The Face of Eve

by Betty Burton

  ‘Are you open for coffee yet?’

  ‘Yes, madam. First floor. Thank you, madam.’ Only one or two of the little coffee tables were taken, but the rest were laid ready for the ladies of Southsea to take coffee. Eleven o’clock was the time. This place had been the Mecca of what passed for Southsea society, and although Eve and her friend had been daring girls, they had never ventured into Handleys restaurant. They had scorned it… too toffee-nosed, too stuffy. Women did not go to Handleys unless wearing hats and gloves. Eve had a hat – the beret she had brought with her she wore close over her springy, corn-coloured curls – and she was wearing gloves, the very nice ones, hand-stitched, unlined calf that she had picked up with her coat on the journey back to England. Like the coat she wore – long, expensive cashmere styled on the lines of a military greatcoat, warm as toast, cheap as dirt – everything she had bought had been handmade and tailored. Very quick, lady. Very cheap, very good, lady. Luxury knickers and petticoats embroidered there in the doorways of open-fronted shops by little girls. She had been reminded then of her own days as a machinist. But she had been to school for nine years and been allowed to become an adolescent before she was doing similar work, and by machine.

  The uniformed waitress waited patiently, pencil poised over her order-pad on a string, as Eve started to tweak off her gloves, then stopped as she remembered her hands were still in bad shape from working the Lavender Creek vineyards. ‘A pot of coffee for one and some biscuits.’

  ‘Fancy, chocolate or plain – or a selection?’

  ‘Digestive would be nice.’

  Hours to idle away until her afternoon appointment with Dr McKenzie. The receptionist in the hairdressing department said that if madam would just take a seat, she would enquire whether there was a possibility of her being seen without an appointment. Yes there was. And a manicure? Yes, that would also be possible.

  By the time Eve returned to the main store, the stylist had turned the curls into a long bob that dropped over one eye. The beautician had masked and cleansed her face until it glowed beneath the arsenal of cosmetics she recommended Eve would be wise to purchase – ‘This is probably the last of the luxury goods. Everybody is going over to war work.’ Eve went along with it and purchased everything suitable. It was all a wonderful experience. Her worn hands and nails had been soaked and massaged and grouted into ladylike softness, a French manicure giving neat, short nails with whitened undersides.

  All the while she was within the curtained cubicle being pampered, Eve was entertained by conversations on either side of her. ‘Stocking up for the Duration’ was the topic of the day – probably of the week too. Clients for perms, washes-and-sets, and Marcel waves – and their hairdressers – exchanged bits of information in hushed voices. There would soon be a shortage of Marmite and tinned milk, black lead and hard soap for daily women; but daily women were disappearing to do men’s work. The prospect of black-leading one’s own kitchen range was frightening, added to which, the domestics would soon be on the blackmail because of the higher wages they could get in the little engineering firms and welding shops that were opening up everywhere.

  With Eve’s experience of factory owners in this town, she couldn’t envisage such a turnaround in the fortunes of Portsmouth women needing work. There were, as there had always been, ‘beached women’, whose husbands and or the common-law fathers of their children went to sea for long periods of time, then would come ashore, blow their pay, and leave having given the women another mouth to suckle, clothe and feed. It could still terrify her to think how close to that life she had been.

  David Hatton, on behalf of The Bureau, had provided Eve and Dimitri with a decent wad of money, some of which she now spent without guilt on a fur jacket. The assistant, wearing black with white Peter Pan collar and pearl earrings, fanned out the coat showing off the long silver, silky fur. ‘Car-length opossum, madam, a beautiful coat. Glamorous, madam. Only a woman with your colouring and figure can really wear a coat like this. It was forty guineas, but what with the problems of cold storage, it is now thirty guineas. You won’t regret it, madam.’

  Eve didn’t need persuading. When she drew out a fifty-pound note in payment, the fur assistant needed to defer to the manager. Eve was enjoying herself. A coat like this would normally be paid by account. Perhaps they thought she had robbed a bank. But the long silvery fur of opossum was probably not the easiest to sell – a bit on the exotic side for her home town. More suited to London. She loved it. She had seen a film studio photograph of Betty Grable wearing such a coat and apparently nothing else.

