had deteriorated everywhere. Miss Midden wasn't. 'The good old days' their good old days had been
other people's bad old days with long hours and miserable wages and the brutal assumption that
the lower classes, black or white, were there to be despised and set apart. And they grumbled. Oh
God, how those people grumbled. They grumbled about everything, particularly the National Health
Service to which they had contributed not one penny during their spoilt, distant lives. Old Mr
Lionel Midden had been furious when he had to wait to have a hip replacement and had come back
from the Tween General Hospital complaining about the bad food and the fact that the nurses had
refused to call him 'Sir'. And all he had ever been was a so-called recruiting officer for some
mining company in Zambia, which he still insisted on calling Northern Rhodesia. Mrs Consuelo
McKoy, who had lived for thirty-five years in California until her husband died and she found he
had left her nothing at all in his will and had in fact spent his last few years gambling his
fortune away, deliberately, she said, to spite her, was always saying how much better things were
done in the United States. 'People are so hospitable and friendly there. Over here there is no
friendliness at all' Miss Midden particularly resented that 'over here'. It suggested that Mrs
McKoy was an American herself, whereas she had been born in London where her father had had a
grocer's shop in Hendon. She had married Corporal McKoy of the US Airforce during the War and had
lorded it over the family on the occasional trip to Europe. Miss Midden could remember her
driving up to the Midden in an absurdly large Lincoln Continental Bob McKoy had borrowed from a
business associate (he had gone into electrical engineering at the end of the war) in London. Now
she demanded to be driven in the old Humber staff car when she wanted to do a little shopping in
Stagstead and insisted on sitting in the back while Miss Midden drove.

It was the same with all of them. Almost all. Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who as long ago as 1956
had insisted on keeping her maiden name when she married, was different. She helped with the
washing-up and vacuumed her own room and generally made herself useful about the place. Arthur
Midden, who had been a dentist in Hastings and who suffered bouts of depression when he did
bizarre charcoal drawings of gaping mouths as a form of therapy, actually paid for his room and
board.

'I don't like to inflict myself on you, my dear,' he said when he first came to the
Middenhall, 'but it's peaceful up here and I need company since Annie died. You don't make many
friends in dentistry and Hastings has deteriorated with so many young people injecting themselves
there. I never liked giving injections and the sight of hypodermics still unsettles me.' No, they
weren't all spongers or complainers, but most of them were. Besides, Miss Midden had never liked
the Middenhall even as a child. It was dauntingly ugly and she had shared her father's distaste
for it. She had only agreed to take over to allow him to go into a retirement home. The house and
its inmates had broken him. Miss Midden had given him a few years in which to sit and read in his
own room in Scarborough and nurse his ailments. Even so she resented the treatment he had
suffered at the hands of the so-called family.

Now, stepping out across the rough grass and avoiding the wet places where the sedge grass
grew, she knew the time had come to get out herself. She would see her cousin, Lennox, who had
taken over as the family solicitor from his father, Uncle Leonard, and tell him she was no longer
prepared to take responsibility for the place. He would have to find someone else. She would keep
the farmhouse, possibly letting out to summer visitors to earn some money, but she wouldn't live
there. She would go away and find work of some sort. She had a small amount of money put away,
not enough to live on but enough to allow her time to make a different life for herself. With
this sense of resolution, the decision made, she walked into the yard and steeled herself to give
MacPhee his marching orders. But as she entered the kitchen and saw him she knew that something
far worse than a hangover afflicted him. He stood staring at her with terrified eyes and he was
trembling all over. For a moment she thought he might be dying. She had never seen such palpable
terror in anyone before. The man had ceased to exist as a man or even an animal. He had become
something amorphous, almost liquefied by fear. For a few seconds his state kept her silent. Then
she said, 'What in God's name is the matter?'

MacPhee held on to the kitchen table and opened his mouth. His lips quivered, his mouth moved
jerkily, he gibbered.

Miss Midden pulled a chair out and pushed him down onto it. 'I said what's the matter,' she
said harshly. 'Answer me.'

The Major raised anguished eyes to her. 'It's in my room,' he gasped.

'What's in your room?' She was almost certain now that he had delirium tremens. 'Tell me
what's in your room?'

'A man. He's been murdered. There's blood everywhere. On my bed, on the duvet, on my
clothes.'

