Not Just a Soldier’s War

by Betty Burton

  ‘As I said, a spy. Call it a spade, Alex. It’s not something I would want to do. If I had known that Sophie Wineapple was a suspect when I spent that week with her, my loyalties would have been pretty stretched, because no matter what else she was, to me she was a woman having a pretty bad time.’

  ‘You think her work for the enemy didn’t give other women a pretty…?’ She stopped abruptly, her attention caught. Eve followed the direction of her interest. Her mouth dried and even if her cheeks did not show it, she was blushing. Some men, one or two of whom were in the uniform of the Republican army, had jumped down from the back of a truck and were helping offload some luggage.

  The man whose belongings were dumped on the pavement was David Hatton.

  ‘Did you know, Alex?’

  ‘That he was coming to Madrid, of course. I asked you if he had been in touch.’

  Eve backed away into the comparative shelter of an entrance, but to no avail. It was as though, in the midst of waving to the truck-driver, David became aware of eyes on the back of his neck. He turned, slowly dropped a canvas tote on the pavement and raised his hand.

  ‘Hasta la vista. This one’s yours.’ Without looking at its destination, Alexander leaped on to a tram that was just drawing away.

  Eve did not move, mesmerized by the strangeness of the situation. David recovered more quickly. He abandoned his bags and dodged through the traffic. ‘I can’t believe it’s really you!’

  ‘Hello, David.’

  The short silence was awkward. They were in a minefield of possibilities, neither knowing which way to step. Even mention of her name could blow them apart.

  ‘I say, do you mind? I left my equipment over there. I don’t want to…’

  ‘Of course.’

  He floundered. ‘Will you come… or shall I…’

  ‘Oh, I have to cross to that side of the road.’

  He moved as though he might be going to embrace her; instead, he took her elbow gently and they dodged the traffic together. ‘Um. I was just going in to deposit my gear in…’

  ‘It’s OK. I have to get back to the…’ She waved vaguely in the direction of the hospital to which she was now attached. ‘To my vehicle.’

  ‘You are an ambulance-driver?’

  ‘I drive anything, really.’

  ‘Will you come up while I stow my stuff?’

  ‘I’ll wait here.’

  If real affairs were to follow the rules of a romantic novel, then this meeting would be the one where they resolved the problems that had kept them apart. Life isn’t like that.

  He picked up his bags. ‘You won’t go.’

  ‘No, but I do have to report in.’

  ‘This won’t take long.’

  As she waited she was forced to face up to the reality of the situation. The years between eighteen and twenty had changed her. The David of sparkling and arousing memories, the sophisticated David in a tuxedo and driving a low sports car, the David who had thrilled her when she was eighteen, was not this David. Or, if he was, then he aroused and thrilled her no longer. She was too old for him now.

  He laid a tentative hand on her shoulder. ‘You waited.’

  ‘I said I would.’

  His reply could have been: You once said that you would speak to me. Hers: I tried, but I allowed myself to be intimidated by your grandmother.

  ‘Yes. Um, do you know somewhere we could eat? I’m starving.’ Her reply to that could have been: So is everybody in Spain. (Although that was not the exact truth, shipping blockades had cut off the Republic from essential industries and supplies, resulting in terrible shortages. Eve, who had grown up in an area of great poverty and deprivation had, nevertheless, been one of the lucky children who had never gone barefoot or hungry. Destitution was becoming almost commonplace in the beleaguered Republic.)

  ‘If you like chilli beans and pimentos.’

  ‘I love chilli beans.’ He smiled, as Ozz might have smiled when he suggested that they find a canteen, friendly and not caring about anything much except the moment.

  As in Barcelona, the people’s canteen had once been the banqueting hall of one of the city’s most prestigious hotels. Extravagant light fittings were still suspended, but where there had once been long dining tables all a-glitter with crystal and silver, there were now dozens of small cafe tables at which were seated people who, in the glittering hey-day, might have worked in the kitchens. The aroma of garlic and tomatoes pervaded the air.

  They collected their food and easily found a table. Eve ate a little of her rice and hot sauce, but she had no appetite. She had to tell him that the past was over, and it made her awkward and uneasy. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was a nice man. They’d had fun together, they had kissed and danced, she had driven his motor car and he had briefly taken her into a more glamorous world than she had ever known.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve just eaten. Alex and I…’

  ‘Ah, right.’ He smiled. ‘And Alex skedaddled and left you to it.’

  They had talked about food in the officers’ mess at the RN dockyards, when she had worn her green silk gown, and she had realized that she could never let him know that at the stroke of midnight Cinderella must return to her industrial sewing-machine. She could not meet his eyes in case hers revealed what she remembered. She said, ‘I met your brother, you know.’

  ‘I know. And I yours.’

  They were treading on dangerous ground again. She gave him a puzzled look. ‘Really?’

  He nodded. ‘Rich died.’

  ‘Richard? But he was going to be all right. He was being treated by a friend of mine, everybody said he would be all right.’

  ‘He didn’t wait to find out. He killed himself.’

  ‘Oh, David, how absolutely awful. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Absently he wiped a crust of bread around his plate.

