The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  I had been thinking it would be more fun to take Penny to the pictures. The new Hitchcock film, Notorious, was playing and Penny had always liked Cary Grant. Besides, sitting in the cinema precluded conversation and might have prevented us from saying things we’d later regret. Julia and Tuchman being with us might serve the same purpose although I thought I could smell a plot. Not one likely to be as well-constructed as Hitchcock’s perhaps, and, unlike those in the pictures, one it was difficult to see having a happy ending.

  ‘If that’s what Penny wants to do,’ I said. ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘Seven, then. Ida worked out all right, did she?’

  ‘Yes, Harry, I’m sure she’s going to be fine. Unfortunately she told Penny how I found her.’

  ‘Why “unfortunately”?’

  ‘Because you found her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Oh, Harry,’ Julia sighed with irritation. ‘We’ll see you at seven o’clock,’ and rang off.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon browsing through some of the west-end shops. If Penny was up for the weekend I decided it couldn’t hurt to look my best. My army uniform was getting a bit shabby and it would only be a reminder, if she needed one, that I’d been missing for the past few years.

  I might have found a costumiers and hired a police constable’s uniform for the weekend. But perhaps that would have been seen as trying too hard. The last thing I wanted was to appear obvious.

  *

  According to Julia the club hadn’t been open long. A dimly lit basement smelling of fresh distemper and damp, it boasted a dozen tables, a band and a small dance floor. They were playing the Charlie Barnet favourite Skyliner as we walked in but the band’s brass line was too thin and lacked the necessary impact. On the other hand, glancing through the menu it was obvious the place must have a black-market supply of food. What was on offer could only have looked good to Londoners starved of anything other than Spam and carrots for the last six years. I suppose being in the army Tuchman and I had fared better than those at home, although judging by the way he grappled with his slice of beef when it arrived, Tuchman was probably more used to having his meat separated from its leather hide before being served. But he didn’t complain. Nor enquire, I happened to notice, whether the meat was kosher when he ordered. Not that I had any reason to suppose him to be Orthodox, or even practising, which at least gave Julia some room to manoeuvre. I caught Penny’s eye as the meal was served as we had once been attuned to that sort of thing, on occasions often able to tell what the other was thinking. She avoided looking at me now, however. I suppose had this been a Hitchcock film, the camera would have moved in for a close-up at that point and everyone would have been able to tell the moment had significance. But it all went over my head for a while longer.

  I believe Tuchman sensed something was up and, rather than make him feel uncomfortable, the situation seemed to afford him some wry amusement. All part of our British quaintness, perhaps. But finally, when it became obvious even to me, rusty as I was, that Penny had some sort of grievance, I guessed that we were out with Julia and Tuchman so that Penny and I would not have to be alone together. Even then, while Julia was very fond of Penny, I doubted she would have been willing to ruin her evening with Tuchman just to rescue Penny or spite me, so I gathered there was more afoot than my usual run-of-the-mill differences with my wife.

  We had finished dinner and ordered another drink when Tuchman suddenly sat upright and stared at Julia as if she had just kicked him under the table.

  ‘Penny,’ he said with admirable aplomb, ‘would you like to dance?’

  They excused themselves and glided across the empty dance floor to the strains of Irvine Berlin’s Just the Way You Look Tonight. Tuchman was a good dancer, I noted, although I wouldn’t have expected anything else. I nodded in their direction.

  ‘Shall we?’ I asked Julia.

  She regarded me sourly. ‘Hardly Harry. I remember what a rotten dancer you were. I don’t suppose you’ve improved.’

  ‘Not much opportunity,’ I replied, although I recalled there had been the odd club or two in Berlin where a brief shuffle around the dance floor was the usual prelude to other diversions. I toyed with the stem of my wine glass for a moment then said, ‘Is there something up?’

  ‘Well of course there is,’ Julia said. ‘What do you expect?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ I told her.

  That brought another disdainful look.

