A Lesser Evil

  Every house looked neglected. The one the woman and child had gone into didn’t even have proper curtains, just a blanket or some such thing hung over a piece of wire. There were no flowers in tubs, not even a tree; in fact the street had a sinister, almost malevolent air about it. Could she really bear to live here?

  ‘Forget what’s out there,’ Dan said from behind her, sliding his arms around her and nuzzling his chin on her shoulder. ‘Come and see the bedroom. We could christen it straight away!’

  As Dan kissed the back of her neck, his hands cupping her breasts, Fifi began to tingle all over. Since Dan went to London they were like honeymooners every weekend, often staying in bed most of Saturday. He’d only arrived back in Bristol early this morning to collect her and all their stuff, and once they were on their way to London, he kept telling her all the naughty things he was going to do to her once they were alone in the flat. It had aroused her so much that it was all she could do not to suggest they pulled off into a quiet lane to make love.

  ‘There aren’t any bedclothes,’ she protested feebly as he shuffled her into the room next door. It was every bit as miserable as the living room, but at least the mattress on the old bed looked brand-new. ‘We should go down and get our stuff in first.’

  But his fingers were already unzipping her jeans and she could feel his erection pressing against her bottom. Perhaps if she just let herself sink into the bliss of being made love to, she might start thinking of this horrible place as home.

  ‘You are so beautiful,’ Dan whispered as he slid into her. ‘I wish I could give you everything you deserve.’

  Whatever other disappointments they’d encountered since they got married, lovemaking always made up for them. Dan could whisk her away on a magic carpet ride every time. She loved his slim but muscular body, the silkiness of his skin, the sensitivity of his touch.

  Fifi pulled him close to her, covering his face with frantic kisses. ‘I’ve got everything I want, I’ve got you,’ she whispered back. She meant it too. Maybe this flat wasn’t what she’d expected, but she was in London at last and she and Dan could start afresh.

  Right from when she was a child, visits to the cinema had given Fifi tantalizing images of America, with ultramodern houses, flashy cars and a standard of life so different to the post-war austerity she knew. By 1960, when she was twenty, she had got the idea from the news and magazines that London was becoming like this too. It infuriated her that new fashions, films or even music took such a long time to filter down to the West Country, and she’d resolved to move to London then so that she’d be at the hub of everything.

  As it turned out, a secure job and various boyfriends sapped her desire to make the break. But now at last she’d made it here, and she just knew there were going to be untold opportunities for her and Dan. Wages were higher and there were far more prospects for advancement.

  Yet it was the idea that they could start off all new and shiny, free from class snobbery, which appealed to her even more. No one knew her, or her parents, here. There was no one to whisper behind their hands that she, a professor’s daughter, had married a bricklayer. They could live how they wanted, go where they wanted, with no one watching for them to fail.

  She did of course hope that one day her parents would come round about Dan. But a hundred miles away from them, she wouldn’t be holding her breath for it. London was going to be a huge adventure, and she would show her family just what she and Dan were made of.

  Later that same afternoon Dan and Fifi were being watched from three separate windows in Dale Street as they unloaded the borrowed van.

  Yvette Dupré in the ground-floor flat of number 12, across the street, was a dressmaker. With her sewing-machine in front of her window, she saw most of the comings and goings in the street.

  Seeing such an attractive young couple moving in was a real event, but she was unsure whether it pleased or worried her. The blonde girl was so slim and elegant in her jeans and hand-knitted jumper. Her husband was devilishly handsome, gypsy-like with his dark hair and angular cheekbones. She could see they were deeply in love by the way they laughed together and touched each other. It made her smile just to watch them.

  Yvette had little to smile about in her life. She was thirty-seven but looked far older. Her once thick dark hair was peppered with grey, and she pulled it back tightly from her face into a severe bun at the base of her neck. She wore old-fashioned, drab clothes, and lived a very reclusive and lonely life. Her only real pleasure was her work, which she took great pride in.

