The Face of Eve

by Betty Burton

  ‘A ’course. I ought to have thought – it’s just so nice having somebody who speaks proper English. I heard the monkeys take the truck round the back. You’ll find your things in your rooms. Anything you want, tell Rita or the other one.’

  ‘Duke! Doesn’t she have a name?’

  ‘A ’course. Rita, both of them. Just say Rita and somebody will get you what you want – well, if it’s in the store. G’night, DB, g’night, Paul. I get started before dawn, but you just do what you want. Eve, you going to let me show you the other rooms?’

  Taking her by the hand, he led her straight to his high-ceilinged bedroom where they made love at once.

  ‘Jesus, Lu! I scarce thought of anything since I come home from Madrid. How about you?’

  She shut his mouth with her tongue and kisses. She didn’t want to tell him the truth; neither could she tell him the lie that she had not thought about him and what they had done together ever since. Lifting her off him, he sat up, back against the wall. The bed was little more than a wide mattress laid directly on rugs, and piled with pillows and cushions, everything covered in fabric woven in multi-coloured stripes.

  ‘When you got back here, how was Alex?’

  ‘I don’t know. She started to hit the bottle again, and I told her if she didn’t stop, I would report on her. She just laughed it off, she thought she was bullet-proof, being in with high society. It was a game to her, thinking she was in with everybody that mattered. She kept coming over, saying she needed things for her mares, asking me to look at them. Then she started to say I’d been with somebody else.’ He kissed Eve and put one arm round her shoulder. ‘Well, I had, hadn’t I? Then, she come round here spitting fire. “Who was it, you fuckin’ dago?” she says. Well I been called a lot worse than that. Still, I smacked her – only because she was getting hysterical. She calmed down. She asked for a glass of brandy, but I wasn’t born yesterday. So I got her a cup of water and asked her what it was all about.’

  While he was speaking, he put Eve’s hand between his legs and held his own hand over it. In seconds he was aroused again. Now he put a hand between her legs, searching her face for the response that was there.

  ‘So, to cut a long story short, she said she had been called back to London.’ Leaning on one elbow he looked down at Eve. ‘There’s not much of you these days, Lu.’ Eve tweaked a groin hair. ‘Aow! I never said there wasn’t enough of you. The most I ever wanted in my whole life is this. Lu Wilmott under me.’

  ‘No, Duke, Eve Anders – on top.’

  ‘All right then, missie.’

  ‘Duke…?’

  ‘No, Lu. I know what you’re going to say, by your voice. Ladybird never slept in here. I got all this up for you. And when you go I shall set fire to it down on the rocks. All right?’

  There was no one else in the world like Duke Barney.

  They both slept for a while. Then Eve was disturbed by hearing him grunt as he pulled on riding boots.

  ‘Are you going out?’

  ‘Coming? I don’t know what you’re going to wear. Those trousers you got here looks way too pricey to be up on a horse.’

  ‘They’re only trousers, Duke. Their time’s up.’

  ‘Better wear your shoes against the sharp stones.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Taking Diabolo for a swim.’

  The sky lightened sufficiently for Eve and Duke to see the surf where it broke. She had learned to ride bareback, as he had on Eli Barney’s land. The fast, black horse took the two of them, Eve in front, both holding the reins loose, letting the horse gallop in the warm sea.

  When they had first become lovers they had struggled together in fierce passion.

  This time, Eve was certain, must be the last. It was almost mystical.

  This time there was no tree to support them.

  This time there were no tar-barrels burning and rockets shooting into the black night.

  This time, as Eve held herself to Duke with arms and legs, the sun rose and the Jaws of Hell began to live up to its name.

  * * *

  It was on 1 August that the Windsors boarded a ship to begin their journey to the Bahamas – very different refugees from the ones with whom Eve had fled, a year ago.

  In the hold were fifty-two pieces of luggage. Among other trophies: a set of golf clubs, four baskets of old Madeira and port wine, a brand-new limousine. And a portable sewing machine.

