A Lesser Evil Part 9

'Cross!' he exclaimed. 'Why should I be? It's great news, the best ever. I always wanted a son and heir.'

'It might be a girl and we've got nothing for him or her to inherit,' Fifi reminded him.

'Except our looks and brains,' he said, and his smile grew ever wider as he looked at her.

'But we can't have a baby here. Imagine having to pull a pram up all those stairs,' she said anxiously. 'And how will we find another place we can afford?'

'Old worry-guts,' he said with affection. 'We leave the pram in the hall in the time-honoured tradition of slum dwellers.'

Fifi looked stricken.

'I was joking.' He laughed. 'We'll find somewhere else. If I work all day Sat.u.r.days we'll soon have enough for a deposit on a house of our own. A bloke at work said he only put down two hundred. We could sc.r.a.pe that together.'

Fifi leaned into his arms. For a whole month she had been so worried and scared. But now Dan knew and seemed happy about it, she felt inclined to be that way too.

'We'll have to tell your parents,' Dan said thoughtfully as he held her. 'With luck it might even make them accept me.'

Fifi looked up at his words. He never mentioned her parents any more, but she realized then that he had been brooding about them. 'I'm sorry,' she said softly, suddenly seeing that she only ever considered how situations affected her, and rarely thought about how it was for him.

'Don't be,' he said, kissing her on the nose. 'I don't suppose I'll be too happy if my daughter wants to marry a guttersnipe either.'

'You aren't a guttersnipe,' she said quickly. 'Don't say such things.'

'There's only this much,' he said, holding up two fingers an inch apart, 'between me and the Muckles. If I'd married someone like Molly, there'd be even less.'

'Rubbish,' Fifi retorted. 'You've always worked, you aren't a thief or a bully, you've got a brain, for goodness' sake! There's a million miles between you.'

Dan shook his head. 'I'll only think that when I can carry you over the threshold of our own house.'

A month later, at the very end of July, Fifi sat in a chair by the open window knitting a little white baby jacket. Yvette had helped her get started, and though she still kept dropping st.i.tches, she found it a rather soothing pastime.

It had been a scorching day, and though it was nine in the evening, it was still very hot and sticky, without any breeze. Dan was working late, as he had done every evening for the past two weeks. The office building he was working on was behind schedule, and all the men were doing overtime to catch up. Fifi didn't really mind being alone, but she was concerned that Dan was working too hard: last night he'd been so tired when he got home that he could barely speak.

She was finding her own journey to and from work hard. She felt she couldn't breathe on the tube, and although her stomach had only the slightest curve so far, the waistbands of her skirts were now too tight. Sometimes on the way home she had to get off the tube because she felt so giddy and sick in the crowds.

She wondered if this was something that would go as the pregnancy advanced, or whether it would get worse. Her mother would have been the right person to advise her, but her parents hadn't yet replied to the letter she wrote to inform them. That was over two weeks ago, so she could only suppose they thought a baby was another calamity.

Putting down her knitting, Fifi turned to look out of the window. All the children who had been playing in the street earlier had gone in now, but Angela was still outside, perched on her doorstep playing cat's cradle with a bit of wool, all by herself.

Fifi had been so preoccupied by her pregnancy that she hadn't thought much about Angela in the past weeks. She saw her often enough in the street, but Angela had very little to say, just a shy flickering smile, the odd halting question about where Fifi was going. The bruising around her eye was all gone now, but she still looked pitiful because she was so pale and thin.

Now the schools had broken up for the holiday, Fifi doubted the child got anything to eat at midday. Yvette had said she was pushed out of the house in the morning and stayed outside all day.

Fifi had become very friendly with Yvette since she made the curtains for her. They were only cheap cotton from the market, but the design of lilies on a pale green background was very pretty and they fitted from the ceiling right down to the floor and made the room look really swish. Each time Fifi looked at them she smiled because they were so lovely and she thought Yvette was very clever.

