A Train of Powder

by West, Rebecca

  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from time-expired naval men, which used to be quartered at regular intervals along the British coastline, but has been superseded since the advent of the combustion engine by smaller mobile forces operating from the harbour.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.

  Mr. Tiffen acted as guide, made a statement to a Scotland Yard Inspector, learned who the dead man was and that he had reason to expect a thousand pounds’ reward, and went home feeling deadly tired and nauseated by the thought of the parcel, though believing that a sleep would get him over that. But it did not; and the next night a chill came on him. He shivered and piled on the bedclothes, and his son-in-law brought him his army greatcoat to lay on top of him, and there is real warmth in those army greatcoats, but still Mr. Tiffen shivered so that the bed rattled. In the morning his so
n-in-law brought him a cup of tea, and he said he did not want it. His son-in-law said, “Go on, try it, Dad, you must have something,” but he only brought it up. He was like that for a week, and all that time he was away from work; it was as if he had a real chill, but it was not that, it was the shock of handling the body. Of course he had brought in bodies before. In the war he had found several RAF men and a couple of German sailors out on the marshes, but that was helping them to Christian burial, you didn’t think anything of it. But this was different. Mr. Tiffen’s brother-in-law agreed that it was different, something apart. He had brought in a suicide, a woman that had drownded herself (they all four used the old form of the past participle), and had thought nothing of it, but he would not have done what Mr. Tiffen did, not for anything. “Come to think of it,” said Mr. Tiffen’s sister, “Have you seen anything in the papers about them burying the body? I haven’t.”

  “They ought to lay it at rest,” said Gran.

  “Well, I suppose it’s awkward for them having only the one part of it,” said the sister.

  “It’d be better if they got the whole of it. I go up all the time to Mum’s room with the binoculars, to look if I can see another parcel coming in, but I never see anything.”

  “You never will,” said Mr. Tiffen, “all the rest is at the bottom of the sea. And it is awkward for the family. Nice people, they seemed, too. They were at Bow Street when I went up to give evidence. Mr. Setty’s sister’s husband came right across the room to shake hands and thank me for the trouble I’d taken, very civil.”

  Death was a sacred mystery to these people and a loathsome obscenity; but also it had sometimes to be inflicted, and the risk of it suffered, in the way of duty. Gran had brought in cups of fresh hot tea, and for a minute or two we all drank and were silent. My eyes went to two photographs of destroyers on the walls, and Mr. Tiffen’s brother-in-law said, “My ships in the war. We’re all in the Navy here.”

  “All in the Navy,” nodded Gran, and sure enough all the bridegrooms in the wedding groups wore naval uniform. So death was not altogether terrible here, for it was part of a familiar and accepted and enjoyed discipline. Indeed, they had subjugated death still further, for though it was solemnly realized, it was also domesticated, a part of household economy, not taken too seriously, carelessly dispensed to the birds and beasts and fishes, along with love.

  “It came of being my holiday then that I came on this thing,” grieved Mr. Tiffen, “for, it being my holiday, of course I went down on the marshes and got out in my punt; that’s what I like to do, have a bit of shooting in my punt.”

  “He is a proper wonder in his punt,” said his brother-in-law; “nobody can do more with a punt gun than he can.”

  “Only time,” said Mr. Tiffen sadly, “that I ever had anything to do with the police before all this fuss and bother was to go to the police station and get a license for my gun. Duck we can get,” he said more happily, “and widgeon. There’s many like widgeon better than duck, it’s richer. It’s a nice kind of sport too. It’s not like other shooting, you know. You don’t wait for the birds to rise. You paddle along, quiet as you can, lying down in the boat, facing forward, till you see a nice lot of birds settled on the water, and you get to the right distance, so that the shot splays out amongst them, and you get the lot.”

  “Twenty or thirty he gets at a time,” rejoiced his brother-in-law.

  “We take what we want,” said Mr. Tiffen, “and we get rid of the rest easy enough. I don’t even have to send them to market; I just take them home to the village and sell them up and down the street. People are glad to have them to make up the meat ration.”

  “He has his fun and makes good money out of it,” said the brother-in-law. Mr. Tiffen’s glasses shone with satisfaction. The times had got him with his back to the wall; they had made him a farm worker when he was a fisherman and a fowler, but he had found the only loophole, he had an exceptional gift, and, in his several ways, he was enjoying exceptional rewards.

