by Tom Sharpe
‘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.
12
Major MacPhee sat on the edge of his bed feeling sorry for himself. His head ached, the stitches over his eye hurt, so did his lips, and one of his teeth was loose. His hands were bandaged and worst of all he had lost an expensive pair of shoes. Not that they were both lost, but a pair of shoes had to be a pair and he’d lost one. He was proud of his shoes in a way he would never be proud of himself when he was sober. They were possibly the most important things he possessed to mask his wretchedness. Especially the brogues. He’d bought them at Trickers in Jermyn Street and had polished them assiduously every evening as he sat on the edge of the bed before, as he put it, turning in. And now he had lost them and Miss Midden was furious with him too. She’d been furious with him before but this time he knew her anger to be different. It was less coarsely abusive and far colder than he had ever known it to be.
The Major was a connoisseur of anger. People had been angry with him all his life, contemptuously angry and scoldingly angry, but nobody had ever hated him. There was nothing to him to hate. He was simply silly and weak and had never had the courage to do anything. Things were done to him and always had been. ‘You bloody little wet,’ his father had shouted at him time and time again, ‘can’t you stand on your own two feet?’ And his mother hadn’t been much better. Kinder, but perpetually scolding him and making him wash his face and hands or, more often, doing it for him. He had been brought up having things done to him and for him. He had tried to escape from his own dependence over and over again, but each time he had been defeated by fear and his own passivity. And with each defeat he had come to hate himself more. In the end he had run away to sea. He hadn’t even done that properly. He had drifted away to sea as an assistant cook on an oiler that made short runs between Rotterdam and small ports along the coast. The job hadn’t lasted but it had taught him how to get work on ships and he had joined a cruise liner as a cabin steward. It was there that he had observed how the rich and elderly passengers behaved. It was on his third voyage that a retired army officer whose cabin he attended took a fancy to him. He was a Major, too, and had saved up for the cruise in the faint hope of finding a rich widow whom he wouldn’t find too repulsive to marry. Instead he found the young Willy MacPhee and did things to him. It wasn’t the first time. It had happened on ships and in ports. He was used to it, used to being beaten up and forced down onto his knees. But the Major was different. He was the genuine article, even if he was poor, and he knew how to dress. MacPhee could tell that by the labels sewn inside his jacket pockets and by the cloth. But most of all by his shoes. They too had come from Trickers and the leather gleamed with polish. He had five pairs, three brown ones, all brogues, and the one thing he wouldn’t allow the steward MacPhee to do for him was polish them. ‘I always do it first thing before turning in. Had to when I joined the army and I’ve made a habit of it ever since. So don’t let me ever catch you touching them. Understand that, steward?’
‘Yes sir,’ MacPhee said in an attempt to adopt a military bearing himself. ‘Understood, sir.’
In fact he did touch them and, when the real Major died of a heart attack in Barbados brought on by the unexpected vigour and unwonted sexual expertise of a very rich woman from Sunningdale, he inherited them. Or stole them. He stole several suits, too, and hid them in his locker. It was at that moment MacPhee decided on his future career. He would join the army and have his own suits made for him and buy brogues at Trickers. When the ship docked in Southampton MacPhee went ashore for the last time and looked around for a recruiting office. The only one he found was for Royal Marines. The Sergeant had turned him down. ‘You can go for a medical, lad, if you want it. But I shouldn’t bother. You’re not up to standard. Not RM 1 anyway. Try the Army,’ he had said with kindly contempt.
It was the first of many rejections. In the end he got a job as a manservant for a military family in Aldershot and spent three years studying the way officers talked and comported themselves. He picked up the lingo and heard stories he would be able to repeat as if they were his own. The need to become an officer, if only in his own mind, became an obsession with him. Outwardly subservient, he was inwardly rehearsing the confident manner and practising the assumptions of the military. On his evenings off he would go to the pubs and learn army lore from the NCOs and ordinary privates whose disrespect for most officers taught him even more. He learnt in particular to steer clear of the other ranks who would most likely see through his pretence and ask awkward questions. Officers didn’t do that. They took you at face value and it was only necessary for a Captain or a 2nd Lieutenant to say sheepishly that he was in the Catering Corps for there to be no further questions asked. The Royal Army Service Corps was another useful foil. The danger lay among the better regiments, whose officers received deference. MacPhee had sufficient wiliness to know that he must never rank himself too highly, Major was quite sufficient, and that he must live among elderly people and gentlefolk who knew better than to be too inquisitive.
He observed all this in the Colonel’s house, where occasionally some old Indian Army hand would call Mrs Longstead ‘Memsahib’ and junior officers were not encouraged to express their opinions too readily. And all the time the real Willy MacPhee seethed with envy and only very occasionally went on a bender, in every sense of the word, in London or Portsmouth. But that was a long time ago. Since then he had drifted about the country from one barracks town to another acquiring the patina of the man he would have liked to be. In the end he had found and been accepted by Miss Midden. The position suited him perfectly. The Middenhall was far from any large town and the Middens from overseas were too old or self-centred, and, like him, too dependent on Miss Midden to show more than superficial curiosity about the ‘Major’s’ past. And until this weekend Miss Midden herself had accepted him without making her understanding of his pretence too obvious.