  14

  Eve set out early in her little red car, to drive through the New Forest. It would be the last time she would be able to get petrol, so she savoured the moments. So, when she came to the Hampshire moorlands, where purple heather reminded her of distant views of La Mancha, she drew off the road.

  She had been chauffeuring a big-wig American through the saffron crocus fields. ‘Hell, young lady,’ he’d said, ‘I reckon the Good Lord must have had a pretty good day when He dreamed up this place.’ And, although there was a vicious war going on, she had agreed. There had been elation and a sense of utter freedom. Free to be herself. No ties.

  Then, as now, she could take risks because she had only herself to answer to.

  Yet she already had strings attached. New ones. How stupid! Dimitri. Sex, not love had accounted for a large part of their relationship. She hadn’t wanted him to fall in love with her. There wasn’t a thing anyone could do about love. At times she almost wished that she had fallen in love with him.

  No, no. Not really.

  The only true love she ever had was for the old one: independence. For that, she was paying the high price of cleavage from people she had once been close to, and of refusing to be loved by Dimitri.

  She ate a sandwich she had scrounged from Griffon kitchens.

  What changes were going on there. The house was coming alive again. Shuttered windows were now draped with sumptuous Eastern fabrics and the plywood partitions had been removed.

  A WRNS officer in the mould of Phoebe Moncke, before she was transformed, Petty Officer Jo Glasspool, had taken her to see what was being done.

  ‘If you say it looks like a tart’s boudoir, you won’t be the first.’

  ‘I rather like opulent furnishings. Have they kept the black and silver room?’

  ‘Oh yes, and the one next to it. Very classy, those are.’

  Eve hadn’t time to see much of it, but PO Glasspool said to come in when she got back to Portsmouth.

  ‘Who’s having it done?’

  Glasspool had shrugged her shoulders. ‘Can’t say, but it’s somebody who had the cash to buy it, and ship in all this stuff. Some Indian chap is the rumour.’

  Baldock, the handyman who had cared for her MG, was still there.

  ‘I can get me hands on a drop of petrol, only enough to do you less than a hundred miles.’

  Eve gave him a generous tip. She only wanted enough to get her to the New Forest and back.

  Now, she was not far from her destination. The Priory, otherwise known as the Finishing School, was where undercover agents of every kind were trained in the art of dirty tricks, and skills that were criminal in civilian life. Skills to use in Them-or-Us situations, often in enemy or enemy-occupied territory – France, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and, of course, the neutral countries, Spain, Portugal, Eire and Switzerland.

  Although everyone there at any one time was not expected to undertake all of the training, most were taught how to use binoculars at night, to operate a signal lamp, to fire handguns and rifles, to send and receive morse, to wire a fuse-timer, and to detonate TNT. These were the ‘hardware skills’.

  Equally important was health and fitness, and the softer tricks of the trade – simple disguise, living off the land, melting into the indigenous population, and, more sinisterly, how to loop fine electric cable round a throat and throttle; learning where were vulnerable points on the body such as the carotid artery, and how to keep out of the way when it was severed. All very practical skills for SOE agents.

  At the stage Eve was n
ow – contemplating her independence and the New Forest ponies – she didn’t mind what she was expected to do. Anything. Anything at all.

  Every time she started anew, it felt as though she was being given an opportunity to do better than in the past.

  Now, she leaped to her feet, startling the scavenging ponies. Remembering something from long ago, she clasped her hands above her head and began spinning on the spot. A childish thing. A wonderfully light-hearted thing.

  She had learned how to spin until she felt herself joined to the sky, ages ago, when she was twelve. Her friend Bar had initiated her into the ‘dervishing’. It had been magical, and the magic had been natural and wonderful. Bar, wise in the way of magic, Lu, city child, had spun themselves into ecstasy. And that was when Duke had appeared.