  We asked him questions about this gun which brought down twenty and thirty birds at a time, and they were foolish questions, since neither of us had ever shot from a punt. We were worried about the kick of such a wonder-working gun, because we thought it must be fired from the shoulder, like other guns. “No, no,” said Mr. Tiffen patiently, “you haven’t got this right. The boat takes the kick, not my shoulder. It isn’t near my shoulder, it’s lying on the floor of the punt. There’s a couple of ropes like a cradle at the back of it like, to take the kick. It’s got no sights, I just look along the barrel, and when I get it fined up on the birds I ship a paddle and pull the hammer-trigger with my hand. But you come out and see for yourselves the way it is.” “Yes, you ought to have a look at that punt and that gun,” said the brother-in-law, “you won’t see better.” “I never saw better,” said Mr. Tiffen. “I don’t know who made them. They belonged to an old man used to live round here. I bought them when he died. I was young myself then. Come and have a look at them. It’s just a step along the sea wall.”

  Outside the warm house the air came cold through our clothes to our skins; it was as if we had dropped into a swimming pool, we shivered and said “Brrr,” but liked it. We walked in single file along the top of the sea wall, Mr. Tiffen going first. His feet were very small, and he put them down lightly and firmly as if he were a ballet dancer. Like us, he had come over two miles of drained marsh, and he had explained that we had not overtaken him on the road because he had come by a short cut of his own across the fields. But though we were muddied to the knees there was hardly a speck of dirt on his neat brown boots. We stopped to look over the blue-green mudflats and listen to the cry of the seabirds. It was as if the still air were striped vertically with the pure, thin, ascendant notes. “The teuks those are,” said Mr. Tiffen. “Some call them red shanks.”

  Staring out to the sea, which was now just visible as a dark shining line on the horizon, he ran his hand through his hair and said, “An unnoticing man he must have been, a most unnoticing man. This Hume, the man they said had done the murder. You see how it happened that the body was laying about so that I found it? He dropped it from the plane where he saw deep water. That is why I say he must be a most unnoticing man, for they tell me he was round here during the war with the RAF. He should have noticed that all round the coast here there’s places where it’s deep water just twice in the month, when there’s a full moon and a new moon, and all the rest of the time there’s shallow water. When he dropped this parcel here the sea was flooding over the flats; it was near to the top of the sea wall, I grant you that. But the water runs away, after that there’s only a foot or two of water even at high tide; that parcel was bound to lie about on the mud when it was low tide, same as it was doing when I found it. You’d think a man would know more about tides and such than to do a thing like that, wouldn’t you, especially when he’s been in the neighbourhood, like?” The face he turned on us was deeply lined by the strain of acute observation carried on all his life long, of a constant conversion of the knowledge he thus gained into wisdom. But for once he was inquiring into something which would remain for ever unknown to him. It was not for him to understand the peculiar bargain this age had driven with some of his fellow men: teaching them to perform one enormously complicated operation, such as flying a plane, but in exchange taking away their knowledge of certain very simple things, such as the pull of the moon on the sea, and the unlikelihood that a man can kill another man without being found out, or even the nature of murder.

  The punt was lying in one of the channels, and we went out to it over the mud, again appreciating how neat Mr. Tiffen was on his feet. If we followed his trail exactly, treading on the tufts of grass where he had trod, we remained dry-shod; if we strayed, we slid on stuff like toothpaste. For a little we hung over the punt and made clucking noises as if it were a baby. It had that mysterious secondary colour, apart from its paint, which very old boats have, and it looked too fragile to carry its gun, which loo
ked like a drainpipe. “Do you ever capsize?” we asked. “Well, I did when I was very young,” said Mr. Tiffen, and laughed as if he remembered a story against himself.

  Just then the clouds broke. Circles of amber brightness travelled towards us over the mudflats and broadened out, and we were suddenly in full sunshine, and quite warm. We were surprised, but Mr. Tiffen told us, “It often gets hot like this down here, even in the wintertime; the coastline runs all twisted here, and the way this bay lies the sea wall shelters you from the east wind. Why, it wasn’t long ago, we were right into November, that I came down here and found a great seal sunning himself in that channel over there. The punt was here, and he was over there, sitting up against the bank as if it was his own armchair. I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve never shot a seal and now I’m going to get one,’ and I had my shotgun lying down here at the foot of the wall, and I came back and fetched it, and I was creeping up on him when he looked round at me and started shaking his head. You know, moved it from side to side, the way old people do when they’re just sitting and are comfortable. Like this.” Mr. Tiffen made a movement which brought before the mind’s eye all the seals in zoos and circuses that look like old gentlemen, all the old gentlemen that look like seals. “After that I couldn’t shoot him. I hadn’t the heart to take his life. Not after he’d looked round at me and shook his head that way. I lowered my gun and let him be.” His face deeply creased with smiling tenderness, Mr. Tiffen looked round at his marshes, his sky. “It was a nice day, just like this,” he said.