The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  We talked of inconsequential things as we walked around the park, and I became more conscious of what Penny was not saying than of what she was. She might have still been considering my brother’s offer of marriage——assuming he had had the good manners to ask rather than to take the matter for granted. It had already occurred to me that she might have wanted to see me this weekend to tell me so. I could have told her of my own continuing love, except I wasn’t sure how sincere I could have made it sound. And, given her nature, it was possible such a declaration would have the unwanted effect of pushing her into a precipitate decision. One I wouldn’t like. Despite a reputation for selfishness——of which I’m sure my mother had spent the war reminding Penny——I actually wanted the best for her, and for her decision to be her own. I was well aware that George and my mother would be lobbying for her to divorce me, but I could do little about that. All I could do, I realized, was to let her see what kind of man I was now and allow her to make her decision based on that.

  We came out of the park by Victoria’s statue in front of Buckingham Palace. Guardsmen stood at the gate resplendent in red tunics and busbies as if nothing had changed. The palace had been hit during an air raid although the damage hadn’t been extensive. I hadn’t been in London on VE day, of course, when the crowds had gathered outside the palace gates and the Royal Family and Churchill had waved at them from the balcony. I’d seen the newsreels of it later while in Berlin, and had wondered at the time if Penny had been in the crowd. I’d like to have been there myself——to have experienced that great wave of euphoria——of happiness and satisfaction, joy and hope——which even so must have been tempered by a sense of regret and sadness at the human cost of it all. Not to mention a sense of trepidation for what the future might hold. This last feeling I had experienced myself while watching the film of the celebrations, wondering what would happen now.

  As she had always seemed able to do, Penny read my thoughts.

  ‘Have you any idea what you’re going to do, Harry?’

  ‘What, the flat you mean?’ I asked, obfuscating while knowing exactly what she meant. ‘When they pull down the building?’

  ‘That, yes, but I mean after. Or were you planning to stay in the army?’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t think they’ll want me. We’ll have to keep troops stationed in Germany I suppose, to keep the Russians out. And I imagine there’ll be a bigger standing army than we had before the war. But I can’t see them letting me stay in. Not and keep my commission at any rate. It would be back to the ranks for me and I don’t think I’d like that.’

  ‘Now you’ve tasted power, you mean?’ She may have been teasing but it was not without having an edge to her voice.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said a little stiffly.

  ‘Back to the police then?’

  ‘Same thing would apply. Would you want to be married to a beat policeman again?’

  ‘After everything that’s happened?’

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the war or what had happened to us while we’d been apart.

  Walking north, Penny slipped her hand into mine. We didn’t speak for some time. We found a tea room open and shared a pot and a slice of cake. When we finished I asked her if she would like to do something else or go home.

  ‘I’d like a drink, actually,’ she said.

  ‘The pubs won’t be open for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Don’t you have anything in the flat?’

  ‘Some gin,’ I said.

  ‘That’ll do.’

  *

  I felt an odd sense of trepidation, trying not to take things for granted like my brother George.

  ‘Where does Ida live?’ Penny asked when we reached my floor. I gestured to Ida’s door and Penny put a playful finger to her lips as we passed.

  In the flat her eyes wandered around at the meagre rooms as if she was mentally totting up what my life had amounted to.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ I said. ‘Places aren’t that easy to get.’

  ‘Didn’t your pay go up when you were promoted?’

  ‘Even so...’

  I took the bottle of gin from the kitchen cupboard. It was half full, mainly because I didn’t like gin without a mixer and I never seemed to have any mixers.

  ‘The money you send me...’ began Penny. ‘I don’t spend it.’

  ‘Why not? That’s what it’s for.’

  ‘It’s mounting up. If you want it back...,’

  I took two relatively clean glasses out of the sink and gave them a wipe. Penny sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘Leave it for now,’ I said.

  I poured gin into the glasses and Penny picked hers up, raising it towards me.

