The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  His mother came back a few minutes later, pushing past them with a battered tray and tea things. She put them on the table then looked down at the boy, saying he wasn’t to be cheeky to the officer and gave him a casual clip round the ear on account. Then she told him to bugger off across the road. He gave her a shrug and with a last look in my direction wandered out. Mrs Burleigh poured the tea, passed me a chipped cup and took hers to the other chair. Settled, she hauled the girl onto her lap, wiped her nose with the hem of her housecoat, then looked expectantly at me.

  She had a broad, fleshy face with lifeless skin and pale, almost colourless hair. It looked to have been cut round a basin and reminded me of a German helmet. Judging from the age of the children I supposed she might have been in her thirties but looked closer to fifty. I told her how sorry I was for the loss of her husband and asked if she was receiving her widow’s pension from the army and if she was managing. She barely was, of course, but I hadn’t expected anything else. I asked if she had been sent any of her husband’s personal belongings. She shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t suppose there was any,’ she said.

  I said that under the circumstances, with his battalion in action, anything Robert had left was probably mislaid.

  ‘Nicked, more like,’ she responded, looking at me.

  ‘Your husband was part of a carrier crew,’ I said. ‘They were all killed, although the body of William Kearney was never found.’

  ‘He was Bob’s sergeant, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. Did he ever speak of him?’

  ‘Only to say he was an Irish bastard. Not that Bob had anything against the Irish. He wasn’t bothered who he served with.’

  ‘You never met any of his army friends, I suppose?’

  ‘What, Bob bring people ‘ere?’ She laughed. ‘Not likely. Besides, ‘e ‘ad enough of ‘em in the army. Wasn’t goin’ t’spend his leave with ‘em, too.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said, and smiled at the very thought of it. ‘So he never told you anything much about his colleagues?’

  ‘He said the one called Poole was a bit of a bugger.’

  ‘Arnold Poole? In what way was he a bugger?’ I tried to look sympathetic, hoping she didn’t mean literally.

  ‘Throwin’ ‘is weight around, mostly, bein’ a corporal. Miserable so-an’-so, Bob said. But then, you couldn’t blame ‘im, could you? Lost ‘is wife and kiddies to a doodlebug. Thing like that’s enough to get on top of anyone.’

  I looked through my notes but there was no mention of Arnold Poole’s family having been killed.

  ‘Do you know when that happened exactly?’

  ‘Exactly? No, I don’t. Sometime in forty-four it was.’ The girl started struggling and Edna Burleigh put her on the ground and she ran out the door. ‘How come all the interest in my Bob all of a sudden? Been dead two years.’

  ‘Trying to tie up loose ends,’ I said.

  I was about to ask if her husband had spoken French when she said:

  ‘Because of the grave, is it?’

  ‘The grave?’

  ‘Like the other officer said. From the Graves Commission, ‘e said ‘e was.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I told her. ‘We’re a different department.’

  ‘Cause ‘e wanted to know about this Kearney, too. Not that I could tell ‘im much.’

  ‘When was it he spoke to you?’

  ‘Couple of days ago. Thursday, it was.’

  ‘Did he give you a name?’

  ‘Hendrix. Major Hendrix.’

  I asked her a few more questions and she gave me a photograph of her husband she found after rummaging in the drawer of an old chipped dresser.

  ‘You can ‘ave that one. I got others to remember ‘im by.’

  I took it, then on impulse gave her ten shillings to buy some sweets for the children. I didn’t suppose she had much money to spare to spend on her sweet ration. She looked at the note warily for a second. ‘For the children,’ I said again and she slipped it into the pocket of her housecoat.

  *

  I treated myself to lunch in a greasy cafe by the docks, a gristly sausage and fried slice. The tea tasted as if they’d brewed it up on VE day and left it to stew and the whole plateful sat in my stomach all the way back to Clerkenwell. I kept telling myself that the bright side was I’d saved on ration coupons and it worked until I got as far the station lavatory and threw the lot up into the stained pan. I wiped my mouth and dabbed at the sweat running down my face and trudged back to the flat. I lay down on the bed waiting for the first signs of food poisoning, then fell asleep before they came. When I woke I felt better. I heated up enough water for a shallow bath and took out some fresh clothes. By six o’clock I was feeling so bright I telephoned Aunt Julia.