Yet she was puzzling too. Not just her frumpy clothes, or the hermit-like life she led, or even her flat which was a complete shambles Fifi had got used to all that. The puzzling part about Yvette was that she gave nothing away about herself.

She had great warmth, she took others' troubles to heart and often refused to accept any payment for little sewing jobs she did for neighbours. She was also intensely interested in other people, so why didn't she ever reveal her hopes, dreams, past mistakes or glories?

Her ground-floor flat was overrun with pattern books, the walls almost hidden with fas.h.i.+on pictures cut from magazines. Boxes of fabrics and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs spilled out on to the floor, cards of b.u.t.tons and reels of coloured thread covered almost every surface. Yet there appeared to be no personal belongings, not even a photograph. She fitted her clients in their own homes, admitting she would be embarra.s.sed for them to come to her. Fifi could only a.s.sume, in the absence of any information, that Yvette had no family or real friends of her own. She appeared to live her entire life at second hand, listening to her clients talk about their families, holidays and social life.

Yet Fifi loved going over to see Yvette. She was so welcoming, so interested, and she had a kind of wisdom about life and people that was quite unique. That was why she was the first person after Dan that Fifi told about the expected baby.

'That ees wonderful,' Yvette exclaimed in delight, clapping her hands with joy. 'You must be so 'appy.'

Fifi had confided that she wasn't certain about that, and then went on to tell her about her parents disapproving of Dan, and how she was afraid if they didn't manage to get a house of their own they'd get stuck in Dale Street.

'Then you must, 'ow they say?, take the bull by the horns,' Yvette said with an enigmatic smile. 'Become the strong one.'

Fifi took that to mean Yvette thought she should push Dan harder. But that wasn't necessary since she'd told him about the baby he wanted to work all the hours G.o.d sent. They'd stopped going out for meals and if they went for a drink it was only for one. He was taking fatherhood very seriously.

It occurred to Fifi that Yvette had misjudged Dan in much the same way her parents had. Why did they a.s.sume he was f.e.c.kless and weak? That wasn't how he was at all.

Yvette glanced up at the windows across the street as she reached to draw her own curtains. She could see Fifi silhouetted in her window on the top floor and guessed she was alone again. She hoped Dan really was working late and not down the pub with his workmates.

Yvette really liked Fifi. But then she was the kind of girl almost anyone would like, for she was beautiful, sunny-natured and so full of life. She remembered how back in early June Fifi had come rus.h.i.+ng in to tell her that Dr Stephen Ward, the osteopath at the centre of the big vice scandal, had committed suicide. Yvette had taken very little interest in the affair of Christine Keeler and John Profumo, for she'd known people back in France far worse, but Fifi knew every last thing about it, and the girl's pa.s.sionate interest made her laugh. Yvette hoped for Fifi's sake that she'd move on soon, before this street changed her.

In the sixteen years Yvette had spent here, she'd observed how the street made people apathetic. It was almost as if there was something poisonous in the soot-laden air. No one of course really wanted to live here, except perhaps old Mrs Jarvis and the Muckles who'd never known anywhere else. Everyone said it was just a temporary place to live until they found something better. Yet almost all those who had arrived since the war ended were still here.

Stan the Pole had told her he was going to find work on a farm. Miss Diamond had her sights set on a place on Clapham Common. Frank and June Ubley were intending to join their daughter and grandchildren in Australia. But Stan was still a dustman and Miss Diamond was still complaining that it wasn't what she was used to. Sadly, June Ubley had died, but Frank stayed on, keeping his net curtains snowy-white in memory of his wife, when there was nothing to stop him going to Australia. There was always farm work available for a man like Stan, and as for Miss Diamond, surely she could reply to any of those advertis.e.m.e.nts for flats that required a mature business lady with good references?

Yet Yvette knew why they hadn't moved on, for the street had affected her too. She loathed everything about it the meanness, squalor, lack of suns.h.i.+ne, the dust and noise from the coal yard, and the Muckles next door above all else. She could afford to live somewhere better, so why was she still here?