But now it was different and he was afraid. With painful care he undressed and put on his pyjamas and got into his narrow bed and wondered what to do to please her. He also wondered, though only slightly, where he had picked up the smell of dogshit. Presently he went to sleep. Eight inches below him the cause of the smell slept on. The Valium and the whisky still worked with the residual Toad to keep Timothy Bright unconscious. Only towards dawn did he stir slightly and briefly sno
re. To Major MacPhee, woken by the sound, those snores were an indication that he was far from well. It wasn’t simply his bodily injuries that alarmed him. His hearing had evidently been affected too. He reassured himself by thinking he must have imagined what he had just heard, or even that his own snoring had woken him. He turned gingerly over and went back to sleep.
It was seven when he woke again, this time because his bladder was full. He got up and limped through to his little bathroom. When he came back and sat heavily down on the bed he thought for a moment there was something wrong with the mattress. It wasn’t a very thick one but it had never had a hard lump in it before. The next second he was absolutely sure his brain had, as Miss Midden suggested, been damaged. There was a groan and the lump underneath him (it was Timothy Bright’s shoulder) moved. Major MacPhee lay still, except for his racing heart, and listened in terror for another sound but all was quiet in the room. Unless . . . unless he could hear someone breathing. He could. There was someone under the bed, someone who had snored and groaned. Transfixed by fear he tried to think. He succeeded, though only in the most primitive form. Childish panic held him in its grip. For ten minutes he lay still listening to that dreadful breathing and tried to summon up the courage to get up and turn the light on and look under the bed. It was almost impossible but in the end he managed it. Very, very carefully he pulled the curtains – he wasn’t going to turn the light on – then bent down and peered into the shadow under the bed.
The next moment he was upright and stumbling towards the door. The face he had just seen had fulfilled his worst fears. It was covered with blood and was ashen. There was a murdered man under his bed. Or one who hadn’t yet been murdered but was dying. And the man was bollock-naked. The Major fled into the dining-room and was about to go through it to the hall and call Miss Midden when he was stopped in his tracks by the thought of her reaction. She’d told him to keep well clear of her in the morning and she had meant it. But he had a dying man in his room, or a naked man who’d been murdered. Major MacPhee’s wits failed him. All his pretence dropped away from him and left him as childish and helpless as he had ever been in all his life. All he could see was that this was the ultimate in having things done to him. His own bruised and stitched face shrank in on itself, and he too was ashen. He had no resources to fall back on. Leaning against the wall he trembled uncontrollably. He trembled for twenty minutes before recovering sufficiently to sit down. Even then he couldn’t think at all clearly. His sense of guilt swept up from its hiding-place in his mind, swept up and over him. He had never overcome it and now it flooded his whole being, intensifying his terror. Finally he got to his feet and went to the sideboard where there was a decanter of whisky. He had to have a drink. He had to. Major MacPhee sat at the dining-room table and drank.
He was still there when Miss Midden came down at nine o’clock. The decanter was empty, the Major had been sick on the floor, and now lay in a drunken stupor in his own vomit.
‘You filthy bastard, you disgusting little phoney,’ she shouted. The Major didn’t hear her. ‘Well, this is the bloody end for you. I’ll have you out of the house before nightfall. By God, I will.’ Then she turned and went through to the kitchen in a blazing temper and made a pot of very strong tea.
The Major didn’t hear her. He was lost to a world that had too many horrors in it. But under the bed Timothy Bright heard those words and shivered. He was cold, his mouth tasted vile, his head hurt, and visions of a skinned pig flickered in his mind. In front of him a pair of bedroom slippers loomed menacingly and it took him some time to realize there were no feet in them and no legs above. Even so, there was something terribly threatening about them. They didn’t belong to him. He didn’t wear cheap felt bedroom slippers. His were leather and wool. Slowly moving his eyes away from the things he saw the legs of a wooden chair, the bottom of a door, a skirting-board, the lower quarter of a wardrobe with a mirror in it, pink floral wallpaper, and a brilliant shaft of sunlight that ran down it and a short way across the floor. None of these things made any sense to him. He had never seen them before and the angle at which he now saw them made them even more unrecognizable and meaningless. They intimated nothing to him. He did not know them or understand them. They were the adjunct to his sick horror, which was internal. But the words Miss Midden hurled at the supine MacPhee in the dining-room conveyed some meaning to him. He understood ‘You filthy bastard, you disgusting little phoney’ and ‘This is the bloody end for you. I’ll have you out of the house before nightfall. By God, I will.’ Timothy Bright knew that very well. He lay under the bed and tried to come to terms with his condition.
