A Lesser Evil

  ‘She will come round, she’s just shocked, that’s all,’ he said comfortingly as he hugged her tightly.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, I just married the man I love,’ she wept. ‘Why is she so horrible about that?’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t lucky enough to ever feel the way we do,’ Dan suggested. ’But don’t let her spoil what we’ve got, it’s our honeymoon, remember.’

  That night as Fifi lay in Dan’s arms she told herself she didn’t care about her parents. They were stupid snobs, and she could do perfectly well without them. She was glad she hadn’t got to go home any more, she had her own one now and she was blissfully happy. She and Dan would prove to them that they were wrong.

  Six weeks later, Patty sat back on the couch in the Kings-down flat and grinned broadly at Fifi. ‘Stop worrying about Mum’s feelings,’ she said in answer to her sister’s question about how things were at home. ‘Just think how happy you’ve made me by letting me have the bedroom all to myself.’

  Fifi felt a surge of affection for her sister. If Patty was hurt she wasn’t told about the wedding, she’d never showed it. On the Monday following, despite all hell having broken out at home following Fifi’s phone call, and orders that no one was to break rank and speak to their sister, Patty turned up at Fifi’s office, bringing her a canteen of cutlery for a present.

  She hugged Fifi and wished her happiness, and said she had liked Dan right from the start. Then she’d asked what Fifi had worn, who was there and if they’d had any other presents. When Fifi admitted there were only two guests and all they’d had was an electric kettle from Dan’s workmates, Patty hugged her again and said maybe they could have a blessing in church one day when Dan had proved he wasn’t such a bad choice.

  Since then Patty often popped in on her way home from work, diplomatically skirting round what was being said at home, admiring everything they had done to their flat, and being happy for them.

  Dan liked Patty a great deal, and it had pleased them both when she found a boyfriend herself. In just three weeks, she had begun to lose weight and her acne was getting better. Dan said he couldn’t wait to meet the man responsible for it, but as yet Patty was too nervous to introduce him to anyone.

  ‘Especially not Mum,’ she laughed. ‘I’m afraid she’ll jinx it for me.’

  ‘Make him carry garlic and a crucifix when he gets invited to tea,’ Dan suggested. ‘And maybe a couple of pints of holy water too.’

  Fifi tried very hard to treat her mother’s attitude in the same light-hearted way as Dan did, but she often shed a few tears about it in private. She felt so angry and indignant that he’d never been given a chance to show everyone what a wonderful person he was. Every time Patty came round she remarked on how homely the flat was, and much of that was down to Dan’s efforts.

  He was always bringing home things he’d found in junk shops. He liked a bargain, so he was always attracted to the damaged or ugly things that were cheap, and he did his magic eyes thing, believing he could transform them into something beautiful.

  Sometimes he succeeded. A hideous old bookcase had been transformed with a coat of pale blue paint; a coffee table with a new tile top looked fabulously expensive, yet had cost him only three shillings. But Fifi was hoping he might accidentally break the china shepherdess ornament he was trying to mend, and that he’d decide the cuckoo clock was too irritating to keep.

  She bought fresh flowers every Friday night to put on their little dining table, hand-sewed pretty curtains for the bathroom, and painted red spots on some white enamel storage jars to hold their coffee, tea and sugar. They’d bought a lovely picture of a bluebell wood, two table lamps, and bright cushions to put on the bed. Fifi often thought that if her parents were to unbend enough to visit, they’d get a pleasant surprise.

  It was Patty who bit by bit brought Fifi’s belongings to the flat, her record-player, clothes, shoes and books, each time making a joke about how it left more room for her in their old room. While Fifi was delighted to have all her old belongings back with her, it saddened her too. It was as though the memories of her were being permanently erased from her family home.

  Patty had only just left one evening when Dan arrived home, and right away Fifi knew something was wrong because he seemed distracted. While he had a bath, she warmed up the stew she’d made for him, and once he was eating it, she tackled him.

