Now, driving back to the farm, she was in a dangerous mood. Her plans for the weekend had been thwarted by her own pathetic sentimentality. That was the way she saw it. She had taken pity on the wretched Major from the very first day she met him at the bus station in Tween where he had arrived in answer to an advertisement she had put in The Lady for a handyman. Standing there in his little polished shoes and regimental tie and with an old raincoat over one arm he was so obviously neither handy nor entirely a man that Miss Midden's first impulse was to tell him to forget it. Instead she picked up one of his old suitcases, hoisted it into the back of the Humber, and told him to get in. It was an impulse she had never been able to explain to herself. The Major had been rejected so often that his anticipation was almost palpable. In other circumstances Miss Midden would have followed her common sense but the bus station at Tween was too desolate a place for common sense. Besides, she liked surprising people and the Major needed a few pleasant surprises in his life. He was also easy to bully and Miss Midden had recognized his need for that too.
'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.
Chapter 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.