  Like most of her neighbours, she’d come to live in Dale Street out of desperation. Old Mrs Jarvis, who had lived at number 1 since the street was built in 1890, had told her that in those days everyone kept a maid. Yet Yvette found it hard to believe that it had ever been a smart address.

  The young couple were laughing about a bag which had spilled its contents out on to the pavement and the sight reminded Yvette poignantly of similar scenes in her native Paris when she was a girl. She used to sit in the window, just as she was doing now, to watch people moving into the apartments in rue du Jardin. She would report back to her mama when she saw leather luggage, fur coats or beautiful hats, for these were signs that their owners might be likely candidates for needing a first-class dressmaker. Then at the first opportunity Mama would go round there with a bunch of flowers or a homemade cake to welcome them, always leaving one of her gold-edged cards.

  Yvette supposed that on the outside at least, Dale Street and rue du Jardin had some similarities. Both were narrow, sunless cul-de-sacs, with tall, neglected old houses. Yet behind the peeling paint of the shutters and doors in rue du Jardin there were some beautiful apartments. Yvette remembered seeing chandeliers, opulent drapes, beautiful rugs, silver and alabaster when she went with her mama to do a dress fitting. She once asked why their apartment wasn’t the same, and she got boxed round the ears instead of receiving a proper explanation.

  There were no pleasant surprises behind the doors of Dale Street, except perhaps at the Boltons’ next door on the left to Yvette’s, which was luxurious. But then John Bolton was a villain, and the thick carpets, gilt-framed mirrors and brocade curtains were in keeping with his handmade suits, gold watch and the many visits he had from the police.

  The smells and sounds which wafted out of the houses here were of damp, fried food, crying children, adults squabbling and Workers’ Playtime on the radio. Back in Paris it was newly baked bread, garlic, Mozart or Edith Piaf, and when adults raised their voices it was in greeting, not anger.

  Remembering Paris always made Yvette feel shaky and sick, and today was no exception. She turned away from the window and went over to the turquoise cocktail dress on her dressmaker’s dummy. She had to set the sleeves in and have it ready for a final fitting for Mrs Silverman in Chelsea on Monday.

  Forty-seven-year-old Ryszard Stanislav, known to everyone in Dale Street as ‘Stan the Pole’, was also watching Fifi and Dan from his bedsitter on the top floor of number 2. He wanted to go down to offer to help them, but he knew from experience that he would immediately be suspected of having some sinister motive.

  After fifteen years here his English was excellent, but try as he might, he couldn’t lose his Polish accent. It didn’t help either that he was a dustman and lived alone; this made people think he was dirty and uncouth.

  About ten years ago he’d rushed to help an old lady who had collapsed in the street. Later, after she was taken away in an ambulance, the police came, accusing him of stealing her purse. He would never forget the way they spoke to him, so bigoted, so full of hate, almost ready to string him up without a shred of real evidence against him. It transpired eventually that the old lady had left the purse at home – she found it once she was discharged from the hospital. But the police officer who came to tell Stan the charges against him had been dropped didn’t apologize. It was as if he imagined that an immigrant with a funny accent couldn’t have any feelings.

  Stan had learned to
ignore slights and ignorance; that he had to be dim because he was a dustman; that he’d never known anywhere better than Dale Street; or that he liked being called ‘Stan the Pole’. Sometimes he was tempted to grab people by their shoulders and insist they listen to his story before judging him. But he was only too aware that most people around here had no idea what had gone on in Poland during the war.

  The truth was that he’d been a skilled carpenter with a wife and two beautiful daughters, until the Germans invaded. While he was off trying to defend his country, his wife and children were gunned down in the streets of Warsaw and his home destroyed. Stan felt he might as well have been killed too, for without his family he was nothing.

