The architect, a man of some discernment, had his own ideas about how his client had 'come up' and supposed correctly that the lives of his employees must have been exceedingly hard. Accordingly he had presented a design that had all the charm of a concrete blockhouse (Black Midden had built a great many blockhouses for the British during the Boer War). The old man had rejected the design. 'I said a house, not a bloody prison,' he said. 'I want towers and turrets and stained-glass windows and a huge verandah on which I can sit and smoke my pipe. And where are the bathrooms?'
'Well, there's one here and another there '
'I want one for every bedroom. I'm not having people wandering about in dressing-gowns looking for the things. I don't care what other people have. I want something better. And different.'
The architect, who already knew that, went away and added towers and turrets and stained glass and a vast verandah and put bathrooms in for every bedroom. Even then Black Midden wasn't satisfied. 'Where's the pillars along the front like they have in Greece?' he demanded. 'And the gargoyles.'
'Pillars and gargoyles?' the architect said weakly. He had known he was dealing with a difficult client but this was too much. 'You want me to add pillars and gargoyles?'
'That's what I said and that's what I meant.'
'But they hardly go together. I mean...' protested the architect, a devotee of Charles Mackintosh.
'I know that. I'm not a damned fool,' said Black Midden stoutly. 'The pillars are for holding up the front of the house and the gargoyles are for spouting the rainwater off the gutters.'
'If you say so,' said the architect, who needed the money, but who was also beginning to wonder what sort of damage this appalling building was going to inflict on his reputation, 'but there is a slight problem with the verandah. I mean if you want pillars and a verandah '
'And I do,' Black Midden insisted. 'It's your business to solve problems. And don't put the pillars in front of the verandah. I want to sit there and enjoy the view. I don't want it spoilt by a whole lot of damned great pillars in front of me. Put them behind.'
The architect had gone away and had spent a fortnight desperately trying to find a way of meeting his dreadful client's requirements while at the same time teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the end he had produced a design that met with the old man's approval. The Middenhall had gargoyles and stained glass. Every bedroom had a bathroom, the columns were behind the vast verandah, and there were all the towers and turrets, balconies and loggias imaginable. Nothing matched, and everything was immensely strong and consequently quite out of proportion. Black Midden was delighted. The same couldn't be said for the rest of the Middens. The family had never had any social pretensions and had been quite content to be small farmers or shopkeepers or even very occasionally to enter the professions and become doctors or solicitors. They had liked to think of themselves as solid, respectable people who worked hard and went to Chapel on Sunday. Black Midden destroyed that comfortable reputation. His excesses were not confined to building a ghastly house. A succession of too well-endowed mistresses, some of whom couldn't by any stretch of the imagination be called white, had been brought to the Middenhall, always in open carriages so that their presence couldn't be ignored, and had disported their excessive charms on the lawns and, on the most memorable occasion, by swimming naked in the lake at a garden party which the Bishop of Twixt had most inadvisedly agreed to attend.
'Well, that stupid old bugger isn't going to forget me,' Black Midden had commented at the time, and had gone on to make absolutely sure that no one else who came to the Middenhall would ever forget him by lining the drive with a series of sculptures in the hardest Coadstone, each of which depicted some ostensibly mythical event with a verisimilitude that was revoltingly authentic except in size. At the top of the drive a twenty-foot Leda was all too obviously enjoying the attentions of a vast swan, while further down the Sabine women were getting theirs from some remarkably well-hung Roman soldiers.
All this had pleased Black Midden immensely. Other people felt differently. Having planned a celebration party to mark the completion of the statues he was thwarted when the entire outdoor staff had gone on strike and the cook and the indoor women had left without notice. For a year Black Midden had held out against local opposition to the revolting statues by importing staff from outside the county at enormous cost. Finally, ostracized by every one of his own relatives and by the rest of the county, he had retired to Lausanne only to die of monkey-gland poisoning in an attempt to restore his virility in 1931. By then the statues had been dismantled by a blasting squad from the quarries at Long Stretchon in the course of which a number of windows in the Middenhall had also been blown out, largely, it was thought, thanks to the attempt of his nephew, Herbert Midden, to bribe the demolition men into blowing up the entire house. Black Midden's revenge was revealed only with the reading of his will, drawn up by the most experienced lawyers in London. He left the house, demesne, lands, and estate, together with his entire fortune, to the youngest Midden over the age of twenty-one in each succeeding generation with the proviso that the Middenhall be kept in unaltered condition and a room be provided for any Midden who wished to have one.
At the time these terms had not seemed too burdensome. No sane Midden would want to live in the awful house and the income from the Midden Trust was considerable. By the time Miss Midden inherited the place things had changed.
Chapter 11
At first the change had been almost imperceptible, so much so that some Middens Lawrence Midden the bank manager in Tween was one maintained that with their disreputable uncle's death things had gone back to normal.
'Of course, there is that indestructible palazzo,' Lawrence admitted, giving vent to his feelings about foreigners, art, and extravagance at the same time, 'but the Trust provides for its upkeep and I am told that there are ample funds.'
'In Liechtenstein,' said Herbert bitterly. 'And who are the Trustees? Do we know anything about them? No, we don't. Not one damned thing except their address, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it is a post box. Or poste restante, Hell.'
It was true. Black Midden's funds had been so discreetly dispersed into numbered and hidden accounts all over the world that, even if the Middens had tried to find out what their total was and had got past the barrier of secrecy erected in Liechtenstein, they would never have found out. But the quarterly payments arrived regularly and for some years it had been possible to maintain the gardens and the artificial lake with its little island in their former condition. The Middenhall itself didn't need maintaining. It was too gracelessly solid for that. All it seemed to require was sweeping and polishing and dusting, and this was done by the indoor staff.
But change, however imperceptible, did come, as Frederick Midden, the pathologist, pointed out with morbid glee. 'The process of extinction is marked by a number of fascinating bodily conditions. First we have the healthy person whose physiological state we call normal. Then we have the onset of disease, which may take many forms. From that we move on to the dying patient, who may linger for a considerable time. Parts of the body remain unaffected while vital organs degenerate, sometimes to the point where pre-mortal putrefaction begins to take place as in gas gangrene. Now, consequent upon this most interesting process the patient is said to die. In fact, paradoxically, he may become far more alive than at any time during his previous existence. Flies, maggots '