The Midden

Chapter 20

By lunch time Timothy Bright's memory was considerably improved. And by supper he had remembered everything with remarkable clarity. The process had been accelerated by hunger and the smells reaching him, he supposed, from the kitchen. They were, first of all, the smell of bacon being fried with eggs. Later came the scent of roast lamb with rosemary and finally, around six, he could have sworn they were cooking a leg of pork.

In fact it was merely a chop but with some crackling added to give it the desired effect. And the smell, the delicious smell, did not emanate from the kitchen. In her stockinged feet Miss Midden had climbed the stairs to the old nursery with trays and had allowed the draught to waft the smells under the door for ten minutes. Then she had crept downstairs again, put on her shoes and had come clattering up to enquire if he wanted any lunch. Timothy Bright did. He was ravenous. But he still refused to tell her exactly who he was or why he had broken into her house and hidden himself under the Major's bed. He tried bluster.

'You've got no right to keep me locked up like this,' he'd said after the roast lamb treatment.

Miss Midden had denied keeping him locked up. 'You are free to leave the house this very minute. Nobody is stopping you.'

'But you won't give me my clothes. I can't just go out with nothing on.'

'I can't give you your clothes because I haven't got them. I've looked for them all over the house. And the garden. They aren't to be found. If you choose to break into other people's houses stark naked, that's your business. I'm not here to provide burglars with trousers and jackets.'

'Yes, I can see that,' said Timothy Bright, 'but you are starving me.'

'I'm doing nothing of the sort,' said Miss Midden. 'I don't clothe intruders and I don't feed people who break in and then refuse to tell me who exactly they are or what they are doing here.'

Timothy Bright said he didn't know what he was doing in her house either.

'Then you had better think about it very carefully because until you tell me the truth and nothing but the truth you are going to remain a very hungry young man.' She turned towards the door and then stopped. 'Of course, if you want me to call the police, I shall be only too happy to oblige you.'

But Timothy Bright's face was ashen. 'No, please don't do that,' he said. If she called the police, he'd be in even deeper trouble. The man with the razor, piggy-chops and the money he had stolen from Aunt Boskie...No, she mustn't call the police.

It was the smell of roast pork that broke him. Particularly the crackling. The skinned pig came to mind, and the fact that it wouldn't have any crackling even if it was roasted. And the Major had visited him twice to ask how he was doing and to say that Miss Midden was a decent person and not at all hard-hearted. 'You can trust her,' he said. 'She's ever so nice really but she's a Midden and one of the old sort. Do anything for people, she will, if they treat her properly. She just won't put up with being lied to and messed about.'

'She doesn't seem very kind-hearted to me,' Timothy Bright retorted.

'That's because you won't tell her the truth,' said the Major. 'She hates people lying to her or making excuses. You tell her the truth and you'll be all right. And another thing. She doesn't like the police so she won't hand you over provided you tell her everything.'

Timothy Bright wanted to know why she didn't like the police. 'Because she says they're corrupt and beat people up in the cells. She's got it in for the Chief Constable too. He's a horrible man. You must have read about the way they've framed people round here. It was on Panorama and in the papers. The Serious Crime Squad are as bent as a nine-pound note. Talk about brutal.'

On this cheerful note the Major had gone back to the kitchen to report. 'One more meal and he'll spill the beans,' he said. 'It's just that he doesn't trust you.'

'I don't trust myself,' said Miss Midden enigmatically, and busied herself with the piece of pork.

At six that night Timothy Bright broke down and wept. He said he'd tell them everything if only they'd promise not to tell anyone else.

Miss Midden wasn't giving any promises. 'If you've done something really horrible, anything violent like rape or murder,' she began, but Timothy Bright swore he hadn't done anything like that. It had to do with money and getting into debt and couldn't he have something to eat?

'That depends on what you tell me,' Miss Midden replied. 'If you so much as tell one lie, I'll spot it. Ask him.' She indicated the Major standing in the doorway behind her.

The Major nodded. Miss Midden had an uncanny nose for a lie, he said.

'And just because I have a personal quarrel with the Chief Constable, don't think I won't hand you over,' Miss Midden went on. 'If you lie to me, that is.'

Timothy Bright swore on his honour he wouldn't lie to her. Miss Midden had her doubts about that but she kept them to herself. 'All right, you can come down to the kitchen and tell us the story,' she said. 'In that towel. You're not getting any clothes until I know who and what I've got on my hands.'

At the kitchen table, with the smell of roast pork filling the room, Timothy Bright told his story. At the end Miss Midden was satisfied. She got out the pork and the crackling and the roast potatoes and the broad beans and carrots and the apple sauce and watched him eat while she considered what to do. At least he had good table manners, and what she had heard had the ring of truth about it. He was just the sort of conceited young fool who would get himself into trouble with drug dealers and gamblers. She had been particularly impressed by his admission that he had stolen Aunt Boskie's shares.

'Where does this aunt of yours live?' she asked.

'She's got a house in Knightsbridge but she's usually in a nursing home. I mean she's ninety-one or two.'

