“She did well to get out of Germany,” Evelyn said, watching Sally. “Aren’t the borders closed?”
“I’ve no idea. All I know is that strings were pulled with Daddy’s friends at the Foreign Office.”
“Guide ropes, more like.” Evelyn laughed.
“What do you mean?”
“Wasn’t Hans quite . . . well, you know . . . friendly with German top brass?”
“Oh. I don’t think so.” Sally pressed her lips together, smiling at her reflection. “They’re not all Hitler fanatics, you know, Ev. Anyway, Julia has nothing to do with all that. She was only a girl when she went over there. She hardly knew what she was doing.”
Evelyn had only spoken to Julia a few times at school. She led a pack of tall, leggy sixth formers, barely glancing at the junior girls who scattered from their path after meals in the dining hall or before nighttime assemblies in the common room. Evelyn had watched them with a curious mix of terror and adulation; they occupied a mysterious, transitional space to her: nearly women but still girls, shrieking and giggling and pushing out their voluptuous chests beneath thick navy sweaters, something desperate and jittery about them, like fillies in the race gate before the gun was fired. But Julia wasn’t like that. She never giggled or preened, and as she marched past Evelyn she was always looking straight ahead, her amber eyes narrowed in determination as though something else waited for her at the finish line.
And then, one Sunday morning in late spring, as the choral notes of Psalm 23 drifted through the air, Evelyn found Julia smoking alone under an oak tree at the back of the chapel. She looked nothing like her fair cousin; Julia was all sharp angles, her bobbed hair so dark it was almost black, something violent about the red of her lips as she sucked on that Westminster.
“You’re Sallywag’s friend,” she observed. “Evelyn, isn’t it?”
She offered Evelyn a drag on her cigarette. Evelyn took a quick inhale, a cough blooming in her throat. She had never smoked before.
“But what are you doing out here? You’ll be in trouble if they find you skiving off.”
Evelyn shrugged. “I’ll risk it. I couldn’t sit through another sermon.”
Julia picked up an acorn and lobbed it across the lawn. “What is it this morning?”
“Matthew on Judas.”
“Again?”
“If you ask me, it only gives us ideas.”
Julia tucked some hair behind her small ear. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I think it gives us ideas about betrayal,” Evelyn said. “These morality stories are supposed to be warnings, aren’t they? But what if they only plant seeds in our imagination?”
There was amusement on Julia’s face as she placed her hands lightly on her hips.
“You’re not like the rest of them, are you,” she said, smiling at Evelyn’s embarrassment. “That’s a good thing, trust me. I’m not like them, either.”
Evelyn looked up. “You’re not?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I talk the same, dress the same, have the right sort of name.” Julia raised a finger and tapped it against her temple. “But I’m not like them in here.”
Despite the cool morning breeze, Evelyn felt her cheeks grow warm. She recalled the stories she had heard about Julia’s mother. Crude stories, really, about how before she died she had gone with other men. Many men. “Hundreds,” Cynthia Buckland had hissed with lurid delight. She called Julia’s mother a slut. Sally wasn’t aware of these stories—at least Evelyn hoped she wasn’t—but as Julia stood taller, brushing down her blouse and fixing her clear gaze across the grass, Evelyn wondered if she knew her mother’s reputation.
Julia smiled again, lines creasing around her eyes. “Funny, isn’t it? I want to get away. You want to get in. Pity we can’t help each other out.”
Evelyn frowned. “Don’t you want to be like everyone else?” she asked.
“Why should I want that? Wearing the same mousy dresses, grazing on the same tasteless food, spending each night in the same drafty dormitory with girls I detest . . .” Julia brushed some hair from her eyes. “This place is nothing more than a factory churning out proper little Englishwomen like tins of bully beef. Why don’t we have room for something else? Something . . . better?” She sighed and ground the cigarette butt into the grass beneath her heel. “Still, I suppose there is some truth to that old Japanese saying: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”
“Maybe.” Evelyn picked up her own acorn and moved it from palm to palm. “We haven’t done Japanese proverbs yet.”