She had told Fifi it was because she couldn't face searching for another flat or packing up all her belongings. That was true to a point, but it was also the neighbours, with the exception of the Muckles, who kept her here.

In the absence of real family, these people had taken their place. As she sat sewing in her window, their familiar faces made her feel less alone. She knew they were like her, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity, tossed up here to live out the remainder of their damaged lives. Some had shared their stories with her, and it made her feel better about herself because they valued her ability to listen and comfort.

Without that, what would she have? Her clients were not friends; they might value her dressmaking skills, but not her as a person. If she lost her sight, or her fingers became crippled with arthritis, she would never hear from them again. But that wouldn't be true of her neighbours here, they'd care enough to call and ask if she needed shopping or a fire lit. They would invite her into their homes, for though being French set her apart from them a little, they sensed she was truly one of them.

She might ache to live somewhere clean, quiet and beautiful, but deep down she felt this was all she deserved.

In Fifi she saw something akin to that too. Intelligent, pretty and from a very good family, she was a girl who should have had the world at her feet. Yet maybe because she had burned her bridges by marrying Dan, she had got into the mindset that she now belonged in the kind of world he came from.

Dan was certainly very handsome and he had a rough charm too with his ready smile and his irrepressible sense of humour. Yvette liked him very much. But the fact remained that he was a working-cla.s.s man and he couldn't transform himself into anything else.

Yvette knew Fifi saw living in London as a bit of an adventure. She saw the people in this street as 'characters' rather than life's casualties. But once her baby was born, with only Dan's wages coming in, she was likely to view things very differently. Had she realized those characters were likely to complain about a crying baby? She would be lonely and bored stuck in those two small rooms all day, and once she started complaining, Dan might do exactly what other men in the street did run off to the pub.

Yet worse still to Yvette's mind was that Fifi would lose that sparkle of hers, and that every day she'd find herself a little further alienated from her own family and the middle-cla.s.s world she grew up in.

She deserved better than that.

Yvette knew these things because it was what her own mother had endured. She had run off with a man her parents considered a bad lot, and they were right about him too, for he did leave her when the going got tough after Yvette was born. Mama had sewed from first light until it was too dark to see, but they still often went to bed hungry. Yvette wondered what she would make of her daughter ending up in much the same situation, albeit without a child. She thought she had secured safety and the chance of a much better life for Yvette by sending her away when the Germans took Paris. Perhaps it was as well that she died before the war ended, for it would have killed her anyway if she'd known what happened to her child.

Yvette could remember her first night here in Dale Street very clearly. She was so glad to have a home of her own at last that she barely noticed it was virtually a slum. She was just twenty-one, and two years had pa.s.sed since the war and all the horrors she'd endured during it.

She had next to nothing to unpack, just a change of clothes, a towel, a few s.h.i.+llings in her purse and a small bag of groceries. She knew no more than a dozen words of English and it was so cold that she had to wear all her clothes to bed. But she was happy because she'd been taken on as a seamstress in Mayfair, to start the following day, and she believed she'd left all the hurt and shame back in France.

Mr and Mrs Jarvis were the first to offer her a welcome. Mr Jarvis had been in France during the First War, and knew a little of the language, and he invited her over to share their Sunday lunch. Sadly, he died a few months later, but Yvette would always remember him fondly, for that Sunday he had taught her so many English words by naming things and making her repeat them.

Yet even through the cold and loneliness of that winter of 1947, she still found many reasons to be glad she'd come to London. First, she found she stopped dwelling on the past so much. The nightmares she'd had virtually every night for so long became less and less frequent. She liked the polite way the English queued for buses and their rations, never pus.h.i.+ng in as they did in Paris. She liked their affection for the King and the Royal Family, and the way people tried to help her when they realized she was French. But above all she liked London itself. It might be battered from the war, with weed-strewn bomb sites everywhere, nothing much in the shops, and so many people living under terrible conditions, but there were still many beautiful buildings and wonderful parks. She found much to admire in the English, too, for they held themselves with pride. They grumbled of course, but she also saw that they pitched in to help one another, and the weak and the old in local communities were supported by their neighbours.

