The Midden

Chapter 3

At his little cottage at Pud End, Victor Gould pottered across the old croquet lawn to his summerhouse-cum-study overlooking the sea. From its window he could look down at the estuary and watch the fishing boats and yachts heading for the Channel. In the normal way he found great comfort sitting at his desk, but today there was no consolation to be had there. He had just received a very nasty shock and he needed time to think. Mrs Leacock, who came to clean the house and see that he was all right, as his wife Brenda put it, had left a note on the hall table to say that Mr Timothy had phoned to ask if it was all right for him to come down to stay for a few days.

It was not all right at all, in fact it couldn't have been less all right if Timothy Bright had deliberately chosen to make it so. It was the worst bit of news Mr Gould had received for a very long time and it had landed on the hall table just when he was about to enjoy himself, when something he had been looking forward to for a year was about to happen. He had been having a very pleasant time on his own (except for Mrs Leacock in the mornings, and he could avoid her) while his wife was taking an extended holiday in America visiting her relations there. Victor Gould was all for her visiting her relations so long as he wasn't asked to take part. It had been one of the trials of his married life that, in marrying Brenda Bright, he had married into her confounded family as well. Not that he had ever been welcomed there. From the very first the Brights had made it quite clear that he was not of their class or cultivation. Colonel Barnaby Bright, DSO, MC and bar, had gone so far as to attempt to dissuade his daughter in her bedroom the day before the wedding. 'My dear child,' he had begun, deliberately standing on Victor's trousers and raising his voice. 'You must see that the fellow is a bounder and a cad.' For a moment the naked Victor in the next room had preened himself. He rather liked being a bounder and a cad. The Colonel corrected himself. 'A sleazy, greasy bounder, the sort of dirty pimp and gigolo who hangs around hotel lounges in Brighton and sucks up to rich old women.'

In the dressing-room Victor Gould had flushed angrily and had almost sneezed. Brenda's reply had chilled him still further.

'I know all that, Daddy. I know he's awful and not one of us and that there is bad blood in the Gould family because Victor's Uncle Joe was cashiered from the Navy for attempting to bugger a stoker on a make-and-mend afternoon...'

For a moment Victor had been too shocked to listen. Uncle Joe's disgrace was news to him and his fiancée's familiarity with the term 'bugger' had surprised him almost as much as it had evidently mind-blown the Colonel.

'And of course he is all the things you say he is,' she continued, 'but that's why I need him. You do see that, don't you, Daddy?' (A gurgling sound from her father suggested he wasn't seeing anything at all clearly.) 'I need someone disgusting like Victor to give my life meaning.'

Naked and cold, Victor had tried to come to terms with this new role as her husband.

Colonel Bright was having difficulties too. 'Meaning? Meaning?' he bawled apoplectically. 'What the hell do you want meaning for? You're a Bright, aren't you? What more meaning do you need? You don't have to marry some filthy bounder to get meaning. The man's an absolute shit. He'll make your life a positive hell and go around having affairs with other fellows' wives and losing money on something loathsome like greyhound racing. Goddamit, the fellow doesn't even hunt.' This last was evidently the worst thing the Colonel could think of. But Brenda was not to be persuaded.

'Of course he doesn't, you old darling. He's far too yellow, and besides the poor dear wears a truss.'

'Dear God,' said the Colonel and Victor in unison. 'But the damned man is only twenty-five. What the devil does he need a truss for at his age?'

It was a question Victor wanted an answer to as well. He'd never seen the inside of a truss in his life. Brenda's reply had stunned him too. 'I think it has something to do with his scrotum, Daddy,' she said coyly. 'Of course I don't know what yet. Perhaps after the honeymoon I'll be in a position to tell you.'

But Colonel Bright had no longer wanted to hear anything more about his prospective son-in-law. With a grunt of revulsion he had turned his heel, this time on Victor's shirt, and had stumped out of the bedroom. From that moment on he had avoided his son-in-law as far as was possible and had spoken to him only when forced to. And the family's attitude had never changed. Nor, he realized now, had Brenda's. At the time he had succumbed almost at once to her charms and the delicious moue she had made as she asked him if she hadn't been a clever little girliewhirl to get rid of Daddy so quickly. Only later when they had been married and Brenda had decided she'd had enough of sex herself and preferred counselling other people with sex problems did Victor fully realize the truth of her remark that she needed someone disgusting to give her life meaning. By 'meaning' she meant feeling morally superior. Not that Victor had cared. There had been compensations in his role as the morally inferior. He had been left free to have a notorious love life while Brenda had had the gratification of forgiving him. Victor found the forgiveness galling but could hardly blame her for it. His real quarrel remained with the Bright family. And now he was faced with the invasion of his house by his least favourite Bright, Timothy. To make matters worse he was expecting his own nephew Henry, who had just returned from a trip to South America and Australia.

'What a damned nuisance,' he muttered and looked out of the window in desperation. He had already tried phoning Timothy Bright's house in London but without a reply. As usual in his dealings with the Brights there was nothing he could do to prevent the fellow from coming. In the past he had worked out a set of tactics which had tended to keep them at bay by turning the central heating off just before they arrived and contriving a number of electricity black-outs when they were in the lavatory or bathroom. On the whole the system had been moderately successful, although his own reputation had suffered even more as a result. With Timothy Bright he would have to devise something more in the way of inconvenience. Victor Gould had no intention of having his own nephew's visit ruined.