  ‘What shall we drink to?’

  ‘Better times,’ I said.

  ‘Better times,’ she echoed and knocked it back in one, shivering slightly and grimacing.

  I recalled our wedding night when, both nervous, we had sat in our room above a pub in Devon after the train journey down from London. There had been some talk——grudgingly expressed as I remember——of Penny’s father paying for us to go to France for our honeymoon. Perhaps at the Château de Hêtres although I don’t remember. In any case, I wasn’t going to be beholden to Reggie Forster, so we’d taken a room in a pub in North Devon. We’d arrived after an uncomfortable train journey and discovered we were suddenly shy with each other. I’d had some limited experience but was still unsure as to whether Penny was a virgin or not. We had held back during our brief courtship, not through any lack of desire but more from the want of somewhere decent to express it. My digs were out, as was Penny’s parents’ house. And Julia made sure she never gave us the opportunity at her place. We could always have taken a cheap hotel room, I suppose, although——inexplicable to me now——at the time both of us had wanted more for each other than that. Overtaken by the moment, we had often gone as far as possible wherever we had happened to be, and so once at the pub in Devon it seemed odd to find ourselves so unaccountably nervous.

  That room with its creaking floorboards and awkward sloping ceiling couldn’t have differed much from a cheap hotel, I suppose, but by then we were married and it no longer seemed to matter. We had bought a half-bottle of brandy in the bar below and drank most of it before we had settled our nerves. Then, after that first halting coming together it became difficult to keep us apart. For the week we were there we rarely left the room, except to eat and take the occasional breath of fresh air.

  Now we were back in a room cheaper than either of us could have imagined and I was nervous again. Only this time it was because I was unsure of Penny’s intentions. She took a second glass of gin, shivered less and managed not to grimace.

  ‘Not as good as the brandy,’ she said, managing once more to read my thoughts.

  ‘No.’

  She stood up and looked out over the kitchen sink at the rubble beyond the window.

  ‘I thought I needed to get drunk but I don’t.’ She came over to where I sat. ‘Can we try again, Harry, or is it too late for us?’

  I pulled her towards me, my voice muffled against the softness of her breasts. ‘I’ve never thought it was too late.’

  *

  About eight o’clock we got up and went out for something to eat. Penny had lunched at the Savoy but I’d had nothing since the powdered eggs I’d eaten for breakfast. We went to a small place I knew that served a decent meal despite the shortages and didn’t care that we weren’t dressed for a Sunday evening. That sort of thing didn’t seem to matter as much as it had before the war; social standards along with many people’s morals had slipped in the intervening years. Maybe both would come back one day although, till then, people seemed to be making the most of their absence. We ate and afterwards I took out two cigarettes and lit them, passing her one. She grimaced again but was laughing now as well.

  ‘It’s not one of those horrible Capstans, is it?’

  ‘No. There’s nothing to these, just like fresh air... Well, fre
sher than London air anyway.’

  ‘Tastes cheap,’ she said, inhaling.

  ‘That’s their selling point.’

  ‘If it’s so bad why do you stay?’ she asked.

  ‘If what’s so bad?’

  ‘London air.’

  ‘It’s where I work. I’m still in the army, remember? I can’t do much else till they let me go.’

  ‘Have you applied to be demobbed?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I was co-opted into Jekyll’s section. Anyway, I still don’t know what I’m going to do yet.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  When I was younger and trying to decide on a career, unlike most people who didn’t have the luxury of choice, I had disappointed those around me by choosing something they thought inappropriate. It hadn’t worried me at the time as I’d always thought that if I hadn’t joined the police I would never have met Penny.

  Of course, voluntarily joining the army had been another matter.

  ‘Something will turn up,’ I said.

  ‘And what about us?’

  ‘We can live on what I earn.’

  ‘In that flat of yours?’