Miss Midden asked for her exact address. Timothy Bright looked alarmed. 'Why do you want to know that?' he asked. He was into the apple pie now. 'You're not going to get in touch with her, are you? I mean she'd kill me if she knew. She's a really fierce old woman.'

'I merely want to know if she exists, this aunt of yours,' Miss Midden said, and forced him to give her the address as well as that of his Uncle Fergus and his parents. Timothy Bright didn't understand, and he panicked when she went to the phone in the hall.

'Oh for goodness' sake, use what few brains you seem to possess,' she told him when he followed her into the hall clutching the towel round his waist. 'I'm only going to call Directory Enquiries. Go back and finish your supper.' But he stood there while she dialled and got confirmation that there was a Miss Bright who lived at the address he had given. And a Mr Fergus Bright at Drumstruthie.

'That seems satisfactory,' she said when she put the phone down. 'Now you can have some coffee.'

Half an hour later Timothy Bright went to the old nursery with a book Major MacPhee had lent him. It was by Alan Scholefied and was appropriately called Thief Taker.

Downstairs Miss Midden sat on over her own supper thinking hard. She had very little sympathy with Master Bright but at least he had had the good sense to tell her the truth. She would have to do something about it.

In his apartment overlooking Hyde Park Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre put the telephone down with a deep, ruminative sigh. It was not often he heard from his daughter and he was grateful for this infrequency. But now the damned woman had phoned to say she was coming round and had something terribly urgent to tell him. 'Why can't you tell me over the phone, my dear?' he had asked almost plaintively.

'Oh no, it's far too important for that, Daddy,' she had bleated. 'And anyway you wouldn't like it.'

Sir Edward shifted his bulk in the small chair and didn't suppose he would. He had never liked anything about his daughter. For one thing she reminded him too clearly of his wife and besides she was the only girl he had ever known who had progressed (sic) from the puppy-fat of adolescence to the several spare tyres of middle-age without a modicum of lissom grace in between. As for her mind, if it could be called that, it too had remained as vacuous as several expensive co-educational establishments and a Swiss finishing school could make it. To her undoting father, Vy Carteret Purbrett Gilmott-Gwyre at twenty-three had had all the physical and mental attractions of a lead-polluted black pudding. He had been absolutely delighted when Arnold Gonders, then a mere Superintendent, asked for her hand in marriage. As had been said at the time, her father had not so much given her away at the wedding as thrown her. And now, to judge by the inane whimpering over the phone, she might well have got herself into really serious trouble. Sir Edward had no desire to get her out of it.

To prepare himself for her visit he had two very large brandies and hid the gin bottle. He was damned if he was going to top her up. Lack of alcohol would make her leave all the sooner. He had Elisha Beconn coming to dinner and he intended to have his daughter out of the flat long before that learned professor arrived. In the event he was shocked to find her completely sober and obviously genuinely disturbed.

'Now what's the matter?' he said with the total lack of sympathy that characterized all his emotional contacts with the women in his family.

Lady Valence, his wife, had once remarked that life with Sir Edward could only be compared with being smoked as a ham. 'Not that I mind his smoking,' she said, 'it is the remorseless misogyny of the brute that has turned me into the wizened creature you see before you.' It was an unfair comparison. The unutterable boredom his wife's conversation engendered and the crassness of his daughter had left Sir Edward a dedicated believer in the Women's Movement as a means of securing his own privacy.

'It is the great advantage of the liberated and educated woman that she wants to have nothing to do with me,' he had said, and had become an advocate of universal lesbianism to the point of female conscription into the army for the same reason.

Now, faced with his distraught and sober daughter, he could only sigh and wish that the next half hour should pass quickly.

'I don't know how to tell you, Daddy,' Vy said, sinking into the baby talk she misguidedly thought he enjoyed.

'Need you bother yourself?' her father asked. 'If you don't feel '

'You see it's Arnold, Daddy,' she went on. 'He's become impossible.'

'Become?' said Sir Edward, who had always found his son-in-law quite unbearable.

'He's begun to plot against me, Daddy, he really has.'

'Plot? What the hell for?'

'He wants to silence me.'

'Really? Enterprising chap, your husband. I tried for years with your mother and it didn't do any bloody good at all.'

Lady Vy's face sagged still further. 'Why are you always so horrid to me, Daddy?' she whimpered.

'Because you come to see me, dear, that's why,' said Sir Edward. 'Now if you stayed away I couldn't be, could I?'

'But you don't even hear what I have to say,' she went on.

'I try not to, but some of it sticks. What part were you thinking of?'

'About Arnold plotting against me. You see, he wants to stop me talking to the newspapers.'

Sir Edward peered over his cheeks at her. 'Very sensible of him, I'd have thought,' he said. 'I agree with him. You shouldn't go anywhere near the newspapers. What are you complaining about, dear?'

Lady Vy looked wildly round the book-lined room and fastened on the heavy velvet curtains. 'He put a naked man into my bed the other day and then nearly beat him to death,' she almost screamed in her panic. 'Then he made me help him take him downstairs into the cellar and he tied him up in two sheets with yards of tape round him and he got a basting syringe from the kitchen and...'