  Dimitri would love that.

  The thought of surprising him aroused her. She had done as Dr McKenzie had asked and stayed away from Griffon House whilst she was interviewing Dimitri, but now she wanted to be back there.

  This sudden wish to see him surprised her. Was it more than the anticipation of watching his reaction to surprising him in the seductive coat? Was this how people felt when they were in love?

  Driving back to Griffon House she went back to playing Betty Grable for Dimitri.

  Dr Janet McKenzie PLEASE KNOCK AND WAIT

  Eve did so until the door was opened by a large, youthful, balding man; horn-rimmed glasses and a nice broad smile. ‘Miss Anders? Please come. Dr McKenzie will be two minutes.’

  ‘It’s OK, Eric. If you’d like to come in, Miss Anders… Just type up these notes, Eric, and you can take off.’

  Dr McKenzie closed the heavy, panelled door behind her and indicated a low glass-topped table and two carver chairs, obviously part of the set of a dozen or so arranged around a long table covered with dust sheets. ‘Please take a seat.’ The room was warm from a fire of logwood crackling and flaring close by. Eric knocked and brought in a tray with the paraphernalia for tea. ‘Would you?’ Janet McKenzie indicated that Eve should pour tea. ‘I must get a footstool. I spent the morning with my legs dangling. Five foot three – the world is not made for us – and I need to make notes.’ She settled herself. ‘I love the smell of burning logs, don’t you?’

  Eve nodded towards the flames. ‘Especially applewood.’

  ‘That’s applewood?’

  ‘Yes. Apple and cedar are the most aromatic – not that many people burn cedar in this country.’

  ‘But you know about it?’

  ‘My brother used to bring home chippings from work – not often, but it was lovely.’

  ‘Your only brother?’

  ‘No, I have two, both older: Ray, who was more of a father to me than my own father – he was at sea – and Ken, who was fond of the girls and was good fun, except that he wouldn’t do his share in the house. He could afford to have fun, Ray took on everything.’

  Daylight disappeared as another heavy snowstorm piled large flakes on earlier falls. The only light in the room was from a red-shaded reading lamp and the flaming wood. The earlier wind had dropped, so that the snow fluttered down and the sound of any vehicles became hushed.

  A wonderful sense of tranquillity – Eve felt it physically as it seeped into her tense nerves and muscles. As she breathed in the scent of the burning wood, she felt her shoulders slump and her stomach muscles relax.

  ‘Sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  The short silence was filled with Dr McKenzie stirring a minute tablet into her tea.

  Unaccountably, Eve wanted to tell her about Bar.

  ‘There is a friend – since we were twelve… we have always said that we were sisters.’

  The image came like a clear snapshot: water swirling around herself and Bar, clinging tightly to one another as they leaped into a woodland pool. ‘She created a ritual to unite us – you know how girls do – she said, “We’re two halves of the same whole, Lu.” And I believed then that we may have been.’

  ‘Lu?’

  Eve looked up sharply.

  Janet McKenzie said, ‘You said she called you “Lu”.’

  Eve went silent. She must tell this woman, this Bureau psychologist.
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  ‘Is Lu a pet name you have outgrown?’

  ‘No. I used to be Lu – Louisa Vera.’ McKenzie nodded encouragingly, professionally, allowing her client time to consider how to talk about something that was vital and large in her life.

  ‘All this you see here, this Eve Anders, is a person handmade by me – a bespoke woman.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Lu was born into the lowest stratum of society. She hated it – the poverty, the ignorance, the acceptance of it by my… by her own kind. When she was still a girl, she decided that she would get away… somehow.

  ‘Eventually she escaped because she was lucky, she was clever and she had a mentor – a school head who encouraged her to aim high, to be ambitious. Before that, though, there was that whole summer of Lu with Bar – living away from the squalor that her / my mother and brothers tried really hard to keep out of the house.’

