The Midden Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Sharpe

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his national service in the Marines before going to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, and from 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.

  He is the author of sixteen novels, including Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape which were serialised on television, and Wilt which was made into a film. In 1986 he was awarded the XXIIIème Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir Xavier Forneret and in 2010 he received the inaugural BBK La Risa de Bilbao Prize. Tom Sharpe died in 2013.

  Also by Tom Sharpe

  Riotous Assembly

  Indecent Exposure

  Porterhouse Blue

  Blott on the Landscape

  Wilt

  The Great Pursuit

  The Throwback

  The Wilt Alternative

  Ancestral Vices

  Vintage Stuff

  Wilt on High

  Grantchester Grind

  Wilt in Nowhere

  The Gropes

  The Wilt Inheritance

  The Midden

  Tom Sharpe

  In fond memory of Montsé Turró and with thanks to Jaume, Maria Carmen, Pep and Kim and everyone at the Hotel Levant, Llafranc

  1

  It was Timothy Bright’s ambition to make a fortune. He had been brought up in the belief that every Bright had made a fortune and it seemed only natural to suppose he was going to make one too. All his life the evidence of the family’s success had been around him, in the houses all Brights he knew lived in, in the furnishings of those houses, in their acres and ornamental gardens, in the portraits of Bright ancestors on the walls of Bright mansions, and above all in the stories the Brights told of their forebears whose exploits over the centuries had amassed the wealth that allowed contemporary Brights to live so very comfortably. Timothy never tired of hearing those stories. Not that he fully understood their import. And he certainly didn’t understand that twentieth-century Brights, and in particular his father’s generation, had done practically nothing to increase or even maintain that wealth. In fact, thanks to their public school education and the smug conceit this engendered in them, they had done a great deal to waste the family finances and influence. They had also done the country no great service by wasting themselves. While the older and politically influential Brights had used their peculiar talents to ensure that wars were almost certain to take place, the younger members of the family had died with courageous idiocy on the battlefields. Whether this had helped the family finances no one could be entirely sure, but what wars and their own preference for playing games and killing birds instead of thinking and working hadn’t done, death duties and indolent stupidity had.

  All this had been hidden from Timothy Bright. One or two elderly aunts grumbled that things weren’t what they had been in their day, when apparently every house had had a proper butler plus a great many indoor servants, but Timothy hadn’t been interested. In any case the few domestic servants he had occasionally seen sunning themselves in the desultory sunlight against the wall of Uncle Fergus’s fine old kitchen garden at Drumstruthie hadn’t impressed him. This was hardly surprising. The rest of the family disapproved of Uncle Fergus. He was an exceptional Bright and a very rich one. Thanks to a life of unstinted service in various unhealthy and inexpensive parts of the world (he had been Vice-Consul in East Timor and had even been considered for the Falklands) Fergus Bright had been prevented from sharing in the financial fiascos of his brothers and cousins. His last appointment, as the Governor of the Royal Asylum near Kettering, had been most rewarding and, thanks to the discretion he showed in the matter of his extremely well-connected patients, he had been handsomely rewarded. In spite of this, and perhaps because of his strange parsimony, Uncle Fergus had been held up to Timothy as an example of boring rectitude and of the social dangers of a good education.

  ‘Uncle Fergus got a First at Oxford,’ Aunt Annie was fond of saying to annoy her brothers and was always rewarded by a shout of ‘And look where that got him – East Timor’ from the other Brights, only a few of whom had been to university. So, in spite of the wealth that allowed him to keep up Drumstruthie, the example of Fergus was a negative one and Timothy had been encouraged to find his heroes in Uncles Harry and Wedgewood and Lambkin, all of whom played polo and shot and hunted and belonged to very smart clubs in London and who spoke of having had jolly good wars somewhere or other and who seemed to live very comfortable lives without having to think about money.

  ‘I just don’t understand it, Daddy,’ Timothy had told his father one day when they had gone down Dilly Dell to watch Old Og, the handyman, training his new ferret by setting it down an artificial warren after a pet rabbit because, as Old Og said, ‘They ain’t no real coneys about what with this Mickey Mousitosis like, so I has to make do with a shop-bought one, see,’ which Timothy Bright did understand.

  ‘But I still don’t understand money, Daddy,’ he persisted as the ferret shot down the hole. ‘What is money for?’

  Bletchley Bright had taken his protuberant eyes off the unnatural world of the warren for a moment and had studied his son briefly before going back to more important things like dying rabbits. He wasn’t entirely sure that Timothy’s question was a proper one. ‘What is money for?’ he repeated uncertainly, only to have Old Og answer for him.

  ‘’Tis for spending, Master Timothy,’ he said and gave a nasty cackle which, like his archaic rustic language, took him a lot of practice. ‘Spent by thems that has it and stole by thems what ain’t.’

  ‘Well I suppose that is one way of looking at it,’ said Bletchley uncertainly. His only act of public service was to be a Magistrate in Voleney Hatch. The discussion was interrupted by the emergence of the young ferret with a bloodstained muzzle.