Yvette remembered how at the height of her loneliness, she brought sc.r.a.ps of silk and velvet home from the work-shop. She would lie in her bed rubbing them comfortingly against her cheek, just as she used to do as a child with her mother's dressmaking sc.r.a.ps.

As a little girl the pieces of luxurious cloth had transported her into day-dreams. She would see herself and her mother living in a grand house; the table would be laden with every kind of expensive food and they'd be wearing beautiful clothes. Her mother was never toiling at her sewing-machine in these dreams, she would be playing a piano, dancing or picking roses in the garden. And she smiled all the time.

Yvette's adult day-dreams were far less fanciful. The touch and the smell of fine fabrics were merely rea.s.surance that she had landed in a safe, female-only world. She might use her dressmaking skills to ensure her ladies got male attention at b.a.l.l.s, parties and weddings, but she didn't have to suffer it herself.

Sometimes these same ladies told her she had beautiful eyes and they held their own clothes up to her, clearly suggesting that if only she'd dress in something more colourful and fas.h.i.+onable, she would soon have admirers. Yvette would giggle and blush, and let them think it was timidity that prevented her.

The sudden blaring of music next door made Yvette start. She was used to Molly shouting the woman seemed unable to communicate with Alfie or her children in any other way but music in that house went with drinking and that often led to a vicious fight with Alfie.

People in this street always claimed that Alfie was the worse half of the couple. But Yvette knew better. Alfie was more obviously reprehensible: ignorant, brutish, a thief and a perverted bully. But Yvette was inclined to see some of those traits in most men, and she could handle Alfie.

On the face of it Molly appeared to be nothing more than a hara.s.sed, downtrodden woman who had had the misfortune to marry the wrong man. But in fact she was far brighter than Alfie, the instigator of much of their mischief, and far more cunning. She drank and swore like a man, she showed no maternal feelings, and she was predatory and dangerous.

Molly was in her late twenties back in '47 when Yvette came to Dale Street. She had four children already, and four more would arrive over the next eight years, but back then she looked far younger than she really was, clear-skinned, shapely and attractive in a pin-up girl sort of way. There was also a spontaneity and jollity about her that was very appealing.

She seemed so kind in those early days. She acted as a go-between for Yvette and her landlord when the geyser didn't work or the fire smoked. She would often give Yvette a couple of rashers of bacon or an egg when all her rations were gone. Her children supplied wood for Yvette's fire in that first bitter winter, and Molly often brought her in a gla.s.s of brandy to warm her up. All Yvette could do in return was offer to make Molly a dress.

She could see Molly now when she came in for the first fitting. It was around seven in the evening in early May, and it had been the first warm day of the year. She had on her usual everyday skirt, a worn hound's-tooth black and white check, but instead of the customary stained blue jumper, she was wearing a cream crepe de Chine blouse, and her face was flushed pink from the sun.

'Tres jolie,' Yvette said, not knowing the English then for 'You look pretty'.

She thought Molly understood it was a compliment as she smiled, and Yvette remembered thinking that she wished she knew the words to say that Molly should smile more, as it made her look beautiful.

She had a voluptuous, very curvy figure with a small waist and full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the cream blouse emphasized her shape and gave a becoming glow to her complexion. Even her peroxide-blonde hair looked lovely that night, for she'd just washed and curled it.

Yvette indicated that Molly was to take off her clothes, and stood waiting with the blue and white summer dress she was about to fit in her hands. She noticed an old scar above Molly's right breast when she had stripped down to her petticoat, but it wasn't until she turned for the back of the bodice to be pinned in place that Yvette saw all the other scars.

Livid red ones and old faded brown ones criss-crossed her back and Yvette was so shocked she almost stuck a pin into Molly's flesh.

She had no English words for 'What has happened to you?' but she didn't need to ask that anyway. She knew they were the scars of beatings, almost certainly achieved with a thin cane, because she had such scars herself.