  5

  June 15th

  ‘Who’s this?’ Julia demanded when she finally answered the phone. There was a buzz of conversation and the sound of music in the background. She had to raise her voice above the noise.

  ‘Harry,’ I said. Then, just to rub it in, ‘Your nephew by marriage.’

  ‘But for how much longer, Harry?’ was her reply.

  ‘Is Penny there?’

  ‘Somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘Having a party?’

  ‘Just a few drinks with friends before the theatre. Sorry, but I could only get a half-dozen tickets.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘If you remember I always preferred the pictures.’

  My using the common idiom for the cinema was one of the things about me that had always irritated Julia. The pictures, or the movies was what ordinary people called cinema. And besides, Julia would only watch a film if it had a cultural pedigree. Snobbish, I’d always thought, given the sort of theatrical fluff her beloved West End had been in the habit of putting on before the war.

  ‘If you want to see her,’ she suggested unexpectedly, ‘you’d better come round and have a drink before we leave. But be quick or you’ll miss us.’

  The invitation aside, what struck me most about the conversation was that Julia was answering her own telephone, and her unorthodox manner in doing so. She had told me when I had seen her after getting back to London that she was having trouble finding servants, but I had supposed she would find someone soon enough as there were always people looking for work. Before the war she had had staff——only two, admittedly——to screen her from those with whom she did not wish to speak. One, a ladies’ maid, was a vivacious Londoner named Lizzie Benson whose GI boyfriend not only survived the invasion of Europe but came back afterwards to whisk her off to Oklahoma, or some other god-forsaken state where I couldn’t picture Lizzie living at all. The other half of Julia’s staff had been a man named Lawford, more a major-domo than a butler, and someone who had made it plainer than Julia that the general opinion was that Penny had married beneath her. He had still been of conscription age and when his papers came through in 1940 he’d taken it on the lam, as Lizzie’s GI might have said. One morning I got up and found Lizzie struggling to light the stove——Lawford’s job——and grumbling that he’d disappeared. Along with Julia’s petty cash, I suspected, although she never lodged a complaint. I assumed he had spent the war in some funk hole, keeping his head down, but the warrant is still active and sooner or later he’ll surface and I’d cheerfully give a week’s pay to be there when they arrest him.

  As with so many other people, the war had reduced Julia’s circumstances and now she had to struggle through on her own with just a woman who came in twice a week to do the cleaning. An example of the unfairness of life with which, I was sure, Edna Burleigh would concur.

  I was quick, as Julia had advised, but even so only reached the Belgravia house a few minutes before the party was due to leave for the theatre. A flamboyantly elongated Bentley was parked at the kerb, of a size I suspected would need a month’s petrol ration just to fill the carburettor. Its driver was dressed in chauffeur’s livery and was leaning casually on t
he front wing, smoking a cigarette while he waited. Behind the Bentley was a far more modest Humber, sleek enough as limousines go but obviously only a poor relative.

  I rang the bell and a man in a dinner jacket opened the door to me with a highball glass in his hand. He called over his shoulder to Julia who was behind him in the hall and about to go up the stairs.

  ‘Harry,’ she said.

  ‘Julia,’ I replied.

  She was Penny’s mother’s younger sister and still an attractive woman. The last few years had added some lines to her face that she was obviously trying to disguise, but to my way of thinking they were the kind of lines that enhanced mature looks, not detract from them. She gave me a limp gloved hand to hold and the offer of a cheek to kiss and I dutifully did both.

  ‘We’re off in a moment or two, I’m afraid,’ she announced, ‘but do stay and have a drink. Ronnie will see to it, won’t you Ronnie?’ and she turned towards the man with the highball.

  Ronnie agreed and led me along the hall towards the drawing room. I supposed in the absence of a hired flunkey she had co-opted one of her hangers-on. At least Ronnie looked to be a man who knew his way around a glass and a bottle.

  ‘Nice to see you again!’ cried a woman I’d never seen before as we passed.

