The Midden

Chapter 10

As she drove the old wartime Humber she had inherited from her father back to the farmhouse Miss Midden was in a filthy mood. She had been looking forward to a weekend on the Solway Firth, visiting gardens and walking. But her plans had been ruined by Major MacPhee. As usual. She should have had more sense than to allow him to go to Glasgow by himself. The city always did terrible things to the silly little man, both mentally and then physically. This time he and the city had excelled themselves.

'You're a perfectly filthy mess,' she had told him when she found him at the Casualty department of the hospital. 'I can't think why I put up with you.'

'I'm awfully sorry, dear, but you know me,' said the Major.

'Unfortunately. But not for much longer if you go on like this,' she had replied. "This is your last chance. I can't think what gets into you.'

In fact, of course she could. A large quantity of Scotch whisky. And as usual when he went to Glasgow the Major had drunk himself into a disgusting state of daring in more awful pubs than he could remember and had then chosen a particularly explosive bar filled with young Irishmen in which to announce in a very loud voice that what was needed to solve the problems of Ulster was to bring back the B Specials or better still the Black & Tans. The Irishmen's reaction to this appalling suggestion had been entirely predictable. In the battle that followed Major MacPhee had been thrown into the street through a frosted-glass window that had until then borne the inscription WINES & SPIRITS, only to be hurled back into the pub by an enormous Glaswegian who objected to his girlfriend being physically accosted by small men with ginger moustaches. After that the Major had discovered the real meaning of 'rough trade' as thirty-five drunk Irishmen fought over and around him for no very obvious reason. In the end he had been rescued by the police, who had mistaken him for an innocent bystander and had rushed him to hospital. By the time Miss Midden found him, there he had several stitches above his left black eye and all hope of continuing the weekend at the Balcarry Bay Hotel had vanished. No respectable hotel would have accepted the Major. His trousers were torn and he had lost the collar of his shirt and one shoe.

The doctor in Casualty had been entirely unsympathetic. She had been working all hours of the weekend and didn't take kindly to people like Major MacPhee. 'You're very lucky to be alive,' she told him. 'And the very next time you are brought in here like this I shall consider a psychological examination. There are too many alcoholic nutters like you on the streets of this city.'

Miss Midden agreed with her. 'He's really despicable,' she said, only to find that the doctor assumed she was the Major's wife.

'If you feel like that, why don't you divorce him?' she asked and, before Miss Midden could find words to express her outraged feelings, the doctor had gone off to tend to a youth who had been hit over the head with a broken bottle.

As they drove out of the city Miss Midden gave vent to her fury. 'You really are a truly horrible person,' she said, 'and mad. You've ruined my weekend by behaving like...like, well, like the sort of person you are.'

'I'm really sorry. I honestly am,' the Major whimpered. 'It's just that as soon as I find myself in a saloon bar, or better still a public one, I get this terrible urge.'

'We all get terrible urges,' said Miss Midden. 'I have one at the moment and I might very well act upon it if I didn't think you'd get some perverse pleasure out of it. You evidently have a death wish.'

'It isn't that,' said the Major through swollen lips. 'The urge comes on me all of a sudden. One moment I'm standing there with my foot on the rail and a small treble malt in my hand and some nice fellow beside me and then out of the blue I have this irrepressible urge to walk up to the biggest oaf I can see and tell him to shut his gob. Or something that will make him try to think. It's wonderful to see a really strong, powerful thug come to life. The look on his face of utter bewilderment, the growing gleam in his eyes, the way he bunches his fists and shifts his shoulders for the punch. I must have seen more really big men throw punches than half the professional boxers in the world.'

'And look what it's done for you. It's a wonder you haven't got brain damage. If you had a brain to damage.' For a while they drove on in silence, Miss Midden considering how strange it was that she had been left the Middenhall with its curious collection of inhabitants, and the Major nursing a separate grievance.

'You could always have left me behind at the Infirmary. I rather liked it there.'

'And have you come home with some foul disease? Certainly not. That hospital looked most insanitary.'

'That's only in Casualty. Casualty is always like that on a Saturday night. It's so busy.'

Presently, as they crossed the border, Major MacPhee fell asleep and Miss Midden drove on, still mulling over her curious circumstances. For one thing, in spite of his occasional outbreaks, she continued to put up with the miserable Major. He was useful about the place and shared the housework. He was also a quite good cook, though not as good as he claimed. Miss Midden did not disillusion him. The poor wretch needed all the pretence he could muster. And his bouts of drunken masochism in Glasgow were, she supposed, part of the camouflage he needed to cover his cowardice. He really was a most despicable creature. But, and in Miss Midden's eyes it was an important 'but', he polished his little brogues every day and took pains over his appearance to the point of wearing a waistcoat and sporting a fob watch. That it was a silver one, while the chain across his stomach was gold, touched her by its pathos. Yes, he was particular about his appearance, grooming his little moustache and surreptitiously dyeing his hair. Even his suits were as good as he could afford and to make them look as though they had been tailored for him; he had learnt to take them in at the waist.

From Miss Midden's point of view it was a useful affectation. The Major had to conform to the shape of his jackets, which meant that he ate very little. Even so he had developed a little paunch and recently he had begun to wear a dark blue double-breasted blazer on which he had sewn the brass buttons of a Highland regiment he had found in a junk shop in Stagstead. The regiment had been disbanded long before the Major could possibly have joined the army. Miss Midden knew this and had been tempted to ask him why he didn't buy himself a kilt as well, but she hadn't the heart to. There was no need to hurt his pride, he had so little of it. And in any case he had such miserably thin legs...No, it was better not to say anything. All the same there were times, and this was one of them, when she wished she was rid of him. She had illusions of her own to protect and his grubby fantasies, his little store of magazines which he kept locked in a briefcase, sometimes seemed to leak out into the atmosphere and fill her with a sad disgust.