  ‘You know this estate in Horfield will be finished by Christmas?’ he finally blurted out. ‘Well, I thought we’d be moving straight on to the site in Kingswood. But there’s been a setback there, some problem with the planning department and an access road, so now we’ve got to go down to Plymouth.’

  ‘You mean move there?’ Fifi exclaimed. ‘You can’t, we’ve only just got this place, and there’s my job.’

  ‘I know,’ Dan sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll have to get digs and just come home at weekends.’

  ‘Oh no. I couldn’t bear that,’ Fifi said.

  ‘Nor me,’ Dan agreed. ‘I told the boss how it was, but he said that’s all he’s got, the one job in Plymouth, take it or leave it.’

  ‘You mean you get the sack if you won’t go?’

  Dan shrugged. ‘I took the job with Jackson’s on the understanding we worked all over the place. If I want to stay here, I’ll have to find a local firm willing to take me on.’

  ‘How hard will that be?’

  ‘Easy, I should think. There’s loads of new developments in Bristol.’

  ‘Then there’s no problem.’ Fifi beamed. ‘I get to keep you here.’

  ‘Happy Christmas, sweetheart!’

  Fifi forced her eyelids to open. Dan was standing by the bed with just a towel around his waist, and he had a tray in his hands. ‘Come on, look joyful, it’s breakfast-time!’ he said with laughter in his voice. ‘Don’t panic, I haven’t got you anything unsuitable for a princess with a hangover.’

  Reluctantly Fifi sat up and Dan put the tray across her knees. It was just grapefruit segments in a little glass dish with a glacé cherry on top, toast and a pot of tea.

  She had been on top of the world and slightly drunk when she got home yesterday after the office party. She had tinsel in her hair and a bag of small presents from the other girls. Dan had arrived home soon after, also a little tight as it was his last day with Jackson’s, and they decided to go out for the remainder of the evening to the Cotham Porter’s Stores, a pub just around the corner from their flat.

  The Porter’s Stores was a cider house, and a bit run down, but it always had a good atmosphere because of the wide range of people who drank there, from serious cider drinkers with red noses to hard-up students and the immediate locals. Maybe drinking rough cider wasn’t such a good idea after drinking spirits at work, but Fifi was fine until Robin, her younger brother, came in with a group of friends.

  Overjoyed to see him, she left Dan and rushed over to Robin, and because she was a bit drunk and assumed he’d come looking for her, she flung her arms round him.

  ‘Don’t embarrass me in front of my friends,’ he said coldly, nudging her away.

  Fifi was so deeply hurt she couldn’t think of a clever or cutting remark. Instead she said something about how she was only pleased to see him, and it was Christmas after all. Robin retorted that he wasn’t pleased to see her drunk, and obviously she was going downhill fast since she married Dan.

  Robin had always been a bit of a prig. If Fifi had been sober she would have given as good as she got. But Robin turned on his heel and left the pub without having even one drink. Fifi returned to Dan’s side and ordered another cider.

  She didn’t tell Dan what had been said, but her good humour vanished and she drank quickly and silently, not even talking to Dan.

  Later, she vaguely remembered being carried up the stairs over Dan’s shoulder, and the next thing she knew was she was kneeling on the bathroom floor, head over the toilet, vomiting and telling him to go away.

  By the time she came out of the bathroom, much
more sober now, Dan was fast asleep in bed, but she was wide awake, very much aware it was the early hours of Christmas morning and for the first time in her life she wouldn’t be sitting down later to a family lunch.

  She and Dan had bought a tree and put up decorations everywhere, and until then she’d thought the flat looked like an enchanted grotto. But as she sat huddled up on the couch wrapped in her dressing-gown, thinking about what Robin had said earlier, the twinkling lights, tinsel and paper streamers all looked so garish in comparison to the elegant decorations her parents went in for. There was only a handful of Christmas cards too, just from girls at work, and suddenly she felt an enormous sense of loss.

  Christmas at home was always so jolly and noisy. Even when they’d all got too big to have stockings, they still crowded into their parents’ room quite early in the morning and insisted on opening the presents. Neighbours would pop in during the morning for a drink, and there would be a record of carols playing on the radiogram. Sometimes her maternal aunts, Rose and Lily, would come up from Somerset with their husbands and children; other times Uncle Ernest, her father’s brother, would come with his wife and two boys who were a similar age to Robin and Peter. After a huge dinner they’d play games, charades, Monopoly or Ludo.