  ‘I’d like to know a bit about Bar.’

  Eve spoke quietly, staring into the flames, unaware of the conflicting messages – a soft smile and a sad look in her eyes. ‘We were born six months apart, each of us on the turn of the year. She is dark, born at the winter solstice. As a girl I was even fairer than I am now. I was born midsummer. We said that we were two halves of the same person. She was very fey… pagan. She was everything that I was not, but I’m sure that I would have easily changed places with her, or gone to live with her. She could cast spells… tried to teach me all the magic of the woodlands. There was one occasion when I believe that I did almost get there.’ The flames flickered wildly in her vision, though she was unaware that tears were coursing down her cheeks. ‘Girls of twelve have such wonderful and simple ideas of how easy it all is.’

  ‘But it’s not, is it?’

  Eve shook her head and accepted the tissues Dr McKenzie offered. Reluctantly she withdrew from the flickering sun through birch trees reflecting on the surface of a green pond.

  ‘I’m sorry. I am not normally a crying sort of person.’ She regained some composure by refilling their cups.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘I don’t mean, are you forever blubbing and snivelling.’

  ‘I know.’ There was something not right about expressing feelings to a complete stranger, yet that is what Eve wanted to do. It felt to her as though here was this doctor – an empty vessel into which she could pour the sludge of bad memories that had turned sour and frightening in the pit of her stomach – and this doctor was glad to have her do so. It was a ridiculous thought. ‘Sometimes I do feel like crying, but it is not what the Wilmotts do.’

  ‘The Wilmotts?’

  The name was out. Drawing her gaze away from the fire, Eve met Dr McKenzie’s quizzical look.

  ‘Until I was nineteen, I was Lu Wilmott.’ She gave the other woman a look that might have been construed as defiant – or proud. ‘And then I made myself Eve Anders. That’s really all there is to it.’

  ‘Miss Anders, you realise that to me you are a complete stranger. All I have been given is the facts of your life in this slim file. I have discovered that you and Major Vladim have a relationship – and that is all. The fact of that relationship is perhaps for another time. Before that, I should like to get to understand a little about you,’ she smiled warmly, ‘what makes you tick, so to speak.’

  Eve felt a sudden apprehension. ‘I just told you.’

  ‘You commented that crying is not what the Wilmotts do, then immediately became defensive. Is it the crying, or is it the Wilmotts?’

  Again that same desire to tell. ‘It is because I am defensive – I have a lot to defend.’

  ‘To lock away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it about crying?’

  She thought for a few seconds. ‘It is crying that…’ The words wouldn’t come.

  McKenzie waited patiently, but Eve appeared to have dried up.

  ‘You are finding this difficult to say?’

  ‘Of course I am. I am not the sort of person who…’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who can talk about… I like to be private. I don’t want people to get the idea that they know me.’

  Eve didn’t notice the slight look of satisfaction that appeared in McKenzie’s eyes.

  ‘But you have had close relationships?’

  ‘You mean love affairs, sexual relationships?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Yes. I’m quite good at that.’ She smiled wryly. The other woman must suppose that she spent half her life on her back. Well good. She could think what she liked.

  ‘You can let yourself go with something as powerful as an orgasm, but crying terrifies you?’

  Eve found herself blushing at her interrogator’s bluntness. ‘It doesn’t…’ She had never uttered the word ‘orgasm’; she felt that it would come out ‘organism’ and she would feel foolish. ‘Sex is never going to go on for long. Even when it’s good, you know that it’s going to stop, it is always under control. Well, I mean that it is something that has a boundary, a limit to it.’

  ‘But not responding to a need to cry?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Losing control?’

  Eve nodded.

  ‘How about anger?’

  ‘The same. I don’t know why you need to ask. It is obvious.’

  ‘It is not obvious to me. Expressing anger is a healthy emotion.’

  Eve didn’t comment.

  ‘I can see that you are angry.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘I don’t mean the kind of fractiousness that you are feeling now – some authoritarian figure asking you questions that you really don’t want to answer – that’s not anger. Why are you answering me?’