Julia stared at her, then she laughed. “What an odd girl you are.”
They stood in silence, the wind blowing at their legs, and after a while Julia seemed to forget that she had company. Evelyn searched for something she might say to insert herself back into Julia’s consciousness. But all she could think about was how impossible the task of growing up like Julia seemed, full of so many ideas and opinions, and she felt the bright prick of fear that in the years to come she would resemble an old mangled branch on the tree looming above them, always on the brink of snapping under too much weight.
Another hymn rumbled from the chapel and a few seagulls screeched across the sky. Straightening her tie, Julia pointed to the edge of the lawn, where the earth suddenly dropped away.
“Have you found the tunnels yet?” she asked. “They lead right down to the beach. None of the other girls dare—they’re scared some fellow is waiting in the dark to rape them. But I’ve never seen anyone else down there, so you can do whatever you like. Once I drank a half bottle of whisky and slept through supper.” As Julia glanced over her shoulder, Evelyn saw something anguished pass across her face. “Some nights I gather cockles washed up along the beach. I bring them back and Cook puts them in a saucepan with some butter and garlic for me—delicious.” She made a kissing gesture with her fingertips that Evelyn had never seen before but assumed she could have only learned in France. “Come too, if you like?”
“All right,” said Evelyn, excited at what the other girls would make of this invitation. “I will.”
But she never had the chance. Julia was excluded the following week and sent to London. Evelyn discovered there had been a long list of misdemeanors before this, but an incident with the sports master on the beach had been the final straw. Sally wept at the news, though they were angry tears. “She always has to make a scene,” she cried. “Always has to stand out!” Evelyn sat beside her, rubbing her friend’s back, imagining the dank, musty tunnels beneath the cliff and trying to understand what had drawn Julia to hide down there.
Of course, Julia could have never known that her experience would inspire Evelyn’s quiet and careful project of assimilation at Raheen. She no longer wanted to stand out and be unhappy, so she decided to recast herself as a background player, a bit part, and go unnoticed for the remainder of her schooling. That was the way to get along, she had come to understand. That was the way to make a success of herself.
It began with her appearance, accepting more and more of Sally’s old clothes from Debenhams, while saving up her own modest pocket money to spend judiciously each midterm visit to London. Then came the extra elocution and comportment lessons, which soon had her speaking with the same rounded vowels as everyone else. She no longer finished a meal, as an empty plate was uncouth (“You’re not a farmhand ravenous after a day in the field, Miss Varley,” Frau Schneider scolded), and tea was certainly poured before milk. And when she asked her mother and father to stop visiting each month, their bedraggled presence in the house foyer after the long walk from the bus stop drawing ignominy and hilarity, Evelyn’s transformation was complete. By the time she turned thirteen, the bullying had stopped, and after Cynthia asked her to partner up for doubles at tennis and they won the House Cup, Evelyn was invited to sit with Cynthia and her friends at meals, even joining them on a few Sunday trips to Brighton.
“Looks like you’ve been accepted at last,” said Sally one evening as they changed into
their nightgowns before bed.
Evelyn threw a sock across the aisle. “Are you jealous?”
“Hardly.” Sally peeled back her quilt. “I don’t understand, that’s all. I thought you hated them.”
Looking down the length of the dormitory to where Cynthia was brushing her hair at the standing mirror, something hot and metallic rose in Evelyn. She did hate them. It was like a furnace, that loathing. It never burned out.
“Well, you know what they say: Keep your friends close . . .”
She smiled, but Sally only frowned and climbed beneath the covers. “If you say so,” she murmured. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
While the Raheen girls may have forgotten her inglorious past, Evelyn hadn’t, and neither, it seemed, had her father. “Blimey,” he declared during her visit home at Christmas. “They’ll have you presenting on the BBC soon.”
The next time she came down, he began commenting on her clothes, her hair, even her manners at the dinner table—“Bring out the best silver, Mum, one of the princesses has come for tea!”
