A Train of Powder (26 page)

The door was opened by a young woman. She was at the opposite end of the scale of rural society from the family made of dough. Completely articulate, she explained that she was Mr. Tiffen’s married daughter, and kept house for him, and was sorry, Dad had gone to see Gran, he always did on Sundays. We asked where Gran lived, suggesting that we might follow him, and, though she was careful not to discourage us, lest she should be implying that Dad would not find our company agreeable, her gaze softened with pity. She did not think we could follow him. Gran lived four miles away in the old coast-guard’s cottage. Well, that was all right, we had an automobile and four miles was nothing. Yes, but the cottage was on the sea wall. Two miles was as far as we could go by road, after that the way was across the drained marshes, muddy and hard to find. Oh, but we went anywhere. And how long ago had Mr. Tiffen started? Half an hour? Was he driving as far as the road went, or did he ride a bicycle? Oh no, he walked. We reflected on the remarkable filial piety of Mr. Tiffen, who walked eight miles every Sunday to see Gran, and hurried off, saying that we would catch him up.

But we never did. He was not on the road, and he was not in sight when we left the car among the hayricks in a farmyard on the edge of the marshes. We could see Gran’s house in the distance, a small coal-black square under the sharp pie-crust edge of the sea wall which bounded the landscape, and there seemed to be no living thing between us and it. This was, of course, an illusion. The air was alive with the cries of countless marsh birds. All here was lively. To town dwellers winter is a season of death, but here it was a brisk cleansing process. The earth was being tilted so that the heat which had collected during the summer drained away, freshness was flowing in. Growth had not stopped. Through the black fatness of some fields the winter wheat and oats were sending up green blades bright as paint, the ploughed fields lay cut up into dark shining bricks as obviously nourishing as butter. On that nutrient material we slid and skipped and fell as we worked our way across the flatlands to the sea wall by the sides of the deep irrigation ditches. We kept at it hard, pausing only once when we came on a dead fox, which looked less pathetic than would seem possible for a dead animal, because it was still a trim and barbered wise guy. We crossed an irrigation ditch, jumping from one slope of dark butter to another, and got to the sea wall, and clambered up through the long wet grasses that clothed it.

The tide was out. So far as the eye could see there stretched the matted bents of the mudflats: a soft monotony blended of grey and green and blue and purple. It had a quilted look, for the thousands of rivulets which cast a network over it followed the same course day in, day out, and had worn down the mud into channels between the hummocks some feet deep. To the small creatures which lived here this must have been a most fantastic landscape. At the bottom of these deep channels the tiny streams, only a few inches wide, had their established, deeply graven waterfalls, their rapids which tested to the utmost the gallantry of straws, and lakes with bays and beaches; and on the islands grass roots found purchase on the mud by gripping it and one another so that they grew into cushions of jungle, one plant rising on another like minute vegetable pagodas. The scene was incised and overstuffed with profligate ingenuity; and it was odd to think of all this elaboration being wiped out twice in every twenty-four hours, the rivulets losing their identities in the rough inundation of the tide, the springing grasses, so obstinate in their intention of making dry land out of mud, becoming the bottom of the sea. There was the same spendthrift and impermanent fabrication going on at ground level as there was over our heads, where great clouds, momentarily like castles, temples, mountains, and giant birds, were blown by the cleansing winter wind to the edges of the sky, here not clipped away by hills or streets and astonishingly far apart. There could not have been a more generous scene, nor one which was less suited to receive the remains of Mr. Setty, who from infancy had been so deeply involved in calculation, and so unhappily, who had tried keeping figures outside his head and got sent to prison for it, and had kept them inside his head and got killed for it.

Gran’s cottage lay about a quarter of a mile away on the landward side of the sea wall, not small, containing at least eight rooms, but nonetheless a deplorable habitation. It was built of brick covered with tarred weatherboard, which was falling away in splinters, and the windows of one half of it were broken. The only approach to it was by a couple of planks laid across an irrigation ditch. It seemed unlikely that Mr. Tiffen would allow Gran to live there, or that she would consent to do so, unless they were sunk so deeply in poverty that they had forgotten how to make demands. The young woman who had received us at Mr. Tiffen’s home was perhaps a sport from a rough stock; or, just as probably, we had mistaken for gentleness what was really the inanition of anæmia. We fumbled at a door, but of course it led only into a woodshed, for it was on the seaward side, and here the front door would have to face landwards, or on many days it would be impossible to open and shut it against the gales. As it was, so strong a gust blew on us as we knocked at the right door that we were pulled inside, and thus were suddenly confronted with the character of the Tiffen family, and gaped. It did not matter. They were expert in all forms of courtesy, and knew how to receive guests, and how to give them time to recover themselves if they had lost their self-possession.