  But the English didn’t understand, and how could they? Their country had never been invaded. London might have been heavily bombed, but English people had never experienced soldiers crashing into their homes in the middle of the night, or seen innocent civilians shot in the street just because they were out after curfew. He was just Stan the Pole, the man with the funny accent, another one of those immigrants who ought to leave England for the English.

  As he looked down at the couple in the street below, laughing because their pile of belongings was toppling over, he realized that his daughters, if they had lived, would have been around the same age as the young blonde girl. Sabine had been dark, taking after her mother, and Sofia blonde, after him. A tear trickled unchecked down his cheek as he remembered them.

  Alfie Muckle at number 11, right opposite number 4 and next door to Yvette Dupré, was watching Fifi through ahole in the blanket which covered his bedroom window. As she bent over to pick up a box from the pavement, his cock stiffened at the sight of her pert backside in her tight jeans.

  Alfie was the same age as Stan the Pole, but that was the only thing they had in common. Stan was tall and thin, with a face as sad and loose-skinned as a bloodhound’s. Alfie was short and stocky, with a round, shiny face and receding sandy hair. Stan was an intelligent, honourable man, Alfie was a liar and a thief, and what he lacked in intelligence he made up for in low cunning.

  Alfie’s bedroom was representative of his entire house. Distempered walls were stained with everything from thrown food, blood and grease, and the furniture was equally knocked about. The double bed he shared with his wife, Molly, was unmade, the sheets unwashed for weeks on end. It smelled sour, of sweat, feet and cigarette smoke, and the bare wood floor was littered with dirty clothes. Alfie and his family weren’t aware of either the mess or the odour, for they had never known any different.

  ‘Whatcha doin’?’

  At the sound of his wife’s voice behind him, Alfie jumped.

  Molly was forty-five, two years younger than Alfie, an overweight bleached blonde who, when she managed to take her hair out of curlers, put on some makeup and dress up, was still quite attractive in a garish way.

  ‘Doggin’ up the folk moving into number four,’ he said.

  Molly came over beside him and flicked the blanket back to look out of the window, then looked back at Alfie, her sharp eyes taking in the bulge in his trousers. ‘You dirty bastard,’ she exclaimed. ‘You ’d’ave bin wanking over’er if I’adn’t come in, wouldn’t yer?’

  There was no reproach in her voice, just a statement of fact.

  Molly was seventeen when she married Alfie, already six months gone with their first child. They spent their wedding night in 1935 sharing a room with two of his four brothers, for back at that time Alfie’s grandparents were living here, plus his parents and their four sons and two daughters. Molly went into labour prematurely when Alfie knocked her down the stairs for complaining that Fred, one of the brothers, wouldn’t stop pestering her for sex. After twenty-eight years of marriage she had long since forgotten she once thought such behaviour unacceptable; she knew now that all Muckles were sex mad and violent. She had even become that way herself.

  ‘Mind yer own fuckin’ business,’ Alfie retorted.

  Molly flounced away from him without saying anything more. She wasn’t concerned about what he got up to, but she liked him to know he didn’t fool her.

  Fifi and Dan were blissfully unaware of the scrutiny they were under as they carried their belongings indoors.

  ‘We should go along to the corner shop and buy some groceries before we unpack,’ Fifi said as she staggered up the stairs to the top floor with her Dansette record-player. ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea, and they might close soon.’

  ‘I’ll go once we’ve got all our stuff up,’ Dan said. ‘Are you all right about this place now? Maybe I should have looked a bit more before taking it, but I wanted you to join me here so badly.’

  Fifi couldn’t bear to see him look so worried. ‘It’s fine,’ she lied. ‘Well, it will be once we’ve arranged all our things in it.’

  Half an hour later, Fifi stood at the window looking out on to Dale Street, watching Dan going up to the shop on the corner. She could see how happy he was by the way he bounded rather than walked.

  In the eight months they’d been married she’d come to see he needed only one thing to make him happy. He could get by without money, he’d eat anything, work harder and longer than any man she’d ever known, without complaint, just as long as he felt loved.