  Now, before an audience of suspicious ponies, she began turning, at first gently, then speeding up. Then, raising her hands above her head, she re-enacted the graceful, dervishing spin. Off-balance with vertigo, she tumbled onto the ling, dry and crisp with last season’s flowers, breathless and laughing. This was the closest she had ever come to it – not ecstasy, but joyfulness, gladness. Happiness.

  She lay there on her back, looking straight up at the clear sky, brimful of all her old energy and ambition. Everything that had been troubling her since the recent entanglements with Duke and Dimitri, and had been holding her spirits down like stones in the pockets of a suicide, dispersed.

  She got back in her car and drove on, ready for the challenges of the Priory.

  15

  ‘You are here at the Priory for a number of weeks, depending on which of the courses you are here to attend. Priory estate, as you will be aware, is for the most part given over as a centre in which you people may train and learn from older hands. There are six other houses here; only the one allocated is for you to be interested in. You will ignore anything you might see or hear. You will hear other languages spoken, but these are not your affair.

  ‘We had hoped that women could be given a house to themselves, but as there are so few of you, and there is a group of men undertaking the same training, then it’s sharing – the house, not the beds. You will need to give all your attention to training.

  ‘The course of instruction is intensive. Map-reading, morse code and weapons training are central. Fitness and mental alertness are, of course, what is required in an agent. Special Operations! Those of you who complete the course and are successful will become operatives with very special skills.’

  The candidates had not been introduced to the suited man who addressed them. His eyes roamed the room and alighted here and there on a rookie.

  ‘You have each been selected for some attribute, craft or knowledge that SOE requires. Each of you has something to offer. Suffice it to say that whatever your field of expertise you have a limited time in which to learn other strategies and techniques. Less than perfection is not good enough and you will be OUT.

  ‘You know all about the Official Secrets Act. The safety of the realm is at stake and we are at war. What goes on here is highly classified. You will not use the telephone; you will not leave the estate at all until your training is complete; all letters in and out will be read – censored if necessary. The Priory is a very pleasant place in which to train, but, but, but,’ his forefinger fired shots all around the room, ‘the Finishing School is not a resort. However, the accommodation is very good and the food is plentiful and excellent.’ He straightened his uncreased jacket. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Sir, those who are successful – what happens next?’

  ‘No leave, if that is what you are wondering. If appropriate, you will go on to other short intensive courses, e.g, use of parachute. Not all successful candidates will be required to undertake this. It would be poor use of manpower; those of you who propose to sit out the war far from the madding crowd, engaged on cipher and encoding work, will not need to know how to jump from a moving aircraft.’

  Before he could be asked any further questions, the anonymous man left the room.

  And so the training started.

  The women in Beauchamp House were Eve, Elizabeth Carstairs, Catherine Pugh, Cilia Haddington, Anomie Nash and DB.

  DB arrived after the rest. She came up quietly behind Eve and caught her in a bear-hug. Eve’s reaction put DB on the floor.

  ‘Hey, man, what will you be like when you’re trained?’

  They had a joyful reunion.

  Liz Carstairs and Cilia Haddington had ‘come out’ together.

  ‘What did you come out of?’ DB wanted to know.

  Liz and Cilia looked at one another. ‘Out of girlhood and into the big, wide world.’

  ‘We were debutantes.’

  ‘What must you do to be one?’

  Liz and Cilia grinned conspiratorially, ‘Have the right sort of mummy and daddy.’

  Eve said, ‘And plenty of money.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Cilia confirmed, ‘one needs to be of a certain set.’

  Liz said. ‘“Coming out” is being presented to the King and Queen. When you have curtsied to them in your virgin-white gown, you become a debutante.’

  ‘And somebody gave you a ball.’

  ‘And that was where you were supposed to find a young man to marry.’

  ‘You’re not joking, are you?’ DB said.

  ‘No, of course we’re not joking. It is the system.’

  ‘Don’t take me wrong if I laugh, but I’ve never heard of such a rotten way of parents getting daughters off their hands.’

  ‘I know. I can remember standing in this long line of girls in white satin thinking to myself, this is pathetic. I would rather be a virgin in a pagan ceremony.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Cilia said, ‘I was pagan. I felt as though I was being paraded before potentates who were choosing girls for harems.’