It was all in jest, she told herself, but these remarks snagged like a thread caught on a branch when she realized he enjoyed making fun of her. No, she wanted to shout at him. Can’t you see I’m not like that? That I’m not like them? It was one of the few things that could raise her temper, and this made her father chuckle and shake his head, as though he’d won an argument she hadn’t known they’d been having. She had always expected they would laugh together about the peculiarities of the school, the spoiled girls, their small-mindedness despite all this “opportunity”—after all, this was how it had been between them before she went away. But now he didn’t understand her, or seem to want to. Her mother was no better, clucking around, her conversation never venturing beyond what Evelyn might need to take back to the dorm, as if she couldn’t wait to be rid of her daughter.
Sometimes, as Evelyn lay in her bed upstairs, she was racked by loneliness. She loved her parents, but now she could see them for their true selves, free from the burnish of childish idolatry or just plain youthful ignorance. She knew her father belittled her because he couldn’t face the idea of her one day looking down on him, and she recognized how meager her mother’s existence had become, counting out her shillings at the bakery and going without new clothes or books or an outing to a restaurant, refusing any activity that she deemed indulgent. Evelyn was embarrassed by this puritan denial of even the smallest forms of pleasure. She didn’t want her life to be a mere transaction; she wanted to feel the workings of experience deep in her bones. She knew her parents sensed this change in her, but since she could never tell them about what really happened at school, she had to live with the knowledge that they believed she had actually become this person and was not merely wearing a disguise.
* * *
Supper that night was served in the parlor. It was cold meats with half a dozen salads, and a good deal of wine. Elizabeth Wesley sat at the top of the table still dressed in her paint-stained smock. She had spent the afternoon in her studio by the lake putting the finishing touches on a landscape that would form part of her collection due for exhibition in Edinburgh. The Breeze Through the Trees she was calling it, and a friend had arranged private rooms for the showing in Abercromby Place.
Evelyn loved meals with the Wesleys perhaps more than anything else about her visits to the manor. There was no formality. No matter the subject of conversation, Evelyn was always encouraged to share her ideas, and since Sally’s academic career had long been perfunctory at best—never integral to her future life and happiness—Hugh and Elizabeth were always attentive to Evelyn’s studies. But they talked easily about all sorts of things, and tonight the discussion flowed from the doings of mutual acquaintances to Elizabeth’s recent trip to Paris and the “Farewell to the Lyceum Theatre” production of Hamlet in London.
“Gielgud was terribly good, wasn’t he?” said Hugh. “Really the finest of the age. Shame about the theater.”
“What did you think of the play, Sal?” Evelyn asked, skewering a Chantenay carrot.
“It was all right . . . Maybe when I’m your age, Daddy, I’ll fall back in love with Shakespeare. How many did they make us read at school, Ev? About a hundred, non?”
“Some days it certainly felt like it.” Evelyn smiled at Hugh. “But I should have liked to see that performance. I do think Hamlet is my favorite of all the tragedies and—”
“Cripes, here we go, Evelyn’s off,” Sally grumbled, pulling apart some lamb to feed to Tortoise, who had somehow made his way under the table. “What I want to know is why no one thinks about poor old Ophelia. Riddle me that.”
“Maybe if you had focused your dissertation on that inadequacy,” Elizabeth remarked, “you might have found yourself with a better grade in English.” She turned to Evelyn. “Sally tells me you were also awarded a first for German. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Doesn’t seem like such a wise choice of subject right now . . .”
“It will come in useful,” said Hugh. “Have no fear of that.”
Evelyn pushed some peas around her plate. A gust of wind rattled at the parlor windows and the candlelight flickered.
“You really think there will be another war?” she asked.
“Oh yes.”
“But Chamberlain’s been trying to negotiate, hasn’t he? What about Munich?”
“Chamberlain won’t be there much longer. Others in government don’t want appeasement: they’re of the mind that if Hitler wants to take a bite, why not set the dogs on him?”
Evelyn raised her eyebrows in Sally’s direction. “What do you reckon, Sal—is Jonty ready to take on the Luftwaffe?”