  Eve watched him, wondering what his grandmother would think of that. Or his mother. She knew hardly anything about his parents, only that she stood in for them in their absence in South America or somewhere.

  This attempt at formality increased the tension between them. Their well-behaved enquiries were at odds with their emotions.

  ‘Please, could we go somewhere less public?’

  She really did not want to prolong the inevitable end of the affair, but she owed him more than a blunt ‘Sorry, David, but it’s over’.

  ‘There’s a… it’s just a kind of room where chauffeurs and ambulance drivers… no guarantee that there won’t be people hanging around.’

  ‘Can we go there?’

  ‘If you like. It’s only about five minutes from here.’

  There were three male drivers there, including two who were English. Eve had seen them several times before, and today they were engaged in what appeared to be a critical discussion about poetry. They wore the short leather jackets and jodhpurs that had become the practical standard dress for those drivers who could bargain for the jackets.

  ‘You recognized Rich was my brother?’

  ‘I thought at first that it was you. Even though he looked dreadfully haggard and sick, I…’ She trailed off.

  He gave her a brief smile. ‘I hope that you were going to say, that you would have known me anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t really know what I was going to say. To be perfectly frank, ever since I happened to meet Alex this morning, I’ve been in a state of confusion. I’ve swung from bewilderment to fury to chagrin and back again. When I said that I had met Richard, you said, I know. How did you?’

  ‘I was at Benicasim, in that first-floor balcony place. I saw you get into a truck and drive away. I started to race out after you, but it was no use, of course.’

  ‘And you said that you had met my brother. Were you at Benicasim when Kenny was there?’

  ‘I’d met him before that. Of course, I had no idea that you and he were related. I’ve met Captain Wilmott on more than one occasion… sold his pict
ure to…’ That was the first step that he had taken towards the subject of her old name.

  ‘The picture with the Madrileño women’s militia?’

  He nodded. ‘Ken showed me. It was a very good photo.’

  ‘People thought so. It helped to buy some penicillin.’ He leaned forward a little and said, in the same tone that he might have used to tell her he liked the hairband she wore, ‘This may not be the moment, but I am very much in love with you.’

  She sat back and clasped her hands tightly in her lap, not knowing what she thought, let alone what to say.

  ‘I’m not expecting you to fall into my arms, but I do want you to know. Since that evening, the shindig in the officers’ mess, remember? Well, I haven’t wanted to look at another woman.’ Eve gave him a doubtful look. ‘You don’t believe me? Rich knew, he’d heard all about it. Used to call you my magical mystery girl. That last time I was with him down at Benicasim, we talked about the way all our lives are governed by chance. Rich believed it was Fate, part of a plan, a kind of play in which we have a part and we have to act it out.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to think that all of this was preordained and that we have no choices.’

  ‘That is one of those philosophical subjects that takes you round in circles; maybe the choices too are preordained, and so are not choices. I don’t like that kind of discussion.’

  He reached out and laid his hand briefly upon hers. ‘What do you like? I know that you like gardenias, dancing and driving.’

  There could be no more skirting round the subject that was right there between them.

  It was hard to keep her voice even. ‘From what Alex said to me earlier, I imagine that you must know everything about me.’

  ‘No. I know only what I see now, what I saw those other times, and a few unimportant facts that Alex needed to know before she showed her hand.’

  ‘How could you agree to do it? How could you make enquiries into the background of this woman you’ve just said that you love? I can’t understand…’

  ‘I had no idea that Alex’s protegee and you were one and the same woman.’ He longed to tell her all the facts, how he had watched the girls come out of the factory and felt elated by the thought that she had once been one of them; to tell her that he had seen the house where she had lived, and the mean school she had attended; to tell her that his admiration for her knew no bounds. He longed to tell her that she was a woman in a million. But he knew that anyone who had worked so hard to obliterate what she been born to would find his curiosity unforgivable. He couldn’t blame her.

  He knew only too well that he wouldn’t have had the guts to do what she had done. He called himself a socialist, yet he still used his own class to further his career. He knew the right people, knew whom to lobby, how the old public school network operated, how to call in a favour. To an extent, both he and Rich had rejected their own class, but not totally.

  Her voice when she said, ‘Well, now you do know,’ was toneless.

  ‘Yes. What do you want me to say? That I don’t love you? That it is a matter of the greatest importance that you have chosen to be yourself? That it matters in the slightest that you’ve said goodbye to the kind of life that was imposed upon you? That it matters a damn to me whether your name is Louise or Eve, or Daffodil for that matter?’

  ‘Oh that! A rose is a rose is a rose.’

  ‘Yes, that! A rose by any other name does smell as sweet.’ He laughed in a way that brought back memories.

  ‘I am absolutely willing to believe that you are right.’

  Before she could move away, he had grasped her hands and was holding on to them. ‘Damn it, what have I got to say to you to convince you that the love of my life is this woman here,’ he kissed her fingers, ‘this woman with chapped hands, who dresses like a pilot in the Condor Legion.’

  Not long ago she would have had a very different reaction to such a declaration of love. Now she was less certain. ‘I… David, I don’t know what to say.’ She tried to lighten her tone. ‘As they say, this is so unexpected.’