  ‘It’s the ball that starts you off, gets you into the marriage market.’

  DB thought that very funny. ‘What’s the price of a girl in a virgin-white gown these days?’

  ‘No price will get you a couple like us,’ Liz said.

  Cilia linked arms with her coming-out partner. ‘Not in marriage. We rebelled – told our people we were going to become pros.’

  Anomie said, ‘Streetwalkers? You two? Your accents alone would frighten the clients.’

  ‘Oh, we didn’t plan to do it on the streets. We thought maybe a flat in Mayfair, and only take the ones in our own set.’

  ‘We thought it made better sense that instead of marrying them and letting them get it for free, we would pick and choose the best and charge them for it.’

  ‘Good scheme, eh?’

  ‘Did you try it?’

  The two girls burst into laughter. ‘We’re still virgins and got picked up to come here.’

  ‘To become pros?’ Anomie asked.

  ‘So why didn’t you just jump ship like I did?’ DB asked.

  ‘Oh, we did.’ The two young debs laughed. ‘It’s a long story, but we ended up here. Cilia has a second cousin Bazil who thought, with our corners rubbed off, we might do something worthwhile.’

  An earlier Eve – one without her own corners rubbed off – might have thought: There you go. Their type always knows somebody to fix them up. But this new, happier Eve liked their cheek and honesty.

  Four out of five had ‘jumped ship’. Maybe Anomie Nash had too, but during the first days, she was as much an enigma as Eve.

  DB’s family was newly rich and she didn’t mind who knew it. ‘The Debs’ families were on close terms – their brothers were known to one another – so that Cilia and Liz would reminisce about Spiffy, Old Tosh, Bobbity and Jay without realising that they were being exclusive of the others. Not that any of them appeared to mind; true or not, the family stories were jolly and kept everyone entertained.

  There were five men – ‘The Chaps’ – in Beauchamp, whom Anomie described as ‘interchangeable’, which wasn’t a bad description as none had any particularly striking featur
e except for accent: a Geordie, who had a language all his own for the first couple of days and the rest learned it; a ‘posh’ chap, who spoke like Liz and Cilia; two who spoke with London accents – one white and one black, both named John; and a fifth who slipped between accents very much as Janet McKenzie did – ‘Tommy’, but only because his chin was as elongated as that of the popular comedian Tommy Trinder.

  So as well as Tommy, there was Geordie, Posh, Jim and Johnny. A sixth was expected later in the course.

  The sergeant PT instructor – known to the girls as Pecs, in honour of his extraordinary pectoral muscles – had to forget Aldershot where he had knocked a good many concave-chested young recruits into shape. The Finishing School teams were to be exercised into a state of fitness but not put into hospital with strained backs and torn ligaments. It went against the sergeant’s athletic grain but he was secretly glad to heed the directive because he was pushing forty and preferred the life here to Aldershot. Even so, the press-ups, arm-swinging and bicycling on their backs soon proved his warning about the evils of tobacco to be valid, and he organised a ritual disposal of ‘coffin nails’ in a fire pit he lit on the slipway at Bucklers Hard where they had all flopped down breathless after a very long trot.

  The weapons training sergeant instructor – ‘Finger’ in honour of his ability to swing a shooter in Hollywood cowboy fashion – handed out ear plugs and threw the trainees in at the deep end. On the first morning they were shown almost every automatic weapon and handgun known to man; and by the time they went off duty with ears ringing they were able to put names to Schmeissers, Lugers and Colts, to make a good fist of taking weapons apart and putting them together again.

  That same afternoon they were required to fire several of the weapons. Eve, who had fumbled a lot with the concealed weapon, redeemed herself by proving to be a crack shot with a rifle. Having spent a good deal of her early years in the country, where she had learned how to take rabbits and pheasants, she now found shooting at a man-sized target easy. Cilia and Liz had been taken on shoots with their brothers, and they too were well practised.