Sally was stroking Tortoise’s ears. The enormous brute had now flopped his head on the table, his flat black nose nudging at the carafe of wine, steaming up the glass.
“I rather think he’s itching for it,” she said. “And Jonty is the best pilot in his squadron.”
Hugh laughed. “Who told him that? Wing Commander Dalgleish? He’s a friend of the boy’s father!” He turned to Evelyn and winked. “Still, good to have friends in high places, eh?”
“Oh, Daddy!” Sally groaned.
It was never like this with her parents, Evelyn thought, helping herself to more salad. Meals were to be eaten quickly, at the kitchen table, with the wireless on. At home, ideas were not contested but accepted, news remarked upon but left undebated, and Evelyn wondered with a guilty kind of sorrow what sort of person she might have been if she had grown up here at the manor with parents like Hugh and Elizabeth, and whether such an upbringing would have made her more certain of herself.
But if the Wesleys sensed any of this they didn’t say, and after Hugh had told an amusing story about the Birmingham factory and his new foreman, a Welshman named Derog (“You know it means ‘obstinate one?’”), Elizabeth asked after Evelyn’s mother and father, as she always did, though she had only met them once at a first-year college dinner. It had been an awkward encounter, Evelyn’s parents dressed in mothballed suits only ever brought out for Christmas mass, hardly knowing what to say to Elizabeth—or anyone else at the table, for that matter—having never met people quite so grand or gregarious. They’d tried their best, digging around for questions about the estate and Hugh’s business (embarrassingly, her father even showed him a Wesley button on his jacket), but it had been a spiritless exchange, and to Evelyn’s blessed relief her parents had declined any further invitations to the college.
Now Hugh stood up and raised a toast. “Sallywag,” he cried, “it only seems like yesterday that I was dropping you off at Raheen, and now look at you—about to be married!”
They all clinked glasses and drank. Elizabeth headed back to the servery with the tray. She was a tall woman, taller even than Hugh, with the shoulders of a swimmer, and intricate jewelry shook from her broad wrists flecked with white paint. She had Sally’s blond hair and gray, slightly bulging eyes; Evelyn always felt a tad unnerved
by the way she could stare into the middle distance with an expression of contented yet still curious understanding.
“But Evelyn,” she said now, “I must confess I hardly recognized you this evening. What were they feeding you at Somerville—chalk dust?”
“Well, not exactly . . .”
“Awful slop, college food,” Hugh reminisced. “I always make Elizabeth take me to the Bird and Baby after those dreadful dinners. They’ve a decent steak-and-kidney pie at the Baby.”
“It wasn’t so bad at Somerville,” Evelyn said. “If you were selective.”
“By selective you mean vegetarian,” Sally said.
Evelyn laughed. “Yes, maybe I do.”
“Perhaps, Hugh, if you’d had fewer pies and more college slop, Dr. West wouldn’t have you taking those pills.” Elizabeth, with some irritation, set down the carafe as she returned to the table. “Anyway, you’re much too thin, Evelyn. Nobody wants a rake, dear.”
“Thank you, Mummy,” said Sally. “Evelyn will bear that in mind. Besides, it’s not her fault. She’s been working like a galley slave, didn’t you know, for Charles Marsden’s firm.”
“The cosmetics outfit? Vivian Something-or-other?” Hugh wiped his mouth with a napkin. “What’s he got you doing there?”
“I’m in the advertising department. I go about stores and suggest where they might place the Raspberry Delicate in the window.” Evelyn fixed her eyes on the deep burgundy being poured into her glass. “But I’d rather like to do something different, especially if there’s a war.”
“Maybe Daddy could find you something?” Sally glanced toward her father.
“Hm?” Hugh’s jaw was grinding at a piece of roast beef. “I’m not sure Evelyn is best suited to work at the factory, though we might be able to find something for the short term in accounts.”
“What about Caro Menzies? You could always put in a good word for Evelyn with her.”
An Unlikely Spy Page 4