'Wait a moment, wait a moment. I'm lost. Arnold got a basting syringe from the kitchen? What in God's name did he do that for?'

'He used it to give the boy the Valium with whisky. It was awful, Daddy.'

'I should rather think it was. Absolutely revolting and rather dangerous. You should tell him that. After all, he is your husband, though God alone knows what made you marry the shit. Still, it's your bed and you've got to lie in it.'

'But not with a naked man friend or whatever of Arnold's, Daddy. You can't expect me to do that.'

'Really? Don't see why not. I should think anyone would be better than Arnold. Ghastly fellow. Always thought he was.'

'But don't you understand what I'm saying, Daddy dear?' Lady Vy appealed pathetically.

'I'm trying not to, my dear,' said Sir Edward, rinsing his mouth out with brandy for emphasis and spitting into the fire. 'It all sounds too utterly filthy. Still, if you will bring these things to my attention...'

Lady Vy made a final attempt. 'Daddy, you've got to do something. Arnold mustn't be allowed to get away with it. He must be stopped.'

Sir Edward shrugged massive shoulders and remained silent. He often found that the best thing to do was to stretch his daughter's attention span past its limit so that she forgot what she had been saying. This time it didn't work.

'He's going to kill me when he finds out I've told you,' she went on.

Sir Edward looked at her appreciatively.

'There is that, of course,' he said presently.

But for once his daughter had been driven past the point of the baby talk she thought he enjoyed. 'He's going to blacken your name too. He said he'd have the whole family in the gutter press like Fergie's father and Prince Charles and he can, you know. He's been doing some terrible things and he's going to be arrested and he's trying to save his skin by using us. You don't understand. And I've left him for good. And he's out for blood.'

All the words Auntie Bea had dinned into her poured out and for the first time in his life Sir Edward took some notice of her. He was particularly horrified by the mention of Major Ferguson and he certainly didn't like talk about blood. In fact he was genuinely alarmed.

He had never had any time for Sir Arnold, but he had to admit that the man could not be not as cretinous as he looked. In his opinion it was a disgrace that such a creature should have been appointed a Chief Constable, and he had regarded the appointment as another example of administrative decadence and the failure of the men in Whitehall to think at all clearly on social issues. That decadence had spread all the way to the top now in the exposure of those private peccadilloes that had always been there but had never been made public knowledge to hoi polloi for perfectly sound reasons of state. All that had been changed, and even the Royal Family was not invulnerable to the smears of exposure and the destruction of the mystique that was essential to political stability. Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre knew his Burke, but he also had no illusions about the loyalty of all his friends once he had been pilloried. The pack would turn and rend him almost without any hesitation. He put the tendency down to the need to get rid of the contagion of contempt as fast as possible. It was as necessary as the swift scavenging of hyenas to keep dead meat from rotting in the sun.

On the other hand he had no intention of becoming that dead meat and, for once, he had morality on his side. He was, if Vy was to be believed, being threatened by a man who was as brazenly corrupt as any police officer promoted and protected by Mrs Thatcher. It was necessary to redress the balance by bringing the past forward to purge the present. In such ringing and largely meaningless phrases Sir Edward had gulled the voters in the past. He saw no reason why he should not put his gifts for eloquence to more personal use.

'Now then, my dear,' he said to his daughter. 'I want you to put in writing, that is to write down, what you have just told me.' For a moment he hesitated. He was putting an unbearable burden on the poor woman to ask her to write anything vaguely coherent, indeed to write at all. 'Have you anyone who can help you write it down? Where are you staying?'

'With Auntie Bea, Daddy,' said Vy, much happier now that the storm seemed to have passed.

Again Sir Edward hesitated. 'Auntie Bea?' he said, and was conscious once more of a frisson of horror. He had once in the mid-seventies, while on a Parliamentary fact-finding mission to Outer Mongolia, been forced to share a tent with the so-called Auntie Bea and had found her fascination with thongs and the sexual attributes of leather at first exhilarating and then terrifying. He had never played the role of a woman in an encounter with a woman before. Eton had been bad enough: Ulan Bator was frankly appalling. That his daughter should now be the plaything of a woman like Auntie Bea struck him as being exceedingly bizarre and ironic.

All the same, there could be no doubting Auntie Bea's intellect when she chose to apply it. He could cheerfully leave Sir Arnold Gonders' baleful curriculum vitae in her hands. And, of course, Vy. Sir Edward cheered up. He had a purpose in life once more and his daughter had finally found a woman who could make use of her. When he finally got rid of Lady Vy he made several phone calls and then changed for dinner. He would sound old Elisha Beconn out about police corruption and ways of combating it and get another ball of influence rolling. It was worth decanting a really good claret. Besides, he had a theory to explain why Lady Thatcher was such a passionate advocate of arming the Bosnian Muslims. Her son was an arms dealer and by backing the Muslims so openly she was bound to help dear little Markie's standing in Saudi Arabia. It was in the discovery of real motivation in politics that Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre found his greatest pleasure.