  ‘I suppose it is. Because I have been thinking of you for months on end, I suppose I must have imagined that you had been thinking of me too. Pretty stupid. Just the kind of thing Hatton Junior would do.’

  ‘I have thought about you, many, many times. I did keep my promise and phone you but…’

  ‘But my grandmother answered. I know. She knew that I was expecting a call. I was on crutches, couldn’t get to the telephone. She thought that you were… that you were someone else and that… Christ! Louise, it simply all went wrong. I’ve been every place I could think of to try to trace you, but you covered your tracks so well. I went to all the dance-halls in Southampton and in Portsmouth, because the only clue that I had was that you probably lived in Portsmouth and were a brilliant dancer.’

  She began to feel guilty that, because his grandmother’s authoritarian voice had startled her, she had cut herself off without leaving a message. ‘I was only eighteen then, David. I’ve changed a lot since that time.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I have, not only my name and so forth, I am… I’m quite different.’

  ‘You are more a woman than then, which is why I can tell you how I feel about you, but all that… that enigma. I don’t even know how to describe it, that sense of still waters running deep in you. I wish I could find a more apt simile but in the respect that nine-tenths of you is hidden, you are like an iceberg. Except that I know that you are the opposite of icy. You intrigue me, and I dreamed of spending a lifetime discovering what it is that enchants me.’

  ‘Look, David, I’m sorry I was so silly as to have drawn you into my girlish fantasy. You were nice to me and, to be honest, I did have romantic notions. But the whole thing was a bit of a fantasy, you should have known that.’

  ‘No. If I hadn’t felt something more than that, then I would have gone ahead and… and made love to you that night out on the downs.’

  ‘You didn’t call it making love at the time.’

  ‘I know. I hardly knew what I was saying. It…’

  She watched as he floundered. She wanted it to be over, to be able to return to the life that had been hers before she happened to meet Alex that morning. But her past had caught her like a bramble, and unless she unhooked all the barbs, then she would have to keep dragging Louise Wilmott about with her.

  ‘I’d been used to a different kind of girl. My own set, the set I’ve grown up with, the fast set, as people say. It’s the clever sort of way we say things to prove that we are unconventional, not bourgeois.’

  ‘Literary like D. H. Lawrence or earthy like Mellors?’ She heard an unpleasant edge creeping into her tone, and she encouraged it. ‘Do you play Mellors when you are with your fast girls? In my set, as I’m sure you know, that sort of language is only spoken in the dockyard area – and I don’t mean the officers’ mess.’

  He looked as though she had slapped him in the face. ‘This is not to do with all that, is it?’

  ‘No, it is not to do with that.’

  ‘It is because I happened to discover Eve Anders’ past life. If only you’ll believe me, all that makes no difference to me. When I realized that I had found Louise, I went to see your street, where you went to school, where you worked…’

  ‘You what! You went to see?’

  ‘Yes, I couldn’t not go once I had made the discovery. You must believe me, it makes no difference to my feelings for you.’

  She felt her anger rise. ‘Did you suppose that it might? When you discovered that a girl who could pass as one of your set had been brought up in a slum and worked in a factory, you had to go and look. Did you find the idea of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins exciting?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  It probably wasn’t, but in her imagination she saw him standing outside the house, driving past the factory gates, looking at the poverty-stricken kids in the school yard, and she
saw herself in those same locations. She should have been sad for their pinched lives; instead she was furious that he had inspected them. ‘I’ll tell you what’s not fair. What’s not fair is life at the bottom of the pile. You long for beautiful things, to be with beautiful people, to go places where nobody gives a second thought to where the next meal is coming from. What’s not fair is for an intelligent girl with ambition to have to play-act to get a little bit of what people like you take for granted.’

  ‘Stop it. Stop it. Why are you so angry? I’m way out of my depth, I just don’t understand. I wish Alex had never asked about Eve Anders. I wish I hadn’t been the one she asked. But it happened.’

  ‘When you said that what you found out about my origins has made no difference, what did you mean?’

  ‘That I can accept all that. We rise above the stuffy social differences between us. I don’t care. I’m a socialist, for God’s sake. I committed myself to the working-class cause long before we met.’

  ‘You aren’t a socialist, David. Perhaps you hold a party card, but if you really had committed yourself to the working class, as you call us, then you wouldn’t have to insist that my origin is something to be risen above.’

  Now he sounded angry. ‘But isn’t that what all this Eve Anders business is about – you getting away from that?’

  ‘No. This Eve Anders business is nothing like that. It is getting away from the prejudice of people of your set, your class. I’m not trying to rise above anything, I simply want to be accepted for what I am. D’you know, that first time when I met you, I had travelled down on the train with a really fashion-plate woman – a journalist so she said – who complimented me on my style and then went on to make fun of the lack of fashion in women who were involved in trades unions. I let her go on until I could stand it no longer, then I told her that I was one of those figures of fun and swept out with as much dignity as I could muster.’

  ‘Malou French. I know her. She told the story, she tried to make a joke of it, but it was obvious that she had been humiliated by…’

  ‘One of the lower orders?’

  ‘Don’t, don’t go on with that, please!’