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 snore. 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.