  ‘No. They’ve decided to pull it down so I’ll have to find something else. Something better this time, I promise. I’ll start looking straight away.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘I’m sure Julia will be pleased to have you if you don’t want to live at the flat.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘I can’t imagine even Julia would be willing to take her as well.’

  ‘You know that’s not what I mean,’ she said.

  ‘Telephone her,’ I suggested. ‘Tell her you’re not coming back.’

  ‘And George?’

  ‘Tell him, too.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you if you like,’ I offered.

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’d just as soon not talk to them at all. But they’ll have to know sooner or later.’

  ‘Later, then,’ said Penny. ‘Let’s keep it between ourselves for now.’

  ‘If that’s what you want. But you’d better ring Julia and tell her you won’t be back tonight.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Penny. ‘I’ll have to go back.’

  I was about to insist but the memory of how our disagreements had a habit of escalating into fights stopped me. I looked at my watch. It was already past ten.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you want to be back by midnight we’d better get started.’

  ‘It’s not that late already, surely?’ she said.

  ‘No, but you remember how I always liked to get to bed early on Sundays,’ I said. ‘And if I’ve got to get up again to take you home we’d best turn in now.’

  ‘Harry!’

  *

  It was almost midnight by the time I got Penny back to Julia’s house. I said goodnight at the door then saw a taxi pull up at the kerb. Julia and Tuchman climbed out, Julia saying goodnight to Tuchman then hello to me.

  ‘Have you and Penny settled things?’ she asked, looking through her handbag for her keys.

  ‘We’ve made a start,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, Harry. That girl deserves some happiness.’

  I doubted Julia and I would agree on what might or might not make Penny happy, but decided it was up to Penny to break the news to her. I said goodnight and raised a hand to Tuchman, who was still waiting by the taxi.

  ‘Can I drop you anywhere?’ he asked.

  ‘Only if it’s no trouble.’

  We got into the taxi and Tuchman waved the driver on.

  ‘I’m glad I ran into you, Harry. As a matter of fact I’ve been meaning to have a word. What about a nightcap before you turn in?’

  The taxi turned into Belgrave Place and crossed the square towards Hyde Park Corner. We went through Piccadilly and five minutes later were in Wardour Street, not far from the club we had visited the previous evening. Tuchman signalled the driver to stop. It was Sunday night and everything looked closed, but a dim light shone over a basement door across the road and Tuchman led me down the few steps. There was no number or sign but Tuchman knocked and the door opened. A man in a dinner jacket greeted him by name.

  Perhaps Tuchman was used to clandestine bars from the Prohibition years in America although inside I found no riotous party, just a smoky basement with a few comfortable chairs and small tables. The walls were decorated with cartoons from sporting magazines and photographs of sportsmen——boxers mostly. I recognized Bombardier Billy Wells in the classic fighting pose, fists up and looking up and under at the camera.

  The man in the dinner jacket gave Tuchman a pen and he signed the book that lay on a table.

  ‘For guests,’ he explained. ‘Handy place if you want a drink out of hours.’

  I’d seen few drinking clubs while in the police before the war although I didn’t know this particular one. Mostly, drinking clubs was all they were. Others might offer gambling, and in some you could order a girl along with your whisky and soda——not on the premises usually, but at an address on a note slipped beneath the coaster of the drink you were served.

  Tuchman chose a table in a corner away from the other drinkers and ordered a scotch and soda from the waiter. I asked for a glass of beer, dry from an evening of unaccustomed exertion.

  ‘The thing is Harry,’ he began once our drinks arrived, ‘I’ve kind of got myself into a ticklish situation.’

  My first thought was that he was married, having a little fun on the side whilst in London, and had somehow compromised himself with Julia. But that wasn’t what he said.

  ‘Back in civilian life I’m a lawyer. When the war came along I was with a New York firm.’

  He made the war sound like a bus he’d been waiting for.

  ‘Did you volunteer?’

  ‘It seemed the right thing to do at the time.’