  Eve retained her poise and looked directly at her tormentor. ‘To be perfectly frank, only because I want to be part of this set-up. The officer who recruited me said that The Bureau was made for me and I for it. And he’s right. So I’ll answer any damned question you like just so long as you tell them that I am normal enough to be one of them.’

  ‘You think The Bureau needs normal people? Really? What normal person would want to become a secret operative? The Bureau needs an appearance of normality, of course, but their best people will be extraordinary abnormal people, people with vision and a crazy kind of dedication. Normal people don’t always see far beyond the ends of their noses – would you agree?’

  Eve shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘You, Miss Anders, are, I believe, far above a normal person. I still know very little about you, but the mere fact of your relationship with an officer of the Russian Army who has jumped ship, so to speak, and become a man who must be seen as a traitor in his own country, is—’

  ‘A traitor?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘He is a good and loving man who gave up everything to rescue two orphans and get them away from the war.’ She had said more than she intended. Maybe Dimitri had not mentioned that.

  The other woman got up to balance a new log on the others, the dry, curling bark of which flared at once, giving the dark skin of her noble nose a kind of luminescence. Eve wondered about that. She had known a man in Spain with that same proud profile. He had been a doctor too, working in a bombed-out hospital; even in the midst of that mayhem he had appeared cool and capable. It was all in his narrow skull, with the skin so tightly stretched that every contour was visible. Dr McKenzie had that same quality, the haughty length of her nose exaggerated by the severely bunched hair at her neck.

  Turning her head away from the fire, she said, ‘You are an ambitious woman?’

  ‘Yes, I would say so… very ambitious.’

  ‘Do you think that you could forego marriage and children to satisfy that ambition?’

  ‘Yes.’ Eve was ready to blurt out the fact of her miscarriage when the log toppled into the hearth.

  ‘You seem very positive.’

  ‘I am.’ I see where this is leading, Eve thought. They were playing cat and mouse with Eve
’s control over wayward emotions.

  ‘When was the first time you felt real anger – I mean something so powerful that it left you feeling afraid of it?’

  Another image, from an angle that looked down into their mother’s grave as Ray and Ken and the bearers stood, toes to the fake grass. Ray and Ken in dark suits and ties, and white shirts with stiff detachable collars, their shoes polished to the hilt; Lu in a borrowed tam-o’-shanter and a coat with the hem altered. All the Wilmotts – except her father who was, as ever, on the other side of the world — in their ‘deep black’, showing grim respect that they did not feel. They had never liked Vera Wilmott because she was an outsider.

  ‘At Vera Wilmott’s graveside when Lu realised that she was never going to finish her education and that Vera didn’t really die from the tumour, she died because she was so poor and Lu couldn’t go to grammar school for the same reason. To get medical treatment or an education you have to make sure that you don’t live in that kind of poverty.

  ‘Vera Wilmott, my mother, was young… and had once been elegant and pretty… a student teacher swept off her feet by one of the handsome Wilmotts. She shouldn’t have been dead; if they hadn’t been so poor she wouldn’t have been, but she had had to sit at home stitching ribbon trimmings on garments. The money hardly paid for the gas to light the room in winter. Her womb got diseased.

  ‘You said that anger is healthy. What good does it do? Lu didn’t know what to do with it. If that’s right, then why did she run away, making a show of herself in front of the Wilmotts? Actually, she wanted to make a show of herself – throw herself upon her mother’s coffin and sob her heart out.’ Eve fell silent, covering her terrible anxiety by drinking tea.

  ‘Miss Anders,’ Dr McKenzie’s tone was firmer now. ‘I’m sure you know how this works – I cannot recommend you to The Bureau knowing that you are vulnerable. You are a really very special person, you know. If you have only half the talents that are here in your file, The Bureau will not want to lose you to the ATS or the WRNS. Your vulnerability is your past. We have to talk about it. You have to say things out loud. It won’t be so terrible.’