Tom Sharpe by The Midden

Author:The Midden
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Humorous Stories, Fiction:Humour, Humorous, General, Fiction, Modern fiction
ISBN: 9780099466536
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1996-06-01T03:00:00+00:00

It was the same with all of them. Almost all. Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who as long ago as 1956 had insisted on keeping her maiden name when she married, was different. She helped with the washing-up and vacuumed her own room and generally made herself useful about the place. Arthur Midden, who had been a dentist in Hastings and who suffered bouts of depression when he did bizarre charcoal drawings of gaping mouths as a form of therapy, actually paid for his room and board.

'I don't like to inflict myself on you, my dear,' he said when he first came to the Middenhall, 'but it's peaceful up here and I need company since Annie died. You don't make many friends in dentistry and Hastings has deteriorated with so many young people injecting themselves there. I never liked giving injections and the sight of hypodermics still unsettles me.' No, they weren't all spongers or complainers, but most of them were. Besides, Miss Midden had never liked the Middenhall even as a child. It was dauntingly ugly and she had shared her father's distaste for it. She had only agreed to take over to allow him to go into a retirement home. The house and its inmates had broken him. Miss Midden had given him a few years in which to sit and read in his own room in Scarborough and nurse his ailments. Even so she resented the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the so-called family.

Now, stepping out across the rough grass and avoiding the wet places where the sedge grass grew, she knew the time had come to get out herself. She would see her cousin, Lennox, who had taken over as the family solicitor from his father, Uncle Leonard, and tell him she was no longer prepared to take responsibility for the place. He would have to find someone else. She would keep the farmhouse, possibly letting out to summer visitors to earn some money, but she wouldn't live there. She would go away and find work of some sort. She had a small amount of money put away, not enough to live on but enough to allow her time to make a different life for herself. With this sense of resolution, the decision made, she walked into the yard and steeled herself to give MacPhee his marching orders. But as she entered the kitchen and saw him she knew that something far worse than a hangover afflicted him. He stood staring at her with terrified eyes and he was trembling all over. For a moment she thought he might be dying. She had never seen such palpable terror in anyone before. The man had ceased to exist as a man or even an animal. He had become something amorphous, almost liquefied by fear. For a few seconds his state kept her silent. Then she said, 'What in God's name is the matter?'

MacPhee held on to the kitchen table and opened his mouth. His lips quivered, his mouth moved jerkily, he gibbered.

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