The MIDDEN
by Tom Sharpe
In fond memory
of Montsé Turró
and with thanks to
Jaume, Maria Carmen,
Pep and Kim
and everyone at the
Hotel Levant, Llafranc
Chapter 1
It was Timothy Bright's ambition to make a fortune. He had been brought up in the belief that every Bright had made a fortune and it seemed only natural to suppose he was going to make one too. All his life the evidence of the family's success had been around him, in the houses all Brights he knew lived in, in the furnishings of those houses, in their acres and ornamental gardens, in the portraits of Bright ancestors on the walls of Bright mansions, and above all in the stories the Brights told of their forebears whose exploits over the centuries had amassed the wealth that allowed contemporary Brights to live so very comfortably. Timothy never tired of hearing those stories. Not that he fully understood their import. And he certainly didn't understand that twentieth-century Brights, and in particular his father's generation, had done practically nothing to increase or even maintain that wealth. In fact, thanks to their public school education and the smug conceit this engendered in them, they had done a great deal to waste the family finances and influence. They had also done the country no great service by wasting themselves. While the older and politically influential Brights had used their peculiar talents to ensure that wars were almost certain to take place, the younger members of the family had died with courageous idiocy on the battlefields. Whether this had helped the family finances no one could be entirely sure, but what wars and their own preference for playing games and killing birds instead of thinking and working hadn't done, death duties and indolent stupidity had.
All this had been hidden from Timothy Bright. One or two elderly aunts grumbled that things weren't what they had been in their day, when apparently every house had had a proper butler plus a great many indoor servants, but Timothy hadn't been interested. In any case the few domestic servants he had occasionally seen sunning themselves in the desultory sunlight against the wall of Uncle Fergus's fine old kitchen garden at Drumstruthie hadn't impressed him. This was hardly surprising. The rest of the family disapproved of Uncle Fergus. He was an exceptional Bright and a very rich one. Thanks to a life of unstinted service in various unhealthy and inexpensive parts of the world (he had been Vice-Consul in East Timor and had even been considered for the Falklands) Fergus Bright had been prevented from sharing in the financial fiascos of his brothers and cousins. His last appointment, as the Governor of the Royal Asylum near Kettering, had been most rewarding and, thanks to the discretion he showed in the matter of his extremely well-connected patients, he had been handsomely rewarded. In spite of this, and perhaps because of his strange parsimony, Uncle Fergus had been held up to Timothy as an example of boring rectitude and of the social dangers of a good education.
'Uncle Fergus got a First at Oxford,' Aunt Annie was fond of saying to annoy her brothers and was always rewarded by a shout of 'And look where that got him East Timor' from the other Brights, only a few of whom had been to university. So, in spite of the wealth that allowed him to keep up Drumstruthie, the example of Fergus was a negative one and Timothy had been encouraged to find his heroes in Uncles Harry and Wedgewood and Lambkin, all of whom played polo and shot and hunted and belonged to very smart clubs in London and who spoke of having had jolly good wars somewhere or other and who seemed to live very comfortable lives without having to think about money.
'I just don't understand it, Daddy,' Timothy had told his father one day when they had gone down Dilly Dell to watch Old Og, the handyman, training his new ferret by setting it down an artificial warren after a pet rabbit because, as Old Og said, "They ain't no real coneys about what with this MickeyMousitosis like, so I has to make do with a shop-bought one, see,' which Timothy Bright did understand.
'But I still don't understand money, Daddy,' he persisted as the ferret shot down the hole. 'What is money for?'
Bletchley Bright had taken his protuberant eyes off the unnatural world of the warren for a moment and had studied his son briefly before going back to more important things like dying rabbits. He wasn't entirely sure that Timothy's question was a proper one. 'What is money for?' he repeated uncertainly, only to have Old Og answer for him.
''Tis for spending, Master Timothy,' he said and gave a nasty cackle which, like his archaic rustic language, took him a lot of practice. 'Spent by thems that has it and stole by thems what ain't.'
'Well I suppose that is one way of looking at it,' said Bletchley uncertainly. His only act of public service was to be a Magistrate in Voleney Hatch. The discussion was interrupted by the emergence of the young ferret with a bloodstained muzzle.
'He be a little beauty, bain't he?' said Old Og affectionately and was promptly bitten on the thumb for this lapse. Stifling the impulse to say anything more appropriate than 'Lawsamercy' he stuffed the ferret into his jacket pocket and hurried off to get some Elastoplast from the Mini-Market in the village, leaving father and son to wander home for kitchen tea.
'You see, my boy,' said Bletchley when they had gone two hundred yards and he had had time to marshal his thoughts. 'Money is...' He paused and sought for inspiration in a muddy puddle. 'Money is...yes, well I don't quite know how to put this but money is...Good gracious me, I do believe I saw a barn owl over there by the wood. It would be wonderful to see a barn owl, wouldn't it, Timothy?'
'But I want to know where money comes from,' said Timothy, not to be so easily distracted by nothing more than a pigeon.
'Ah, yes, where it comes from,' said Bletchley. 'I know where it comes from. It comes from other people paying it, of course.'
'What other people, Daddy? People like Old Og?'
Bletchley shook his head. 'I don't think Old Og has very much,' he said. 'You don't if you do odd jobs and things like that. Of course, he's very happy. You don't have to have money to be happy. Surely they've taught you that at school?'
'Mr Habbak earns ninety-one pounds a week,' said Timothy. 'Scobey saw his payslip on his desk and he says it isn't much.'
'It's not a great deal,' said his father. 'But then schoolmasters get their board and lodging and that means a lot, you know.'
'But how am I going to get money? I don't want to be like Mr Habbak,' Timothy persisted. Bletchley Bright looked dourly round the faded winter landscape and finally revealed what was evidently the family secret.
'You will make money by becoming a Name,' he said finally. 'That will happen when you are twenty-one. Until that time I would appreciate it if you would never mention the topic of money again. It is not a subject at all suitable for a Bright your age.'
From that moment Timothy had been sure he was going to make a fortune because he was Timothy Bright and his name entitled him to one. And since this was so certain, he didn't have to think too much about how he was going to do it. That would come later in some natural way when he was twenty-one and had become a Name. In the meantime he had some of the problems of adolescence to cope with or enjoy. Having developed a taste for blood sports with Old Og he underwent a temporary religious crisis during what the school chaplain, the Reverend Benedict de Cheyne, called 'his sixteenth year to Heaven' in an explanatory letter to Timothy's parents.
'We frequently find that sensitive boys do tend to have fantasies of this nature,' he wrote after Timothy had decided to reveal all during a confessional hour with him. 'However I can assure you that the impulse towards undue holiness tends to pass quite rapidly once the initial sense of sin wears off. I shall of course do all I can, as Timothy's spiritual adviser and consort, to hasten this change. We shall be taking our holiday in a cottage on Exmoor at Easter. I have often found that this period of isolation is helpful. Your obedient servant in God, Benedict de Cheyne.'