  I realized I was the only man there in uniform; the rest of the company had dressed for an evening on the town except for a few who were dressed more casually in suits. Uniforms were no longer de rigueur, in fact had become unfashionable, and the number like myself still bound to wear them was diminishing every day. One of those dressed more casually, standing in front of Julia’s Adam fireplace with his back to me, seemed to have taken insouciance to the extreme and was wearing a hound’s-tooth check jacket and light grey trousers. And, oddly enough, although I couldn’t place him, he looked unaccountably familiar. He stood out even more in that he was talking to a man in full evening dress; a bespectacled and exceptionally tall individual with hair greying to silver at the temples but as black as the devil’s soul on top. I assumed it was some kind of toupee until I realized that no one would look that peculiar by choice, and so must have been his real hair. As I got closer to them I heard the tall one say something to the man in the hound’s-tooth jacket about being “kept appraised of developments” then caught no more as the man addressed turned around and I found myself looking into the glass eye of Colonel G.

  ‘Harry?’ he said, briefly disconcerted.

  As surprised as he was——a square peg in a round hole——I stammered, ‘I didn’t...didn’t realise you knew Julia, Colonel.’

  Jekyll glanced momentarily at the tall man beside him then extended to me the hand that wasn’t holding his glass.

  ‘Our hostess? No, I don’t. I came with Sir Maurice. He was...well...,’ he raised his glass and smiled although his false eye wasn’t looking as cordial.

  He introduced me to Sir Maurice Coveney, telling him that I was the man handling the business. I might have thought to wonder what interest Coveney had in what our section was doing had I not been a little dismayed by the way Coveney was looking down his nose at me. His face wore the sort of imperious expression I’d see on Roman statuary in Italy. I was used to being on the wrong end of disdainful looks but something about Coveney’s colourless face and dead eyes seemed doubly disconcerting.

  I pegged him at first as either a businessman or a politician although, since Labour won the election, I’d found the latter tend to affect a sloppily-dressed man-of-the-people air; something this man obviously eschewed. And as for the former, most businessmen I had come across were decidedly more portly than Coveney——fat from the profits they’d made from the war. Coveney, hovering over Jekyll and myself like a praying mantis, had more of the stamp of the senior civil-servant about him.

  ‘You’ll be Penny’s husband,’ he said to me, which I wasn't expecting. ‘I’m surprised we haven’t met before.’

  I didn’t know why we should have, and although it was a harmless remark I thought I detected a note of censure in his tone which insinuated the fault was probably mine.

  Making light of the fact, I said, ‘I’ve been otherwise engaged,’ attempting to make my war service sound like a prior engagement. But it came out sounding more like the defensive snap of a dog who’s just been scolded.

  ‘North Africa and Italy,’ Colonel G interposed on my behalf. ‘Not much opportunity for leave.’

  ‘Hard on your wife,’ said Coveney.

  ‘I’m rather afraid it was,’ I agreed.

  Julia appeared at the door just then and announced it was time for the theatre party to leave. Coveney nodded curtly in my direction then drew Colonel G aside, whispering something into his ear I didn’t catch. I wasn’t really listening because I saw Penny bringing up the rear of the group, looking at me with a mixture of hesitation and irritation that seemed perfectly to sum up how we behaved towards each other each time we met.

  ‘I just wanted to say...,’ I began as I reached her, ‘About yesterday...’

  ‘Come along Penny,’ called Julia from the door, putting on her wrap.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Harry. You should have come earlier.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Come back tomorrow morning. Early.’ And she put a hand on my chest and patted me absently, as though I were a purchase that had proved something of a disappointment.

  I followed her down the hall and outside and watched as she climbed into the Bentley beside Julia and Coveney.

  After they had driven away I turned to see Ronnie on the doorstep, watching.

  ‘So you’re Harry,’ he said as we went back inside. ‘Not what I was expecting, I have to say. You’d better come in and have that drink.’