  This year there would be just her and Dan, no carols playing, no games. She had believed until now that she would be glad to be alone with Dan, that family gatherings were boring, yet all at once they seemed so dear and precious. She began to cry because she felt forlorn and cut off. If Robin was against her, that meant Peter probably was too, her father would always side with her mother, and that left only Patty. Her family had shrunk to one person who wouldn’t even be able to visit over the holiday.

  ‘Would you like an aspirin?’ Dan asked, looking concerned.

  Fifi forced herself to smile. ‘No, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I got so legless last night, and Happy Christmas.’

  ‘Santa’s been,’ Dan said, pulling a bulky stocking out from under the bed. It was one of the white net ones, trimmed with red crêpe paper, that Fifi had often had as a child, and peeping from the top was a teddy bear in a red woolly hat.

  ‘Oh, Dan,’ she exclaimed, all at once aware he must have planned this weeks ago. ‘I didn’t think to make you one.’

  ‘I didn’t expect one,’ he said, sitting down beside her on the bed and pouring her some tea. ‘You are all I want for Christmas.’

  ‘I have got you presents,’ she said. ‘Just not the stocking. I intended to get up before you and put them all under the tree. They’re still in the sideboard where I hid them.’

  ‘Eat your breakfast, then we’ll open them,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Our first Christmas together, that’s very special.’

  Fifi’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away and laughed, saying it was because he was so sweet, but the truth was that she felt ashamed of herself. She could have thought of making Dan a stocking. And she shouldn’t have spent half the night thinking about her old home and feeling sorry for herself.

  Dan was taken on by a Bristol building firm the day after Boxing Day. He was ecstatic when he returned home, for the job was building a new rank of shops, and the site he would be working on was right in town. Just a walk from home, and better money than he’d been earning with Jack-son’s. He was due to start work on New Year’s Day.

  On New Year’s Eve Fifi hurried home from work with two steaks and a bottle of Blue Nun. They had no plans to go anywhere special to see the New Year in, but some of the girls at work had said it was always like a big party up at the Victoria Rooms in Clifton. Apparently the previous year someone had put detergent in the fountains and the bubbles went right across the road. Fifi thought if Dan was agreeable they might walk over there to have a look.

  Dan had the chips cooking and the table laid when she got in. He’d lit candles and he had Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ on the record-player. He took Fifi’s coat and hung it up, then grabbed the steaks and began grilling them, all the time singing and dancing to the music.

  This was a new party piece, it was usually Elvis Presley he liked to do. He knew the words of all his songs, and he had Elvis’s voice, gyrating hips and mannerisms down to a T. Often he would get Fifi crying with laughter when he did ‘Teddy Bear’.

  ‘Come on, baby, do the Locomotion with me,’ he sang as he put the bread on the table and coming up behind her, made her turn her arms like pistons.

  ‘Where’s Elvis tonight?’ she asked laughingly as the record finished.

  ‘New year on its way in, new music,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to work on Cliff Richard, or Duane Eddy.’

  ‘Duane Eddy doesn’t sing,’ she giggled. ‘And you don’t look anything like Cliff.’

  ‘Then perhaps I’ll be Ray Charles,’ he said, and turning away, swiftly picked up two beer-bottle tops as impromptu sunglasses and burst into ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’.

  ‘Idiot,’ she said affectionately. ‘But let those steaks burn and I’ll stop loving you.’

  ‘I’m too full to go anywhere,’ Fifi said with a groan as she staggered away from the table an hour later. She lay down on the bed, undoing the waistband on her skirt.

  Dan looked at her and laughed. ‘I thought you wanted to dance in the fountains!’

  ‘That was before steak, chips and mushrooms,’ she said. ‘Do you really want to go out?’

  Dan went over to the window. ‘Well, I thought I did,’ he said, a note of surprise in his voice. ‘But it’s snowing!’

