The doctor in Casualty had been entirely unsympathetic. She had been working all hours of the weekend and didn't take kindly to people like Major MacPhee. 'You're very lucky to be alive,' she told him. 'And the very next time you are brought in here like this I shall consider a psychological examination. There are too many alcoholic nutters like you on the streets of this city.'
Miss Midden agreed with her. 'He's really despicable,' she said, only to find that the doctor assumed she was the Major's wife.
'If you feel like that, why don't you divorce him?' she asked and, before Miss Midden could find words to express her outraged feelings, the doctor had gone off to tend to a youth who had been hit over the head with a broken bottle.
As they drove out of the city Miss Midden gave vent to her fury. 'You really are a truly horrible person,' she said, 'and mad. You've ruined my weekend by behaving like...like, well, like the sort of person you are.'
'I'm really sorry. I honestly am,' the Major whimpered. 'It's just that as soon as I find myself in a saloon bar, or better still a public one, I get this terrible urge.'
'We all get terrible urges,' said Miss Midden. 'I have one at the moment and I might very well act upon it if I didn't think you'd get some perverse pleasure out of it. You evidently have a death wish.'
'It isn't that,' said the Major through swollen lips. 'The urge comes on me all of a sudden. One moment I'm standing there with my foot on the rail and a small treble malt in my hand and some nice fellow beside me and then out of the blue I have this irrepressible urge to walk up to the biggest oaf I can see and tell him to shut his gob. Or something that will make him try to think. It's wonderful to see a really strong, powerful thug come to life. The look on his face of utter bewilderment, the growing gleam in his eyes, the way he bunches his fists and shifts his shoulders for the punch. I must have seen more really big men throw punches than half the professional boxers in the world.'
'And look what it's done for you. It's a wonder you haven't got brain damage. If you had a brain to damage.' For a while they drove on in silence, Miss Midden considering how strange it was that she had been left the Middenhall with its curious collection of inhabitants, and the Major nursing a separate grievance.
'You could always have left me behind at the Infirmary. I rather liked it there.'
'And have you come home with some foul disease? Certainly not. That hospital looked most insanitary.'
'That's only in Casualty. Casualty is always like that on a Saturday night. It's so busy.'
Presently, as they crossed the border, Major MacPhee fell asleep and Miss Midden drove on, still mulling over her curious circumstances. For one thing, in spite of his occasional outbreaks, she continued to put up with the miserable Major. He was useful about the place and shared the housework. He was also a quite good cook, though not as good as he claimed. Miss Midden did not disillusion him. The poor wretch needed all the pretence he could muster. And his bouts of drunken masochism in Glasgow were, she supposed, part of the camouflage he needed to cover his cowardice. He really was a most despicable creature. But, and in Miss Midden's eyes it was an important 'but', he polished his little brogues every day and took pains over his appearance to the point of wearing a waistcoat and sporting a fob watch. That it was a silver one, while the chain across his stomach was gold, touched her by its pathos. Yes, he was particular about his appearance, grooming his little moustache and surreptitiously dyeing his hair. Even his suits were as good as he could afford and to make them look as though they had been tailored for him; he had learnt to take them in at the waist.
From Miss Midden's point of view it was a useful affectation. The Major had to conform to the shape of his jackets, which meant that he ate very little. Even so he had developed a little paunch and recently he had begun to wear a dark blue double-breasted blazer on which he had sewn the brass buttons of a Highland regiment he had found in a junk shop in Stagstead. The regiment had been disbanded long before the Major could possibly have joined the army. Miss Midden knew this and had been tempted to ask him why he didn't buy himself a kilt as well, but she hadn't the heart to. There was no need to hurt his pride, he had so little of it. And in any case he had such miserably thin legs...No, it was better not to say anything. All the same there were times, and this was one of them, when she wished she was rid of him. She had illusions of her own to protect and his grubby fantasies, his little store of magazines which he kept locked in a briefcase, sometimes seemed to leak out into the atmosphere and fill her with a sad disgust.
On the other hand for all his faults Major MacPhee was not a Midden, and with so many family members, or people who claimed to be relatives, living down at the Middenhall his inability to demand anything of her was a distinct advantage. As she put it to Phoebe Turnbird over at Carryclogs House, 'Of course he's a very silly little man and, if he was ever in the Army he was probably a corporal in the Catering Corps, but at least I can throw him out whenever I want to which is more than I can say for the people at the Hall. I'm lumbered with them. I sometimes dream the place has burnt down and I can get away. Then I wake up and it's still there in all its awfulness.'
'But it's a lovely house...in its way,' Phoebe said, but Miss Midden wasn't to be fooled or patronized. Carryclogs House was beautiful, the Middenhall wasn't.
'If you think it lovely...well, never mind,' Miss Midden had said and had stumped off across the fell, whacking her boots with the riding crop she always carried.
Now, driving back through the night following the narrow lanes she knew so well and disliked on this occasion so intensely, she cursed the Major and she cursed her role as mistress of the Middenhall. Most of all she cursed the Middenhall itself. Built at the beginning of the century by her great-grandfather, 'Black' Midden, to prove to the world that he had made a fortune out of cheap native labour and the wholesale use of business practices which, even by the lax standards of the day in Johannesburg, were considered more devious and underhand than was socially acceptable, the house ('pile' was the more appropriate term) was proof that he had no taste whatsoever. Or, to be more accurate, that he did have taste but of a sort that could only be described as appalling. To describe the Middenhall itself was well-nigh impossible. It combined the very worst eccentricities of every architectural style Black Midden could think of with a structural toughness that was formidable and seemingly indestructible. To that extent it accurately reflected the old man's character.
'I want it to be a monument to my success in life,' he told the first architect he employed, 'and I haven't got where I am today by being nice and namby-pamby. I've come up the hard way and I mean to leave a house that is as hard as I am.'