It took him some time, another hour during which heavy footsteps in the passage and the slamming of a door echoed in his head. But finally, after some more muttered threats in the next room – Miss Midden had looked furiously down at the Major and had been tempted to kick him into wakefulness – he heard the front door slam and footsteps crunching on gravel.
Miss Midden, sick with disgust and revulsion that she should ever have taken the creature MacPhee under her wing, had left the house and, passing through the narrow gate in the garden wall, was striding across the open fell towards Carryclogs House. Sheep rose and scattered at her coming. Miss Midden hardly noticed them. She too was absorbed in a private world of anger and frustration. She was almost sorry the Major was still alive. She had seen him breathing. She was also totally unable to understand what had come over the dreadful little man. He’d behaved badly often enough on his so-called ‘benders’ in Glasgow, but in the house, her house, he had always remained sober and obsequiously well-mannered. And now this had happened. Her only conclusion was that he must be mad, mad and beyond help. Not that it was going to do him any good. She had enough problems with the people down at the Middenhall without adding his alcoholic mania to them. As soon as he was able to move she would have him out of the house, lock, stock and barrel, even if she had to do it at the point of her shotgun. Certainly he would be gone before nightfall.
As she came in sight of Carryclogs House, Miss Midden veered away. She had no intention of revealing her feelings or the state of affairs to Phoebe Turnbird. Her own sentimentality was burden enough and she wasn’t going to allow Phoebe the pleasure of sympathizing with her. And gloating. At twelve o’clock Miss Midden sat down on an outcrop of rock overlooking the reservoir and ate the sandwiches she had brought with her. Then she lay back in the grass and looked up at the cloudless sky. At least it was clean and blue. Presently she dozed off, exhausted by her late night and her feelings.
13
Sir Arnold Gonders hadn’t had a pleasant day either. Or night. It had been nearly four by the time he left the Land Rover by the byre and walked up to the house where he was alarmed to see a light on in Auntie Bea’s bedroom. ‘That bloody woman,’ he muttered bitterly and wondered what on earth, in addition to a massive dose of Valium in gin, was needed to keep her asleep at night. Avoiding the front door, he sneaked round to the study windows to let himself in. Sir Arnold crept upstairs and was presently fast asleep. He had done all that he could do. The rest was up to fate.
In fact it was in large measure up to Genscher. The Rottweiler had spent a ghastly night in the cellar desperately trying to deal with the insulating-tape muzzle. In his brutal attempt to prevent the dog from exercising any right to bark or, more dangerously, to bite when he was kicked in the scrotum, Sir Arnold, never a brave man, had made it almost impossible for Genscher to breathe as well, and the dog had spent hours trying to scratch the beastly tape off before evidently deciding that it was likely to lose its nose as well. Unable to whine or do anything at all constructive – backing away from its nose had done not the slightest good and had only resulted in its banging its bruised backside against the wall – it had dementedly climbed the steps to appeal for help by head-butting the cellar door. By seven o’clock the house was reverberating to the thud of one hundred and fifty pounds of maddened Rottweiler hurling itself against the door every few s
econds. Even Mrs Thouless, usually a sound sleeper and one whose deafness prevented her from being included in the nastinesses of the household, was shaken to the conclusion that something very like an air raid was taking place in the vicinity. Since she had been brought up during the war in Little Kineburn under the very shadow of the great dam when it had been widely supposed the Germans would bomb the dam and loose the waters of the reservoir onto the tiny village, Mrs Thouless was particularly nervous about air raids. By 6.20 she was driven from her bed and went into the kitchen in her dressing-gown with a view to possibly taking refuge in the cellar. By then Genscher’s efforts to attract attention had diminished slightly. All the same, the cellar door shuddered every time the dog launched itself at it. Mrs Thouless looked at the door. She wasn’t at all sure about it. Then very cautiously she unlocked it and lifted the latch.
A moment later she knew with absolute certainty that there was no danger of being drowned or bombed in her bed. A far worse horror had bowled her over in the shape of a huge and demented Rottweiler with twenty metres of insulating tape wrapped in a grotesque black knot round its head. Mrs Thouless, never fond of dogs at the best of times and particularly wary of large German ones, found the experience and the apparition too much for her semi-deferential servility, and screamed. If anything more was required to send Genscher into an even greater state of panic, it was the sound of those screams. Nowhere indoors was safe. Only the outdoors would do. Without hesitation it hit the back door – and recoiled against Sir Arnold’s golf clubs which clattered onto the tiled floor. A further crash, mingled with Mrs Thouless’ Scottish screams, followed as the great beast, its head lolling under the weight of so much insulating tape, mistook the Welsh dresser for an easier door and hurtled into it. But Genscher’s course was run. In the midst of cascading plates and saucers the Rottweiler, now notably short of oxygen and breathing stentoriously through its bloodied nostrils, slithered across Mrs Thouless’ recumbent body and fell back into the darkness of the cellar.