Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Old Quarter ·
The Mutes Wait First
An assistant recounts eleven funerals where the same four hired mutes stood posted at the house door before any family had telephoned anyone.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Harold Pike, undertaker's assistant"
I assist at the undertaker's on Rope Walk in the Old Quarter, and the fact I have been asked to set down is this: for four years the same four hired mutes have taken their places outside the house before the family has called anyone at all, always the same four men, and the hire sheets are in order, and the office will not stand behind the order.
A mute is a hired man in a black band and gloves who stands at the door of the house of mourning and says nothing. The trade has done it this way longer than the firm's own ledger, and the firm's ledger goes back past the flood maps. For removals in the Old Quarter we hire through the trade office by telephone. A clerk reads the names off the card index, and the men are paid in cash against the sheet, initialled at the door.
The first occasion I can date it from: a call came in at twenty past nine for a two o'clock removal in Salmon Lane. At ten past ten I went ahead to measure the hall and book the bearers, and there they stood, four men, gloves and bands, posted either side of the door, still as the railings by the pier. A woman at the flat across told me they had come while the light was still grey, which is hours before the call, and before the office opens. I have counted the occasions since. Eleven in four years, and every time the same: posted before the call, whatever the weather. I will not swear the bands stayed dry in the rain; I only say nobody offered them shelter and none was taken.
They are always the same four, and I will give the names because the sheet gives them: R. Callow, F. Meek, T. Soames, W. Tibbet. The cards are in the trade office index, written up years before I came to the firm. But the labour master says he has not telephoned those four numbers once in his time, and when I asked how men get hired without a call he looked at my sheet a while and said the typing is not the office's. The cashier, for his part, cannot find any float drawn against those four names in the cash book, and yet their fee is always entered, receipted and initialled, under a float code he tells me was retired before 1980.
The families take it the other way round. When the door opens, they suppose the firm sent word along ahead. The firm supposes the family asked for standing men, as Quarter families have been known to do. Each side has waited on the other's word, and both deny giving it, and the four men, who were sent by neither, wait on neither and speak to nobody. I asked the tall one, Meek, once, on the third occasion, who had sent them. He looked at the door rather than at me and said, the house did, it asked by name. I have not asked again. The sheet has columns, and that answer has none.
The removals themselves are entirely proper. Times are kept, bearers are booked, the certificates come through in the ordinary way, and the men neither speak nor stir unless a neighbour speaks to them, which nobody does twice. That is possibly the part that keeps me at it: nothing to point at, nothing out of order, only the order arriving early, standing patient on the step in the right gloves.
So it is disputed, and will stay so. The cashier will not initial my sheets, the labour master says the cards are old stock, and the families, who saw the men plain enough, have better things to remember after a decent interval. What neither office will take up, though the sheets keep offering it line after line, is a small plain question: who ran a hire list for a house that had not yet telephoned, and paid it, and ruled it off neat, eleven times in four years?