A Lesser Evil (11 page)

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 the 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.’

‘She looks half-starved, and her dress and shoes were too big,’ Fifi replied indignantly.

‘So her folks are poor, that’s all. Now, let’s go down to the pub and check out the rest of our new neighbours.’

The Rifleman was packed by the time Dan and Fifi got there. They squeezed through the crowd to the end of the bar where there was a little space, and while Dan waited to be served, Fifi looked around her eagerly.

She liked what she saw, for this was what she expected of a London pub. It had atmosphere, colour, jollity and a huge range of age groups from those barely old enough to drink, to the very elderly.

There were slickly suited young men with the latest college-boy hair-styles and winkle-picker shoes, girls with teetering beehive hair-dos, Cleopatra-style eye makeup and skirts so tight they could hardly walk. There were old stooped men with rheumy eyes, watching the proceedings from their seats in corners. Brassy women, mousy women, men still in working clothes who’d forgotten to go home for their tea, others who looked as though they hadn’t got a home to go to, and a whole gang of men between twenty-five and forty wearing expensive suits and don’t-mess-with-me expressions.

A thick-set man in his sixties smiled at Fifi. ‘How are you settling in?’ he asked. ‘I’m Frank Ubley. I live downstairs to you on the ground floor. I saw you moving in, and I would’ve offered to help you carry your stuff up, but I’d just had a bath and I wasn’t dressed.’

‘I’m Fifi Reynolds and that’s my husband, Dan,’ Fifi said, pointing to Dan who was just paying for their drinks. ‘We’re more or less straight now, thank you. Though we’d like to paint the place. Is your wife with you tonight?’

‘I’m a widower,’ he said. ‘My wife died four years ago.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Fifi said, a little embarrassed. ‘I just assumed a married couple lived on the ground floor as the net curtains are so white.’

‘A man alone doesn’t have to become a slob,’ he said, and smiled. Fifi noticed he had nice eyes, grey with very dark lashes. ‘I like to keep the place proper. My June was very particular, she washed the nets every two weeks without fail. She wouldn’t like it if I let things go.’

Dan came over with their drinks then and she introduced him to Frank. ‘Who lives on the first floor?’ she went on to ask.

‘Miss Diamond,’ Frank replied. ‘She works for the telephone company, and she rules the roost.’

‘She’s an ogre, is she?’ Dan asked with a grin.

Frank chuckled. ‘She can be if she doesn’t like a body. She’s particular, you see, just like my June was. You leave a ring round the bath, make too much noise or don’t take your turn sweeping the stairs, then there’s hell to pay.’

Fifi could see now why the bathroom had been so unexpectedly clean, the only nice surprise of the day. She approved of the pub too, and now meeting Frank cheered her still more as he looked and sounded a decent, rather fatherly type. A comforting person to have as a neighbour.

She made some remark about being glad she hadn’t got to share the bathroom with messy people, and brought the subject round to the house across the street.

‘I saw a little girl coming out of there. She looked sad.’

‘She would be, with folks like them,’ Frank said with a grimace. ‘The Muckles are a disgrace. Filthy ways, lying, cheating curs.’

‘You don’t like them then?’ Dan joked.

‘Like them!’ Frank’s voice rose a couple of octaves. ‘They need exterminating!’

‘I can’t believe anyone is called Muckle,’ Fifi giggled. ‘Maybe they are that way because of their name.’

‘Their name is the only thing you can laugh about,’ Frank said, grimacing with disgust. ‘If I was a Catholic I’d be crossing myself whenever I heard it.’

A Polish man came along then, and Frank introduced him as his friend Stan and said he lived next door but one. Despite Stan’s strong Polish accent he had the manner of an English gentleman, very correct, a little stiff but also rather charming, and his long, mournful face reminded Fifi of a stray dog she’d once taken home.

‘You have such pretty hair,’ he said appreciatively. ‘It is good to see you leave it loose, I do not like this fashion they called the bird’s nest.’

‘Thank you.’ Fifi blushed at the unexpected compliment. ‘But I think the style you mean is called a beehive.’

‘To me it looks like a bird’s nest, and all stuck up with that lacquer,’ he made a grimace, ‘a man would never want to touch such a thing.’

Dan ran his fingers through a lock of Fifi’s hair protectively, giving both Frank and Stan a clear message she could be admired, but not touched by anyone but him. ‘Let me buy you both a drink to celebrate our first night in London together. We’d begun to think we’d never be able to find a flat here.’

Both Frank and Stan said they’d like a pint. ‘I hope London will be good for you,’ Frank said, looking from Fifi to Dan almost fondly. ‘I’m glad to have young people in the house again. When my daughter lived nearby she was in and out all the time with her children. I miss all the laughter and chatter.’