  ‘For an ex-policeman you’ve always been oddly deficient in them. Ida?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Did you really think it was a good idea to suggest I employ one of your girls? I mean, if I hadn’t been desperate I wouldn’t have considered it. To be honest,’ she added, flicking cigarette ash carelessly on the tablecloth, ‘it never crossed my mind you’d be quite so callous. Not until Penny told me you’re supposed to be looking for her brother...’

  I began to laugh. Julia became indignant.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Ida? You seriously thought——’

  ‘I fail to see what’s so funny,’ she snapped. ‘She’s a very pretty girl. Or would be if she dressed properly.’

  I watched Penny and Tuchman on the dance floor. Having broken the ice they’d now been joined by two or three other couples. I stood up, dropped my serviette on the table, and crossed the floor. I tapped Tuchman on the shoulder.

  ‘May I?’

  Penny glowered at me but was too well-bred to make a scene. Tuchman grinned. I put my arm around Penny’s waist and took her hand, promptly leading off with the wrong foot. She winced.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You still haven’t learnt to dance,’ she complained.

  ‘I haven’t had the opportunity to practise,’ I said.

  She muttered something and gazed over my shoulder.

  ‘For someone who said they needed to see me,’ I said, ‘you’ve not got much to say for yourself.’

  ‘Are you surprised?’

  ‘Nothing surprises me anymore, Penny. Julia just told me you’ve taken exception to Ida.’

  She made to pull away from me but I held her firmly. We stumbled through a few more steps before she said:

  ‘Well? She’s the one with the missing brother isn’t she?’

  ‘If you remember,’ I said with overt patience, ‘that woman was Irish. Even the tone deaf couldn’t mistake Ida’s accent for Irish. This one was engaged to one of the other men killed in the carrier. She married someone else who, it turns out, knocks her around. Stan, one of my men, paid him back in kind. Ida left her husband and turned up here.’

  ‘She told me she’d moved in next to you,’ Penny replied sullenly.

  ‘That was Stan’s idea, not mine. She had nowhere else to go. The only reason there’s room in my building is that the place is falling down.’

  ‘So she’s with this Stan, is she?’

  ‘I’m sure Stan would like to think so. But he’s old enough to be her father.’

  ‘You found her a job,’ she said, managing to make what had been an altruistic act sound more like a criminal one.

  ‘Julia needed help and Ida needed work. As simple as that.’

  Julia and Tuchman whirled past us.

  ‘He seems like a nice chap,’ I said.

  ‘Julia’s very fond of him.’

  ‘I hope he hasn’t got a wife and family back home. What does he do?’

  ‘He’s attached to the US State Department or something. He’s a colonel, actually.’

  ‘Perhaps I should salute next time they pass.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

  To change the subject I said Julia had told me Helen and Reggie were coming home.

  Three months into our marriage I came to the conclusion I couldn’t keep referring to them as Mr and Mrs Forster. I didn’t care to call them mum and dad any more than they would have wanted me to, so in the end I settled for their Chri
stian names. They didn’t care much for that, either, but fortunately I never saw that much of them.

  ‘I’d like to see your father’s face when Julia introduces Tuchman to him,’ I said to Penny.

  ‘Why?’ Then she realized what I meant. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose they think that way anymore. Not after everything that’s happened. Not when you realize what having those attitudes led to.’

  Everyone had seen the newsreels of the Nazi concentration camps playing in the cinemas at the end of the war. There had always been rumours about what the Nazi government had been doing to the Jews and those who had opposed them, but it took seeing film of the atrocities to bring it home. It was still news now, what with the war crimes trials dragging on and with executions scheduled.

  But instead of pressing the point, I said something conciliatory to Penny about her parents. Conversation between us had become like crossing a frozen pond. It paid to watch out for thin ice rather than charge ahead heedlessly as I used to be in the habit of doing. I’d got into deep water so often before that now I had learned to tread carefully.

  The band segued from a waltz into In The Mood and some of the couples around us began to jitterbug or jive, or whatever they were calling it now. Any attempt at the dance on my part generally resembled all-in wrestling and usually resulted in a tangle of twisted limbs. Penny, knowing me of old, turned back to our table. We passed Julia and Tuchman who were throwing themselves into the dance like a pair of adolescents.