They were sitting in a room which was surprisingly warm. The house was much better than we had thought; it kept out the weather, this room had a pleasing and individual shape, the fire was drawing well in the grate. There were four of them, sitting round a table, drinking cups of tea and eating mince pies, and they were obviously an elect race. If they were not eminent it was because generation after generation had chosen not to be, having the sense to know that they would have more fun and do as good a job by remaining obscure. Gran, who was eighty-four, had been a beauty. She was still pleasing to the eye, with abundant white hair and a very white skin, and a plumpness which seemed an accumulation of satisfactions. Her daughter sat beside her, red-cheeked and blunt-featured like a Brueghel peasant, but aristocratic and artistic by reason of her unusual powers of perception. Beside the fire, next to me, sat her husband, and it could be seen that she had taken to herself a man who might have been outside the tribe but was one of the same kind. He had a good head and body, he bore himself with dignity, he made sensible remarks in beautiful English. It was to be noted that on the walls there hung two religious prints, one of them a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and numerous photographs of weddings, in which both brides and bridegrooms looked thoroughly pleasant human beings. Obviously the Tiffens, whom I realized had been looking after my interests in many ways which I had never suspected, had been carrying on successful experiments in eugenics on quite a large scale. There remained Mr. Tiffen, who was sitting over in the window, instantly affording a complete answer to the problem of why the reporters’ pencils had checked for a moment when they came to write of him. He was a small man, with dark hair which was tousled because he constantly ran his hands through it in wonder. It could be seen that he was not a rich man, because his spectacles were the cheapest kind that are made; but he needed nothing, he could get everything he wanted out of what he had, save certain things which the nature of things denied him. But he was thinking of that denial in a way which made it something other than a frustration.

Our friend settled with Mr. Tiffen the matter which was the cause of our visit, and Mr. Tiffen thanked him, and told us all was going well, and set about making our visit a pleasant social occasion. We spoke of the agreeable warmth of the house, and it turned out that Gran’s tenancy of it was quite a story. She had gone there as a young woman because her husband had been a coast guard, a member of a marine police force recruited from time-expired naval men, which used to be quartered at regular intervals along the British coastline, but has been superseded since the advent of the combustion engine by smaller mobile forces operating from the harbour. In the old days there had been a row of these houses, and she had had plenty of company; there may have been a dozen adults set down here on the marshes. When the coast guards were disbanded the pensioned men and the widows were allowed to stay on, and as they died off the houses were pulled down. “And quite right too,” the women agreed, their voices rising. They were not archaic. They were part of the modern England which was building itself anew. “No woman,” they said, “ought to be asked to live like this. There’s no water here except the rainwater in the cisterns on the roof.”

Now the family who had lived in the other half of this house had gone; that was why the windows had not been mended after having been broken by the winter gales. So Gran was the last one to linger here, and a mercy it was she had held her ground and not gone up to the village when she could have, before the war, for now her son-in-law and daughter were living with her, and glad they were to have a roof over their heads, for they had lost their home while he was serving in the Navy during the war. Of course it was very hard on the son-in-law to be down here on the sea wall, for he was a builder and never worked nearer than the village and sometimes farther away, so in the winter he had to do the two-mile walk across the marshes in the darkness of early morning and late afternoon. But goodness knows what they would have done if Gran had not been able to take them in; and she could do that only because of the trouble that had fallen on Mr. Tiffen.