She had tears in her eye as she fitted the dress, and Molly saw them and wiped them away tenderly with her finger, smiling at her. She said something Yvette couldn't understand, but by the tone of her voice she felt Molly was a.s.suring her it was nothing.

Yvette knew now to her cost that Molly saw sympathy as weakness and gullibility. She was soon asking to borrow money which she never repaid, and to dump her children on Yvette for her to look after. She should've refused and backed away as soon as she saw she was being used, but she felt sorry for Molly and indebted to her too.

Yvette knew now that Molly was never the victim she took her for. The truth was, for every blow she received from Alfie, he got one back, and she got some kind of perverted thrill from violence.

In sixteen years Yvette must have witnessed and overheard hundreds of shocking and depraved scenes, and she knew now that even if Molly were to meet a rich man who would overlook her drinking and s.l.u.ttish ways, she couldn't leave Alfie. They were joined in some unholy bond which had nothing to do with love.

But Yvette didn't know any of that back in the late forties. She learned it gradually as her understanding of English improved and the gossip from the street began to filter through to her. Sadly, by then she had already become trapped in Molly's web.

Yvette could still remember the day the woman boasted that she and Alfie frequently had other s.e.xual partners. Yvette was so shocked she listened in silence as her neighbour gleefully described the thrill they got out of watching each other with someone else. Her language was graphic, intended to upset and disgust Yvette. Molly was in fact doing to Yvette what she so often did to Alfie trying to provoke a fight.

Yvette had made so many excuses for Molly up until that point. But that day she suddenly realized that this wasn't a woman who was merely overstretched and unable to cope. She actually thrived on chaos and she had a black heart. She was also trying her best to recruit Yvette into her sordid games.

It was only then that Yvette attempted to distance herself from the entire Muckle family. She didn't answer the door to the children, and ignored Molly calling to her over the back fence. Even when Angela, the last child, was born, she didn't weaken and offer any help. But living in such close proximity, she couldn't block out what went on next door.

In the Muckle household bodies were shared like food and drink. Molly had s.e.x with two of Alfie's brothers while he looked on, and Alfie regularly used Dora, Molly's backward sister. Recently, Mike, Alfie's young nephew, had come to live with them, and now it was he who had laid claim to Dora. But Yvette had heard Mike rutting noisily out in the backyard with Molly on several occasions since then, when the children were watching television in the front room. The four oldest children had left home: the two boys were always in and out of prison, and the two girls left when they were heavily pregnant, never to return.

Yvette had no illusions left about Molly or Alfie now. They were totally amoral in every aspect of their lives; they would steal anything from anyone, intimidate anyone who opposed them, neglected and hurt their children and lived in utter squalor. Each time the police came to the house Yvette prayed that whatever their latest crime was, it would be serious enough for them to be sent to prison for a long stretch. Yet this never happened. Somehow they always seemed to wriggle out of it, and they were getting worse as the years went by.

Yvette was stuck now with having to be on her guard all the time. She had to remember not just to keep the back door locked so one of the children couldn't jump the back fence and steal something from the kitchen, but also never to confront or upset Molly in any way.

Back in the early years she had foolishly told Molly a little of what happened to her during the war. She knew that if she were ever to cross her, Molly would use this against her, and she just couldn't take that risk.

This was why she didn't dare go to the social workers and report Molly and Alfie for what they did to their children. She hadn't even found enough courage to warn Dan that she'd overheard Alfie saying he'd get even with him for threatening him about Angela.

Yvette sighed deeply as she slipped the bodice of the dress she was making on to her dressmaker's dummy. It was too hot to sew any more tonight, her sweaty hands might mark the fabric. She would turn up her radio a little louder and try to blot out the sounds from next door. Perhaps if she had a little brandy she'd fall asleep before things got really nasty.

Frank Ubley shut his window as the music blared out, picked up a book and went into the bedroom at the back of the house. He had only to see Molly and he got angry, but when he saw her dancing around to music, drinking, laughing and shouting, he felt murderous.