  ‘Was Ben at the house the other week when you went to the theatre?’ I asked as we sat down.

  ‘No, he met us there. Why?’

  ‘I don’t remember seeing him, that’s all. As it happens I was talking to Maurice Coveney. I had no idea he was an old friend of your parents. You’ve never mentioned him to me before.’

  ‘Uncle Maurice? Of course I have. You’ve met him, surely.’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Well, I’ve certainly spoken of him. He married Aunt Louise after her first husband died. I never knew him, of course. He was killed in the first war. They’d only been married a few months.’

  I had to admit that “Aunt Louise” had a familiar ring to it.

  ‘Was she the French one?’

  ‘Yes. You see? She was Mummy’s best friend at school.’

  It came back to me then. Mainly because at the time there had been some lascivious story about Penny’s mother, Helen, and the brother of her school friend. I’d found it difficult to believe at first. I couldn’t remember how the subject had come up——some off-hand remark I had made to Penny about her straight-laced mother probably. I was not as careful then about skirting thin ice. Penny had taken exception to the remark, I seemed to recall, and to demonstrate how wrong I was about her mother told me the story about how when Helen was a girl before the First War, spending her summers in France at the home of a school friend, she had had an affair with the friend’s elder brother. They had been in love, Penny assured me and it was assumed they would marry, although they had never been officially engaged. The boy had volunteered at the start of the war and shortly afterwards had been posted as missing, presumed dead. After several months Helen met Reggie Forster and married him. It was more than a year before she learned that her friend’s brother was alive and in a German POW camp and by then Penny had been born.

  To look at the prim and proper Helen I knew, the story was difficult to believe. But Penny had got it from Julia who had known about the affair at the time. Penny, of course, swore me to secrecy on pain of exclusion from the marital bed.

  ‘I still can’t believe you’ve never met him,’ Penny insisted.

  ‘Coveney? Well, I haven’t. I only mention it now because when I met him that evening I thought he was interested in you.’

  ‘Interested in me? You don’t mean—— Don’t be ridiculous, Harry! Sometimes you can be so dense,’ and she began to laugh.

  ‘I jumped to a wrong conclusion,’ I said.

  Her laughter began to fade. ‘What you mean is that now I’m the one who’s jumped to a conclusion.’

  ‘But I would never have called you dense,’ I said. ‘Were you jealous?’

  ‘No!’ she protested. Then looked at me sheepishly. ‘Well, all right, just a little bit perhaps.’

  There was more that could have been said, but with thin ice all around I decided to leave it at that.

  ‘I’ll be nice to Ida,’ Penny promised. ‘But not to the other one, the Irish one.’

  ‘Rose? It turns out the fellow wasn’t her brother after all, and that they were both mixed up in the IRA. So I doubt I’ll be seeing her again.’

  ‘Just as well by the sound of it,’ said Penny. Then she rounded on me as she remembered something. ‘I wrote to you about Aunt Louise being killed in an air raid so I know I’ve told you about the Coveneys.’

  ‘Did you?’

  I honestly couldn’t remember. I may have been told although letters had a habit of going astray overseas.

  ‘Mummy wanted Aunt Louise to stay with them in Connecticut. At least while the bombing was on. Uncle Maurice couldn’t leave because of his work at the Foreign Office and Aunt Louise wouldn’t go without him. Mummy was devastated when we wrote to tell her auntie had been killed in a raid. They had been friends since they were girls.’

  ‘Who were friends?’ Julia asked, a little breathlessly and catching the end of the conversation as she and Tuchman returned to the table.

  ‘Mummy and Aunt Louise,’ said Penny. ‘I was telling Harry that Mummy used to spend her summers at their château in France.’

  ‘I used to be so envious,’ Julia said to Tuchman. ‘They said I was too young to go. Then the war started and Helen married. My first visit wasn’t until Marie-Louise and Maurice were married. You were still a child, Penny, so I don’t suppose you remember.’