In London Timothy Bright completed the arrangements for his trip to Spain. He had been to his doctor for something to calm his nerves and had been drinking much more heavily than usual. It was largely due to the fact that he was hardly ever entirely sober the drink and the tranquillizers did tend to lessen his anxiety about piggy-chops that his plans coincided with the realization that he had been hard done by in more ways than he had previously imagined. He felt particularly bitter about his own family. In Timothy's opinion they ought to have helped him by giving him money. Especially after all he had done for them in the City. Instead they didn't seem to care what happened to him. They'd let him land up in debt to the Markinkus brothers and they'd let the bank make him redundant. The Brights had always banked at Bimburg's, ever since the year dot, and if anyone could have used their influence to see he was kept on, they could. It hardly occurred to him that only their influence had got him the job in the first instance and had kept him in it for so long. From this constant self-pity his thoughts turned weakly to revenge.

If the family refused to help him, why should he do anything for them? From that point it was an easy slide to the idea of helping himself to what they owed him. It wouldn't be difficult. Rotten old Auntie Boskie, who was ninety or something, had given him her power of attorney to sell some shares when she was in hospital the year before and she had never cancelled it. And anyway she was in failing health and wouldn't notice anything. She wouldn't miss some other shares. Half of them weren't producing much in the way of dividends. And why shouldn't he use them? Especially if they saved him from piggy-chops. Auntie Boskie would give him the shares if she knew about piggy-chops, wouldn't she? It was hardly a question in Timothy's mind. He knew she would. Having overcome his very few scruples, Timothy Bright sold her shares, and then some of Uncle Baxter's, and by the time he left London had over £120,000 in cash on him. Of course he would pay it all back with interest when the present emergency was over. In the meantime he had something to fall back on if things went really wrong. With this precious idea in mind, and with the strange brown paper parcel Mr Smith had given him in one of his panniers, he set off for Cornwall.

He arrived to find Victor Gould sitting out on the lawn with his nephew Henry sipping their drinks in the evening sunlight. Timothy Bright felt aggrieved. He hadn't expected Henry to be there. He'd heard that Aunt Brenda had gone to America and he'd thought Uncle Victor would be on his own. Uncle Victor was known to the Brights as a curmudgeonly old fellow, no one Timothy knew much liked him, and it had never occurred to Timothy that he had any sort of social life of his own. Whenever he'd been down to Pud End to see Aunt Brenda, Uncle Victor had been in his summerhouse or doing something in the garden and had seemed to be some sort of appendage to his aunt, someone who ran errands and did the shopping for her and occasionally took his Wayfarer dinghy out or fished or something. That, after all, was one of the main reasons he had chosen Pud End as a place to stay. He could be quite sure that no one in the Bright family would go there while Aunt Brenda was away and, since Uncle Victor never had anything to do with the other Brights, they wouldn't learn where he was or what he was doing. And now Henry had barged in.

Timothy got off his bike and took off his helmet. 'Don't bother to get up,' he said. 'I'll get a glass and join you. I reckon I know where everything is.' He went into the house jauntily.

'See what I mean?' said Victor. 'He's absolutely insufferable.'

'Then why do you put up with him?' asked Henry. 'Tell him to go some place else.'

Victor Gould smiled bitterly. 'My dear boy, I can see you have no understanding of the complications and compromises that marriage forces on a man. Your aunt has family loyalties that are stronger than...well...than anything except some sort of maternal instinct. I could no more throw this lout out on his ear and live happily ever after with your dear aunt than a hippopotamus could flap its ears in a mud swamp and fly. I am doomed to endure the brute. Let's hope he's leaving tomorrow.'

But Timothy, who came out with a glass of Victor's best malt whisky, soon disabused him of this hope. 'Heard you were on your own, Victor,' he said. 'Thought I'd come down and cheer you up. Moody old bugger is our Uncle Victor.'

'Perfectly true,' said Victor. 'Very moody indeed.'

'I didn't know you rode a bike,' said Henry after a moment's awkward silence which Timothy hadn't recognized.

'Oh yes, frightfully good fun. Simply the only possible way to get about London these days, you know.'

It was a hellish evening. Timothy got drunk, didn't help with the washing-up after dinner, and talked all the time about the City and stocks and shares, topics which held not the slightest interest for the others. Worst of all he prevented Henry talking about his year off.

'Oh dear Lord, you can see what a shit he is,' Victor said on the stairs when finally he took himself off to bed. 'I really can't bear the thought of having him another day. I shall do something desperate.'

'Not a very pleasant specimen,' Henry agreed, and went up to his room thoughtfully. Poor old Uncle Victor was getting on in years and it was appalling that he should have to suffer this wretched yuppie in his house just to keep the peace with Aunt Brenda. Downstairs Timothy had turned the television on loudly.

'That's too much,' Henry muttered and went down to turn it down a bit. He found Timothy helping himself to a tin of Victor's Perth Special tobacco. 'You know he has that specially made up for him,' Henry said.

'Yes, but he won't notice it. He's past it, you know. I mean I feel sorry for him,' Timothy said. 'He used to be a lot of fun, or some people say so, but he seems bloody sour and old to me. You going to have some?'

'I don't think so,' said Henry, but he took the tin all the same. And for the next hour he watched the television and listened to Timothy's maudlin conversation. By the time he went up to his room Henry Gould had formed some very definite opinions, the nicest of which he would have hesitated to express in words.

When he came down in the morning he found his uncle up and making himself some toast and coffee.

'I thought I'd be up and about before he deigns to favour us with his presence,' Victor said. 'I must say he left a hell of a mess in the other room and it looks as though he nearly finished the whisky. Let's hope it keeps him dead to the world for a bit. I thought we might take ourselves off for a walk along the coastal path and have lunch at the Riverside Inn.'

Henry looked out of the window at the fresh summer day. He and Uncle Victor were going to have a good time after all. After breakfast they set off, but just before they left Henry went up to his room, brought the tin of Old Perth Special Mixture down, and put it by the television set. The scheme he had in mind might not work, but if it did it would be Timothy Bright's own fault.