  ‘No!’ Fifi exclaimed. ‘You’re just saying that to make me get up.’

  ‘It is, and it’s heavy too,’ Dan insisted. ‘Come and see.’

  Fifi got up reluctantly. ‘If you are having me on I’ll punish you,’ she said. But as she got to the window she gasped when she saw Dan was telling the truth.

  There had never been any snow to speak of in Bristol, not since 1947. Fifi was seven then and she remembered going sledging day after day because the schools were closed, and building a huge snowman in the garden. Grown-ups harped on about that terrible winter for years after, but it had never been repeated. If snow did fall it was light and usually gone within a day or two.

  ‘Good God,’ she exclaimed as she watched it swirling against the window. ‘It’s like a blizzard.’

  As they were on the second floor and it was dark, they couldn’t see if it was settling on the ground.

  ‘I won’t be able to lay bricks if it does settle,’ Dan said. ‘Let’s hope it’s cleared by morning.’

  When they woke the following morning the light in the room was grey and sinister and there was no sound of traffic in the distance. Fifi got up, and to her astonishment a thick carpet of snow lay over the whole of Bristol.

  Her initial reaction was delight, for everything looked so beautiful, like an old-fashioned Christmas card scene. She called excitedly to Dan to come and look.

  Like her he was entranced, but he looked worried too. ‘I’ll go down to the site, but the chances are there’ll be no one there as I doubt if there’s any buses running. Damn, this would happen just as I was starting a new job.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ Fifi reassured him. ‘Shame I only have to walk to work, I’ve got no excuse for not being there. We could’ve gone to Redland Park and played in the snow.’

  Bristol’s centre was virtually deserted. No buses were running and few people had even attempted to drive in as many roads into the city were impassable. Fifi was amused to see how the few very determined people who had braved the snow to get to their work were reacting. Bundled up in thick coats, boots, hats and scarves, they were acting like intrepid pioneers, yelling out warnings to others about areas they’d passed through that morning.

  Fifi enjoyed her walk to the office, taking a childish delight in making footprints in clean snow. Everything looked so pretty; even waste ground that was normally an eyesore of rubbish and weeds had become a winter wonderland. But the sky was like lead and everyone was pre
dicting there was more snow to come.

  Only one of the solicitors and Miss Phipps, the accountant, had managed to get into the office, so at three in the afternoon as it began to get dark, they went home.

  Dan was already there when Fifi got home, making a stew for their dinner. He looked glum and anxious as he told her that the foreman on the building site had told him there would be no work for the rest of the week, and unless the weather improved dramatically, he doubted there’d be any the week after either.

  ‘Never mind,’ Fifi said comfortingly. ‘We can manage on my money.’

  ‘I’m supposed to provide for you,’ he said grumpily. ‘It’s not a very good start to the new year.’

  The bad weather continued for several weeks, with many more heavy snowfalls, and Dan’s spirits sank lower and lower when he couldn’t go to work. Fifi was very sympathetic at first because she knew it hurt his pride to live on her wages. But as time went on, and she had to battle her way through snow and ice daily while he was home in the warm flat, irritation began to set in.

  She didn’t care that he wasn’t bringing any money in, she just missed him being jolly and fun. There were no more Elvis impersonations, he had nothing to talk about, and each night when she got home, he had a glum face. He did all the shopping, cleaned the flat and cooked the dinner, but that only seemed to emphasize her shortcomings because he was far better at cooking and cleaning than she was, and an expert at economical meals.

  Whenever she suggested they went out for a change, he always pointed out how cold and miserable it was outside. He was right of course, but the real reason he didn’t want to go was because of the money. She ached to be in a noisy, lively pub, to see other people and have some fun, and she really missed her old friends.

  She wished she hadn’t been so hasty in dropping them all when she met Dan. She had always despised girls who abandoned their mates the minute they found a new man, yet she’d done just that. While it was true that a couple of them had made indiscreet remarks to their mothers, which had got back to hers, mostly she’d kept Dan all to herself because she didn’t want to share him with anyone.