The Midden

Chapter 11

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.

'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.