  ‘Not then,’ said Penny.

  ‘It was a lovely old house,’ said Julia. ‘Maurice told me it was all but destroyed during the invasion. Such a shame. It stood at the end of a long wooded drive and was named for the beech wood it stood in.’

  My throat constricted. ‘Whereabouts in France?’ I croaked.

  ‘Normandy. Near Caen. The Château de Hêtres.

  21

  ‘Hêtres is French for beech trees, of course,’ Julia prattled on as my glass went over, red wine spilling across the tablecloth.

  I began dabbing at the spreading stain with a napkin.

  Penny glared at me. ‘You’re so clumsy.’

  Tuchman righted the glass and refilled it from the bottle. I picked it up and took a long pull at the wine, the hairs standing on the back of my head.

  ‘What did you say the house was called?’ I said to Julia.

  ‘The Château de Hêtres. Such a shame. Of course Claude, Marie-Louise’s brother, had inherited the estate after their parents died. Though he lived in Paris mostly. He was killed during the invasion.’

  I became aware that Penny was watching me and put a hand over hers.

  ‘Life can be so unfair,’ Julia went on. ‘The war taking both Claude and poor Marie-Louise. Didn’t Maurice have to identify his body?’ she asked Penny.

  Penny, still alert to my reaction, glanced at Julia.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Identified who?’

  ‘Maurice,’ Julia repeated. ‘He identified Claude’s body.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. But that was a long time after, surely...’

  ‘Claude and Marie-Louise were the last of their line,’ said Julia. ‘Well, except for Jeremy, I suppose.’

  I asked who Jeremy was.

  Julia lit another cigarette, inhaling deeply before blowing a stream of smoke to one side of the table.

  ‘Maurice and Marie-Louise’s son. I dare say he’s inherited the estate now. What’s left of it, if there is anything. There was no land apart from the house as far as I know. Nothing that might provide any income.’

  ‘It’s going to be a while before farming can start again,’ Tuchman sta
ted with what wasn’t quite a non sequitur. ‘They’ll have to clear the ordnance first.’

  ‘What’s ordnance?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Bombs,’ I said. ‘Ben means the unexploded variety.’

  ‘He’ll sell, I suppose,’ Penny said.

  Julia agreed with a murmur. ‘You know your mother was quite sweet on Claude once. Before she married your father, of course.’

  Penny glanced at me. I knew she was thinking of the story she’d told me about Helen’s affair, worried probably that I might say something and let Julia know that I knew.

  ‘Your father and Claude became great chums, of course,’ Julia went on. ‘Although Marie-Louise did once tell me that Helen was the reason her brother never married.’ She flicked ash towards the ashtray, adding with a wry smile, ‘Actually I’m not sure how true that was. Claude had something of a reputation as a ladies’ man, you know. He propositioned me once.’

  ‘Well if he couldn’t have one sister...,’ I suggested.

  Penny elbowed me forcefully.

  I winced. ‘Did they keep in touch with Claude once the war had started?’

  ‘I don’t see how they could,’ Penny said. ‘Not with France occupied by the Germans.’

  ‘She could write from America. Until they entered the war, anyway,’ said Julia. ‘Wasn’t it your mother who told Claude that Marie-Louise had been killed? When was that... nineteen forty-one?’

  ‘March,’ said Penny.

  ‘Well, there you are. That was a long time before America came in.’ She laid her hand on top of Tuchman’s as if to demonstrate that it was a question of historical fact, not an aspersion upon America’s tardiness. ‘There was nothing to stop anyone in America corresponding with France, surely? Not if they were neutral at the time.’

  ‘None at all,’ said Tuchman who’d said nothing since his comment on ordnance.

  ‘But that wouldn’t be right,’ said Penny, as if it was a question of loyalty. ‘Mummy wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Your father would,’ I said, regretting the remark as soon as I voiced it.

  Penny glared at me.

  ‘We’re getting a reputation as Johnny-come-latelys,’ Tuchman intervened, smiling as he said it, although I got the impression he was less than comfortable with the subject.