  Since he had taken the trouble to stuff himself into the dinner jacket, I had assumed he was part of the group going to the theatre. Obviously not, he helped himself to another highball and mixed me a gin and tonic. There were still a few guests left but Colonel G wasn’t among them. Assuming he wasn’t going to the theatre in a houndstooth jacket, I supposed he’d slipped away while I was talking with Penny. It seemed an odd coincidence to have found him there but I didn’t know from which direction the coincidence was working——his knowing Coveney or Coveney knowing Julia. Either way, I thought I had detected something proprietary about Coveney’s attitude towards Penny. Whether it was fatherly concern or something more carnal, I couldn’t have said. I wondered whether I ought to call my brother to give him something to worry about. Knowing George though, he was probably already brooding about Penny spending the weekend out of his sight in London.

  ‘Who’s this fellow, Coveney?’ I asked Ronnie, tasting my drink and finding it heavy on the gin.

  ‘Something in the Ministry of Something,’ he said, knocking back half his at the first attempt. ‘Don’t ask me what. One of Julia’s. Friend of the family, but not one of the set, if you know what I mean. Don’t know about the fellow with him. Never seen him before but not Julia’s sort. Not in that jacket.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s one of my sort. He’s a colonel.’

  And despite what Ronnie thought I rather suspected that if Julia ever got a look at the kilted Jekyll in full dress uniform he might very well prove one of her sort after all.

  ‘I was surprised to see him here myself, actually,’ I said. ‘The colonel, not Coveney. I’ve not run across Coveney before.’

  ‘Bryce over there knows all about Coveney,’ Ronnie said lifting one of his chins towards a young man in wire-rim spectacles by the window. ‘He works for him.’ He raised his glass and shouted, ‘Bryce, come and say hello to Harry.’

  Bryce came over, a vacuous smile pasted on his face. He stuck out a hand.

  ‘Harry was asking about Sir Maurice Coveney.’

  ‘I was just saying to Ronnie that if he’s a friend of Julia’s family, I’d not run across him before,’ I said to Bryce.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about that,’ said Bryce. ‘All I know is he had to work late a
nd asked me to run round to his flat and pick up his evening togs so he could change here.’

  I didn’t suppose he was Coveney’s valet as I couldn’t see Julia wasting her alcohol on someone’s manservant, but since he obviously had access to Coveney’s flat I thought he might at least know what Jekyll was doing with him.

  ‘The fellow in the houndstooth jacket——’ I began.

  ‘Haven’t a clue, old man,’ Bryce said quickly. ‘Don’t know anyone here. Ronnie told me to stay for a drink even though I don’t know him from Adam either. Tell you what, though. I wouldn’t mind getting to know the young girl who just left with Sir Maurice. She’s a corker.’

  ‘Tennant here’s her husband,’ said Ronnie.

  ‘Ah,’ said Bryce. ‘Put my foot in it, have I? No offence, old chap.’

  ‘None taken,’ I said.

  ‘Not going with them to the theatre?’

  ‘No. You look as though you’re dressed for it, Ronnie,’ I observed, wondering if he was miffed at not being invited.

  ‘Didn’t fancy it,’ he said. ‘Not my sort of play.’

  I took another pull at the gin to make room for some more tonic, topped myself up and turned to ask Bryce something about Coveney. He’d gone, though. I had another one with Ronnie but he was already drunk and started to ask me awkward questions so I left too. I assumed Julia could handle him if he was still conscious when she got back and he needed handling.

  I walked down through Sloane Square and Chelsea Bridge Road to the river, in no hurry to get back to my empty flat. Dusk had fallen and the street lights were on. A novel experience even after a year for anyone who had spent the war in London, perhaps. There was still some river traffic despite the hour, tugs towing lighters loaded with rubble and other detritus to be dumped somewhere down the estuary. I expected in time London would rise like a phoenix from the ashes but she was a very dowdy bird at that moment. The country was exhausted and it showed in the faces of its people. Drawn and haggard, the gaiety they had exhibited in the early years of the conflict and manifested in the impulse to enjoy themselves no matter what, had given way to a realization that they weren’t all about to die after all. Now they would have to buckle down and get on with things. The lights coming back were, in that respect, like an artificial dawn, one that heralded a long and uncertain day of hardship and privation.