On the other hand for all his faults Major MacPhee was not a Midden, and with so many family members, or people who claimed to be relatives, living down at the Middenhall his inability to demand anything of her was a distinct advantage. As she put it to Phoebe Turnbird over at Carryclogs House, 'Of course he's a very silly little man and, if he was ever in the Army he was probably a corporal in the Catering Corps, but at least I can throw him out whenever I want to which is more than I can say for the people at the Hall. I'm lumbered with them. I sometimes dream the place has burnt down and I can get away. Then I wake up and it's still there in all its awfulness.'

'But it's a lovely house...in its way,' Phoebe said, but Miss Midden wasn't to be fooled or patronized. Carryclogs House was beautiful, the Middenhall wasn't.

'If you think it lovely...well, never mind,' Miss Midden had said and had stumped off across the fell, whacking her boots with the riding crop she always carried.

Now, driving back through the night following the narrow lanes she knew so well and disliked on this occasion so intensely, she cursed the Major and she cursed her role as mistress of the Middenhall. Most of all she cursed the Middenhall itself. Built at the beginning of the century by her great-grandfather, 'Black' Midden, to prove to the world that he had made a fortune out of cheap native labour and the wholesale use of business practices which, even by the lax standards of the day in Johannesburg, were considered more devious and underhand than was socially acceptable, the house ('pile' was the more appropriate term) was proof that he had no taste whatsoever. Or, to be more accurate, that he did have taste but of a sort that could only be described as appalling. To describe the Middenhall itself was well-nigh impossible. It combined the very worst eccentricities of every architectural style Black Midden could think of with a structural toughness that was formidable and seemingly indestructible. To that extent it accurately reflected the old man's character.

'I want it to be a monument to my success in life,' he told the first architect he employed, 'and I haven't got where I am today by being nice and namby-pamby. I've come up the hard way and I mean to leave a house that is as hard as I am.'

The architect, a man of some discernment, had his own ideas about how his client had 'come up' and supposed correctly that the lives of his employees must have been exceedingly hard. Accordingly he had presented a design that had all the charm of a concrete blockhouse (Black Midden had built a great many blockhouses for the British during the Boer War). The old man had rejected the design. 'I said a house, not a bloody prison,' he said. 'I want towers and turrets and stained-glass windows and a huge verandah on which I can sit and smoke my pipe. And where are the bathrooms?'

'Well, there's one here and another there '

'I want one for every bedroom. I'm not having people wandering about in dressing-gowns looking for the things. I don't care what other people have. I want something better. And different.'

The architect, who already knew that, went away and added towers and turrets and stained glass and a vast verandah and put bathrooms in for every bedroom. Even then Black Midden wasn't satisfied. 'Where's the pillars along the front like they have in Greece?' he demanded. 'And the gargoyles.'

'Pillars and gargoyles?' the architect said weakly. He had known he was dealing with a difficult client but this was too much. 'You want me to add pillars and gargoyles?'

'That's what I said and that's what I meant.'

'But they hardly go together. I mean...' protested the architect, a devotee of Charles Mackintosh.

'I know that. I'm not a damned fool,' said Black Midden stoutly. 'The pillars are for holding up the front of the house and the gargoyles are for spouting the rainwater off the gutters.'

'If you say so,' said the architect, who needed the money, but who was also beginning to wonder what sort of damage this appalling building was going to inflict on his reputation, 'but there is a slight problem with the verandah. I mean if you want pillars and a verandah '

'And I do,' Black Midden insisted. 'It's your business to solve problems. And don't put the pillars in front of the verandah. I want to sit there and enjoy the view. I don't want it spoilt by a whole lot of damned great pillars in front of me. Put them behind.'

The architect had gone away and had spent a fortnight desperately trying to find a way of meeting his dreadful client's requirements while at the same time teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the end he had produced a design that met with the old man's approval. The Middenhall had gargoyles and stained glass. Every bedroom had a bathroom, the columns were behind the vast verandah, and there were all the towers and turrets, balconies and loggias imaginable. Nothing matched, and everything was immensely strong and consequently quite out of proportion. Black Midden was delighted. The same couldn't be said for the rest of the Middens. The family had never had any social pretensions and had been quite content to be small farmers or shopkeepers or even very occasionally to enter the professions and become doctors or solicitors. They had liked to think of themselves as solid, respectable people who worked hard and went to Chapel on Sunday. Black Midden destroyed that comfortable reputation. His excesses were not confined to building a ghastly house. A succession of too well-endowed mistresses, some of whom couldn't by any stretch of the imagination be called white, had been brought to the Middenhall, always in open carriages so that their presence couldn't be ignored, and had disported their excessive charms on the lawns and, on the most memorable occasion, by swimming naked in the lake at a garden party which the Bishop of Twixt had most inadvisedly agreed to attend.

'Well, that stupid old bugger isn't going to forget me,' Black Midden had commented at the time, and had gone on to make absolutely sure that no one else who came to the Middenhall would ever forget him by lining the drive with a series of sculptures in the hardest Coadstone, each of which depicted some ostensibly mythical event with a verisimilitude that was revoltingly authentic except in size. At the top of the drive a twenty-foot Leda was all too obviously enjoying the attentions of a vast swan, while further down the Sabine women were getting theirs from some remarkably well-hung Roman soldiers.

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.