  That was humbling for someone like her who had always taken love for granted. And here she was, looking at her new surroundings with distaste, wondering how she could survive a few weeks before they found somewhere she liked. She couldn’t live with the awful orange curtains, and having no carpet on the floor appalled her, yet Dan would settle in here as if it were a palace, just because she loved him and would be sharing it with him.

  How, with his bleak childhood, he’d ended up this way, she didn’t know. She thought most people brought up as he was would become hard and cold, always on the take. If all he wanted in the whole world was to be with her, then the least she could do was show some real appreciation for the effort he’d made in finding them a home.

  She would start by suggesting they went to the Rifleman, the pub on the opposite corner of the street to the shop, after they’d returned the van. That way it would show him she didn’t think she was too grand to live here.

  Yet as she continued to gaze out on to the miserable grey street, she didn’t believe she would ever get to like it. As much as she told herself she no longer gave a damn what her parents thought about anything, she knew she’d sooner die than let them see her living here.

  The moment she knew Dan had found a flat for them, she had written to her parents to tell them she was leaving her job and going to join him in London. Last night she had hoped they might come to say goodbye, and she wouldn’t have felt ashamed for them to see the flat in Kingsdown.

  But this place would shock them, and it would be just another thing to hold against Dan.

  Yet if they couldn’t unbend enough to go a couple of miles from their home to see her, they weren’t likely ever to come here, so that was something she really didn’t need to worry about.

  Just as Fifi was about to return to the unpacking, the same little girl she’d seen crying earlier came out of her house. Although she wasn’t crying now, her lethargic movements and the way her head hung down suggested she was still very unhappy. Fifi hadn’t taken in much about the child’s appearance earlier, but she could see now that she was as neglected as the house she lived in. Her dress looked like a hand-me-down from someone far older, her brown hair was fuzzy at the back, as if it hadn’t been brushed, and her ill-fitting shoes slopped up and down on her heels as she walked in the direction of the corner shop. She was exactly the way Fifi had always imagined slum children, malnourished, dirty, pale and sickly.

  She looked back to number 11, the child’s home, noticing again the lack of proper curtains, and that one of the panes of glass in the ground-floor window was broken, boarded over with a piece of wood. It was by far the most dilapidated house in the street, the front door battered as if it was constantly kicked in. As her eyes flickered over th
e house, she saw a man on the top floor looking straight at her.

  Fifi backed away in fright. She couldn’t see him clearly as his house was in shadow, and he was only partially visible as he’d been holding back the cloth covering the window. But she sensed something unpleasant about him.

  At eight that same evening they had returned the van and finished unpacking. With their own table lamps, a cloth and a vase of flowers on the ugly table, and their picture of the bluebell wood above the gas fire, the living room looked much better.

  Dan was sitting in one of the fireside chairs smoking a cigarette and looking around him reflectively. ‘We’ve got enough money saved to buy a square of carpet, some paint and new curtains. I reckon that would turn it into a little palace.’

  Fifi half smiled. A little palace it would never be, but she liked the idea of attempting to beautify it. ‘I think we’ll have to get some net curtains too,’ she replied as she arranged some books and a couple of ornaments on a shelf. She went on to tell him about the man she’d seen in the house opposite. ‘I don’t want someone like him gawping in at us.’

  ‘You, the original nosy parker, complaining of someone watching you!’ Dan exclaimed. ‘If I spotted a gorgeous girl in the house opposite, I’d have my nose pressed up against the window too.’

  ‘He gave me the creeps,’ she said, tossing back her blonde hair. ‘And you saw what that woman was like with the little girl. I saw the kid again, she looks terribly neglected.’

  Dan got up and came over to her and lifting a strand of her hair he ran his fingers down it. ‘What do you know about neglect?’ he said teasingly. ‘I bet you never even had a dirty face as a kid.’