The Midden

'Oh no, it's far too important for that, Daddy,' she had bleated. 'And anyway you wouldn't like it.'

Sir Edward shifted his bulk in the small chair and didn't suppose he would. He had never liked anything about his daughter. For one thing she reminded him too clearly of his wife and besides she was the only girl he had ever known who had progressed (sic) from the puppy-fat of adolescence to the several spare tyres of middle-age without a modicum of lissom grace in between. As for her mind, if it could be called that, it too had remained as vacuous as several expensive co-educational establishments and a Swiss finishing school could make it. To her undoting father, Vy Carteret Purbrett Gilmott-Gwyre at twenty-three had had all the physical and mental attractions of a lead-polluted black pudding. He had been absolutely delighted when Arnold Gonders, then a mere Superintendent, asked for her hand in marriage. As had been said at the time, her father had not so much given her away at the wedding as thrown her. And now, to judge by the inane whimpering over the phone, she might well have got herself into really serious trouble. Sir Edward had no desire to get her out of it.

To prepare himself for her visit he had two very large brandies and hid the gin bottle. He was damned if he was going to top her up. Lack of alcohol would make her leave all the sooner. He had Elisha Beconn coming to dinner and he intended to have his daughter out of the flat long before that learned professor arrived. In the event he was shocked to find her completely sober and obviously genuinely disturbed.

'Now what's the matter?' he said with the total lack of sympathy that characterized all his emotional contacts with the women in his family.

Lady Valence, his wife, had once remarked that life with Sir Edward could only be compared with being smoked as a ham. 'Not that I mind his smoking,' she said, 'it is the remorseless misogyny of the brute that has turned me into the wizened creature you see before you.' It was an unfair comparison. The unutterable boredom his wife's conversation engendered and the crassness of his daughter had left Sir Edward a dedicated believer in the Women's Movement as a means of securing his own privacy.

'It is the great advantage of the liberated and educated woman that she wants to have nothing to do with me,' he had said, and had become an advocate of universal lesbianism to the point of female conscription into the army for the same reason.

Now, faced with his distraught and sober daughter, he could only sigh and wish that the next half hour should pass quickly.

'I don't know how to tell you, Daddy,' Vy said, sinking into the baby talk she misguidedly thought he enjoyed.

'Need you bother yourself?' her father asked. 'If you don't feel '

'You see it's Arnold, Daddy,' she went on. 'He's become impossible.'

'Become?' said Sir Edward, who had always found his son-in-law quite unbearable.

'He's begun to plot against me, Daddy, he really has.'

'Plot? What the hell for?'

'He wants to silence me.'

'Really? Enterprising chap, your husband. I tried for years with your mother and it didn't do any bloody good at all.'

Lady Vy's face sagged still further. 'Why are you always so horrid to me, Daddy?' she whimpered.

'Because you come to see me, dear, that's why,' said Sir Edward. 'Now if you stayed away I couldn't be, could I?'

'But you don't even hear what I have to say,' she went on.

'I try not to, but some of it sticks. What part were you thinking of?'

'About Arnold plotting against me. You see, he wants to stop me talking to the newspapers.'

Sir Edward peered over his cheeks at her. 'Very sensible of him, I'd have thought,' he said. 'I agree with him. You shouldn't go anywhere near the newspapers. What are you complaining about, dear?'

Lady Vy looked wildly round the book-lined room and fastened on the heavy velvet curtains. 'He put a naked man into my bed the other day and then nearly beat him to death,' she almost screamed in her panic. 'Then he made me help him take him downstairs into the cellar and he tied him up in two sheets with yards of tape round him and he got a basting syringe from the kitchen and...'

'Wait a moment, wait a moment. I'm lost. Arnold got a basting syringe from the kitchen? What in God's name did he do that for?'

'He used it to give the boy the Valium with whisky. It was awful, Daddy.'

'I should rather think it was. Absolutely revolting and rather dangerous. You should tell him that. After all, he is your husband, though God alone knows what made you marry the shit. Still, it's your bed and you've got to lie in it.'

'But not with a naked man friend or whatever of Arnold's, Daddy. You can't expect me to do that.'

'Really? Don't see why not. I should think anyone would be better than Arnold. Ghastly fellow. Always thought he was.'

'But don't you understand what I'm saying, Daddy dear?' Lady Vy appealed pathetically.

'I'm trying not to, my dear,' said Sir Edward, rinsing his mouth out with brandy for emphasis and spitting into the fire. 'It all sounds too utterly filthy. Still, if you will bring these things to my attention...'

Lady Vy made a final attempt. 'Daddy, you've got to do something. Arnold mustn't be allowed to get away with it. He must be stopped.'

Sir Edward shrugged massive shoulders and remained silent. He often found that the best thing to do was to stretch his daughter's attention span past its limit so that she forgot what she had been saying. This time it didn't work.

'He's going to kill me when he finds out I've told you,' she went on.

Sir Edward looked at her appreciatively.

'There is that, of course,' he said presently.

But for once his daughter had been driven past the point of the baby talk she thought he enjoyed. 'He's going to blacken your name too. He said he'd have the whole family in the gutter press like Fergie's father and Prince Charles and he can, you know. He's been doing some terrible things and he's going to be arrested and he's trying to save his skin by using us. You don't understand. And I've left him for good. And he's out for blood.'

All the words Auntie Bea had dinned into her poured out and for the first time in his life Sir Edward took some notice of her. He was particularly horrified by the mention of Major Ferguson and he certainly didn't like talk about blood. In fact he was genuinely alarmed.

He had never had any time for Sir Arnold, but he had to admit that the man could not be not as cretinous as he looked. In his opinion it was a disgrace that such a creature should have been appointed a Chief Constable, and he had regarded the appointment as another example of administrative decadence and the failure of the men in Whitehall to think at all clearly on social issues. That decadence had spread all the way to the top now in the exposure of those private peccadilloes that had always been there but had never been made public knowledge to hoi polloi for perfectly sound reasons of state. All that had been changed, and even the Royal Family was not invulnerable to the smears of exposure and the destruction of the mystique that was essential to political stability. Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre knew his Burke, but he also had no illusions about the loyalty of all his friends once he had been pilloried. The pack would turn and rend him almost without any hesitation. He put the tendency down to the need to get rid of the contagion of contempt as fast as possible. It was as necessary as the swift scavenging of hyenas to keep dead meat from rotting in the sun.

On the other hand he had no intention of becoming that dead meat and, for once, he had morality on his side. He was, if Vy was to be believed, being threatened by a man who was as brazenly corrupt as any police officer promoted and protected by Mrs Thatcher. It was necessary to redress the balance by bringing the past forward to purge the present. In such ringing and largely meaningless phrases Sir Edward had gulled the voters in the past. He saw no reason why he should not put his gifts for eloquence to more personal use.