‘Where does she live now?’ Fifi asked, as always wanting to know everything about her new neighbours.

‘In Brisbane in Australia,’ Frank replied sadly. ‘June and I were intending to go out there and join them, but after she died I felt it was too late for me to uproot myself.’

By the time they were on their second drinks, Frank and Stan had pointed out several other neighbours and given Fifi and Dan a potted history of most of them. There were Cecil and Ivy Helass at number 6, solid, reliable folk who had the only phone in the road, and had four children aged from sixteen to twenty-two. John and Vera Bolton lived at number 13, and they were described as flashy. The names of the other neighbours and which houses they lived in went over Fifi’s head, but the one family Frank kept coming back to was the Muckles. It was clear the man had a real grudge against the family, for as he told them the child Fifi had seen earlier in the day was called Angela, he looked fit to burst with something more.

As always when Fifi got a whiff of scandal or intrigue, she was desperate to know the whole story. Bit by bit she pumped both Frank and Stan for more.

It appeared that Angela was the youngest of eight children, four of whom still lived across the street, and that their mother Molly was what Frank called ‘a woman of easy virtue’.

‘Then there’s the two half-wit relations, shacked up together,’ he spat out. ‘God help us all when they produce an offspring!’

Fifi looked at Dan and saw his lips were twitching with silent laughter.

When Stan intervened to say almost apologetically that everyone in Dale Street had good reason to hate the Muckles, and that but for them the street would be a good place to live, Dan asked why they hadn’t been evicted.

‘You can’t evict people who own their house.’ Frank shook his head sadly. ‘That’s the real problem. Alfie lords it over us. He knows there’s nothing we can do about him. The only place he can’t come in is this pub, thank God. He was banned from here years ago and it will never be lifted.’

‘How does someone like him get to buy a house?’ Fifi asked.

‘The legend goes that his grandfather won it from the man who built the street in a game of cards,’ Frank said. ‘Only Mrs Jarvis has lived here that long, and she was only a child at the time, so you can’t say it’s absolute truth. But the house was passed down to Alfie’s father, and then to Alfie. The house ain’t the only thing passed down through the generations, though.’

‘What else?’ Dan asked, his lean face alight with interest.

‘None of the Muckle men has ever done an honest day’s work, they chose women who became their punch-bags, and they pump out children at an indecent rate,’ Frank said with indignation.

‘They are not what you know as a family,’ Stan chipped in. ‘I would call them a tribe. Right now there is only Alfie, Molly and their four younger children, plus Dora and Alfie’s nephew, Mike.’

‘Dora is Molly’s backward sister,’ Frank interrupted. ‘Completely doolally, and like a walking jumble sale. I once saw her going out in odd shoes and just a petticoat!’

Dan winked at Fifi. He was enjoying this, and she had no doubt he would be imitating both Frank and Stan when they got home.

‘But it never stops at just the immediate family,’ Stan went on, getting a little agitated now. ‘This number can swell at any time. They have so many relatives who come and stay, and there’s the card parties.’

Fifi couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw Frank send a warning glance at Stan.

‘Card parties!’ she said brightly. ‘Like bridge or something?’

‘Look, Stan, there’s Ted over there,’ Frank said suddenly, pointing to a fat man with a big red face at the other end of the bar. ‘We must catch him and see when the next darts match is.’ He turned back to Fifi and Dan and apologized for rushing off, but said if they needed any help or wanted to borrow any tools, they only had to ask.

‘The Man Who Said Too Much,’ Dan said in a mock chilling voice as the two older men left them. ‘Maybe the card game is Happy Families and they won’t let Frank or Stan play?’

‘They sound a monstrous family,’ Fifi said. ‘But I suppose you think they were making it all up?’

‘I suspect a bit of exaggeration,’ he said with a grin. ‘But I especially liked the bit about dopey Dora.’

By closing time Dan and Fifi had met several other neighbours, Cecil and Ivy Helass, Mrs Witherspoon from the corner shop, and a man called Wally who had only recently moved into a room below Stan, and they all had something more to add about the Muckles.

Mrs Witherspoon was a plump, seemingly kindly middle-aged woman, and she claimed they targeted any new people in the street, asking to borrow things and telling them hard-luck stories. She advised Fifi and Dan never to invite any of them in, as they would be back to rob them as soon as they got an opportunity.

Ivy Helass said that Stan had seen the two older children locked out of the house one afternoon when there was thick snow back in the winter, so he brought them in to get warm. Two days later he came home to find he’d been burgled, and two solid silver photograph frames taken.

‘It was shameful,’ Ivy said indignantly. ‘That poor man lost his wife and two daughters in the Warsaw uprising, and all he had left was the two pictures of his family. They meant everything to him, and those children must have thrown the pictures away before they sold the frames.’

Wally said that Alfie was a peeping Tom.