  ‘He be a little beauty, bain’t he?’ said Old Og affectionately and was promptly bitten on the thumb for this lapse. Stifling the impulse to say anything more appropriate than ‘Lawsamercy’ he stuffed the ferret into his jacket pocket and hurried off to get some Elastoplast from the Mini-Market in the village, leaving father and son to wander home for kitchen tea.

  ‘You see, my boy,’ said Bletchley when they had gone two hundred yards and he had had time to marshal his thoughts. ‘Money is . . .’ He paused and sought for inspiration in a muddy puddle. ‘Money is . . . yes, well I don’t quite know how to put this but money is . . . Good gracious me, I do believe I saw a barn owl over there by the wood. It would be wonderful to see a barn owl, wouldn’t it, Timothy?’

  ‘But I want to know where money comes from,’ said Timothy, not to be so easily distracted by nothing more than a pigeon.

  ‘Ah, yes, whe
re it comes from,’ said Bletchley. ‘I know where it comes from. It comes from other people paying it, of course.’

  ‘What other people, Daddy? People like Old Og?’

  Bletchley shook his head. ‘I don’t think Old Og has very much,’ he said. ‘You don’t if you do odd jobs and things like that. Of course, he’s very happy. You don’t have to have money to be happy. Surely they’ve taught you that at school?’

  ‘Mr Habbak earns ninety-one pounds a week,’ said Timothy. ‘Scobey saw his payslip on his desk and he says it isn’t much.’

  ‘It’s not a great deal,’ said his father. ‘But then schoolmasters get their board and lodging and that means a lot, you know.’

  ‘But how am I going to get money? I don’t want to be like Mr Habbak,’ Timothy persisted. Bletchley Bright looked dourly round the faded winter landscape and finally revealed what was evidently the family secret.

  ‘You will make money by becoming a Name,’ he said finally. ‘That will happen when you are twenty-one. Until that time I would appreciate it if you would never mention the topic of money again. It is not a subject at all suitable for a Bright your age.’

  *

  From that moment Timothy had been sure he was going to make a fortune because he was Timothy Bright and his name entitled him to one. And since this was so certain, he didn’t have to think too much about how he was going to do it. That would come later in some natural way when he was twenty-one and had become a Name. In the meantime he had some of the problems of adolescence to cope with or enjoy. Having developed a taste for blood sports with Old Og he underwent a temporary religious crisis during what the school chaplain, the Reverend Benedict de Cheyne, called ‘his sixteenth year to Heaven’ in an explanatory letter to Timothy’s parents.

  ‘We frequently find that sensitive boys do tend to have fantasies of this nature,’ he wrote after Timothy had decided to reveal all during a confessional hour with him. ‘However I can assure you that the impulse towards undue holiness tends to pass quite rapidly once the initial sense of sin wears off. I shall of course do all I can, as Timothy’s spiritual adviser and consort, to hasten this change. We shall be taking our holiday in a cottage on Exmoor at Easter. I have often found that this period of isolation is helpful. Your obedient servant in God, Benedict de Cheyne.’

  ‘I must say I find his emphasis on sin disturbing,’ Bletchley told his wife when he had read the letter several times.

  ‘What do you think they are going to do on Exmoor?’ Ernestine asked. ‘It gets so terribly cold there at Easter.’

  ‘I prefer not to think,’ said Bletchley, and left the room before she required him to discuss the nature of Timothy’s fantasies. He shut himself away in the downstairs lavatory and tried to exorcise the memory of his own adolescent lusts by studying photographs of a collection of mole traps in The Field. He’d have liked to use one on the Reverend Benedict de Cheyne.

  But Mrs Bright raised the topic again at dinner that night. ‘Of course I blame Old Og,’ she said as they sat down to scrambled eggs.

  Bletchley’s fork paused. ‘Old Og? What on earth has Old Og got to do with it?’

  ‘Timothy has been exposed to . . . well, Old Og’s baleful influence,’ said Ernestine.

  ‘Baleful influence? Nonsense,’ said Bletchley. ‘Old Og’s all right. Outdoor sports and so on.’

  ‘You may call them that,’ she went on. ‘In my opinion they are something else. To allow a sensitive and delicate boy like Timothy to be exposed to . . . well, Old Og.’ She stopped and looked down at her plate.

  ‘Exposed? You keep using that expression. If you’re telling me Old Og exposed himself to . . .’ Bletchley shouted. ‘By God, I’ll thrash the blighter . . . I’ll –’

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ Ernestine said. ‘You’re making an absolute fool of yourself. You’re not capable of thrashing him. No, that dreadful creature exposed Timothy to two terrible temptations.’ She paused again. Bletchley was about to rise from his chair. ‘One was that awful animal with blood on its snout killing a pet rabbit –’

  ‘He had to,’ Bletchley interrupted. ‘There weren’t any wild rabbits about and he had to train it on something. And anyway it was not an awful animal. It was Old Og’s young ferret, Posy.’

  ‘All ferrets are awful,’ said Mrs Bright. ‘And as if that were not enough to turn the child’s mind, Og had to take him to some frightful girl in the village and expose him to . . .’

