Evie is introduced by Oliver in The Pyramid as a member of a lower class group – she ‘came from the tumbledown cottages of Chandler’s Close’. She works as a doctor’s receptionists and has a (somewhat unfair) reputation amongst the young men of Stillbourne and Oliver thinks she is ‘accessible’. He persists in pursuing Evie, who eventually gives in, albeit reluctantly: ‘Get on with it, then’.
It is Evie’s intense vulnerability beneath her tough facade that forces Oliver to realise ‘what a dreadful thing it was to be a girl’. Later, an emotional Evie cries: ‘That’s all you want, just my damned body, not me. Nobody wants me’. Evie’s low social status and lack of awareness means she doesn’t fully understand she has been a victim of sexual abuse by Captain Wilmot; abuse which has shaped her adulthood.
Evie briefly reappears in Stillbourne two years later, and has ‘hitched herself up a couple of degrees on our dreadful ladder’.
