All about Eve
by Jilliana
Ranicar-Breese
I once had a
friend called Eve. She was born in Germany but
educated in Cardiff. She claimed that her father
owned the factory of the yellow lead pencils
Staedtler.
I first met Eve on my stand at the flea market in
Portobello Road London in the mid 80’s.
Eve’s English was perfect and so was her
accent. You could say she had a presence and was
noticable with heavy makeup and panstick on her
face but she had charisma and we clicked.
She came several times to my house. She seemed a
generous woman but mysterious when I asked her
about her life in Nuremberg. At that time she was
teaching
English to diplomats from black Africa. Once she
said she was Jewish although I never believed her.
I was invited to her home at the beginning of
Advent which she shared with her mother in
Nuremberg.
Over the coming years Eve and I kept in touch.
She had never married but had a partner who was a
doctor with an autistic creative daughter who she
loved and cared for.
Then she vanished for several years. We didn’t
have the internet and smartphones then and she
was not on social media. She was deliberately
impossible to trace.
Years past and one day she phoned out of the blue.
She was living in America as a resident having
emigrated and had built and designed a house in
Cape Coral, West Florida on land which she had
bought. She knew about Florida real estate prices
and only seemed to mix socially with millionaires.
She had become very materialistic and hard. She
had not, however, forgotten me, her best
girlfriend in the UK and was interested in my
fashion sense as she also designed her exclusive
clothing with her own label.
Eve had a dream to travel to Charleston cross
country in her red mustang and stay in
traditional bed and breakfast houses only with me.
Eve met me, looking slightly older, wearing, so I
thought, paste jewellery but some time later at
her home when she showed me her precious
jewellery, she confessed they were real.
One time she let slip that she had had two years
in a wheelchair. Piecing the chapters of her life
together, I gathered she was living in Israel
when some accident happened but she wouldn’t
say any more.
Our trip went well. After, when I got back to
London, she would call me every Sunday to tell me
about her exciting life.
Then disaster struck. A hurricane hit her area
and her house was right in the path. The property
market in Florida crashed. Everyone was panicking
and leaving the country. Eve was selling off all
her valuable African objects at rock bottom
prices until she only had her statement jewels.
She finally managed to sell the empty wreck of
her lovely home to a speculator developer and got
onto the last flight out of West Florida.
I never heard from Eve again and do not know her
fate.
Written
7/9/24 in Nightingale House, London.
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