  ‘Expose him?’ Bletchley said. ‘He didn’t do anything of the sort with me. He exposed her. Ripe as . . . Now, what’s wrong?’

  ‘You are a vile, disgusting, and hopelessly impotent man. I can’t think why I bothered to marry you.’ And Ernestine Bright left the table and went up to her room.

  ‘I can,’ Bletchley told the portrait of his grandfather, Benjamin. ‘For money.’

  *

  But in due course the Chaplain’s forecast proved correct. Timothy Bright came off Exmoor with all dreams of a religious life quite gone. He had a different attitude to the Reverend Benedict, too. Instead he followed the usual course for boys of his sort and failed his A-Levels.

  ‘Bang goes your chance of Cambridge, my boy,’ his Uncle Fergus told him when the results arrived – Timothy was up at Drumstruthie for the summer – ‘There’s nothing for it now. You’ll have to go into banking. I’ve known an awful lot of fools who’ve done remarkably well in banking. It apparently doesn’t require any real thought. I remember your Great-Uncle Harold was put into banking and you couldn’t wish for a bigger fool. Dear fellow, as I remember him, but definitely short of the necessary neurons for anything else. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’d say in the modern jargon that he was so mentally challenged it took him twenty minutes to do up his tie. But a fine fellow for all that, and naturally the family rallied round to train him for his new profession. I seem to think it was your grandmother’s Uncle Charlie who found the way. He owed a bookie at Newmarket rather a large sum and in the normal way would have avoided the fellow for a bit. Instead he got the family to put up the necessary cash and Charlie did a deal with the bookmaker. He agreed to pay up in full immediately provided the bookie took Great-Uncle Harold on and showed him the ropes. Bookie thought Harold was an idiot and accepted, and when he’d graduated Harold went on as a banker in the City. Did damned well too. Ended up as Chairman of the Royal Western, with a gong. They said he had a knack of knowing what a chap was thinking just by looking at his hands. Extraordinary gift for a fellow with no brains to speak of. I daresay you’ll do very well in banking and the family could do with some financial help just now.’

  Inspired by the example of his great-uncle, Timothy Bright had tried to persuade his father to put up the money to apprentice him to a Newmarket bookie, only to meet with an adamant refusal to waste money.

  ‘You’ve been listening to Uncle Fergus’s tommyrot,’ Bletchley told him. ‘Uncle Harold wasn’t such an idiot as all that, and what Fergus forgets is that he was a mathematical genius. That’s what accounted for his success. Nothing to do with watching clients’ hands. From what Fergus says anyone would think he was some sort of tic-tac man.’

  ‘But Uncle Fergus says he always looked at –’

  ‘He was so short-sighted he couldn’t see clearly that far. What he could do was work out square roots and some things called prime numbers at the drop of a hat. Nearest thing to a human calculator in existence.’

  In spite of this Timothy Bright followed his uncle’s example to the extent of attending a great many race meetings at which he gave bookies a considerable amount of money and learnt nothing at all. All the same, he did go into banking, and on his twenty-first birthday became a Name at Lloyd’s.

  Bletchley tried to tell him what a Name was. ‘The thing is,’ he said awkwardly, ‘the thing is you don’t have to put any money up. All your capital stays in investments or property or whatever you like. I suppose some people leave it in Building Societies. And every year Lloyd’s pay you premiums. It’s as simp
le as that.’

  ‘Premiums?’ said Timothy. ‘You mean like insurance premiums?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Bletchley, delighted that the boy had caught on so quickly. ‘Just like insurance on the car. Instead of the company getting the premiums, Lloyd’s distributes them among the Names. It’s a wonderfully fair system. Don’t know what we’d have done without it. In fact Brights have been Names since Names were invented as far as I know. Hundreds of years probably. Been an absolute Godsend to us.’

  On this somewhat lopsidedly optimistic note the interview ended. Timothy Bright was a Name.

  *

  A few years later Timothy had made something of a name for himself. Coming to the City at the beginning of the eighties his opinion that the world was his oyster fitted in exactly with the views of those then in power. From his position in the investment branch of the Bimburg Bank he was soon able to play a surprisingly important role in restructuring the stock market. Long before insider trading became such a well-publicized practice, a few of the shadier and, in the opinion of some, shrewder stockbrokers had used Timothy as an intermediary in the certain knowledge that they could talk through him without his having the faintest understanding of the issues involved. It was this enviable reputation for involuntary discretion which, more than anything else, led to his consistent rise up the investment banking ladder. When Timothy Bright was urged to push shares he pushed them, and when told to talk them down he did that too. And of course the Bright family benefited from his popularity, in particular Uncle Fergus, who regularly caught the night train from Aberdeen simply to take his nephew out to lunch and quiz him about the week’s business. From these unnoticed interrogations Fergus Bright returned to Drumstruthie a richer and more knowledgeable old man. Of course it required all his skills as an interpreter or even a code-breaker to sift the genuine information from the useless bits with which Timothy had been programmed, but the effort was clearly worth the trouble. Uncle Fergus was able to buy cheaply shares that would shortly rise to quite astonishing heights while selling those that would presently fall.