  ‘At the time?’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Harry. I’ve no regrets on that score.’ He raised his glass and peered at the scotch as if he might find a goldfish swimming there. ‘I came over in forty-three. I went through France with Patton. When we got to Germany we found the concentration camps. You see any of those places, Harry?’

  ‘Dachau,’ I said. ‘I happened to be with one of your units at the time. We got there a couple of days after it had been liberated. What I saw was bad enough.’

  Tuchman nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid a few of our men lost their heads at Dachau. Some of the guards still there were shot out of hand. It shouldn’t have happened but given what they found it’s difficult to blame them.’

  I didn’t blame them at all. The stench of the place had been difficult to get out of my nostrils. Unlike anything else I’d ever experienced, the smell had a habit of coming back to me for months afterwards, bringing with it images, like photographs, each one seared into my brain. I remember a siding with railway trucks parked up and left, the living having been locked inside and abandoned to die of thirst and suffocation. The Americans were still burying their emaciated bodies when I first saw them——men and women like twigs with barely enough flesh on their bodies to cover their bones. Someone had had the idea of rounding up the local civilians to show them exactly what bestial depths their blessed Füehrer had reduced the German nation to. They’d been handled roughly but at least they’d lived. Not like the camp guards who hadn’t managed to get away.

  ‘We’d heard the rumours, of course,’ Tuchman continued, ‘but nothing prepares you for sights like that. I don’t know if it was worse, my being Jewish. I guess probably not.’

  He looked across the table at me, perhaps wondering if I might have a point of view on the matter. I didn’t say anything and he went on:

  ‘Are you familiar with The United Nations and the War Crimes Commission? The organization hasn’t been
formally established yet but it’ll be structured along the lines of the old League of Nations. This time with some teeth hopefully.’

  ‘I’ve heard about it,’ I said, not bothering to add that I suspected it wouldn’t turn out to be any more effective than the League of Nations had been.

  ‘The objective of the Commission is to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its allies. But perhaps that goes without saying. Much the same sort of work as you do, I imagine. Only we have a wider remit. Well, you know the score.’

  I did, but I was surprised that Tuchman knew I did. Penny had a vague idea of what my job entailed and I supposed it was she who had told him.

  ‘Penny told me you were attached to the State Department,’ I said.

  ‘Justice Department, actually. I was obliged to join them before I could be co-opted into the War Crimes Commission. It’s what I tell people if I’m asked what I do.’

  ‘It must make things simpler.’

  ‘As I understand it, Harry, your area is solely military. The Nazi extermination programme cast a wider net than that, of course. The Party created a vast organization. A complete bureaucratic machine.’

  He smiled although I couldn’t see where the humour lay in what he was saying.

  ‘And fortunately for us they were wonderful record-keepers. What is it about the Germans, Harry? Something in their psyche that makes them so punctilious and ordered? What do you think?’

  I didn’t know what to think. I had never known. It had become plain to me right from the start of my section’s investigations that if one could get hold of the huge array of files and records kept by both the German civilian and military authorities, there was rarely any need to seek further evidence. They convicted themselves through their meticulous book-keeping.

  ‘Well,’ I said, as Tuchman seemed to be waiting for some sort of opinion, ‘it seems to me that after they passed the necessary laws in the thirties for what they intended to do——the racial purity laws and the like——they gave their actions a semblance of legality.’ I paused, staring into my glass for the words to express what I wanted to say. ‘No, more than a semblance. It was legal. From their point of view. Not morally justifiable, of course, but technically legal. Perhaps that’s why they felt bound to keep records when later, no matter how outrageous became the things they did in the name of their ideology, they could always refer back to their laws. Perhaps they thought that was enough to persuade the German population that everything they did was legal. Persuade themselves, too, perhaps.’ I shrugged, trying to explain what, until then, had been no more than vague concepts. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps keeping a legal framework and records became an extension of the process. Even though what they were doing was reprehensible, by their lights it was nonetheless legal.’