My Name is Eva(10)

Minutes later, she sits in her armchair in her room, sorting through the collection of old photographs in the biscuit tin. There are several of Mama in furs, silk dresses and large ornate hats at weddings, county shows and village fetes. Dear Mama, so elegant. And look, here are quite a few of Papa and dear Charles, standing proudly with other members of a shooting party. Don’t they look grand, all in tweeds and caps, guns cradled in their arms, alert and eager dogs looking up at them and several brace of pheasant at their feet?

There are also more of Evelyn in uniform, laughing with other girls in similar attire and sometimes with young airmen squinting at the camera in sunshine. Such young men, no more than twenty years old or so, soon to be gone, grasping kisses and beauty while they still had life. But there are no more of that awkwardly posed group of four and none at all of Robinson on his own.

It isn’t hard to remember how and when that picture of the four of them was taken and she pulls it out of her pocket to look at it more closely. They are standing outside the entrance to Bad Nenndorf, the former health spa adapted to provide facilities for the interrogation centre. It was in the early days, soon after she’d first arrived, when the place had only just begun operating, before she realised exactly what would happen there and before she saw Robinson’s true nature for herself. In the photograph this short man of slight build looks stern. He holds his chin high, his lips thin beneath a straight pencil moustache, while the other three people alongside him all bear uncomfortable slight smiles, as if they are unsure why they have been made to stand together in false comradeship, squinting in the bright sun.

Evelyn stares hard at the scene from long ago. His face had looked cruel from the time she first met him, but she hadn’t fully understood that was what it was then. He had just seemed cold and efficient, like so many of the commanding officers she had encountered in the service. And although his reputation had preceded him, she had not realised just how calculating he could be until she had seen it for herself.

She begins to tear the photo in half, then stops and peels off just the right-hand quarter, the section that contains the figure of Robinson, standing on the edge of the group, slightly separated from the other three figures. She places this strip on top of her folded newspaper, then picks up her pencil. She tests the tip with her finger, then sharpens it to a needle-like point and then, with the pencil clenched in her fist, she stabs Robinson’s face. Into both the eyes she goes, into that nose and into that hard, unsmiling mouth, until the fragment is tattered and unrecognisable. Satisfied with the destruction of his features, she tears the image into tiny pieces and, clutching them in her hand, shuffles into her bathroom and flushes the scraps away in the toilet.

Then she hobbles back to her chair and picks out the single picture of the blonde child from the tin. She compares it with the one she kisses every night, the one hidden in her bedside table drawer beneath the Bible. She holds both the tiny snaps side by side, trying to decide which is the better picture.

She had often walked past the garden, trying to get a glimpse of the child, and before she finally left Germany, she had decided to take some snapshots around the village. If anyone asked, she could say she was returning home shortly and wanted to remember the years she had spent at Wildflecken. She didn’t really care about recording the houses, the oxen ploughing the fields or the church; she only wanted to keep the ones of the child.

‘Lieselotte,’ she whispers. ‘They called you Lotte, but you were always Liese to me.’ She kisses both of the little photos and puts one back in the biscuit tin with all the other old family pictures. Pat can wonder all she likes, but she will never tell her.





Part II





Clever and good-looking (6,3,9)





12





20 November 1943



My dearest, darling Hugh,



This letter will never leave this country, let alone my possession, so I can say whatever I like without fear of reprisals or censure. All this time, ever since that terrible day when I was told you had gone for ever, I’ve been blaming you for taking risks, cursed you for not making it back home to me, but now I know that it was not your fault. Today, I found out that you and the others were terribly betrayed.

He didn’t want to ‘spill the beans’, as he put it, but your friend Tim McNeil came to see me this afternoon. He said he’d promised you that if he managed to get back home and you didn’t make it through, then he would call on me. He’s such a sweetie and it’s a great comfort to know that you were good friends and supported each other. I told him the only thing I’m grateful for in this whole sorry business is that you weren’t captured like the others. It’s a mercy of a kind that you were shot trying to escape and were never tortured.

Tim and I met for tea at the Coventry Street Corner House. You must remember it, darling, we went there soon after they opened the Old Vienna café and we were both unsure whether we would like the Aufschnitt or other foreign delicacies on the menu, so we ordered the special salad, full of prawns, egg and ham. That was four years ago, before the war even started. I wasn’t sure if I could manage to go back to where we had once been so happy but I decided to make an effort and wore my tailored uniform, the one Mama insisted I should have made. I think she thought I’d let the family down in my regulation kit. I’m not sure what she’d think if she knew I’m down to my last pair of stockings. If I wreck these, it’ll be Bisto seams for me like everyone else!