'Nonsense,' Miss Midden snapped. 'You've been having delusions, drinking all that whisky.'

The Major shook his head or it shook uncontrollably. It was impossible to tell which. 'It's
true, it's true. He was under my bed and his face was covered with blood. He was naked.'

'Bollocks. You've just poisoned yourself with alcohol. A naked man with blood all over his
face under your bed? Poppycock.'

'I swear it's true. He was there.'

'But he's not there now? Of course he isn't. Because he never was.'

'I swear '

But Miss Midden had had enough of his terror. 'Get up,' she ordered. 'Get up and show me.'

'No, I can't.'

'Get up, get off that chair. You're going to show me this man.'

The Major tried to rise and flopped back. Miss Midden seized him by the collar of his jacket
and dragged him to his feet. But he just shook and whimpered.

'You sicken me,' she said and let go. He slumped down into the chair. 'All right, I'll go
myself.'

She moved across the kitchen but the Major spoke. 'For God's sake be careful. I'm telling you
the truth. He's in the bathroom. He could be dangerous.'

Miss Midden looked back at him with utter contempt and went out into the passage. She entered
the dining-room and crossed to the door of the Major's bedroom and opened it. Then she stopped.
Blood. There was blood on the bed, a lot of blood. And on the clothes by the fallen chair. Miss
Midden felt her own fear and her own horror. But not for long. She stepped back across the
dining-room and went into the little office where she kept her twelve-bore. Whatever had happened
in the bedroom and whoever was in the bathroom, and for all she knew there was more than one
person there, was going to have to face a loaded shotgun. She put two cartridges into the breech
and closed the gun. Then she went back. As she entered the dining-room she saw the open window.
Alert now to the reality of the break-in, she noticed the mud on the floor under the window. She
crossed to the bedroom door and looked round carefully before stepping in, holding the shotgun
pointed at the bathroom door. Two yards away she stopped. 'All right,' she said in a loud and
surprisingly steady voice. 'Come out of there. Come out. I'm standing here with a twelve-bore so
open that door and come out slowly.'

Nothing happened. Miss Midden hesitated and listened intently. She heard nothing. She moved
back towards the dining-room and then hurried through to the kitchen. 'You come with me now,' she
told MacPhee, and this time he stood up. Some of her courage had communicated itself to him and
besides the sight of the shotgun was persuasive. He came across the room and she ushered him
through into the bedroom.

'What do you want me to do?' he asked with a low quivering voice.

Miss Midden indicated the bathroom door. 'Open it. And then stand aside,' she ordered.

'But...but...suppose...' he began.

'Don't suppose anything. Just open that bloody door and stand aside,' she said. 'And if anyone
is fool enough to try anything they are going to get two barrels.' She said this loudly. 'Now do
it.'

Major MacPhee went forward and turned the door handle and shoved. The door flew open and he
scuttled away into a corner of the bedroom and put his hands over his ears. Miss Midden had the
gun up to her shoulder and was moving cautiously towards the bathroom. It was very small and now
she saw the dirty feet protruding from the shower. She moved round to the side. Still keeping the
shotgun to her shoulder she peered in. On the plastic tray of the shower, with the curtain
crumpled beside him, was huddled a young man. His face was covered with dried blood, his chest
was bloody too and water dripping from the shower had made a patch of clear skin with a runnel
down past his navel. But he was alive. His eyes staring wildly at her from the mask of blood told
her that. Alive and frightened, almost as frightened as the Major. All the men seemed to be
frightened. But this one was wounded and his fear was understandable.

'Who are you?' she asked and lowered the gun. The question seemed to give the young man
comfort. There might even have been hope in his eyes now. 'I said who are you? What's your
name?'

'Timothy,' said Timothy Bright.

'Can you stand up? If you can't, just lie there and I'll call an ambulance.'

The fear returned to Timothy Bright's eyes but he got to his feet and stood naked in the
shower.

'Now come through here,' she said. 'Come through here and sit on the bed.'

Timothy Bright stepped out of the shower and did as he was told. In the light of the room Miss
Midden could see him more clearly. He was quite a young man and well-built. She leant the shotgun
against the corner of the Major's bookcase. She had no fear of the man who called himself
Timothy.