Sorrow ran through the group like wind through the branches of a tree. It was because of that trouble that Mr. Tiffen had been so upset when he found Mr. Setty’s body. He could not get over it, although it had happened some years ago. He had had a wife, the mother of the girl we had seen in the village and of some sons. She was forty-two years old and had hardly had a day’s illness in her life except for childish troubles. She and Mr. Tiffen and the children had all lived along of Gran, and all had gone well, none of them had a care in the world. One day she had gone shopping in the village and seemed full of unusual happiness. “I’ve never seen you looking so well,” the grocer had said, and she had answered, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I feel on top of the world.” He was not the only one; everybody she met that morning remembered how she had laughed and joked. Then she turned homewards across the marshes. Gran and the children were at the windows, waiting for her; and they saw her pause as she stepped off the plank over the ditch and fall to the ground. They found her lying among the parcels spilled from her shopping bag, dead of heart failure. The faces of these four people asked why there should be all this fuss about murder when death is the real wonder. Think of it, a body is in the state in which all living bodies are, and shows no signs of alteration; it is loved; many people wish it to go on just as it is. Suddenly it is dead; it becomes necessary for those who love it to let the undertakers take it away and bury it. This is much more difficult to understand than somebody dying because they have been stabbed or shot or poisoned by somebody that hates them. Natural death seems far less natural than unnatural death.

After Mr. Tiffen’s wife died he could not bear to stay in this house. He saw her everywhere in it. So he moved into the council house in the village which we had visited that morning. He had had to pay a great price for it, for council houses are given only to farm labourers; they have priority. He was a fisherman and a fowler, and had been so all his days and loved that life, and he hated agricultural work. But to get one of these council houses he left the water and took a job with a nearby farmer. It irked the family that had he got over his feeling about the haunting of Gran’s house and had wanted to come back there, he still could not have exchanged quarters with his brother-in-law and handed his council house over to him, who would have found it most convenient for his building work. The regulation which gave these houses to farm labourers could not have been set aside, and this is reasonable enough, for there is a much greater dearth of farm labourers than of builders; but it is hard for people of independent character, as fishermen tend to be, to accept gladly something that so overrides their wills. That, however, did not vex Mr. Tiffen himself; he still missed his wife so much that he could not have borne to go on living in this house.

It was because of his thoughts about death that he had turned so squeamish over this body, and had not been the same man since he had had to touch it. He had been in two minds about taking any notice of it, but it was such a great parcel that someone might have set store by it; it wasn’t just a thing you could let go, and once he had seen what it was he had to do his duty by it, though nobody likes handling that sort of thing, really. It was not easy to handle either. He had got the stake into the mud easy enough to tie it to, but he had tried to get the rope between the arm and the body, it made a neater job that way, but then the arm had dropped off and to keep it he had had to put the rope round both arm and body, and that was quite a business. Then he paddled the punt back to the sea wall, about a hundred yards it was, and he went the two miles over the marshes to the police station, and he found a constable there, about midday it was, and he brought him down to look at it. They sat in the punt together and looked at the great thing held up above the grey waters by the stake, and the constable said to Mr. Tiffen, “There’s something wrong here,” and Mr. Tiffen answered, “Yes, I think there’s something wrong here.” Then the constable said, “It’s my opinion this is a murdered body,” and Mr. Tiffen said, “Yes, I do think it is a murdered body.”

These comments on a torso which had been found wrapped in felt and tied up with rope might seem comically obvious; but they were said for a purpose. The constable and Mr. Tiffen saw the remains of a human being who had been dispatched without mercy, and they had neither of them ever seen such a thing before, and they knew that if too many of such things happened it would be the doom of their kind. They were deeply moved and had a sound instinct to find words to express their feelings, so that they would commemorate their emotion and make it more powerful. Doubtless they fumbled in their minds among the texts from the Bible and verses from the Church Hymnal and tags from Shakespeare they carried in their minds. But murder is so rare an event that there is no widely known formula for expressing the feeling it arouses, and so they had to do what they could for themselves. They did it well enough, for as Mr. Tiffen solemnly repeated what they said, their holy loathing of murder was manifest, and as we listened we were moved back several stages nearer the first and appropriate shock caused by Cain. His talk told then of the fatigue and tedium which follows catastrophe. The constable had said it was not for him to handle the body and that he must telephone headquarters, and then there was much running backwards and forwards that went through that day into the next. For darkness had fallen by the time the great ones were all assembled and ready to take Mr. Setty ashore, and they could not find him, and had to wait till he showed up across the flats on his stake through the morning light.