The bedroom was just as it was when June died. He hadn't even had the heart to get rid of her clothes. They had bought the new divan in 1953, the day before Coronation Day, and they were so thrilled finally to get rid of the old one they'd inherited from June's mother that they joked they were going to spend all day in it.

June was a real home-maker. With a pot of paint and a few yards of material she could transform any room, however dismal, into a little palace. She found this place when Frank was waiting to be demobbed from the Army. He came home briefly on a twenty-four hour pa.s.s, took one look at it and wanted to run out the door, just the way young Fifi upstairs said she had.

But June insisted she could make it nice, and by the time he got his demob three months later, she had. She'd painted and papered everywhere, even though no one else could get decorating materials for love or money. Green and white stripes in the front room, the bedroom pale pink, and the kitchen all yellow and white. But it wasn't just decorating she was good at, she made things so comfortable and nice. A little table with a lamp on by his chair, a pouffe to put his feet on, and within ten minutes of getting home his dinner was always on the table.

If she hadn't been such a perfect wife in every way, maybe he would have been able to admit what had happened with Molly. But he couldn't hurt her that way, it would have broken her heart.

If only he hadn't made out he was on guard duty at the camp that weekend when he was really in Soho. But all his mates wanted to celebrate the end of the war, and if he'd come home drunk in the early hours June wouldn't have liked it. He didn't think much of himself for having s.e.x in an alley with the blonde who talked dirty; as soon as he sobered up he was ashamed. But all the lads got up to much the same, it was the combination of the drink and the thrill of the war ending.

He had been back with June three days before he discovered that the blonde also lived in Dale Street, right opposite them.

As he walked down the street to the shop, she'd come out of her door. It was so strange that he thought he had no recollection of what the woman in the alley looked like, but the moment they came face to face, he knew it was her. But what was worse, she recognized him too.

Of all the women in London, why did that one have to be living right across the street? And why did she have to turn out to be the most evil b.i.t.c.h in G.o.d's creation?

At first he thought his secret was safe as Molly was married too. But by the time she demanded money for her silence, Frank had been told by dozens of people that Alfie actively encouraged his wife to go with other men. He might give a man a kicking for doing so, but that was just part of the sport.

Frank was forty-nine in 1945. He landed a job as a mechanic at the bus station right after his demob, and he thought he and June were sitting pretty. Their only daughter Wendy was married to an electrician, and the couple had a home of their own and a baby on the way. Frank believed the years until he retired were going to be the best years yet for him and June.

Molly ruined all that.

It was like living with an unexploded bomb. A few weeks, sometimes months, pa.s.sed between her demands for money, and he'd begin to think it was all over. Then she'd sidle up to him in the street and once again she was threatening to tell June. He wanted to move away, he tried desperately to find another flat, but with thousands of people homeless after the war, there was nothing. And June didn't want to leave anyway; Dale Street suited her as Wendy and her husband Ted were only down the road in Elephant and Castle and of course she wanted to see John, their little grandson, frequently.

John was quickly followed by Martin and then Susan, and in 1953, Wendy and Ted decided to emigrate to Australia. Frank and June intended to follow them out there, but June must have told someone in the street and it got back to Molly. This time she demanded fifty pounds to keep quiet.

Frank boiled over every time he thought about it. June was already upset that her daughter and grandchildren were leaving England, and she was living on her nerves because she was afraid she and Frank wouldn't be allowed to go too because of their ages. If Molly dropped her bombsh.e.l.l, Frank knew that would be catastrophic.

He had about a hundred pounds saved up, but they'd need that in Australia until he found a job and somewhere to live.

He tried to be tough with Molly, saying he didn't have the money and that he'd go to the police if she persisted. But she just laughed at him and said he'd be sorry if he did. A couple of days later, while Frank was at work and June out shopping, they were burgled. They didn't have much of value for anyone to take, just a few bits of silver that had belonged to June's grandmother's, and some odd bits of jewellery, but it was all gone when June got home.